Liars by Glenn Beck Read Free Book Online Page B

looks up at little Margaret on the steps, takes a deep breath, and turns back to the men.“Toss! Beauty!” she shouts, beckoning the two dogs to come to her side. Hearing the fear in her voice, the dogs bark and snarl, leaping down the steps, lunging past the children and onto the backs of the men ransacking the cupboards.
    Anne turns toward the stairs with a stern, desperate message. “Margaret, you keep those children there, no matter what occurs.”
    The children watch their mother charge forward to chase the men away. The dogs snarl and bite; the men throw punches, food, and utensils to fend them off. Anne swings the hammer at one of them, landing a blow on his cheek, only to have him smash her across the face with the back of his clenched fist. She falls hard to the floor, just as the other man lands a kick in her side.
    The children cry out from the stairs, “No, Mother!” One of the dogs is felled with a blow from the hammer that Anne drops. The other retreats to the corner and barks and growls as the men grab what food they can and scamper out the door.
    For an instant after they leave, it is impossibly silent. Snow and sleet splash in through the open door and onto the floor, mixing with spatters of blood and milk that spilled during the fracas.
    On the stairs, the children cry quietly. Following orders, Margaret comforts them but doesn’t allow any to venture down, even to see if their mother is still alive. Time passes. The lone candle burns down and dies out.
    As he approaches the home, Michael notices there are no lights in the windows. He sees the front door hanging open and immediately senses that something is very wrong.
    He runs and lunges through the door, slipping to the floor in his haste. On his knees, he crawls to his wife, who is lying in a pool of blood.
    Her breathing is raspy, and her body is cold to the touch, but she is alive.
    â€œMargaret!” he yells toward the stairs. His daughter leaves her post at the top landing and crouches next to him.
    She fetches a wet cloth from the sink, and they begin to clean Anne’s wounds. Michael shakes his wife lightly, trying to wake her. “Get the whiskey,” he instructs his daughter. She obeys and brings the bottle from a drawer in his desk.
    Margaret helps to hold her mother’s mouth open as her fatherpours a dram into it. For a second, nothing happens. Then Anne coughs and gurgles and opens her eyes. She shivers in his arms as he holds her.
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    Anne developed a case of severe pneumonia over the ensuing days, turning a lifelong battle with tuberculosis into a crisis. From that day forward, she often had to lean against a wall or a counter to battle frequent bouts of coughing and labored breathing, and she endured seasonal cases of pneumonia, forcing bed rest off and on for the rest of her life. In the years that followed, vagrants coming to the Higgins household would only be served at the door and only if Michael was home.
    Margaret acted as full-time nursemaid to her mother until Anne eventually died a few years later. Throughout those years of bringing her mother food and water, changing her bedclothes, and holding her while she was wracked with coughing fits, Margaret never forgot the lowly, evil men who had brought her mother to this state. The fear she endured that night had turned into hatred. And then into a blinding rage. She never forgave them. And she eventually dedicated her life to making sure that people like them—and anyone who, in her judgment, shared any of their undesirable traits—would be driven out of existence.
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    Victims of rape or violent assault often experience lifelong post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a form of psychological panic that closes off part of the human brain where reason is processed. Margaret Sanger’s experiences as a child, witnessing the attack on her mother and encountering hundreds of