Sybil

When Sybil is 6 years old, the Great Depression strikes and Willard Dorsett suffers serious financial difficulty. The family lose their home, and Willard takes Sybil and Hattie to live in a one-room chicken house on some farmland his parents own five miles outside Willow Corners.

Sybil loves the new home, but Hattie does not: at the farm, Hattie becomes catatonic. She does not get dressed and does not get out of bed. She does not feed herself. Sybil and her father have to lift her in order for her to use the bathroom. Schreiber intimates that Sybil enjoys the farm precisely because of this change from the mother she knew at Willow Corners: “that mother did things to [Sybil]. This mother didn’t do anything” (194).

At the farm, her father’s hands are crippled with neuritis, so Sybil is allowed to button him into his jacket, and do all the things she used to do for him when she was little. One day, when they are out in the snow together, collecting wood for the wood pile, they hear a loud laugh that makes Sybil tremble. Her father asks if she heard the laugh. Sybil has heard the laugh many times, “when she was made to stand up against the wall.