While They Slept Part 3

This part of the book is where the truly tragic stuff occurs when Billy murders his two parents and his eleven year old sister. He had already killed his mother and father, when his sister, Becky, woke up because of the commotion. She says "I'm going down to Mom," Becky told Jody. "I'm not staying up here"(110). She obviously was curious, and being woken up at 12 AM hinders the ability to think rationally. Billy tries to hit her "with the intent of knocking her unconscious ... failing to take into account the fragility of the skill of an eleven-year-old"(112). Although his report from the trial and his current memories differ, it seems to me that he truly did not want to kill her. He knew that it would be a reprehensible act, and surely Becky had not done anything to him as bad as what his parents did. He was probably in a panic and thinking that Becky would tell someone decided to eliminate this potential threat.
Jody as the lone innocent survivor of her family must deal with her guilt in a very different way then her brother. She does however, try to put in into perspective "she measures her loss, individual and personal, against the sweeping tragedies of history, the Holocaust, the Civil War carnage at Antietam, the endless crises on the African continent"(121). This forces her to be humble and try to lessen the impact of this event on her life. By thinking of the worse things that people have gone through, she gains hope that she will be able to survive this, and hopefully flourish. Linda, her mother, on the other hand had different ways of dealing with a drunken womanizing husband. She says "Fundamentalism excused her from the effort of working out her own answers to questions of right and wrong, and it reasured Linda that her long-suffering fidelity would be rewarded even as BIlls's sins earned him a far worse comeuppance"(125). She feels, as many do, that nice people feel last, and that their needs to be severe punishment for people who sin more often. She wants her own piousness to be rewarded, which can lead down to a horrible path where the pious end up sinning more than the sinner.