The story of the Cain family
Ethel Cain is a character, and her records are one chapter of a planned trilogy about three generations of women in the Cain family: the preacher's mother, the preacher's wife, and the preacher's daughter. Each installment steps a generation back.
The story is told plainly where the records state it. An open circle marks a beat the records leave to the compiled lore rather than tell outright, and years appear only where the artist or the records give them. The story ends in violence, and the final chapters say so plainly.
Generation one. The preacher's mother
The matriarch, and the woman her granddaughter is named after. She has no name of her own on the record, and nothing of her story is public yet. Her record will come last and sit earliest.
Generation two. The preacher's wife
01The marriage
She marries the preacher, Reverend Joseph Cain, in Shady Grove, Alabama. The compiled lore places the family there long before the records open.
02 · 1980The fire
The compiled lore holds that the preacher dies in a fire that devastates Shady Grove, and his wife is widowed with their daughter still a child.
Preacher's Daughter, 2022Generation three. The preacher's daughter
03Childhood in the South
Born into the preacher's household in Shady Grove. Faith, fear, and inherited harm shape her before she can choose any of it.
04 · 1986First love
As a teenager she loves Willoughby Tucker. The home the two of them imagine together stands for everything they almost had, and the prequel record lives entirely inside these years.
05 · 1991Leaving home
Her father is years dead and the household still lives in his shadow. She runs from home and onto the road, looking for a freer, more American life.
06The road
She crosses the country and finds love, sex, drugs, and precarity instead of the life she chased.
07The descent
A dangerous man, and a life that darkens around him. He is known as Isaiah, though the records never confirm the name or his exact part in what follows.
08The end
She is murdered and consumed by a lover. The violence is literal in the story, and it is also the record's central metaphor for how America and men consume women.
09After
Death does not end her account of it. She speaks from somewhere past the story, and the last thing she says, she says to her mother. The compiled lore holds that her mother never learns what happened to her.
