Soldiers' Pay by William Faulkner

Emmy's eyes were black and shallow as a toy animal's and her hair was a sunburned shock of no particular color. There was something wild in Emmy's face: you knew that she outran, outfought, outclimbed her brothers: you could imagine her developing like a small but sturdy greenness on a dunghill. Not a flower. But not dung, either.

Her father was a house painter, with the house painter's inevitable penchant for alcohol, and he used to beat his wife. She, fortunately, failed to survive the birth of Emmy's fourth brother, whereupon her father desisted from the bottle long enough to woo and wed an angular shrew who, serving as an instrument of retribution, beat him soundly with stove wood in her lighter moments.