Joelle's history
derived from his very own personal hard-drinking alcoholic & chicken-farmer Daddy, in the grip of the post-binge Horrors and seeing subjective pests in a big way, one day, up and hitting Wayne at age nine smack in the face with a hatchet one time when Wayne couldn’t tell him where a certain Ball jar of distilled spirits had been hidden the day before
Context
John Wayne's facial "Flaw" is a father-wound made literal: an alcoholic chicken-farmer Daddy, deep in the Horrors, hatcheting his nine-year-old across the face for not knowing where the hooch was hidden. The predatory pole in its rawest rural key — "just him and his Daddy and his Maw" and seven-odd acres — a father whose disease carves itself permanently into the son's face. E.T.A.'s top prospect carries his father's dipsomania as a scar you can point at.