Hours after his daughter Carla's sixteenth birthday, Hank attempts to run off in the middle of the night, but is caught by his mentally unstable wife, Maggie. The two argue and accuse each other of infidelity, and when Hank threatens to take their four children away from her, Maggie snaps and beats him to death with a baseball bat; after hiding his body, she tells the rest of the family that he has absconded with his mistress. Maggie subsequently becomes a shut-in and descends into alcoholism and religious mania, spending most of her time obsessing over Pastor Jon Stackwell, an unscrupulous local Televangelism nicknamed "the Cowboy Prophet."