“Everybody noticed they’d changed. We figured the winter had done it, just the two of them back there in that cabin together, nobody else and not much to be done except fix the place up, and they couldn’t do much of that with the money they had. He was quieter, didn’t have the energy he’d had when they’d first turned up, or even what he’d had in the fall, when he was excited about selling the cattle.

“It wasn’t showing that early in the spring, but it turned out she was pregnant, due in September. But she was thin, terribly thin, they both were, skinnier even than they’d been in the fall, you’d have thought they’d have fattened themselves up over winter. Her hair wasn’t the way it was before, I don’t think she was bothering much to wash it, it was kind of coarse and stringy, and when we first saw her the year before she was all round and pink, and her hair and eyes were shiny things; the women saw her now and shook their heads. Those women knew the lives they had, and they knew hers must be that much tougher; they said she wasn’t going to make it, and they blamed him. They said he was killing her, keeping her back there on that poor farm with no company, nothing but him and work. They couldn’t understand why he didn’t see it and do something, but they should have known; their own husbands didn’t seem to notice what happened to them over the years.”

The old man sighed, looked disgusted.

“I grew up on a farm myself, watched my parents work from sunrise till after sundown, saw the lines in my mother’s face get deeper every year; she died when she was only fifty-six, and I think she was just worn out, nothing but just worn out. My dad spent so much time working outside that his face got all squinty-eyed and his skin was a red colour all the year round, but still he must have stayed healthier than her because he lived to be seventy-two. But he never noticed what was happening to her, and then she died. I got out just as soon as I could. Came into town, borrowed from the bank and started up this store. The old farm was sold after my dad died, and I’ve never been sorry it’s gone. It’s a devil of a life.” He sighed again.

“But anyway. The women thought it was killing young Belle McAllister, and when they heard she was going to have a baby, they were really furious; she looked so frail then. Of course they blamed him; they couldn’t blame their own husbands for what happened to them, so they blamed McAllister. At least that’s what I figured.