“Five hundred a week, they said. Ernie read where they’d pay that, they were putting up a thing up here, you can tell what’s coming at you a thousand miles away. Planes and rockets and like that. I don’t understand those things, anyway, he does, he told me and I said what’s the world coming to, it won’t be fit for the children to live in, pretty soon. Five hundred a week, he said. He wouldn’t make that in a month in Detroit, even overtime. We figured it out about the pay up here, he said six months, five hunderd a week, he figured twelve thousand, can you imagine! We could buy us a house and pay for it, and a yard for the kids to play. I said right away, we’ll make out, the kids and me, go on up, you say your fare’s paid and all, what’s six months, suppose it was a war! First he didn’t seem to mind, he said it was cockeyed, the cold and all, and then the daylight all the time, and everything secret, he never did know what he was doing he just did it. Then he kept writing it was lonely, you just laid in your bunk and looked at the ceiling. So I kept writing stick it out for the kids’ sakes, it’s only six months then it’s a home for all of us forever, no rent. But then he sounded real desperate, so I got my mother to come in, I took a plane the first time in my life, I thought we’d never get here and here I am and now look at the way he acted last night.”

Chris, dressed and standing at the door, apologetically at first until she saw that the woman was past caring who heard her, thought it must be awful it must be unbearable to be married to a man like that. She recalled the filth the obscenities that had seemed like an actual stench in the hot little Rest House. Marriage could be horrible, she thought. How could you know what it would be, beforehand?

“Tell you what,” Bridie was saying, her usually penetrating tones now low and confidential. “Tell you what, Miz—what’d you say your name was?”

“Cowgill. Mrs. Ernie Cowgill, his mother was a Wouter, there isn’t a better family in Michigan, he never behaved like this, well, he’d have a drink now and then, but he never was a drinking man, not like this. I don’t know what’s got into him, if it wasn’t for the kids I’d leave him.”

“Tell you what. If I was you I’d figure like he’d been sick and when he wakes up he’s well. I’m a nurse by profession. I’ve seen it a thousand times. Look. Five hundred a week, five thousand a week, it don’t mean a thing to a man who’s lonesome. He can’t talk to it he can’t sleep with it. I bet your Ernie was so keyed up thinking about your coming he couldn’t take it in, it knocked him flat, he took a couple of beers before your plane got in, maybe a whiskey on top of that, next thing all the poison he’s been storing up these months has got to let loose. That’s all. Pay it no mind. Come on over have a cup of good hot coffee with me, get yourself fixed up, and when he wakes up maybe he’ll get some coffee down. If I was you I wouldn’t throw last night in his face, just talk about the house you and the kids are going to have —–” Then, as the woman’s face hardened, “A man who’ll give up his home and his friends and his whole way of living to come up here and work in this Godforsaken place, why, that’s a man who loves his wife and kids.”