“The second thing I’m gonna do,” I said, “is somethin’ I should have done long ago. I’m gonna give you both barrels of this shotgun right in your stupid, stinking guts.”

And I did it.

It didn’t quite kill him, although he was dying fast. I wanted him to stay alive for a few seconds, so that he could appreciate the three or four good swift kicks I gave him. You might think it wasn’t real nice to kick a dying man, and maybe it wasn’t. But I’d been wanting to kick him for a long time, and it just never had seemed safe until now.

I left him after a while, getting weaker and weaker. Squirming around in a pool of his own blood and guts. And then ceasing to squirm.

Then, I drove on out to the Hauck farm.

The house was pretty much like most farm houses you see in this part of the country, except it was a little bigger. A pitched-roofed shack, with one long room across the front and a three-room lean-to on the back. It was made of pine, naturally, and it wasn’t painted. Because with the hot sun and high humidity, you can’t hardly keep paint on a house down here. At least, that’s what folks say and even if it ain’t so, it’s a danged good excuse for being shiftless. The farm land, a whole quarter section of it, was as good as you’d find.

It was that rich, black silt you see in the river lowlands; so fine and sweet you could almost eat it, and so deep that you couldn’t wear it out, like so much of the shallow soil in the south is worn out. You might say that land was a lot like Rose, naturally good, deep down good, but Tom had done his best to ruin it like he had her. He hadn’t done it, because they’d had too much good stuff to begin with. But both the land and her were a long sight from being what they’d been before he got ahold of ‘em.

She was hoeing sweet potatoes when I arrived, and she came running up from the field, panting for breath and pushing the sweatsoaked hair from her eyes. One heck of a pretty woman, she was; Tom hadn’t been able to change that. And she had one heck of a figure. Tom hadn’t been able to ruin her body either, although he’d sure tried hard. What he had changed was the way she thought—mean and tough— and the way she talked. When she didn’t have to be on guard, she talked practically as bad as he did.

“Goddam, honey,” she said, giving me a quick little hug and stepping back again. “Dammit, sweetheart, I won’t be able to stop today. That son-of-a-bitch of a Tom gave me too much work to do.”

I said, “Aw, come on. You can spare a few minutes. I’ll help you afterwards.”

She said, goddamit, it wouldn’t do any good if she had six men to help her. She still couldn’t get through. “You know I want you, honey,” she said. “I’m crazy about you, baby, and you know I am. If it wasn’t for all this goddam work—”