“What were you doing up at the house?”

“Trying to save your brother’s life. He’s no doubt dead by now.”

“How could you save him?”

Maybe she didn’t mean to sound so contemptuous. It didn’t matter. He knew what she meant. That him having no hidden power, there wasn’t a thing he could do to help anybody. After years of being married, she still put her faith in witchery, just like her kin. He hadn’t changed her a bit. “You’re just the same,” he said. “Evil’s in you so deep that I can’t pray it out of you, and I can’t preach it out of you, and I can’t love it out of you, and I can’t yell it out of you!” When he said “pray,” he shoved her a little, just to make his point. When he said “preach,” he shoved her harder, and she stumbled back. When he said “love,” he took her by the shoulders and gave her such a shake her hair broke right out of the bun she’d made of it, and fluttered around her head. When he said “yell,” he knocked her back so far she stumbled down on the floor.

Seeing her falling, even before she hit the floor, he felt such a shame go through him, even worse than when her father threw him in the snow. A strong man makes me feel weak, so I go home and shove around my wife, what a big man that makes me. Here I been a Christian who never hit or hurt a man or woman, and I knock my own wife, flesh of my flesh, right down on the floor.

That was his thinking, and he was about to throw himself on his knees and bawl like a baby and beg forgiveness. He would’ve done it, too, except that when she saw the look on his face, all twisted up with shame and rage, she didn’t know that he was angry at himself, she just knew that he was hurting her, and so she did what come natural to a woman who grew up like she did. She moved her fingers to make a fending, and whispered a word to hold him back.

He couldn’t fall on his knees before her. He couldn’t take one step toward her. He couldn’t even think of taking a step toward her. Her fending was so strong he staggered back, he headed for the door, he opened it and ran outside in just his shirt. Everything he’d been afraid of came true today. He probably lost his future in politics, but that was nothing compared to this: his own wife did witchery in his own home, and she did it against him, and he had no defense against it. She was a witch. She was a witch. And his house was unclean.