“Donne, John Donne. I’d suffered such men as her husband. Cursed expectorators. I had seen ma pauvre maman reduced to ashes in the grate of her youth. So when Maud, walking through her father’s factory, got a steel splinter in her hand, I removed it, kissed her bloody palm, took that sacrament, and I said,

“Take me to You, imprison me, for I,

Except You enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.”

Otto snorted. “She spread her yams for that?”

“She spread nothing. She divorced and we married—which, as you know, was at the cost of most of her fortune: cut off, cast out into the world. I did not lay a hand upon her before that.”

“And not since, from what I hear,” Otto muttered.

Exhausted by his outburst, Magnus fell back once more against the wall.

Sal had been scraping at something on the table during this exchange and now looked up at Siggy. “Eh, why you never marry again?”

“Once was enough. Gave me no peace, that woman. Said I had no ambition. Told her, I’m the sheriff, damn it. Always had a stick up her ass. But it was that minister what done it. Remember that visiting minister up from Texas? Spoke like a nigger. What a voice on him. Talk about spooking the horses. Every woman in town. Women are like that; a voice can turn ’em.”

“Trudy she cleans the house,” Sal said.

“What?”

“What she did after this minister. Cleans the house like a crazy woman. This my wife, eh? Cleaning the house. Dio boia, I think the world it’s gonna end.”

“That sonofabitch. I’ll tell you,” Siggy went on. “Bess said I was a millstone around her neck; said a man with no ambition has no right to live. I got drunk that night, thought I’d give her a fright. Figured it all out and unloaded my gun. And when I walk in she’s sitting there on the sofa, and I put the gun to my head and I pull back the hammer, and she screams, ‘Sigmund!’ Then she points at the floor. ‘Not on the new rug,’ she says.”

Bennet leaned back as if to get a different perspective on his cousin. “You didn’t tell me this.”

“And you no found another woman?” Sal said.

“Got to find his dick first,” Otto put in. “Ain’t seen anything below that gut for ten years.”

Siggy sighed dreamily. “Now, Ruth—I mean, I wouldn’t have stepped in there or nothing”—he glanced at Goldwin—“but she is one fine-looking woman. Shouldn’t be on her own.”