He was a good husband, a good father. I don’t understand it. I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe that it
happened. I saw it happen but it isn’t true. It can’t be. He was always gentle. If you’d have seen him
playing with the children, anybody who saw him with the children would have known that there wasn’t
any bad in him, not one mean bone. When I first met him he was still living with his mother, over near
Spring Lake, and I used to see them together, the mother and the sons, and think that any young fellow
that was that nice with his family must be one worth knowing. Then one time when I was walking in the
woods I met him by himself coming back from a hunting trip. He hadn’t got any game at all, not so much
as a field mouse, but he wasn’t cast down about it. He was just larking along enjoying the morning air.
That’s one of the things I first loved about him. He didn’t take things hard, he didn’t grouch and whine
when things didn’t go his way. So we got to talking that day. And I guess things moved right along after
that, because pretty soon he was over here pretty near all the time. And my sister said — see, my
parents had moved out the year before and gone south, leaving us the place — my sister said, kind of
teasing but serious, “Well! If he’s going to be here every day and half the night, I guess there isn’t room
for me!” And she moved out — just down the way. We’ve always been real close, her and me. That’s the
sort of thing doesn’t ever change. I couldn’t ever have got through this bad time without my sis.
Well, so he come to live here. And all I can say is, it was the happiest year of my life. He was just purely
good to me. A hard worker and never lazy, and so big and fine‐looking. Everybody looked up to him, you
know, young as he was. Lodge Meeting nights, more and more often they had him to lead the singing.
He had such a beautiful voice, and he’d lead off strong, and the others following and joining in, high
voices and low. It brings the shivers on me now to think of it, hearing it, nights when I’d stayed home
from meeting when the children was babies — the singing coming up through the trees there, and the
moonlight, summer nights, the full moon shining. I’ll never hear anything so beautiful. I’ll never know a
joy like that again.
It was the moon, that’s what they say. It’s the moon’s faul