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heard how, for weeks afterwards, fits would come upon her and she would try to do herself harm, that she had had to be kept under restraint and sedation, and we knew that the town doctors had called in mental specialists from Dallas. But then we heard that the crisis was past, that she would recover, and—early that summer—that she was beginning to take a hand in running the house once more. Mid-summer came, and we began to wait for her to erect a monument over her husband’s grave. The town had given the Captain the biggest funeral in its history. We had high expectations for his tombstone.
    But summer passed and the leaves were on the ground, and even on Graveyard Cleaning Day, with everybody home for it, even those whose families moved away generations ago—for home, we say, is where you bury—she still had done nothing about it; his grave was still unmarked. His exploits were then still very fresh to us, and had been on such a scale that we must have supposed Mrs. Hannah to have been impressed in quite as impersonal a way as we were. Certainly we were surprised, and even a little disappointed, to learn now that she had felt an ordinary wife’s resentment of his escapades.
    Nobody really blamed Mrs. Hannah for the tragedy. Enough of the story was out now for us to see that it was too complicated to have been any one person’s fault. It was just one of those fated things. But as Graveyard Cleaning Day had neared and the scandal grown over her neglect of the Captain’s grave, Mrs. Hannah’s mother, old lady Griffin, had taken it upon herself to exonerate her daughter. She had been very busy telling her story all the week before, and so before work began that morning, as we lingered over breakfast-on-the-ground in the litter of leaves beneath the big bare oaks at the graveyard edge, rifling scythes and filing hoes while the women cleared away the dishes and filled seconds on the coffee, we began to criticize her afresh, and to remember that she had always taken being Mrs. Hunnicutt rather more for granted than such a plain girl had the right to do.
    But if at last her patience had given way, it was not for her own sake that she had taken steps, and it was after years of the kind of selflessness and suffering that holy martyrs were made of. This was her mother’s view. And in truth there was something in it, as all agreed to whom she told her story—though perhaps they saw things Mrs. Griffin did not see in one conversation of Hannah’s which she reported in detail, to illustrate her point. It had occurred years before, just after some particularly loud scandal involving the Captain and somebody’s wife had reached Hannah. Her mother had heard and had gone to her, but had found instead of the broken woman she expected, one to whom long-suffering had become a source of strength.
    â€œHe is my husband,” she had said. “It is a wife’s duty to respect her husband, no matter how little he may deserve it—in fact, all the more as he doesn’t. At least, so my father always told me [her father, Old Man Griffin, had passed on shortly before—to some eternal domino parlor for his sins], and it is certainly a daughter’s duty to respect her father.”
    There was bitterness—as her mother knew—in this. It was to her father that she had gone six months after her wedding to complain that Wade was not pure when he took her. And her father never afterwards occurred to her mind but in that pose of astonishment and amusement, asking her what on earth she had expected of a twenty-eight-year-old man. He had been a little disgusted to speak of the sort of fellow she apparently had wanted for a husband. He was disappointed that she had not known beforehand and did not appreciate what a ladies’ man she was getting in Wade. He himself had known from the start, and though the Griffins were of even older stock than the Hunnicutts, he had been flattered