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don’t know what, helped Toot and Ronnie with the hay. She wasthe one got stung by yellow jackets had a nest under a pumpkin. Well, now she’s livin’ over in Shoreham, I hear from her that her sister-in-law, Mrs. Charles Renfrew, runs the U-Auta lunchroom in Barton, her husband’s at the War in the Air Force, and she been arrested. I have never ate there and I don’t believe I ever will. She shot this feller, Jim somebody, worked for the electric light over there, with his own shotgun. Seems he come sneakin’ around, peepin’ in the windows to see what she was doin’ and he saw plenty. She got this cook in to help her run the lunchroom, a colored fellow from South America, she didn’t say what his name was, but Mrs. Charles Renfrew was seen by the electric company man kissin’ the cook, and in he comes with the shotgun. See, he was sweet on her himself. She’s a good-lookin’ woman, they say. She gets the shotgun away from him and shoots him. And he died. When they arrested her she admitted it all, but said everything was an accident. Got six children, the youngest one isn’t but four. Them poor little children. It was all in the paper. Terrible, ain’t it.’ She waited for Jewell to begin. Few things could be worse than Mrs. Charles Renfrew’s multiple crimes laid out in public view, and she’d told the story to give Jewell a chance to whittle her own troubles down to size. She leaned forward.
    Jewell slid the cup of tea over to her, the string dangling over the edge of the cup. ‘We had a little surprise here last night. Loyal comes in for supper, stands up in the middle of it and says that Billy and him is goin’ out west. They left last night. Kind of took us by surprise, but that’s the way the kids are these days.’
    ‘Is that right,’ said Mrs. Nipple. ‘Takes my breath away. Ronnie will be upset. Him and Loyal was tight as ticks.’ There was something awry, she thought, told straight out like that, no details of who had said what. She knew there was something deeper. Mink must have been crazy mad. The way Jewell told it now it didn’t seem like the kind of story that would gather with time, but instead would retract, condense, turn into one of those things that nobody talked about, and in a year or so it would all be forgotten. There were plenty of those stories. She knew one or two herself. It was all serious business. She never understood why Ronnie liked Loyal, no standout, even in the crowd of Bloods with their knack for doing the wrong thing,except for his strength and his sinewy hunger for work. But one man couldn’t bring that farm up again, it had too much against it. Look how it had gone down since the grandfather’s time when it was tight-fenced for the convenience of trotting horses and fine merinos, only three cows then for family butter and cheese on the place. She liked Jewell well enough, but the woman was a dirty housekeeper, letting the men in with their barn clothes on, letting the dust and spiders take over, and too proud for milk room work.
    ‘Well, Billy was smarting to get out, and I can’t say I blame her. But I’m surprised Loyal would go. He’s a country boy from the word go. She’ll find you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy. It won’t be easy to milk all them cows, just Mink and Dub. Dub’s still here or is he off somewhere again?’ Her voice so custard smooth now it would cure a sore throat.
    ‘Been here pretty steady since his accident. But you know how he is. The two of them can’t do it all. Not run this farm, just the two of them. We’ll have to hire somebody to come in, I imagine.’
    ‘You won’t find nobody. Ronnie tried all last winter, this spring and summer, and I guess he got to know everybody for twenty mile around that could hold a pitchfork, and I’ll tell you, the best he could find was school kids and hundred-year-old grandpas with wooden legs and canes. Some places they’re takin’