You can live with hopelessness for only so long before you are, in fact, hopeless. He was fifty-four years old, and despair had come to Ralph as an infection, without his even knowing it. He could not pinpoint the moment at which hope had left his heart.

The townspeople nodded respectfully as they scuttled past. “Evening, Mr. Truitt.” And they couldn’t help it, “Train’s a tad late, Mr. Truitt?” He wanted to hit them, tell them to leave, to leave him alone. Because of course they knew. There had been telegrams, wire transfers, a ticket. They knew everything.

They knew the whole history of his years from the time he was a baby. Many of them, most of them, worked for him in one way or another, in the iron foundry, logging or mining or buying and selling and tallying up the sales or the rents. He underpaid them, though he grew richer by the hour. The ones who didn’t work for him were, by and large, not doing any kind of work at all beyond the hardscrabble and desperate labor that kept the witless and lazy alive in hard climates.

Some, he knew, were lazy. Some were cruel to their wives and children, unfaithful to their dull and steady husbands. The winters were too long, too hard, and nobody would be expected to last it out.

For some, normal lives turned to nightmare. They starved to death in the horrible winters. They removed themselves from society and lived alone in ramshackle huts in the woods. They were found drooling and naked and were committed to the insane asylum at Mendota where they were wrapped in icy sheets and lashed with electrical currents until they could be restored to sanity and quietude. These things happened.

Still, every day, more people went on than didn’t; more people stayed than left. The ones who stayed, crazy and sane, all of them sooner or later had business with Ralph Truitt. Ralph Truitt, he, too, went on through the cold and his own terrifying loneliness.