“Snow coming hard,” they said.

“Dark already,” they said. Four o’clock and dark already.

“Evening, Ralph, Mr. Truitt. Going to be a big one, looks like. Said so in the almanac.”

All the little things they thought up, to pass the time, to make some small but brave attempt to establish a human connection with him. Each conversation with him became something to be thought out, considered and turned this way and that long before words were ever said, and to be remembered and reported after he was gone.

Saw Mr. Truitt today, they might say to their wives, because few dared think of his name any other way. He was cordial, asking after you and the children. Remembered every one of their names.

They hated him and they needed him and they excused him. The wives would say as their husbands ranted about what a skin flint bastard he was, what a tightwad, what an arrogant son of a bitch, “Well… you know… he’s had troubles.”

Of course they knew. They all knew.

He slept alone. He would lie in the dark and he would picture them, these people. He would dream their lives in the dark.

The husbands would turn and see their wives, and desire would burn through them like an explosion. Ralph imagined their lives, their desires, kindled by no more than a muslin nightdress. Eleven children, some of them thirteen: nine dead four living, six living seven gone.

In Ralph Truitt’s mind, in the dead of night, the knots of death and birth formed an insane lace, knitting the town together, in a ravishment of sexual acts and the product of these acts. All skin to skin in the dark, just underneath the heavy torturous garments in the day. Still, in his mind’s eye, the husbands would race into the warmed sheets and be young again, young and in love if only for fifteen minutes in the dark, lying with wasted women who were themselves, for those few minutes, beautiful young girls again with shiny braided hair and ready laughs. Sex was all he thought about in the dark.