Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

But I didn’t see the girl until after they were married and came back to Hanover to live. He didn’t become a preacher, after all, because his uncle died and left his hardware store to Homer’s lather and Homer’s father thought it over and decided the cash drawer of a good-paying hardware store was better than the rewards of saving souls.

So Homer came back to Hanover to live and set up his wife in a house alongside his parents’ house and took over the hardware store.

The hardware business flourished because Homer was honest and reliable and sold only the best hardware, and his father kind of looked after the business, because Homer wasn’t very good about things like that. He was really romantic and all that squeezing into a hard pious shell couldn’t change that in him. It was always bursting out somewhere.

After he got married he took to reading all kinds of romantic novels like The Three Musketeers. He really wanted to travel to places alone, looking for adventures, but he’d got himself married when he was twenty-one and his wife had twins, and after that there was a baby about every eighteen months until there were five, so he couldn’t very well do anything but look after the store and take care of the children when his wife Etta was doing church work.

And his wife wasn’t much. I’m kind of an idealist, and before he got married, I always pictured him taking up with a woman who was as fine and beautiful as himself. There was something wonderful in the idea of a beautiful girl marrying such a handsome fellow as Homer and in their having a lot of beautiful children.

But when he came back and invited me to supper one night to meet Etta, I felt kind of sick when I saw her. I knew right away that Homer had been up to his old tricks. He’d married the kind of woman he’d been brought up to marry and not the kind he’d been meant by Nature to marry.

She didn’t take to me and I certainly didn’t like her, and after that first meeting, Homer and I began to see less and less of each other. She was the kind of woman who wasn’t going to let her husband have any friends.

It wasn’t just women. She wouldn’t let him have men friends, either. And I guess she thought I was the devil himself, so she wouldn’t even let Homer go on trying to save my soul so I could be in heaven with him.

Once she buttonholed me on the street and called me a sot and harangued me until I got away from her, and after that Homer was ashamed and he’d walk around a block or go into a store if he saw me coming. I guess there’s lots of women like her in America.

Of course, with all that going on, she didn’t have much time for housework. The children were always sick and the dishes were never washed, and Homer used to have to stay at home to look after the children and take care of the house while she went to meetings and traveled about lecturing and haranguing.

I always thought he had too much character to do things like that, but I guess she just wore him down with abuse and whining and nagging. But he did have enough character to preserve a kind of dignity in spite of everything. He just gave up going out anywhere and lived between his house and the hardware store. He was crazy about his children.

But marriage didn’t do him much good. Instead of growing fat on it like most men, he seemed to grow dry. He looked older than he was and there were hard lines in his face that oughtn’t to have been there, and I only found out the reason when he sent for me at the Mitchellville jail after he got into trouble.

When I got word that he wanted to see me, I could have died of surprise, because he hadn’t seen me in fifteen years for more than long enough to say “Howdydo” when we passed in the street. I guess his mind must have gone back a long way, beyond Etta and all she’d done to him, to that day when we went swimming together for the last time and lay on the soft grass behind the haunted Sammis house.

Sitting there in the cell of the Mitchellville jail, he told me all about Etta and about everything else, too. After the fifth child was born, she told him the doctor said if she had another child it would kill her, so they couldn’t live together as man and wife any more. And that happened before Homer was 30. So for seventeen years they lived together as if they weren’t married.

The summer that Homer was 48 Etta said she had to have a rest because she was all worn out. Homer didn’t want to go away but she kept nagging him, and at last he left the hardware store with his clerk and his oldest boy and they went up to La Vallette. He was looking bad himself, all gray and dried-up.

He hardly spoke to anybody any more, and just lived between his home and the store. He’d just given up all his old friends, and somehow he’d got all bitter inside.

La Vallette is a little town up on the lake where all sorts of religious cranks go for a cheap rest. There are some cottages and three or four cheap hotels and a wooden tabernacle.