I’ve listened to it a dozen, dozen times, how he sat in the bar in LaBret and heard talk of the woman on the farm with a lonely daughter. Some drunken drifter told him how the woman’s husband had hanged himself in a barn. It was the old story, the woman going out and finding her man seven-stepping the air, then her cutting him down, the weight of him falling through her arms. He’d heard it many times in those days, so many he thought there must be a hanged man in each barn or house he passed, a lonely woman on every quarter-section from the Dakotas to Alberta. There was always a daughter who lay on a narrow cot each night, her hand between her legs as she imagined a man who might save her from feeding pigs, collecting eggs, and milking the cows she dreamed someday of owning, a hired man, lean and hungry, hanging his arms over a corral fence, smiling at her as she passed by.

He’d heard the story and the jokes. Did you hear the one about the farmer’s daughter? Men drinking their beer and laughing. It was the same in every bar, someone sitting alone and looking for company. After a few beers, he was told of the farm near Nokomis and the women living there alone.

Why did he believe the story? What made him cadge a ride on a passing truck and why did he get off the truck at the road where it swung east toward Nokomis? Why didn’t he keep riding all the way to Prince Albert? Or into Saskatoon? That’s where he thought he was going. He’d been told he’d find work there on the bridges. Why not go there? He said a man goes naturally toward trouble and it’s always a woman.

He told me he didn’t know.

What happened, Elmer?

She witched me wild, he’d say. I lost my mind the day I saw her there.

She was standing at the crook of the correction line just as the drunk in the bar back in LaBret said she’d be. She stood near naked in a threadbare dress by the barbed-wire fence with her hair adrift in the wind and he followed her to the house. Sometimes she walked backward, asking him questions about where he’d been and what he’d done. She said she was going to be a dancer someday. She turned once in a spin upon her bare brown feet and stood between the sun and him. He saw her body inside that white cotton dress, the fall of her young breasts, the shadow at her groin. Lillian knew what he was seeing, spinning there on her toes.

Nettie was in the house making bread, her mother. He knew, seeing them both in the kitchen, they were hungry for a man, and he knew he was good for both of them until the daughter swayed him apart with her talk of his owning the farm, the smell of her crotch rich as the crush of new-mown hay. He could have just had Nettie and the farm, but he couldn’t have both women. Not in the end.

Lillian knew that, young as she was. She waited for him in the field behind the barn and lifted her dress, brazen and wild. He says his brain was between his legs back then. When was it other than that? But back then, how could he turn down something sweet as her? And the farm was a good one. He knew he’d get a price for it no matter the drought.

The rope her father used was still hanging from its beam. Nettie wouldn’t have it down. The end of it where she’d cut her husband loose hung frayed like a shock of antelope hair caught on a barb of wire. Nettie told him her husband’s hair was the same colour. Elmer thought it’s why she left it hanging there. He’d watch it catch the breeze coming through the open doors. It swung there as if waiting for another man to hang himself. He told me he should’ve taken to the road the night the rope danced with blue fire, a storm passing over, lightning walking on its spider legs across the land, the thunder a fitful groan.