Violence - Bonnie Smetts

It wasn’t a storm that ripped the town to shreds. It was that aunt, Jane Whitfield’s aunt, who brought her own kind of storm. You can live some place your whole life and know what to expect. Who’ll be driving down the road, who’ll be at the grocers, who’ll be at the farm fair. Then this woman comes along and changes up everything.

Last summer the crops were looking good, we were all talking about the fall harvest we’d all be having. I know every man in Welford was eyeing a new car, or at least a new tractor. The hedges were high and the creeks ran with water all the way into July.

Yes, the bugs were big too, but nobody cared. At least until the aunt so-and-so started in on the men.

One by one, a man would be missing for an hour or two. Somebody would ask, hey, you seen Walt or Bunkie or Workman? You know, standing around the pub at noon. Nope, nobody saw him, not since yesterday, of course.

Then the next day, hey, you seen —and there was another name called out. When we did see them, they just said they’d had business keeping them busy. That’s seemed possible with the big harvest coming up. You know everyone was making deals behind everyone else’s back, trying to be the first to line up buyers. We’re supposed to act like a cooperative, the whole valley able to sell as one. But the good year had unleashed greed in us. And then with the aunt showing up, the man thing, the thing that happens to any righteous man, reared up. I’m guessing Workman got sexed up with that aunt because he was the first to say he’d found a buyer for this crops, all of them.

Now nobody sells the whole lot like that, so that set off a jealousy. Then every last one of us, I could see this coming, was calling up the grain brokers and the vegetable people and the hay guys, mad that we’d been so trusting. Then we started hearing actual words about that aunt. Words like, you know that Helen woman, I seen her with Walt. Oh yeah? Where? Where around here you’d see her with Walt? Not here, one town over, they’d mention another town.

Every one of us started eyeing every other one. Next thing I know Walt beat up Wrotham, then Wrotham went and beat up Berg. And so it went. My guess is that each man that Helen took then turned mean and wicked, like she cast a spell over us. Men walking around with black eyes and broken arms. Never seen such a thing.

This summer, we’ve had no rain. Not a drop. Nobody’s got orders from anyone outside. We’ll have to get together and sell as a co-op again, just to get something out of the year. That woman disappeared right around the time the rains stopped.