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  With that Hiram swept past all of them, ignoring the children as he went into the house.

  “Why that—” Carrie began and started after him. No one was going to say something like that to her!

  Josh caught her arm. “Don’t,” he said, his eyes pleading. “He leaves in precisely two hours and twenty minutes, and I find that one can bear him for that length of time.”

  “I don’t believe I can,” Carrie said.

  “Someone with your money doesn’t have to,” Josh said meanly. “You’ll never believe what we poor people have to put up with in order to survive.”

  Now she had been insulted by both of the men. Looking down her nose at her husband, she went into the house.

  “Your rich wife give you all of this?” she heard Hiram saying as she entered the house. He was looking over his fat belly toward the table that she had worked so hard on. “Be sure she doesn’t take it with her when she leaves you,” he said to Josh and began to laugh nastily at his own joke.

  When Carrie started to open her mouth, Josh looked at her, his eyes begging her to keep quiet. “When he kicks us off the farm, are you going to buy us another one?” Josh said softly, with such derision in his voice that Carrie clamped her mouth shut. At that moment she wasn’t sure which of the men she disliked the most.

  Carrie was determined to endure this odious man for the full two hours and twenty minutes. After all, Josh was making her leave tomorrow and maybe she’d never see this family again, so it wasn’t as though she had any right to care what happened to them. If they wanted to sit still and endure this man’s insults, that was their business.

  And insult them he did. He talked about the children’s lack of education, wanting Dallas to quote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” When the five-year-old said that she had never heard of the poem, Hiram gave his brother a look of disgust. Keeping his head down, Josh didn’t answer his brother.

  When Hiram looked at Tem’s small hands, he declared them unfit for work, saying that when he was Tem’s age he was practically running a farm by himself. He also berated Tem for getting lost and causing problems that made the Greene name a laughingstock in town.

  When he’d finished with the children, he started on Josh, laughing at Josh’s cornfield and announcing that he had always known that Josh could never make it as a farmer.

  It was only when Hiram began to talk of Josh’s past that Carrie’s ears perked up. From what she could gather from Hiram’s cryptic tirade, Josh had done something atrocious in his past and that was why he’d lost what money he’d had. Hiram spoke of Josh being “on the run,” and when Carrie looked at Josh, she saw the way he was staring down at his plate, not saying a word.

  What could Josh have done that was so bad? she wondered. According to Hiram, Josh had once been quite wealthy, for Hiram mentioned that Josh must be very used to the silver and the pretty dishes, but that Josh had had everything taken away from him.

  Taken away by whom? Carrie wondered. By the law? Had Josh gained his wealth in some nefarious way and been caught at it?

  Hiram finally ran out of words about Josh, then turned to his wife, telling everyone at the table everything that Alice had done “wrong” that week. He told of clothing stains that she had not been able to remove and food undercooked and overcooked. He told of cobwebs hanging from the ceiling.

  Carrie looked at the watch pinned to her breast. Only one hour gone. It was amazing that one person could pontificate for so long.

  When Hiram was at last finished with his wife, he paused—not that talking nonstop had caused him to miss so much as a bite—and looked at Carrie.

  Carrie was well aware of the other people at the table, all of them sitting solemnly, all of them saying nothing in their own defense at what this man was saying about them. When Hiram turned to her, she didn’t look down at her plate, but met his eyes. Money, she thought. That’s what gave this man his power. He owned his own farm and Josh’s, and because he had the power to evict them, in essence to take the roof from over their heads and food from their mouths, he thought he had the right to denigrate them.

  But Carrie knew about money. Many, many times she had felt the power of her family’s money, but, thank heaven, there had always been someone from her family nearby to tell her that money did not give a person special privileges. Just because she had money didn’t mean that she got a free ride in the world. She had to give something back to the earth besides money.

  Hiram looked at Carrie long and hard, then turned away with a little smirk and looked back at Josh. “I can see why you got her,” he said in the most leering tone that Carrie had ever heard.

  Hiram looked back at Carrie, as though trying to ascertain what she was going to say to him.

  When Carrie smiled at him sweetly, Hiram turned away with a smirk of self-satisfaction.

  It was his look that broke Carrie. Not his words. She could handle them, but she couldn’t handle that smile, for he seemed to assume that here was yet another person to browbeat and humiliate.

  “More corn, Brother Hiram?” Carrie asked sweetly.

  With that smirk still on his ugly face, he said, “Don’t mind if I do. Of course it isn’t corn that my little brother has grown, is it? Too many worms for me.”

  Picking up the heavy silver dish, she offered it to him, but when he put his hand on the bowl, he leered at her and said, “You may be useless as a wife, but I bet you have some uses as a woman.”

  Carrie looked him in the eyes, smiled, then poured the bowl of corn in his lap. In the ensuing silence of horror that came from everyone at the table, Carrie managed to pour creamed spinach on Hiram’s head, coleslaw in his face, and hit him with a greasy ham in the chest. She had her hand on the carving knife when Josh grabbed her wrist.

  “He has no right to—” Carrie began.

  Josh’s hand tightened on her wrist. “You don’t know anything,” he said.

  “And no one has bothered to tell me, either,” she said, then, with one more look at the children, she ran out of the house. It wasn’t her business. Just because she was married to Josh, just because she loved the children with all her heart and soul, that didn’t seem to count.

  She ran until she reached the road, and then she kept on running—wanting to run all the way back to Maine. She kept going until her lungs were bursting and her legs were weak.

  When she could go no further, she turned to the nearby river and slipped into the trees to sit on the bank by the rushing water. She hadn’t caught her breath before she started crying.

  She cried for a long time, her knees pulled up to her chin, hiding her face in the folds of her dress. She had tried so hard and had failed so completely.

  “Here,” said a voice beside her, and a handkerchief was held out to her.

  Looking up through her tears, she saw Josh sitting beside her. “Go away. I hate you. I hate all of you. I wish I could leave today instead of tomorrow, and I’ll be glad to never see any of you again.”

  Without any comment on her little speech, his eyes on the water, he handed her a bottle of whisky. “It’s good single malt Scotch, the best there is. My last bottle.”

  Taking it from him, Carrie swallowed a healthy-sized amount of the smoky liquid, then took another drink and another, until Josh pulled the bottle out of her hands.

  “About my brother…” he began.

  Carrie waited. The whisky was making her feel better, hazy, relaxed. Leaning back on her arms, she looked at the water. When Josh didn’t say anything more, she gave a nasty little laugh. “I knew you wouldn’t tell me anything. I knew you couldn’t part with a secret.” She turned to look at him. “I must say that your brother doesn’t look much like you.”

  “We’re not blood relatives. My mother married his father when I was ten and Hiram was already an adult by then.”

  “Was his father like him?”

  “No.” Josh took a long drink of the whisky. “I think my stepfather was a bit horrified by Hiram.”