The Bully of Order by Brian Hart

delivered from Heath’s store so I wouldn’t have to go to town. Duncan and I worked in the garden, and with the money Jacob brought us, we bought three pigs and four lambs. We had a bit of clear weather, and the sun felt lovely. He writes me letters; they come with the supplies or with whoever’s passing by the house.
    A family, the Parkers, moved into the abandoned homestead south of us. Edna was around the same age as me, and they had a boy, Zeb, the same age as Duncan. Lewis, the husband, worked at the mill and was gone most of the week, sleeping at the bunkhouse. They raised goats, and you could smell them from a mile off. Edna and I became friends, and Duncan and Zeb did too. We visited often, and soon it was them that brought the mail and any other news deemed valuable.
    To my surprise, I began to expect and perhaps need the letters from Jacob, and it felt like maybe I understood him, or at least understood why I’d married him in the first place. I felt that in some ways I knew him for what he’d always been, but in others he presented himself fresh, whole cloth. He told me that he’d once stabbed his brother in the leg when he was a boy because Matius wouldn’t stop teasing him. He stabbed him and locked him in the tack room in the barn and wouldn’t let him out. He told me that with his back to the wall he felt the boards shake as his brother kicked and screamed to be let out.
    â€œYou can only take a thing so far,” he’d written.
    I didn’t know if he was bleeding to death (it sounded like he was dying) and I didn’t hate him any longer but I was terrified of what he would do when I let him out, and also what my father would do to me for stabbing my own brother. It was a pocketknife and short-bladed but I stabbed him deep enough to hit bone. He still hasn’t forgiven me. Even after the savage beating I received when he finally escaped. There’s been occasion when I’ve caught him looking at me with the same murderous look as when I let him out of the tack room, and like then, it makes me want to run. I guess it takes little to turn a man to fear and worry. Each of us has his own recipe. I wake up most mornings worried that I’ve failed you, and I know that it is true. I needed honesty after what I’d done, who I’d pretended to be, and the woods welcomed me. There are days when I can’t bear the thought of coming home, and I don’t know why that hasn’t changed. I can’t blame you for your infidelities. I can’t blame Haslett either. I write that, and in the same moment that the ink stains the paper I pray that you burn this letter so no one can shame me with what’s transpired. But doesn’t everyone know? It seems the case. On and on.
    Work in the woods is like you’d expect, toil and sweat. Our task is one of hubris, but it teaches me what a man, a dozen men, can do. There are bears and ghosts in the woods and strange noises that come through the tent walls in the night, louder than the rain, which isn’t quiet. Once we found a mass grave from what the Indians call the Big Sick (smallpox), and there were skulls like river rocks piled up, some with the flathead fronts. A man named Bennoit took a skull and kept it stashed in his bundle, but no one wanted it in the camp for the bad luck it would bring, so they made him get rid of it. We don’t think he did, though, because the very next day a man named Wilson working on another part of the crew was killed in a mudslide. First time anybody had seen that. It took half a day to dig him out. Bennoit slipped away sometime in the bustle, lucky too because the dead man’s cousins were looking for him and might have murdered him. When we freed the body the mud had been packed so deeply into the man’s eyes that they’d been pushed inside his skull and we never found them. He had a vein of mud thick as my wrist packed down his throat as far as we