The Farmer's Wife

The farmer’s wife watched, and she waited, and she dug more holes. Winter was closing in and soon the ground would become too unyielding to turn. Already her breath was clouding around her like white mist, and a thick crust of frost rested on the grass. Pigs in the adjacent field crunched their way through the frozen slurry, the ponies pawing at the hard ground in the paddock. The ducks would have a great deal of difficulty once the pond froze over, skidding onto its surface as they tried to land. It was the same every year.

The barn doors were closed in November when the first snow began to fall. It didn’t always settle, forming a nasty slush that the farmer and his wife had to wade through in their wellingtons. The cold made them miserable. Extra fires were lit, additional layers worn under clothes already heavy with insulation, and bedpans filled to the brim with hot coals. Journeys to the outhouse were almost unbearable. The farmer’s wife envied the ladies in fine country houses who had servants to warm the seat for them and maids to rush away the contents of their chamber pots every morning. Each trip reminded her that her circumstances could have been different, if she had only made a better choice of husband.

Dwight Clarence was not a bad man. Not to the unexperienced, at least. His wife had been smitten on the day they were married, and remained so for a good couple of years; but time revealed many things she did not like about him. It wasn’t his snoring, nor his looks, for he could change neither of these things and she was not petty enough to worry about them. It was the living he denied her, the money pawed aside for his own benefit, that riled her spirit. She had not thought him selfish in the beginning, when he brought flowers to her doorstep and presented her with pretty jewellery. But the further he sunk into his brandy the more selfish he became, and on a few occasions she had wondered whether a bit of arsenic would go amiss.

Killing her husband would be a rather large inconvenience, however. She had considered it many times, mostly when he forced himself upon her and she had a few minutes to think whilst staring at the ceiling. Strangulation, suffocation, and stabbing had all crossed her mind. But she always arrived at the same conclusion; he was irritatingly essential. The local people refused to do business with a woman in the absence of her husband, and Dwight’s close relationship with Mr Brady always ensured a cheaper deal at the grocers.  

In farm work he also found some merit. Harvest was never easy, but it was especially unkind to the solitary. They had no-one to share the load with; farm hands were too expensive, children an impossibility. Once she had resented her body for its inability to create life, but as her husband became more intolerable she was increasingly pleased that she had spared a baby the misfortune of having Dwight for a father.