accord, his wretchedness is money in the bank for me. Miss Elvira Drean, a rich spinster of twenty-seven, seeks information regarding eligible male companions. She pays me to ferret out honorable men who have not yet attached themselves and who therefore might find her an attractive prospect. Here again, I have tried to convince her that I can be of no assistance, for there is not an honorable unattached man within a hundred miles of Hatch. Whether it is local or universal I cannot say, but this is the bald truth concerning romance in our fair county. Either you get married young, or you leave. Either you leave young, or you get married. But you only flee on the flimsy wager that you might find something you don’t already have, and you only marry on the silent prayer that life might, somehow, be miraculously transformed. Miss Drean’s romantic notions—that domestic bliss awaits just round the next bend—have little to do with the coldhearted world she inhabits.
Why so hard on love, you ask? After all, a young man such as myself at twenty-four years of age might be just the sort of person Miss Drean—for there are so many Elvira Dreans—would consider a worthy companion. I make a decent enough impression, being of a spry if not overly impressive build and possessed of good teeth and a head well-threaded with dun-colored hair. My green eyes have yet to rheum over from excessive vice, and my skin is not so pockmarked as is my conscience. There, of course, I might need to kick a little dirt around to cover certain details of my life so as to conceal from her gentle soul some of my less worthy endeavors. But I am, at heart, a good enough man. And my work, though not as commendable as that of a doctor or magistrate, is undertaken much of the time in service to honest people in need of honorable counsel. The hitch in the rope is this: Though I was once an openhearted boy—with an impractical tendency to view everything in an optimistic light—I notice nothing but misery around me now. I trust no one and have little desire to seek a bond that can only, in the end, bring disappointment and despair. I once expected the world of the world, but no more. It is far simpler, I have found, to dive into other people’s problems than it is to sort out one’s own, and my work provides me ample foxholes. For that, I am ever grateful.
My personal prayer book? The Gazetteer and similar town penny sheets full of pleas for help, if one reads between the lines. After all, the stories contained therein—each at its core—hold an almost biblical truth. In simple typeface, the complexities of human passion, greed, generosity, and desperation are laid bare. One need only wipe clean the magnifier and train it on another’s sad history to find a mirror of one’s own unfathomable existence. Not to mention, the potential for employment.
As luck would have it, moments after I had blown the dust from my Sunday topper, a sharp knocking at the front door spared my soul the Lord’s forgiveness. It was a messenger—one I knew well—and I could not help sighing as I took the paper packet he pushed my way and showed him into my study.
Elwyn Cramby. The mere sight of his tortured frame unnerved me, for he hailed from Burns’ Hollow, the town where I resided when I was young. We had shared little but the schoolhouse and our unequal attempts to survive the bullies it sheltered; still, I am not proud that I turned a blind eye to the humiliations Cramby suffered at the hands of a boy who was, in those long-forgotten days, my friend. One James Hurlbut.
How I wish now that I’d known well enough to take Cramby under my wing. But as a youth, he shriveled in the face of human contact and could not meet another’s gaze were a pistol pressed to his temple. The tic rendered him difficult to like and thus to defend when he became James’s target. While I made excuses to absent myself from such sport, I knew that on any given day, Cramby could be
Why so hard on love, you ask? After all, a young man such as myself at twenty-four years of age might be just the sort of person Miss Drean—for there are so many Elvira Dreans—would consider a worthy companion. I make a decent enough impression, being of a spry if not overly impressive build and possessed of good teeth and a head well-threaded with dun-colored hair. My green eyes have yet to rheum over from excessive vice, and my skin is not so pockmarked as is my conscience. There, of course, I might need to kick a little dirt around to cover certain details of my life so as to conceal from her gentle soul some of my less worthy endeavors. But I am, at heart, a good enough man. And my work, though not as commendable as that of a doctor or magistrate, is undertaken much of the time in service to honest people in need of honorable counsel. The hitch in the rope is this: Though I was once an openhearted boy—with an impractical tendency to view everything in an optimistic light—I notice nothing but misery around me now. I trust no one and have little desire to seek a bond that can only, in the end, bring disappointment and despair. I once expected the world of the world, but no more. It is far simpler, I have found, to dive into other people’s problems than it is to sort out one’s own, and my work provides me ample foxholes. For that, I am ever grateful.
My personal prayer book? The Gazetteer and similar town penny sheets full of pleas for help, if one reads between the lines. After all, the stories contained therein—each at its core—hold an almost biblical truth. In simple typeface, the complexities of human passion, greed, generosity, and desperation are laid bare. One need only wipe clean the magnifier and train it on another’s sad history to find a mirror of one’s own unfathomable existence. Not to mention, the potential for employment.
As luck would have it, moments after I had blown the dust from my Sunday topper, a sharp knocking at the front door spared my soul the Lord’s forgiveness. It was a messenger—one I knew well—and I could not help sighing as I took the paper packet he pushed my way and showed him into my study.
Elwyn Cramby. The mere sight of his tortured frame unnerved me, for he hailed from Burns’ Hollow, the town where I resided when I was young. We had shared little but the schoolhouse and our unequal attempts to survive the bullies it sheltered; still, I am not proud that I turned a blind eye to the humiliations Cramby suffered at the hands of a boy who was, in those long-forgotten days, my friend. One James Hurlbut.
How I wish now that I’d known well enough to take Cramby under my wing. But as a youth, he shriveled in the face of human contact and could not meet another’s gaze were a pistol pressed to his temple. The tic rendered him difficult to like and thus to defend when he became James’s target. While I made excuses to absent myself from such sport, I knew that on any given day, Cramby could be
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