A man and woman started their married life by moving to lonely North Dakota to grow wheat. Work was hard and winters long, but they got by. The woman gave birth to a girl. Then another. The next was a boy who died, then another boy who also died.
The man said ``You kill my sons.''
The woman turned her face to the wall and died herself.
Soon the man was courting another woman, but she had no wish to spend her days on a lonely farm with two strange, silent daughters not her own.
The man could find no other woman. In his loneliness he began to use his daughters. First the younger, who he sensed would submit, but he soon found that a few threats and a cuff or two would silence the older one as well.
The man worked himself to obliviousness. If that didn't work he drank.
One dark winter morning when the oldest girl was fifteen their father was already out taking care of the horses. Molly, the younger, sat at the table in the freezing kitchen. Her hands were folded in her lap, her face rested sideways on the scrubbed wood of the table. Her sister Janet came slowly down the stairs, a bruise half hidden at her neck. She poked through the old embers in the stove and tricked them into flame with a handful of shavings. Dry kindling made heat. Coffee and soda cakes were quickly made. The two girls sat opposite each other.
Janet said ``Let's kill him.''
Molly said ``But he has the right. Says so in the Bible.''
``He has no right. Let's kill him.''
``A life for a life.''
``Then we'll kill ourselves as well.''
It was spring before a peddler found the man dead in his barn. No-one else around. The stock all dead or strayed. The kitchen filled with melting snow.
In a few years the sod house dissolved away. Drifters and neighbors took the few dishes and pans. The barn wood was quickly taken. The ground returned to emptiness except that three wild plum trees were seen to grow where the door yard must have been.