The factory closed on a Tuesday in March 1978. Dale Hargrove found out when his foreman, a man named Peterson who had never once looked Dale in the eye, told him that production was being moved to Ohio and that Dale and three hundred other men should collect their final paychecks at the office before going home and not coming back. Dale walked home through the empty streets of his Ohio town, a place that had been full of people three months ago and was now full of nothing. The factory had been the heart of the town, and when it stopped beating, the town had simply stopped. He was twenty-eight years old and he had worked at that factory for ten years. He knew how to operate the stamping presses, how to change the dies, how to keep the line moving when the metal jammed and the alarms went off and the foreman was screaming. He did not know how to do anything else. His mother lived in a small house on the edge of town, a thing of wood and vinyl siding that had been painted white once but was now the colour of old teeth. Mrs. Hargrove was sixty-two and she had been sick for two years, a slow decline that had turned her from a woman who could garden and cook and clean into a woman who sat in a chair by the window and watched the road. Dale visited her every evening after work, bringing dinner from the cafeteria and sitting with her while she ate. She did not say much. Neither did he. They sat in the kitchen, eating cold meat and potatoes, watching the dust motes float in the afternoon light. It was four days after the factory closed that Dale met Linda Miller. He was driving home from the unemployment office, where he had learned that his benefits would last twelve weeks and that after that he should consider other options, when he saw a car on the wrong side of the road. A sedan, blue and dented, had left the highway and was stuck in a ditch, its wheel spinning uselessly in the mud. Dale pulled over. He opened the door and pulled the driver out. She was a woman, maybe twenty-six, wearing a nurse's uniform that was torn and stained with blood. Her name was Linda, and she was from the next town over, a place called Millerton that had once had a drug store and a cinema and was now just a post office and a gas station. Dale drove her to the hospital in his truck, spending the last of his cash on the emergency room bill. He sat by her bedside for two days, watching her breathe, saying nothing to the nurses who asked him who she was. When Linda woke, she told him she was a teacher. She had been driving home from a conference in Columbus when the accident happened. She did not remember the crash. She only remembered the sound of the car leaving the road and then nothing. They began to talk. Linda was not a woman who talked much, but when she did, she said things that were worth hearing. She talked about the students she taught at Millerton Elementary, about the boy who could not read and the girl who drew pictures of birds on every page of her notebook. She talked about the small town she came from and the larger town she worked in and the space between them that felt like nothing most days. Dale listened. He was not a man who talked much either, but he listened, and that was enough. They married in June 1978, in a small ceremony at the courthouse in Millerton. Dale moved into a house that Linda had bought on the edge of town, a modest thing of brick and mortar with a small yard and a view of the fields. It was not much, but it was theirs. The trouble began with a snake. It was found in the woodpile by Linda, who was gathering kindling for the stove. A black snake, thick as a man's wrist, coiled around a piece of firewood, its body the colour of wet earth. It did not flee when Linda shouted. It simply lay there, its dark eyes fixed on Dale with an expression that might have been patience or might have been nothing at all. Dale picked up a shovel and killed it. One strike, clean and efficient, the way he had killed things at the factory. The snake fell without a sound, its black body sprawled on the dirt, its eyes fixed on the sky with an expression that might have been resignation or might have been nothing. Linda was horrified. Dale felt nothing. The first tragedy arrived within a month. Mrs. Hargrove was found dead in her house, killed in a fire caused by a space heater that had tipped over. The fire department ruled it an accident, but Dale knew something was wrong: the heater had been working fine a week ago, and his mother had never been careless with fire. Something else had caused the fire, and Dale suspected he knew what. He suspected the town. Two weeks after his mother's death, Linda was killed in a car accident on the highway between Millerton and the next town. She had been driving home from work, as she did every evening, when another car crossed the center line and hit her head-on. The other driver was drunk. The police report said so. Dale was left with nothing. The unemployment office told him his benefits had run out. The bank told him his mortgage was overdue. The town told him nothing, because the town had nothing to tell. He stopped sleeping. He stopped eating. The neighbours began to whisper about him, and Dale did not care. He spent his days sitting on the porch of the house he had bought with Linda's money, watching the fields, watching the sky, watching nothing. And at night, when the silence grew loudest, Dale would sit on the porch and stare at the fields with hollow eyes, his body still, his face blank, the way a man's face looks when everything he has ever cared about has been taken from him and he has stopped pretending that it does not matter. The neighbours said that he would sit on that porch for hours, sometimes days, watching the fields with an expression that was neither sadness nor anger nor anything that could be named. They said he would talk to himself, in a voice so low that it was almost silence, and that sometimes he would make sounds that were neither words nor silence but something in between. Dale Hargrove disappeared from Ohio in the autumn of 1978, leaving behind only an empty house and a single black scale found in the woodpile where the snake had been. No one could explain how it got there. 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