Harry’s wife wants him to drink some broth; instead, he asks for whiskey. He waits; after Helen leaves, he’ll drink all he wants. He considers sleep, but death seems to have gone down a different street, on a bicycle. Harry is hallucinating, rapidly approaching his death.
Flashback 4
Harry realizes that he never wrote about many things: a ranch and a “half-wit chore boy” who was given the task of protecting the farm in the absence of the owner. When another farmer, a mean-spirited, sadistic man, tried to get himself some feed from the barn and threatened to beat the chore boy if he tried to stop him, the chore boy was loyal to the owner. That was when the chore boy got a rifle, shot the man, and left him for the dogs to eat. Harry remembers taking the carcass into town with the chore boy’s help, who thought he was going to be rewarded for protecting his master’s property, but to his amazement, was arrested and handcuffed. Then he turned to Harry and began to cry.
That was one story that Harry had “saved to write.” He’s sure that he has at least twenty good stories inside him, stories that he would never write.
This particular flashback deals with misguided loyalty. Although the chore boy protected the hay and was loyal to the owner as he was told to do, his misguided sense of how to be loyal and protect his owner results in a grisly crime and desecration of a corpse.
