He took out his knife and whittled the shingles, trying not to look at the house. There was something incredibly fearful about its being awake in the midst of all the sleepers, staring him down with its lighted windows, profligate of kerosene and tallow. The kitchen door was open; by and by a woman came and leaned in the bright rectangle, a silhouette of fatigue. This was Rosie Courier. She had been old Henny Lake’s housekeeper as long as Va Di could remember. Sometimes she had served in the store. Va Di could think of her, immensely tall and tight-garmented, behind the counter, her lean, brown face with its cheek-cords pressing in the corners of her mouth, hovering over his head, righteous and suspicious. Quite invisible as he was in the shadow, he could not keep from cringing a little against the roof as she stood there in the doorway, breathing and resting. Town hall clanged a single note, full and round, and as if in answer another note came and hung among the leaves, a high, unmodulated animal-cry, torn carelessly from the tissues of a throat. The austere silhouette in the doorway straightened and disappeared. “O, my God!” Va Di breathed. As a boy he had always been sent to play with neighbor children on those days when brothers or sisters accrued to his family, and so he did not know. He had supposed he knew; he had had a leg broken once by a jibing boom, and he had seen plenty of men crushed or torn in the bad seconds of ocean fishing. But they had always screamed like human beings. The distracted ululation was in the trees again. “Don’t,” the man whispered. “For Christ’s sake, M-a-m-i-e--don’t!” He got down and tried to walk away, but found himself back again, leaning his crossed arms on the sty roof. He had to be doing something, to dull the blade of that outcry, and so he made up an unearthly anger at those shadows moving against the window-squares. “Damn you to hell!” he mumbled, shaking his white fist. “Why don’t y’u _do_ somethin’? Why don’t y’u _do_ somethin’?” He was aware of Baldy Minn’s figure flapping out of the door, a yawling cat held at arm’s length. He watched her slay the little beast, make some horrible business with a kitchen knife, and flap into the house again with the warm liver. He knew well enough that this would soothe the sufferer a little, tied with a cord around her neck, but he became more than ever furious at the shadowy transaction. He did not want Mamie’s agony allayed a little; he wanted it stopped, definitely and forever. He stood up and bawled after the retreating midwife: “Ow! Ow! Ow!” Baldy Minn turned and peered into the night, wondering, shook the fleshy pendants of her head, crossed her billowy bosom with the hand that contained the liver, and slammed the door shut. Without any clear transition, his hate shifted from “them” to “it.” It was “it” that was tearing and killing Mamie.