The Wife’s Story

Ursula K. Le Guin
The Compass Rose, 1982 Introduction to Fiction

He was a good husband, a good father. I don’t understand it. I don’t believe in it. I don’t
believe that it happened. I saw it happen but it isn’t true. It can’t be. He was always gentle.
If you’d have seen him playing with the children, anybody who saw him with the children
would have known that there wasn’t any bad in him, not one mean bone. When I first met
him he was still living with his mother, over near Spring Lake, and I used to see them
together, the mother and the sons, and think that any young fellow that was that nice with
his family must be one worth knowing. Then one time when I was walking in the woods I
met him by himself coming back from a hunting trip. He hadn’t got any game at all, not so
much as a field mouse, but he wasn’t cast down about it. He was just larking along
enjoying the morning air. That’s one of the things I first loved about him. He didn’t take
things hard, he didn’t grouch and whine when things didn’t go his way. So we got to talking
that day. And I guess things moved right along after that, because pretty soon he was over
here pretty near all the time. And my sister said — see, my parents had moved out the year
before and gone south, leaving us the place — my sister said, kind of teasing but serious,
“Well! If he’s going to be here every day and half the night, I guess there isn’t room for
me!” And she moved out — just down the way. We’ve always been real close, her and me.
That’s the sort of thing doesn’t ever change. I couldn’t ever have got through this bad time
without my sis.

Well, so he come to live here. And all I can say is, it was the happiest year of my life. He
was just purely good to me. A hard worker and never lazy, and so big and fine‐looking.
Everybody looked up to him, you know, young as he was. Lodge Meeting nights, more and
more often they had him to lead the singing. He had such a beautiful voice, and he’d lead
off strong, and the others following and joining in, high voices and low. It brings the
shivers on me now to think of it, hearing it, nights when I’d stayed home from meeting
when the children was babies — the singing coming up through the trees there, and the
moonlight, summer nights, the full moon shining. I’ll never hear anything so beautiful. I’ll
never know a joy like that again.

It was the moon, that’s what they say. It’s the moon’s fault, and the blood. It was in his
father’s blood. I never knew his father, and now I wonder what become of him. He was
from up Whitewater way, and had no kin around here. I always thought he went back
there, but now I don’t know. There was some talk about him, tales that come out after
what happened to my husband. It’s something runs in the blood, they say, and it may
never come out, but if it does, it’s the change of the moon that does it. Always it happens
in the dark of the moon, when everybody’s home and asleep. Something comes over the
one that’s got the curse in his blood, they say, and he gets up because he can’t sleep, and
goes out into the glaring sun, and goes off all alone — drawn to find those like him.

Introduction to Fiction 1
 The Wife’s Story | Ursula K. Le Guin Introduction to Fiction

And it may be so, because my husband would do that. I’d half rouse and say, “Where you
going to?” and he’d say, “Oh, hunting, be back this evening,” and it wasn’t like him, even
his voice was different. But I’d be so sleepy, and not wanting to wake the kids, and he was
so good and responsible, it was no call of mine to go asking “Why?” and “Where?” and all
like that.

So it happened that way maybe three times or four. He’d come back late and worn out,
and pretty near cross for one so sweet‐tempered — not wanting to talk about it. I figured
everybody got to bust out now and then, and nagging never helped anything. But it did
begin to worry me. Not so much that he went, but that he come back so tired and strange.
Even, he smelled strange. It made my hair stand up on end. I could not endure it and I
said, “What is that — those smells on you? All over you!” And he said, “I don’t know,” real
short, and made like he was sleeping. But he went down when he thought I wasn’t
noticing, and washed and washed himself. But those smells stayed in his hair, and in our
bed, for days.

And then the awful thing. I don’t find it easy to tell about this. I want to cry when I have to
bring it to my mind. Our youngest, the little one, my baby, she turned from her father. Just
overnight. He come in and she got scared‐looking, stiff, with her eyes wide, and then she
begun to cry and try to hide behind me. She didn’t yet talk plain but she was saying over
and over, “Make it go away! Make it go away!”

The look in his eyes; just for one moment, when he heard that. That’s what I don’t
want‐ever to remember. That’s what I can’t forget. The look in his eyes looking at his own
child.

I said to the child, “Shame on you, what’s got into you!” — scolding, but keeping her right
up close to me at the same time, because I was frightened too. Frightened to shaking.

Introduction to Fiction 2