Blessed Is The Man

I looked up from my newspaper in deep thought. Lainie Spence was getting married again? How many times was it now? Five? Six?

I shook my head. She had lost more husbands to death than I could even count. There ought to be a law.

Searching my mind, I tried to recall what had happened to them. Wasn’t there some question about how the last one had died? Some kind of a hunting mishap or something, about five years ago?

And now she was marrying again. I worked my mouth into a tiny bud, trying to figure out what men saw in her. At age sixty-three, she wasn’t pretty or smart or svelte. In fact, from my point of view, she was strange, with wild white hair, spooky eyes and a slightly bitter edge. Maybe that was appealing to some men.

Reading on in the article, I recognized the name of her fiancé. Quint Jamison. How had I missed that?

  Quint had graduated from high school six years before me, which meant he was about three years younger than Lainie. He’s a familiar fixture in our small rural community, having walked a mail route for more than thirty years. I consider him a friend.

 Like most little towns, everyone knows everyone else here, and what’s worse, nothing is a secret very long.

Our tiny town of Dix, Missouri, population 899, is within seventy miles of Kansas City, but is so totally rural that it seems like a million miles away. With a flavor all its own, its residents are fiercely loyal to their roots and tend to marry locals rather than outsiders. Lainie, for instance, had already married and buried five and is apparently now on to number six.

I got up to refill my coffee cup, frowning. How could Quint be so stupid? Don’t men see women for what they are? I shook my head in frustration, thinking I suppose that would be too much to ask.

When I see, or even think about Lainie Spence, I see a man-eater, fierce and combative. Why would any man be drawn to that?

It’s true, Lainie does have money, or at least I imagined she did. How could she not, after inheriting from five different men? Maybe that was the draw.

Her third husband, Herb Frawley, left her a small cattle ranch nestled in the hills just outside of town. Of course, she can’t punch cattle herself…No, now that I think about it, that’s not exactly true. The woman could bring a bull to its knees with little more than a glance.

Well, anyway, she doesn’t punch cattle, but has hired various and sundry area males, over the years, to do it for her, some of whom, usually one or two, choose to move into a simple, but adequate bunkhouse located on the property, built years earlier when Herb was still alive. This arrangement conveniently guarantees that Lainie always has men at her fingertips.

The ranch, with its rundown white frame bungalow and sun-bleached outbuildings that could stand a bucket of paint, runs about 500 head of its signature red with white face Herefords, on 800 acres of rocky ground that’s good for nothing but ranching.

What kind of a magic spell did she weave? And what happened to the men caught in her web?