1487. Make hay while the sun shines
© Bruce Goodman 4 December 2018






When farmer Murdoch McCook threw his third wife, Delores, into the hay baler, she came out inside a bale more perfectly than Murdoch could ever have hoped. She was seamlessly encased in the hay bale with only a few strands of her dark hair from the top of her head poking out. Murdoch cut the hair off with an old pair of twine scissors.

He then placed the hay bale containing his third wife at the very bottom of the hay barn, and then stacked all the other hay bales over and around it. He wouldn’t see that bale again until the end of the cold season when all the hay had been fed to the cattle throughout the winter.

It was a perfect murder. No detective was going to think of moving a thousand hay bales to discover a body. And even when the hay bale in question was exposed, there was nothing to say his third wife was inside. Apart from the smell. But by the end of winter the smell would have dissipated. And at the height of the stink, the covering bales would mute the stench.

At last farmer Murdoch McCook was free to invite the lovely Claire Louise into his life. And indeed he did. She moved in with farmer Murdoch and began life on the farm.

How quickly time passes. It was soon hay making season again. Farmer Murdoch arranged a space in the barn for a new bale to sit next to the remaining three.




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