A glass of salts for Dessie

Through a fat green year Tom labours at the ranch — the forge ringing, the house whitewashed, a flush toilet built out of bent tin, a windmill that turns in the slightest wind — manufacturing happiness as cleverly as he knows how. Neither he nor Dessie speaks of what ails them, until one evening on the hill she asks why he does not marry and he answers, "Who'd want a thing like me?" Then she proposes Europe — the cheapest boats, a year of saving, the Colosseum, Bethlehem — and Tom seizes it: a hundred shoats fattened on acorns, and a county-wide acorn contest with bicycles for prizes. Will hears the scheme out and gives nothing away. Tom drives home wondering how to break the bad news and finds Dessie grey on the sofa. He gives her a glass of salts. By night her muscles are knotted like iron; he rides bareback to the Duncans', tears their door off its hinges, and is called a goddam fool by the doctor. A week after the funeral he writes two letters, posts them at three in the morning, and turns his horse south.

The killing is done by kindness and a dose of salts, which is why the chapter spends its first half on how carefully Tom was manufacturing joy. The ending is staged as a courtroom, letting him parade small sins to keep the Gray One waiting, and then gives him his father's voice to solve the last problem: how to die without earning Liza's disapproval.