Mr. Hart is awoken in the night to the sight of his wife, Mrs. Hart, moving his belongings— clothes, fiddle, catalogues, etc.— from the guest room he sleeps in since he’s been sick. He draws himself up from the bed and she remarks that she’s reached the end of her patience, that she can no longer care for him, and that he should call someone from the county to come and pick him up. She leads him out of the room, downstairs, and outside of the house where he notices the iron bed in the front yard they used on warm summer nights and lies down to fall asleep. Two weeks later, lying under the flowering pear tree in the bed, Mr. Hart calls out to his unresponsive wife for water. In a flash, she appears at the front door and runs full speed across the yard with a large pot of water and dumps it on him, returning to the house unbothered by his exclamations that he was leaving. The next morning, awoken by the sound of his dog hitting the bed in attempt to mount it, he notices a flock of geese overhead and calls out to his wife as to what season it is; she fails to respond, and he dozes back off to sleep. Later, still in the iron bed and missing his fiddle, he takes a scrap piece of wire and ties it in between the bed’s railing, plucking it to accompany his singing. He is happened upon by a group of nun’s from the nearby convalescent home the leader of which praises his performance. The nuns take up different posts resting around his bed, and on the tree limbs that previously housed a deck. He built to the deck for his child, but the child was birthed stillborn during a dust storm.  Later in the night, under the glass chymes the nuns put in the pear tree, wakes to see Mrs. Hart, naked, mounting the bed. They fall asleep, and when he wakes the next morning, the nuns return and carry him to a nearby river and they bathe him.