Cyrus's First Wife Dies

Cyrus's first wife, a pale and religious woman, drowns herself in a shallow pond after contracting a venereal disease from him. She sees the disease as a punishment from God for her imagined sins and sacrifices herself. Cyrus mourns her with a keg of whisky and his army friends, getting the infant Adam drunk on a whisky-soaked rag. He then quickly marries a seventeen-year-old neighbor, Alice, to have a woman to care for the baby and the household.