Once upon a time, two women from northern California roared into town on a Harley-Davidson with everything they owned on their backs, or in saddlebags. After roaming here and there about town, they decided that they had found an orchard, ripe for the picking, and settled in. Friendly place that it was, they became selectively acquainted; the more money that was apparent, the better. Their social choices were then narrowed to widows, or about-to-be widows, with the same financial qualifications.
One of the two women bought a house, so perhaps her sons could come down to visit. The other moved to a high hillside home, to aid one of her new friends with an ailing husband. She slowly relieved the grateful woman of her tiring tasks - supervising, then firing the servants, and paying them off with checks, no longer needing her hostess' signature. Still, there was hubby confined to his bed with a heart ailment. He was such a bother to her new friend. Therefore, the helpful guest put a pillow over his head and sat on it for a while, so that they could be relieved of this nuisance. Relieved they were, that very day. It was not long before they found themselves reduced to near poverty, since in the now dead husband's will, he had left everything to his previous family.
Raising chickens in a small house in the lower barrio was not very conducive to a congenial partnership And so it was not long before this helpful visitor moved on, having found another woman in need of her help. In fact she was so helpful to this well-known and respected woman that while her incapacitated husband (another bad heart) lay dying in his bed, his wife, so thrilled at finding this new kind of love, made an announcement of her change to a gathering of her admiring, now startled friends. Before the euphoria diminished, the sick husband was found, dead, as heart patient have a tendency to do. Several months later, the new merry widow herself, died of cancer, and the helpful friend, now without funds, moved on.
This time, it was to a troubled marriage. Her sympathy encouraged the frustrated wife to move out, and in with her. After several weeks of co-habitation, they decided to ask the lonely husband to a nice home-cooked dinner. He accepted and came well prepared. Half way through a verbally argumentative dinner he whipped out his newly sharpened knife, reached across the table and cut off the head of the woman who had stolen his wife, thus ending the life of this soothing and assisting woman who had arrived on the back of a Harley Davidson motorcycle.
The dinner ended, he got into his Volkswagen and drove away. Rumor has it that he is now teaching bridge in Transylvania and his wife went home to mother.
The end.
Editor's note: this is a true story, the names omitted to protect the innocent. The murder took place in the long ago past, when this was a very different kind of place than it is now, and the few foreign residents were rather Bohemian. At that time, cattle were still being driven through the streets, and men still rode donkeys to their farms.
