“Yes,” Hagar said without emphasis. “I expect they’re safe somewheres, Mattie.”
Zeb had welcomed them quietly and gravely, and since had sat staring into the fireplace. Once he said, “Being’s Ben and Andy are here now, I believe I’ll just hitch up and—”
But Hagar said, “I’m going with you, if you do.” And that was the end of it.
Nobody could find much to say more. They had expected to find the cabin thronged, but it had become a sad and awkward place to be. Rachel and her brothers took time carrying in all the fancy cooking they had brought. More stuff piled up inside than there was any place for, and every added hamper made plainer how different things were here than they had expected. Hagar sat inert, looking cadaverous, even failing to protest when Matthilda and Rachel got supper on.
As they gathered at the table, it was Hagar who pulled herself together in an effort to dissimulate. “Like one time in Hog Scrape,” she said. “We had this here bull goose—” She checked herself, and looked timidly at Matthilda. “He-goose—”
“Gander?” Matthilda suggested.
“This here bull gander,” Hagar accepted. The men ate doggedly, as if set on keeping up their strength, as Hagar rambled on. Hog Scrape was what Hagar called the Tennessee hill village where she had been born; actually it had some commonplace name. Willetsville? Like that. Over the years she had piled up enough anecdotes about it to fill a history book. Rachel had always thought her stories funny, and so had Ben. But most people, looking for a point and not finding one, were only bewildered by Hog Scrape. Hagar’s own family took the tales in stolid silence. Tonight Ben was preoccupied, and Rachel could not find the funny part, either, under the layers of foreboding.
It seemed the gander had settled in Hog Scrape of its own accord. Didn’t belong to nobody. Used to sally up and down the board walk like he owned it; dogs learned to slink out of his way. Got to know everybody, friendly-like, and right neighborly, too—always helping folks out. Like if a drunkard was asleep in the street, the gander would run the hogs off, and make the teams go around him. Only, there was this lay preacher they had in Hog Scrape, kept running the gander out of meeting. Claimed he wasn’t housebroken, rightly. Until finally the gander had enough, and took exception….
She trailed off, as if she judged nobody was listening, and Matthilda tried a politeness. “I used to know a… What was his name?”
“Harlow,” Hagar answered. “Only name he answered to, anyway. Though, naturally, he couldn’t tell you; small use asking him.”
Matthilda looked puzzled; she had meant the lay preacher. But Hagar’s stories generally escaped her, somewhere along the line.
“So Harlow called a feud on this here lay preacher,” Hagar picked it up again. “ ’It seemed the gander made about the worst enemy a man could have. Everytime the lay preacher come in view, Harlow taken after him, hissing, and wing-whopping, and tearing the feller’s britches; and him awhooping and acussing, and abusting in anyplace on anybody, for cover. Sometimes five times in an hour…”
She got up to fill a platter, shuffling painfully, but talking on, unwilling to be helped, as always. She said it got so everybody was throwed by such dern carryings-on, and there was talk of a law. Some wanted a law against ganders, and others wanted it against lay preachers—both had their followings. But in the upshot, one evening when a cloud set itself down on Hog Scrape, the lay preacher thrun a shot at the gander, and missed, and taken the constable in the leg. And the constable, he answered fire, out of anguish; and—
She was coming back to the table when she stopped abruptly, and her wandering story stopped. She stood looking downward, as if not seeing the dirt floor, but something deep beneath. Zeb bumped table and bench as he surged up ponderously, to go to her; but before he could leave his place, Hagar let the platter fall. She dragged herself to a seat by the fireplace, and there folded up.
“I can’t go on,” she said, and hid her face. “I can’t play up no more.”
Zeb came to her, and put his hands on her shoulders. “Best you lie down a spell,” he said gently. “I’ll heat up some—”
“No,” Hagar said in a dreadful voice. “No—I can’t stand it back there—all alone in the black dark—”
The Zacharys had no way to leave there. No place for them all to sleep, either, until the main room was changed around, and shakedowns fixed on the floor. The Zachary hands went out to spread their blankets in the barn, and Ben and Andy slipped away to join them as soon as they could. Georgia had a narrow bed, in a lean-to room like a horse stall, and she offered this to Matthilda, then to Rachel. But there was not room for both, and neither would desert the other. Georgia made more coffee, and withdrew. At another time Rachel would have suspected Georgia of going out a window to fool around the boys, but the notion had no interest for her now.
At last Zeb, who had been dozing in his chair, made a feeble effort to take Hagar off to bed; but retired alone when she refused.
Rachel had been asleep in her chair when she was startled awake by Hagar’s voice. There was no clock in this room, but the embers in the fireplace were low, as if the night was old.
“I pray God she’s dead.” Hagar spoke out strongly, her voice dry and harsh in her throat.
“Hagar,” Matthilda protested helplessly.
“I know whereof I speak,” Hagar said. “I was in the hands of red savages, long ago….”
And this became the dreadful night in which they learned what had crippled Hagar, and made her strange. They did not know how to stop her, or to close their ears, no matter now much they might wish forever they had never had to hear.
Hagar had been orphaned, by the time she “come of full growth.” Two uncles and a brother were starting for California, by wagon across the plains, and she had made them take her along. But they were late at Independence; the last wagon train of the year had pulled out a week before. They could not afford to lay over until spring, so they joined one other belated wagon, and set out to overtake the train.
They never caught up. A woman and her three-year-old boy, from the other wagon, and Hagar herself, were the only survivors when the Indians struck. She had never known what Indians they were; all the Horse Indians looked alike to an inexperienced eye. “In number, they was eleven, after their wounded died.”
She judged they knew how the savages had used her then, and the other woman too. For a few days the two women took turns carrying the child as they rode the bareback Indian ponies. But one day the mother could comfort the little boy no more, and he began to cry. Hour in and hour out he cried, until they came to a stream. There an Indian took the child by the feet, and slung him high in the air, into the river. He was hardly more than a baby; didn’t know what swimming was, but there under the river he fought for his life. Soon they saw him crawling to the bank, slipping in the wet clay, but making it out of the water.
A young savage fitted an arrow, and shot the little struggling fellow in the face. The child went under—yet, in a few moments appeared again, floundering and strangling. The arrow had fallen away, but the little face was streaming blood. The bow twanged again, and again the river closed over the child’s head. Then, unbelievably, the little boy appeared one time more. One eye socket was empty, but he was trying still. It took still another arrow before the child went down to stay, under the muddy water.
The mother slumped to the ground, and could not be beaten to her feet. The savages scalped her before they went on. Hagar worked herself free of the horse upon which she was tied, and tried to get hold of the bowman, to kill him with her hands. After that they always bound her ankles together with rawhide, under the horse’s belly, when they rode; and that was how they crippled her forever.
“At first I prayed to die. Wouldn’t you think, as time run on, the body would die and let the soul go free? No; it ain’t that way. I know now why we’re taught beasts have no souls. It takes the soul to tell the body when to die. But the soul goes faint, and lies as though dead. Naught is left but an animal, and the animal schemes to live….” Hagar had at last stolen two of the fastest horses the savages had, and got away. Some soldiers found her, finally, on a wagon trail.
“The body heals as best it can. But it was Zeb Rawlins raised me up among the living again. A whole man, then, and a proud one, and I told him all. Yet it was Zeb gave me back my soul. Or so I thought, until this very now….”
Hagar’s voice had gone lifeless, a dragging monotone; yet she felt the need of telling them one thing more. “This one thing I know. The red niggers are no human men. Nor are they beasts, nor any kind of earthly varmint, for all natural critters act like God made them to do. Devil-spirits, demons out of red hell, these be, that somehow, on some evil day, found way to clothe themselves in flesh. I say to you, they must be cleansed from the face of this
