The Stand

When she finished the last chicken, each of her fingers had a migraine headache and the daylight had begun to take on that still and golden hue that means twilight’s outrider has arrived. Late July now, and the days were shortening down again.

She went inside and had another bite. The bread was stale but not moldy—no mold would ever dare show its green face in Addie Richardson’s kitchen—and she found a half-used jar of smooth peanut butter. She ate a peanut butter sandwich and made up another, which she put in her dress pocket in case she got hungry later.

It was now twenty to seven. She went back out again, gathered up her towsack, and went carefully down the porch steps. She had plucked neatly into another sack, but a few feathers had escaped and now fluttered from the Richardsons’ hedge, which was drying for lack of water.

Abagail sighed heavily and said: “I’m off, Lord. Headed home. I’ll be going slow, don’t reckon to get there until midnight or so, but the Book says fear neither the terror of night nor that which flieth at noonday. I’m in the way of doing Your will as best I know it. Walk with me, please. Jesus’ sake, amen.”

By the time she reached the place where the tar stopped and the road went to dirt, it was full dark. Crickets sang and frogs croaked down in some wet place, probably Cal Goodell’s cowpond. There was going to be a moon, a big red one, the color of blood until it got up in the sky a ways.

She sat down to rest and eat half of her peanut butter sandwich (and what she would have done for some nice black-currant jelly to cut that sticky taste, but Addie kept her preserves down cellar and that was just too many stairs). The towsack was beside her. She ached again and her strength seemed just about gone with two and a half miles before her still to walk… but she felt strangely exhilarated. How long since she had been out after dark, under the canopy of the stars? They shone just as bright as ever, and if her luck was in she might see a falling star to wish on. A warm night like this, the stars, the summer moon just peeking his red lover’s face over the horizon, it made her remember her girlhood again with all its strange fits and starts, its heats, its gorgeous vulnerability as it stood on the edge of the Mystery. Oh, she had been a girl. There were those who would not believe it, just as they were unable to believe that the giant sequoia had ever been a green sprout. But she had been a girl, and in those times the childhood fears of the night had faded a little and the adult fears that came in the night when everything is silent and you can hear the voice of your eternal soul, those fears were yet down the road. In that brief time between, the night had been a fragrant puzzle, a time when, looking up at the star-strewn sky and listening to the breeze that brought such intoxicating smells, you felt close to the heartbeat of the universe, to love and life. It seemed you would be forever young and that—

Your blood is in my fists.

There was a sudden sharp tug at her sack, making her heart jump.

“Hi!” she shrieked in her cracked and startled old woman’s voice. She yanked the bag back to her with a small rip in the bottom.

There was a low growling sound. Crouched on the verge of the road, between the gravel shoulder and the corn, was a large brown weasel. Its eyes rolled at her, picking up red glints of moonlight. It was joined by another. And another. And another.

She looked at the other side of the road and saw that it was lined with them, their mean eyes speculative. They were smelling the chickens in the bag. How could so many of them have crept around her? she wondered with mounting fear. She had been bitten by a weasel once; she had reached under the porch of the Big House to get a red rubber ball that had rolled under there, and something which felt like a mouthful of needles had fastened on her forearm. The unexpected viciousness of it, agony jumping red-hot and vital out of the humdrum order of things, had made her shriek as much as the actual pain. She had drawn her arm back and the weasel had been hanging from it with her blood beaded on its smooth brown fur, its body whipping back and forth in the air like a snake’s body. She had screamed and waved her arm, but the weasel had not let go; it seemed to have become a part of her.

Her brothers Micah and Matthew had been in the yard; her father had been on the porch, looking at a mail- order catalogue. They had all come running and for a moment they had been struck frozen by the sight of Abagail, then just twelve, tearing around the clearing where the barn was to shortly go up, the brown weasel hanging down from her arm like a stole with its back paws digging for purchase in the thin air. Blood had fallen onto her dress, legs, end shoes in a pattering shower.

It was her father who had acted first. John Freemantle had picked up a chunk of stovewood from beside the chopping block and had bawled: “Stand still, Abby! ” His voice, which had been the voice of ultimate command ever since her babyhood, had cut through the yatter and babble of panic in her mind when probably nothing else could have done. She stood still and the stovelength came whistling down and a jolting agony went all the way up to her shoulder (she had thought her arm was broken for sure) and then the brown Thing which had caused her such agony and surprise—in the horrid heat of those few moments the two feelings had been completely interchangeable—was lying on the ground, its fur streaked and matted with her blood and then Micah jumped straight up into the air and came down on it with both feet and there was a horrid final crunching sound like the sound hard candy made in your head when you crunched it between your teeth and if it hadn’t been dead before, it surely was then. Abagail had not fainted, but she had gone into sobbing, screaming hysterics.

By then Richard, the oldest son, had come running, his face pale and scared. He and his father exchanged a sober, frightened glance.

“I never saw a weasel do nothing like that in all my life,” John Freemantle said, holding his sobbing daughter by the shoulders. “Thank God your mother was up the road with them beans.”

“Maybe it was r—” Richard began.

“You hesh your mouth,” his father rode in before Richard could go any further. His voice had been cold and furious and frightened all at the same time. And Richard did hesh his mouth—closed it so fast and hard, in fact, that Abby had heard it snap shut. Then her father said to her, “Let’s take you on over to the pump, Abagail, honey, and wash that mess out.”

It was a year later that Luke told her what their father hadn’t wanted Richard to say right out loud: that the weasel must almost surely have been rabid to do a thing like that, and if it had been, she would have died one of the most horrible deaths, aside from outright torture, of which men knew. But the weasel had not been rabid; the wound had healed clean. All the same, she had been terrified of the creatures from that day to this, terrified in the way some people are terrified of rats and spiders. If only the plague had taken them instead of the dogs! But it hadn’t, and she was—

Your blood is in my fists.

One of them darted forward and tore at the rough hem of the towsack.

“Hi! ” she screamed at it. The weasel darted away, seeming to grin, a thread of the bag hanging from its chops.

He had sent them—the dark man.

Terror engulfed her. There were hundreds of them now, gray ones, brown ones, black ones, all of them smelling chicken. They lined both sides of the road, squirming over each other in their eagerness to get at some of what they smelled.

I got to give it to them. It was all for nothing. If I don’t give it to them, they’ll rip me to pieces to get it. All for nothing.

In the darkness of her mind she could see the dark man’s grin, she could see his fists held out and the blood dripping from them.

Another tug at the bag. And another.

The weasels on the far side of the road were now squirming across toward her, low, their bellies in the dust. Their little savage eyes glinted like icepicks in the moonlight.

But whosoever believeth on Me, behold, he shall not perish… for I have put My sign on him and no thing shall touch him… he is Mine, saith the Lord…

She stood up, still terrified, but now sure of what she must do. “Get out!” she cried. “It’s chicken, all right, but it’s for my company! Now you all git! ”

They drew back. Their little eyes seemed to fill with unease. And suddenly they were gone like drifting smoke. A miracle, she thought, and exultation and praise for the Lord filled her. Then, suddenly, she was cold.

Somewhere, far to the west, beyond the Rockies that were not even visible on the horizon, she felt an eye—