Mrs. Hassenplug refused to come out into the yard to witness their departure. As the wagon crept away she raged at her helplessness, her inability to change anything in her life, but before long her anger turned to tears, as it always did. Now she took up the long and bitter weeping of the irredeemable victim, knowing that by the time her husband accomplished what it was he planned, her face would be dry, set like stone with the salt of her misery.
Surprisingly, Zoe remembered some of the landscape from her passage in the same wagon four years before, on the long drive from town with her new parents. She was now a different person, and didn’t feel at all that she was moving back into her own past. The station where she had said good-bye to her brothers would still be there, but her brothers would not. That was the saddest thought for Zoe, sadder than knowing the man beside her had plans no father should have.
“Not saying much,” Hassenplug commented.
She looked at him, at the smile beneath his mustache. He imagined things would go the way he wanted, but Zoe knew they would not. Her plans did not extend beyond hiding the knife, but as she looked at Hassenplug’s mouth, an alternative to stabbing him flashed into Zoe’s head. The knife would not be necessary after all.
“I don’t have much to say,” she said, and turned her face to the road again.
Hassenplug laughed. “That deal we made, that what you’re thinking about? Remember the deal?”
“Yes. I said I’d think about it when I got a dress.”
“That ain’t the way I recall it. Straight trade, that’s how it’ll be. You get what you want after I get what I want.”
“That isn’t what you said.”
“Don’t get a notion to wriggle out of it, not after you made a deal. Anyone makes a deal with me, they stick to it.”
His voice had turned ugly, the smile had soured. Zoe glanced at him, then away. She saw he meant what he said.
“Afterwards,” she reasoned, “after you get it for me. Then … then you can.”
Zoe intended leaving the store by its back entrance, assuming it had one, or by any available window if it did not. She would go to the station and get aboard the first westbound train that pulled in, and when the conductor asked for her ticket she would admit she didn’t have one; the worst he could do was put her off at the next stop, where she would wait for another train. In this on-again, off-again fashion she would go west, where Clay and Drew led unknown lives. The new dress, with its perfect fit, would give her the confidence to step inside the first of many cars.
“Shoes,” she said, picturing herself aboard the train. “I want shoes too, real shoes, nothing like these.” She looked down at her clumsy boy’s boots, graceless as buckets.
“Anything else?” Hassenplug asked. “Diamonds and pearls, maybe?”
“Just the shoes, and the dress … and a new petticoat.”
“Petticoat! What you think you are, a goddamn princess?”
He laughed again, the same ugly sound, and flicked the reins. “You don’t know a thing, girl. You don’t know nothing, you hear?” Zoe wouldn’t look at him. “You hear me!”
“Yes
“Don’t be telling me what you’ll get and when you’ll get it. I’ll be the one does the deciding, not you, hear me?”
“Yes.”
“A thing’s only worth what it’s worth,” he said, and nodded in agreement with himself. “It ain’t worth no more than that. I’m a fair man,” he continued, softening his tone, “and a fair man makes a fair trade. Don’t you worry, you won’t be sorry about a thing, not a goddamn thing.”
They drove another mile, then Hassenplug said, “Right here’ll be about right,” and steered his wagon off the road into a thick stand of dogwood.
Zoe stiffened with alarm. Hassenplug’s schedule for the trade was the reverse of her own. “No,” she said, “after the dress …”
“Get down, and don’t be running away. I know how you figured it to be, getting to town and then running. Well, you won’t run, not in town and not here neither, because you won’t go to town. Think I’d let you? I know better, see. You’ll get your dress, a real pretty one. You be nice and I might even get you some regular shoes, with them little bows, maybe. Just you be nice and you’ll get what you want. Now get down like I said.”
Zoe did as she was told. Now everything depended on her willingness to use the knife. It made her sick to think of jabbing the blade into Hassenplug, even sicker to think of what he intended doing if her gumption failed and she froze instead of defending herself.
Hassenplug was getting down from the wagon on the same side as Zoe, unwilling even to give her the chance of a head start, should she decide to run. His face was creased by an openmouthed smile, the lips wetted by his roaming tongue. He had never looked uglier. She could never let him touch her, let alone place himself inside her. Even his breathing had been coarsened by his sense of power over Zoe, and his eyes were unnaturally bright with wanting.
Zoe reached inside her sleeve, found the paring knife, pulled it out and held it before her. Hassenplug’s face fell, then his confident smirk returned. Without taking his eyes from the blade, he felt behind him for the horsewhip in its metal socket, yanked it free and lazily unfurled the lash.
“Better not,” he advised, flicking the tip toward her along the ground. “I can take a fly off old Beulah’s ear without she feels a thing. You put that down now and you’ll come to no harm. We made a deal. Can’t blame me for holding you to it, now can you, huh? Set it down. Set it down or by God I’ll make you sorry. She know you took her knife, the missus? She’ll skin you with it for stealing. Lay it down now and she’ll never know it was gone. You hear me!”
Zoe turned and ran. The lash caught her around the throat.
When bitterness had given way to resignation, Mrs. Hassenplug rose from her kitchen chair and went into the yard. Watching chickens scratch the earth around her feet, she failed to notice Zoe’s return until the girl was almost to the gate. At first Mrs. Hassenplug thought it was some old neighbor woman mysteriously arrived on foot, suffering some kind of ailment maybe, all bent over that way. Then she recognized the dress, the old too-tight dress that had caused all the trouble. She’d had no idea Zoe’s hair was that long, since Zoe tended to it herself; it hung over her face like a curtain, but the bruising beneath was not entirely hidden.
Mrs. Hassenplug took several nervous steps toward the gate Zoe clung to, then stopped. Why should she help? The girl had put herself in harm’s way, and harm had come to her, closer to the farm than to town. That fact was welcomed; the hussy hadn’t even completed the trip’s first leg before the harm came. It would have been unbearable to know she’d seen the streets and houses and people denied Mrs. Hassenplug all these years. There was rough justice at work here, she could see that, and it cheered her up considerably. With moral satisfaction bolstering her mood, Mrs. Hassenplug felt herself capable of approaching Zoe with something like charity in her heart.
Lips pursed, she unlatched the gate. Robbed of support, Zoe almost fell into the yard at her foster mother’s feet.
“He went and did you, then,” said Mrs. Hassenplug. “I knew he would. You asked for trouble and got it, I reckon. He’s a mean man when the mood’s on him, I grant, but he never would’ve done you harm if you minded yourself and kept out of his way. There’s the blame. You get in the house and clean up this instant. Look at you!”
Zoe went indoors and dabbed at her face with a cloth and water from the kitchen tub. He had punched her several times, slapped her more times than that. Her face hurt, her vagina hurt, but the sharpest pain came from a deep cut on her shin, where a nail in the thick sole of Hassenplug’s boot had penetrated as he stepped clumsily away from her after the rape. He’d staggered as his foot rolled on the narrow bone, caught himself in time and kicked her in the side of the buttock for almost tripping him up that way. She had watched from beneath tangled hair as he climbed back onto the wagon and returned to the Wister’s Landing road as if
nothing of importance had taken place. He hadn’t looked at her once the wagon started rolling.
Why she had come back to the farm instead of continuing on into town to report what had happened to her, Zoe herself could not quite understand. It was more than a question of fewer miles to cover on her sore leg, but the inner component of her choice eluded Zoe until she put down the cloth and saw Hassenplug’s rifle on the wall. It was his most valued possession, a Henry repeater kept in perfect working order, fully loaded at all times for the kind of native uprising that hadn’t occurred in Indiana for a generation.
Zoe made herself look elsewhere; Mrs. Hassenplug was in the kitchen with her, and must not be alerted to the train of thought that suddenly had made clear to Zoe why she had returned to the farm. In town, she wouldn’t have known where to find a loaded gun, and would probably have had trouble locating Hassenplug among all those streets. At home, the rifle was in its appointed place, as if hung there by fate for Zoe’s purpose, and her target always approached the house from the barn after putting up the horses. Zoe’s window upstairs overlooked the yard, a perfect sniper’s roost.
“I’m … I’m going to lie down now.”
“You do that. You lie down and think on what you did, you silly girl, leading him on with all that nonsense talk of dresses. You be thankful he didn’t hurt you bad like he could’ve. You stay up there till you’re told you can come down again!”
Mrs. Hassenplug went outside to sit under the willow tree beside the pond, where she spent the afternoon hours fretting over what attitude to strike when her husband returned. Should she pose as the champion of maidenly virtue now plundered and gone, or as betrayed wife, the loyal spouse wronged by male carnality? Or should she let Zoe shoulder all responsibility for the incident? This last option would be easiest, given that Hassenplug usually returned from town drunk. Maybe he wouldn’t want to talk about it at all, which presented the best possible chance for a peaceful evening. In the morning it wouldn’t bear thinking about, let alone discussion. That would definitely be best. She wouldn’t say a word when he arrived, would simply heat up his supper, if he proved capable of eating it, and wait on him in silence until he climbed the stairs to fall asleep with clothing and boots still on, as was his way.
Her decision made, Mrs. Hassenplug went back to the house and began to prepare the makings of her husband’s favorite treat, pig knuckles in gravy. As she worked, it seemed to her that something was amiss in the kitchen, some familiar thing misplaced, but she could not identify it. The sensation eventually was lost in her greater concern for the kind of life that would be lived under Hassenplug’s roof in future. Now that he’d had the girl, would he do so again? Everything in life became easier the second or third time; that was a fundamental law of nature. Should she be surprised if it happened in her home? Would Hassenplug be so cruel? She knew he would.
It spelled the end of everything she had known. Her married life had been a bed of bent and rusting nails, but it was the only bed she had known as a woman, and the thought of being usurped by the bruised slip of a thing upstairs was torture. What if she bore him a son! He’d send Mrs. Hassenplug away and marry Zoe … marry their foster daughter! It was too harsh, too biblical.
“No!” she told the walls, and that was when she realized the Henry rifle was gone from its usual place. Had her husband taken it with him to town? He’d never done so before. Hadn’t it been up there on its pegs while the girl dabbed at her face? And after Zoe had gone up to her room, Mrs. Hassenplug went outside for a long time.…
She mounted the staircase at a run, lifting her skirts high, panting with alarm. Zoe’s door was closed. Mrs. Hassenplug opened it slowly, quietly. A chair by the window presented its back to her. Zoe was sitting in it, and did not turn around when her name was hesitantly called. A closer look revealed Zoe asleep, breath whistling faintly in her nose, hands entwined in her lap. Zoe’s swollen face seemed peaceful enough if the mottled patches of blue on her cheek were ignored. The rifle lay across the chair’s armrests at chest level, like some imprisoning device. Had the girl been preparing for suicide? How could she sleep, following the events of her day?
The window’s lower half was raised, the curtains shifting languidly in a late afternoon breeze. Mrs. Hassenplug stifled a gasp, crammed several fingers into her mouth and stared at the girl, the rifle, the window. If she tiptoed out, leaving Zoe undisturbed, the act would very likely be committed; her husband would be shot dead in the yard like a sheep-killing dog.
More disturbing than her awareness of Zoe’s intent was Mrs. Hassenplug’s consideration—mere seconds long—of leaving quietly to let it happen. How could she have allowed such an idea to enter her mind! To protect herself from the consequences of unfettered thought, rather than out of love of her husband, she plucked the rifle from its resting place and hurried away. When her husband returned, he would find the rifle where it should be, his victim secured upstairs where she could do him no harm.
The farmhouse, formerly a place in which few words were spoken, became monastic in its ritual observance of silence. The thing that had happened was never mentioned, but the more intense the silence, the louder it became.
For Zoe, the weeks that followed her rape were skewed, unreal, her chores performed in an undersea world of dragging slowness, the burden of an unnamable, crushing weight. She was a tiny fish in a set of rooms on the ocean floor; two larger fish swam carefully around her, blowing bubbles of nothingness, avoiding her eye. Every day she became slower still, until she knew the reason why. It was too big a secret to tell the other fish, but in time they saw for themselves, and were even less pleased than Zoe.
“She is.”
“She ain’t!”
“Look at her! Just look!”
“She ain’t!” insisted Hassenplug.
“Think she got that way on what we eat? You can pretend all you want, it won’t change a thing. Don’t think I’m fooled. You wanted it this way all along, don’t think I don’t know. She can give you what I can’t, isn’t that so? Isn’t that the way you planned it?”
“Quiet!”
The life inside Zoe was growing at a fearful rate, and she wished herself rid of it, but her wish was not granted. Her belly continued to expand, and now she truly did need a new dress. Mrs. Hassenplug gave her one of her own. The hem dragged at the back but was lifted clear of the ground in front. Zoe was still expected to do her share of work around the place.
Hassenplug approached her with an incredible offer one afternoon in the barn. “Listen here. You make a boy and I’ll get you that dress you been wanting. This time I mean it. You make a boy and I’ll get you that dress for sure, and the shoes too, by God. The missus, she can’t make one. This boy, I’d like him better than some adopted boy. He’d be mine, a genuine son. I’d be good to you, you make me a boy.”
When he left her, Zoe cried. To bear Hassenplug a son, the very thing he wanted, would be the final insult to her. The irony was insupportable. She prayed for a girl. Her god would not have been acceptable to any churchgoer, being female, very much akin to Nettie Dugan in appearance, but fifty feet tall. The avenging angel at her side, the one who would take care of Zoe’s secondary prayer—the death of Hassenplug—bore a definite resemblance to her brother Clay.
5
He actually enjoyed digging postholes. The fatigue he brought to bed helped ease the pain of his growing bones. Almost eighteen, Clay stood six feet four inches on naked feet, and he continued to grow. Despite his alarming height, Clay weighed only one hundred fifty-nine pounds. Beanpole, they had called him at school, until he quit.
His departure was prompted by being cast in the school play (a radical enterprise from a new and enthusiastic teacher) as Ichabod Crane, the gangling dupe of Sleepy Hollow. Being called Ichabod was no better than being called Beanpole. Clay had squared his books on the minuscule desktop before him, risen and said to his teacher, “Excuse me, ma’am, they need me at home,” and walked out.
Expla
ining himself to his father was another matter. Edwin Delaney owned ninety-eight acres west of Tamsen, Missouri, and considered himself something of a gentleman fanner. He was educated, erudite, no friend of fools.
“Why,” he asked Clay, “did you do this thing?”
“I don’t like it there.”
“Because they mock your height?”
“Yes!”
“Please moderate your voice. The measure of a man is often the limits to which he allows himself to be pushed. I find it hard to believe a flock of schoolchildren has pushed you to your limit, Clayton.”
“Well, they did. Them and the teacher.”
“You don’t think you’ve taken their name calling too hard?”
“No.”
“Observe my nose. Do you see its distinct leaning to the left?”
“Yes.”
“In school I was made fun of for that small defect. I rose above it, and I recommend you do the same. An unlettered boy becomes an ignorant man, or do you disagree?”
“No, I just … I can read books by myself. I don’t need school to learn things anymore. I don’t like it there. I like helping you here.”
Edwin had noticed Clay’s preference for farmwork over study. The boy’s hands and feet were huge; he was lantern-jawed, and his ears stood out like jug handles. He already looked like a farmer.
“A lifetime of physical labor is your ambition?”
“No. I don’t know yet. For now … yes. Labor.”
“If I beat you, would you return to school?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
Edwin Delaney stared for some time at his son by adoption. The act had officially been recorded at the county seat, and Delaney was proud, in an undemonstrative way, of the boy he had brought into his home. There were, however, aspects to Clayton’s character that puzzled him. The boy’s phenomenal growth was to be marveled at, the manifestation of an unusual physical condition, but it was the stealthy workings of Clay’s mind that prompted a subtle disquiet in the man.