The Stand (Original Edition) (50 page)

That was the proudest day of her life.

Later, she paused in the middle of the yard, looking out at the sea of corn, broken only by the dirt road going north toward Duncan and Columbus. Three miles up from her house it went to tar. The corn was going to be fine this year, and it was such a shame that no one would be around to harvest it but the rooks. It was sad to think that the big red harvesting machines were going to stay in their barns this September, sad to think there would be no husking bees and barn dances. Sad to think that, for the first time in the last 108 years, she would not be here in Hemingford Home to see the time of the change as summer gave in to pagan, jocund autumn. She would love this summer all the more because it was to be her last—she felt that clearly. And she would not be laid to rest here but further west, in a strange country. It was bitter.

She shuffled over to the tire swing and set it to moving. It was an old tractor tire that her brother Lucas had hung here in 1922. The rope had been changed many times between then and now, but never the tire. Now the canvas showed through in many places, and on the inside rim there was a deep depression where generations of young buttocks had set theirselves down. Below the tire was a deep and dusty groove in the earth where the grass had long since given up trying to grow, and on the limb where the rope was tied, the bark had been rubbed away to show the branch’s white bone. The rope creaked slowly and this time she spoke aloud:

“Please, my Lord, my Lord, not unless I have to, I’m old and I’m scared and mostly I’d just like to die right here on the home place. I’m ready to go right now if You want me. Thy will be done, my Lord, but Abb’s one tired shufflin old black woman. Thy will be done.”

No sound but the creak of the rope against the branch and the crows off in the corn. She put her old seamed forehead against the old seamed bark of the apple tree her father had planted so long ago and she wept bitterly.

She had a great deal to do in the next few days, because she was going to have company. Dreams or not, tired or not, she had never been a one to slight company and she didn’t intend to start now. But she would have to go very slowly or she would get forgetting things—she forgot a lot these days—and misplacing things until she ended up chasing her own tail.

The first thing was to get down to Addie Richardson’s henhouse, and that was a goodish way, four or five miles. She found herself wondering if the Lord was going to send her an eagle to fly her those four miles, or send along Elijah in his fiery chariot to give her a lift.

“Blasphemy,” she told herself complacently. “The Lord provides strength, not taxicabs.”

When her few dishes were washed, she put on her heavy shoes and took her cane. Even now she rarely used the cane, but today she would need it. Four miles going, four miles coming back. At sixteen she could have dashed one way and trotted the other, but she’d not see sixteen again.

She set off at eight o’clock in the morning, hoping to reach the Richardson farm by noon and sleep through the hottest part of the day. In the late afternoon she would kill her chickens and then come home in the gloaming. She wouldn’t arrive until after dark, and that made her think of her dream of the night before, but that man was still far away. Her company was much closer.

She walked very slowly, even more slowly than she felt she had to, because even at eight-thirty the sun was fat and powerful, but still she had to rest a bit by the time she reached the Goodells’ place. She sat in the shade of their pepper tree for a bit and ate a few fig bars. Not an eagle or a taxicab in sight, either. She cackled a little at that, got up, brushed off her dress, and went on.

She hunched more and more over her cane as she went, even though her wrists began to be a misery to her. She wanted a drink of water, she wanted to be home in her rocker, she wanted to be left alone. Now she could see the sun glinting off the henhouse roof ahead to her left. A mile, no more. It was quarter past ten, and she wasn’t doing too badly for an old gal. She would let herself in and sleep until the cool of the evening. No sin in that. Not at her age.

In 1972, when she had turned one hundred, her picture had been in the Omaha paper and they had sent out a TV reporter to do a story on her. “To what do you attribute your great age?” the young man had asked her, and he had looked disappointed at her brief, almost curt answer: “To God.” They wanted to hear about how she ate beeswax, or stayed away from fried pork, or how she kept her legs up when she slept. But she did none of those things, and was she to lie? God gives life and He takes it away when He wants.

The Richardson place was closer now. Lord, how she wanted to lie down and take off her shoes and have a nap!

Abby shuffled slowly on.

The sun was shining in the window of the guest bedroom where she had lain down and fallen asleep as soon as her brogans were off. For a long time she couldn’t understand why the light was so bright;

it was much the feeling Larry Underwood had had upon awakening beside the rock wall in New Hampshire.

She sat up, every strained muscle and fragile bone in her body crying out. “God A’mighty, I done slep the afternoon and the whole night through!”

If that was so, she must have been tired indeed. She was so lamed up now that it took her almost ten minutes to get out of bed and go down the hall to the bathroom; another ten to get her shoes on her feet. Walking was agony, but she knew she must walk. If she didn’t, that stiffness would settle in like iron.

Limping and hobbling, she crossed to the henhouse and went inside, wincing at the explosive hotness, the smell of fowls and the inevitable smell of decomposition. The water supply was automatic, fed from the Richardsons’ artesian well by a gravity pump, but most of the feed had been used up and the heat itself had killed many of the birds. The weakest had long ago been starved or pecked to death, and they lay around the feed- and droppings-spotted floor like small drifts of sadly melting snow.

Most of the remaining chickens fled before her approach with a great flapping of wings, but those that were broody only sat and blinked at her slow, shuffling approach with their stupid eyes. There were so many diseases that killed chickens that she had been afraid that the flu might have carried them off, but these looked all right. The Lord had provided.

She took three of the plumpest and made them stick their heads under their wings. They went immediately to sleep. She bundled them into a sack and then found she was too stiff to actually lift it. She had to drag it along the floor.

The other chickens watched her cautiously from their high vantage points until the old woman was gone, then went back to their vicious squabbling over the diminishing feed.

It was now close to nine in the morning. She sat down on the bench that ran around the Richardsons’ dooryard oak to think. It seemed to her that her original idea, to go home in the cool of dusk, was still best. She had lost most of a day, but her company was still coming. She could use this day to take care of the chickens and rest.

Her muscles were already riding a little easier against her bones, and there was an unfamiliar but rather pleasant gnawing sensation below her breastbone. It took her several moments to realize what it was . . . she was hungry! This morning she was actually
hungry,
praise God, and when she had parted these three chickens from their heads, she would see what Addie had left in her pantry.

Grunting and puffing, she dragged her towsack around to the chopping block that stood between the barn and the woodshed. Just inside the woodshed door she found Billy Richardson’s Son House hanging on a couple of pegs, its rubber glove snugged neatly down over the blade. She took it and went back out.

“Now Lord,” she said, standing over the towsack in her dusty yellow workshoes and looking up at the cloudless midsummer sky, “You have given me the strength to walk up here, and I’m believin You’ll give me the strength to walk back. Your prophet Isaiah says that if a man or woman believes in the Lord God of Hosts, he shall mount up with wings as eagles. I don’t know nothin much about eagles, my Lord, except they are mostly ugly-natured birds who can see a long ways, but I got three broilers in this bag and I should like to whack off their heads and not m’own hand. Thy will be done, amen.”

She picked up the towsack, opened it, and peered down in. One of the hens still had her head under her wing, fast asleep. The other two had squashed against each other, not moving much. It was dark in the sack and the hens thought it was nighttime. The only thing dumber than a broody hen was a New York Democrat.

Abagail plucked one out and laid it across the block before it knew what was happening. She brought the hatchet down hard, wincing as she always had at the final mortal thud of the blade biting through to wood. The head fell into the dust on one side of the chopping block. The headless chicken strutted off into the Richardsons’ dooryard, blood spouting, wings fluttering. After a bit it found out it was dead and lay down decently. Broody hens and New York Democrats, my Lord, my Lord.

Then the job was done and all her worrying that she might botch the job or hurt herself had been for nothing. God had heard her prayer. Three good chickens, and now all she had to do was get home with them.

She put the chickens back into the towsack and then hung Billy Richardson’s Son House hatchet back up. Then she went into the farmhouse again to see what there might be to eat.

She napped during the early part of the afternoon and dreamed that her company was getting closer now; they were just south of York, coming along in an old pickup truck. There were six of them, one of them a boy who was deaf and dumb. But a powerful boy, all the same. He was one of the ones she would have to talk to.

She woke around three-thirty, a little stiff but otherwise feeling rested and refreshed. For the next two and a half hours she plucked the chickens, resting when the work put too much misery into her arthritic fingers, then going on. She sang hymns while she worked— “Seven Gates to the City (My, Lord Hallelu’),” “Trust and Obey,” and her own favorite, “In the Garden.”

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 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 dying 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 or 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 given for some nice blackcurrant 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 come 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 starstrewn 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?

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 it.