Chapter XII

She was an old woman and lived on a farm near the town in which the Mooreheads lived. All country and small town people have seen such old women but no one knows much about them. Such an old woman comes into town driving an old worn-out horse or she comes afoot, carrying a basket. She may own a few hens and have eggs to sell. She brings them in a basket and takes them to a grocer. There she trades them in. She gets some salt pork and some beans. Then she gets a pound or two of sugar and some flour.

Afterwards she goes to the butcher and asks for some dog meat. She might spend ten or fifteen cents but when she does she asks for something. In Tar’s day the butchers gave liver to any one who wanted to carry it away. In the Moorehead family they were always having it. One of Tar’s brothers got a whole cow’s liver out at the slaughter house near the fair ground. He came staggering home with it and afterwards the Mooreheads had it until they were sick of it. It never cost a cent. Tar hated the thought of it all the rest of his life.

The old farm woman got her some liver and a soup bone. She never visited with any one and as soon as she had got what she wanted lit out for home. It made quite a load for such an old body. No one gave her a lift. People drive right down a road and never notice such an old woman.

The old woman used to come into town past the Moorehead house during the summer and fall when Tar was sick. She went home later carrying a heavy pack on her back. Two or three large gaunt-looking dogs followed at her heels.

Well, she was nothing special. She was one of the sort hardly any one knows, but she got into Tar’s thoughts. Her name was Grimes and she lived with her husband and son in a small unpainted house on the bank of a small creek four miles from town.

The husband and son were a tough pair. Although the son was but twenty-one he had already served a term in jail. It was whispered about that the woman’s husband stole horses and ran them off to some other county. Now and then, when a horse turned up missing, the man had also disappeared. No one ever caught him. Once later, when Tar was loafing at Tom Whitehead’s barn, the man came there and sat on the bench in front. Judge Blair and two or three other men were there but not one spoke to him. He sat for a few minutes and then got up and went away. When he was leaving he turned and stared at the men. There was a look of defiance in his eyes. “Well, I have tried to be friendly. You do not want to talk to me. It has always been so wherever I have gone in this town. If, some day, one of your fine horses turns up missing, well, then what?”

He did not say anything actually. “I’d like to bust one of you in the jaw,” was about what his eyes said. Tar remembered afterwards how the look in his eyes made the shivers run down his back.

The man belonged to a family that had had money once. His father, John Grimes, had owned a sawmill when the country was new and had made money. Then he got to drinking and running after women. When he died there wasn’t much left.

Jake Grimes blew in the rest. Pretty soon there wasn’t any more lumber to cut and his land was nearly all gone.

He had got his wife “off” a German farmer, where he went to work one June day in the wheat harvest. She was a young thing then and scared to death.

You see the farmer was up to something with the girl who was what is called a “bound girl”--and his wife had her suspicions. She took it out on the girl when the man wasn’t around. Then, when the wife had to go off to town for supplies, the farmer got after her. She told young Jake that nothing really ever happened but he did not know whether to believe her or not.

He got her pretty easy himself, the first time he was out with her. Well, he wouldn’t have married her if the German farmer hadn’t tried to tell him where to get off. Jake got her to go riding with him in his buggy one night, when he was threshing on the place, and then he came for her the next Sunday night.

She managed to get out of the house without her employer’s seeing her and then, when she was getting into the buggy, he showed up. It was almost dark and he just popped up suddenly at the horse’s head. He grabbed the horse by the bridle and Jake got out his buggy whip.

They had it out right there. The German was a tough one. Maybe he didn’t care whether his wife knew or not. Jake hit him over the face and shoulders with the buggy whip but the horse got to acting up and he had to climb out.

Then the two men went at it. The girl didn’t see it. The horse started to run away and went nearly a mile down the road before the girl got him stopped. Then she managed to tie him to a tree beside the road. Tar later knew all about it. It must have stuck in his mind from small town tales, heard when he loitered about where men talked. Jake found her after he got through with the German. She was huddled up in the buggy seat, crying, scared to death. She told Jake a lot of stuff, how the German had tried to get her, how he chased her once in the barn, how another time, when they happened to be alone in the house together, he tore her dress open clear down the front. The German, she said, might have got her that time if he hadn’t heard his old woman drive in at the gate. The wife had been off to town for supplies. Well, she would be putting the horse in the barn. The German managed to sneak off to the fields without her seeing. He told the girl he would kill her if she told. What could she do? She told a lie about ripping her dress in the barn when she was feeding the stock. She was a bound girl and did not know who or where her father and mother were. Maybe she did not have a father. The reader will understand.

She married Jake and had a son and a daughter by him but the daughter died young.

Then the woman settled down to feed stock. That was her job. At the German’s place she had cooked the food for the German and his wife. The German’s wife was a strong woman with big hips and worked most of the time in the fields with her husband. The girl fed them and fed the cows in the barn, fed the pigs, the horses and the chickens. Every moment of every day, as a young girl, was spent feeding something.

Then she married Jake Grimes and he had to be fed. She was a slight thing and when she had been married for three or four years, and after the two children were born, her slender shoulders became stooped.

Jake always had a lot of big dogs around the house that stood near the unused old sawmill near the creek. He was always trading horses when he wasn’t stealing something and had a lot of poor bony ones about. Also he kept three or four pigs and a cow. They were all pastured in the few acres left of the Grimes place and Jake did little or nothing.

He went into debt for a threshing outfit and ran that for several years but it did not pay. People would not trust him. They were afraid he would steal the grain at night. He had to go a long way off to get work and it cost too much to get there. In the winter he hunted and cut a little firewood, to be sold in some nearby town. When his boy grew up he was just like his father. They got drunk together. If there wasn’t anything to eat in the house when they came home the old man gave his old woman a clip over the head. She had a few chickens of her own and had to kill one of them in a hurry. When they were all killed she would not have any eggs to sell when she went to town and then what would she do?

She had to scheme all her life about getting things fed, getting the pigs fed so they would grow fat and could be butchered in the fall. When they were butchered her husband took most of the meat off to town and sold it. If he did not do it first the boy did it. They fought sometimes and when they fought the old woman stood aside trembling.

She had got the habit of silence anyway--that was fixed. Sometimes, when she began to look old--she wasn’t forty yet--and when the husband and son were both gone, off trading horses or drinking or hunting or stealing, she went around the house and the barnyard muttering to herself.

How was she going to get everything fed--that was her problem. The dogs had to be fed. There wasn’t enough hay in the barn for the horses and the cow. If she did not feed the chickens how could they lay eggs? Without eggs to sell how could she get things in town, things she had to have to keep the place going? Thank Heavens she did not have to feed her husband--in a certain way. That hadn’t lasted long after their marriage and after the babies came. Where he went on his long trips she did not know. Sometimes he was gone from home for weeks at a time and after the boy grew up they went off together.

They left everything at home for her to manage and she had no money. She knew no one. No one ever talked to her. When it was winter she had to gather sticks of wood for her fire, had to try to manage to keep the stock fed with very little grain, very little hay.

The stock in the barn cried to her hungrily, the dogs followed her about. In the winter the hens laid few enough eggs. They huddled in corners of the barn and she kept watching them. If a hen lays an egg in the barn in the winter and you do not find it, it freezes and breaks.

One day in the winter the old woman went off to town with a few eggs and the dogs followed her. She didn’t get started until nearly three o’clock and the snow was heavy. She hadn’t been feeling very well for several days and so she went muttering along, scantily clad, her shoulders stooped. She had an old grain bag in which she carried her eggs, tucked away down in the bottom. There weren’t many of them but in the winter the price of eggs is up. She would get a little meat in exchange for the eggs, some salt pork, a little sugar, and coffee perhaps. It might be the butcher would give her a piece of liver.

When she had got to town and was trading in the eggs the dogs lay by the door outside. She did pretty well, got the things she needed, more than she had hoped. Then she went to the butcher and he gave her some liver and some dog meat.

It was the first time any one had spoken to her in a friendly way for a long time. The butcher was alone in his shop when she went in and was annoyed by the thought of such a sick-looking old woman out on such a day. It was bitter cold and the snow, that had let up during the afternoon, was falling again. The butcher said something about her husband and her son, swore at them, and the old woman stared at him, a look of mild surprise in her eyes. He said that if either the husband or the son was going to get any of the liver or the heavy bones with scraps of meat hanging to them he had put into the grain bag, he’d see him starve first.

Starve, eh. Well, things had to be fed. Men had to be fed, and horses that aren’t any good but maybe can be traded off, and a poor thin cow that hadn’t given any milk for three months.

Horses, cows, pigs, dogs, men.

The old woman had to get back home before darkness came, if she could. The dogs followed at her heels, sniffing at the heavy grain bag she had fastened on her back. When she got to the edge of town she stopped by a fence and tied the bag to her back with a piece of rope she had carried in her dress pocket for just that purpose. That was an easier way to carry it. Her arms ached. It was hard when she had to crawl over fences and once she fell over and landed in the snow. The dogs went frisking about. She had to struggle to get to her feet again but she made it. The point of climbing over the fences was that there was a short cut over a hill and through a wood. She might have gone around by the road but it was a mile farther that way. She was afraid she couldn’t make it. And then besides the stock had to be fed. There was a little hay left, a little corn. Perhaps her husband and son would bring some home when they came. They had driven off in the only buggy the Grimes family had, a rickety thing, a rickety horse hitched to the buggy, two other rickety horses led by halters. They were going to trade horses, get a little money if they could. They might come home drunk. It would be well to have something in the house when they got back.

The son had an affair on with a woman at the county-seat, fifteen miles away. She was a bad woman, a tough one. Once, in the summer, the son had brought her to the house. Both she and the son had been drinking. Jake Grimes was away and the son and his woman ordered the old woman about like a servant. She did not mind much, was used to it. Whatever happened she never said anything. That was her way of getting along. She had managed that way when she was a young girl at the German’s and ever since she had married Jake. That time her son brought his woman to the house they stayed all night, sleeping together just as though they were married. It hadn’t shocked the old woman, not much. She had got past being shocked early in life.

With the pack on her back she went painfully along across an open field, wading in the deep snow, and got into the wood. She had to go up a little hill. There wasn’t so much snow in the woods.

There was a path but it was hard to follow. Just beyond the top of the hill, where the wood was thickest, there was a small clearing. Had some one once thought of building a house there? The clearing was as large as a building lot in town, large enough for a house and a garden. The path ran along the side of the clearing and when she got there the old woman sat down to rest at the foot of a tree.

It was a foolish thing to do. When she got herself placed, the pack against the tree trunk, it was nice but what about getting up again? She worried about that for a moment and then closed her eyes.

She must have slept for a time. When you are about so cold you can’t get any colder. The afternoon grew a little warmer and the snow came thicker than ever. Then after a time the weather cleared. The moon even came out.

There were four Grimes dogs that had followed Mrs. Grimes into town, all tall gaunt fellows. Such men as Jake Grimes and his son always keep just such dogs. They kick and abuse them but they stay. The Grimes dogs, in order to keep from starving, had to do a lot of foraging for themselves and they had been at it while the old woman slept with her back to the tree at the side of the clearing. They had been chasing rabbits in the woods and in adjoining fields and in their ranging had picked up three other farm dogs.

All the dogs came back to the clearing after a time. They were excited about something. Such nights, cold and clear and with a moon, do things to dogs. It may be that some old instinct, come down from the time when they were wolves and ranged the woods in packs on winter nights, comes back into them.

The dogs in the clearing, before the old woman, had caught two or three rabbits and their immediate hunger had been satisfied. They began to play, running in circles in the clearing. Round and round they ran, each dog’s nose at the tail of the next dog. In the clearing, under the snow-laden trees and under the wintry moon, they made a strange picture, running thus silently in a circle their running had beaten in the soft snow. The dogs made no sound. They ran and ran in the circle.

It may have been that the old woman saw them doing that before she died. She may have awakened once or twice and looked at the strange sight with dim old eyes.

She would not be very cold now, just drowsy. Life hangs on a long time. Perhaps the old woman was out of her head. She may have dreamed of her girlhood at the German’s and before that when she was a child and before her mother lit out and left her.

Her dreams couldn’t have been very pleasant. Not many pleasant things had happened to her. Now and then one of the Grimes dogs left the running circle and came to stand before her. The dog thrust his face close to hers. His red tongue was hanging out.

The running of the dogs may have been a kind of death ceremony. It may have been that the primitive instinct of the wolf having been aroused in the dogs by the night and the running, they were afraid.

“Now we are no longer wolves. We are dogs, the servants of men. Keep alive, man. When man dies we become wolves again.”

When one of the dogs came to where the old woman sat with her back against the tree and had thrust his nose close to her face he seemed satisfied and went back to run with the pack. All the Grimes dogs did it at some time, during the evening, before she died. Tar Moorehead knew all about it, afterwards, when he grew to be a man, because once in a wood on another winter night he saw a pack of dogs act just that way. The dogs were waiting for him to die as they had waited for the old woman that night when he was a child. When it happened to him he was a young man and had no intention of dying.

The old woman died softly and quietly. When she was dead and when one of the Grimes dogs had come to her and had found her dead all the dogs stopped running.

They gathered about her.

Well, she was dead now. She had fed the Grimes dogs when she was alive, what about now?

There was the pack on her back, the grain bag containing the piece of salt pork, the liver the butcher had given her, the dog meat, the soup bones. The butcher in town, having been suddenly overcome with a feeling of pity, had loaded her grain bag heavily. It had been a big haul for the old woman.

A big haul for the dogs now.

One of the Grimes dogs sprang suddenly out from among the others and began worrying the pack on the old woman’s back. Had the dogs really been wolves that one would have been the leader of the pack. What he did all the others did.

All of them sank their teeth into the grain bag the old woman had fastened with ropes to her back.

They dragged the old woman’s body out into the open clearing. The worn-out old dress was quickly torn from her shoulders. When she was found, a day or two later, the dress had been torn from her body clear to the hips but the dogs had not touched the body. They had got the meat out of the grain bag, that was all. Her body was frozen stiff when it was found and the shoulders were so narrow and the body so slight that in death it looked like the body of a young girl.

* * * * *

Such things happening in towns of the Middle West, on farms near town, when Tar Moorehead was a child. A hunter out after rabbits found the old woman’s body and did not touch it. Something, the beaten path in the little snow covered clearing, the silence of the place, the place where the dogs had worried the body trying to pull the grain bag away or tear it open--something startled the man and he hurried off to town.

Tar was on Main Street with his brother John who was taking the afternoon papers to the stores. It was almost night.

The hunter came into a grocery and told his story. Then he went to a hardware shop and into a drug store. Men began to gather on the sidewalks. Then they started out along the road to the place in the wood.

Of course John Moorehead should have gone on about his business of distributing papers, but he didn’t. Every one was going to the woods. The undertaker went and the town marshal. Several men got on a dray and rode out to where the path left the road, but the horses weren’t very sharply shod and slid about on the slippery roads. They made no better time than those who walked.

The town marshal was a large man whose leg had been injured in the Civil War. He carried a heavy cane and limped rapidly along the road. John and Tar Moorehead followed at his heels and as they went, other boys and men joined the crowd.

It had grown dark by the time they got to where the old woman had turned out of the road but the moon had come out. The marshal was thinking there might have been a murder. He kept asking the hunter questions. The hunter went along with his gun across his shoulder, a dog following at his heels. It isn’t often a rabbit hunter has a chance to be so conspicuous. He was taking full advantage of it, leading the procession with the town marshal. “I did not see any wounds. She was a young girl. Her face was buried in the snow. No, I didn’t know her.” As a matter of fact, the hunter had not looked closely at the body. He had been frightened. She might have been murdered and some one might spring out from behind a tree and murder him. In a woods, in the late afternoon, when the trees are all bare and there is white snow on the ground, when all is silent, something creepy steals over the body. If something strange or uncanny has happened in the neighborhood, all you think about is getting away from there as fast as you can.

The crowd of men and boys had got to where the old woman had crossed the field and went, following the marshal and the hunter, up the slight incline and into the woods.

John and Tar Moorehead were both silent. John had his bundle of papers in a bag slung across his shoulder. When he got back to town he would have to go on distributing his papers before he went home to supper. If Tar went with him, as John had no doubt already determined he should, they would both be late. Either Tar’s mother or his sister would have to warm their supper.

Well, they would have something to tell. A boy did not get such a chance often. It was lucky they just happened to be in the grocery when the hunter came in. The hunter was a country fellow. Neither of the boys had ever seen him before.

Now the crowd of men and boys had got to the clearing. Darkness comes quickly on such winter nights but the full moon made everything clear. The two Moorehead boys stood near the tree, beneath which the old woman had died.

She did not look old, lying there frozen--in that light. One of the men turned her over in the snow and Tar saw everything. His body trembled and so did his brother’s. It might have been the cold.

Neither of them had ever before seen a woman’s body. It may have been the snow, clinging to the frozen flesh, that made it look so white, so like marble. No woman had come with the party from town, but one of the men, he was the town blacksmith, took off his overcoat and spread it over her. Then he gathered her into his arms and started off to town, all the others following silently. At that time no one knew who she was.

Tar had seen everything, had seen the round track in the snow, like a miniature race track, where the dogs had run, had seen how the men were mystified, had seen the white bare young-looking shoulders, had heard the whispered comments of the men.

The men were simply mystified. They took the body to the undertaker’s and when the blacksmith, the hunter, the marshal and several others had got inside, they closed the door. If Dick Moorehead had been there perhaps he could have got in and could have seen and heard everything, but the two Moorehead boys couldn’t.

Tar went with his brother John to distribute the papers and when they got home it was John who told the story.

Tar kept silent and went to bed early. It may have been he was not satisfied with the way John told the story.

Later, in the town, he must have heard other fragments of the old woman’s story. He remembered her going past the Moorehead house when he was ill. She was recognized the next day and there was an investigation. The husband and son were found somewhere and brought to town and there was an attempt to connect them with the woman’s death, but it did not work. They had perfect enough alibis.

The town was, however, against them. They had to get out. Where they went Tar never heard.

He remembered only the picture there in the forest, the men standing about, the naked, girlish-looking figure, face down in the snow, the circle made by the running dogs and the clear cold winter sky above. White fragments of clouds were drifting across the sky. They went racing across the little open space among the trees.

The scene in the forest had become for Tar, without his knowing it, the foundation for a story a child could not understand and it needed understanding. The fragments had to be picked up slowly long afterwards.

Things happened. When Tar was a young man he went to work on the farm of a German. There was a hired girl and she was afraid of her employer. The farmer’s wife hated her.

Tar saw things at that place. Once later, on a winter night, he had a half-uncanny, mystical sort of adventure with dogs in a forest on a clear moonlit night. When he was a schoolboy, and on a summer day, he went with a boy friend out along a creek some miles from town and came to the house where the old woman had lived. No one had lived in the house since her death. The doors were broken from the hinges, the window lights were all broken. As the boy and Tar stood in the road outside, two dogs, just roving farm dogs no doubt, came running around a corner of the house. The dogs were tall gaunt fellows and came to the fence and glared through at the boys standing in the road.

The whole thing, the story of the old woman’s death, was to Tar as he grew older like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood.

The woman who died was one of those who feed animals. From childhood she had been feeding animal life, in men, in cows, in chickens, in pigs, in horses, in dogs. She spent her life feeding all sorts of animals. The experience with her husband was a purely animal experience. Her having children was an animal experience. Her daughter had died in childhood and with her one son she had apparently no human relations. She fed him as she fed her husband. When her son grew up he brought a woman to the house and the old woman fed them, saying nothing. On the night when she died she was hurrying homeward, bearing on her body food for animals.

She died in the clearing in the woods and even after her death continued feeding the animal life in the dogs that had trotted out of the town at her heels.