Power in the Blood (5 page)

Then he’d gone to the girl, an unremarkable female to be sure, but at least she’d be able to assist his wife. Mrs. Hassenplug had thought her husband was being generous at the time, getting her someone to help out around the house. Four years later, she saw that the unremarkable female had been an investment, not a gift. It was a grievous insult. No woman who had endured as she had should have to fight against something as ubiquitous, as callow, as younger flesh. Mrs. Hassenplug had attempted to halt the course of events by protest and been slapped silly for her trouble. Now what would happen would happen. Mrs. Hassenplug hadn’t been driven to church since her wedding day, but she knew the situation was in God’s hands. No one could have greater need of His help than herself.

The day of the trip to town dawned fair and warm. Zoe had not heard a civil word from the lips of her mother since Hassenplug announced he would take her with him in the wagon. Zoe was afraid, and already ashamed; she had encouraged the man by saying she would think about his offer, and now that he had followed through with an invitation to town that didn’t even include the presence of his wife, Zoe felt she’d stepped off a cliff, and in so doing made an enemy of the woman who’d been reasonably good to her for a long time.

She considered reneging on the arrangement, simply staying home, but that option smacked of weakness. Only fourteen, she had a quotient of the Dugan blood that had been strong enough to survive desertion and poverty (Nettie’s blood, that was, not the craven stuff that flowed in the veins of Zoe’s true father, the coward who’d left them nothing but his name). No, she’d go to town and choose a dress, and the devil take what happened. She was careful, though, to slip a small paring knife into her sleeve before joining Hassenplug on the wagon seat.

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.