The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg/Chapter 6
FROM the day that Annie and Uriah Spragg left Cordova their existence drifted into a strange state that was something more and something less than human. In all their obscure wanderings it appears that they were hounded like the figures out of a Greek tragedy by some fate which gave them no peace, shutting them further and further away from the world into the solitude of their own souls. It may have been that the consciousness of their own queerness set them apart, or it may have been as Signora Bardelli, the janitress, believed long afterward—that Miss Annie Spragg sold her soul to the Devil, a bargain she made perhaps on the day that Uriah found the body of Leander Potts lying in her bower by the bend of the river. Perhaps she preferred the Devil to such a God as Uriah worshipped. The same strange thing that shut them in from the world bound them to each other in a lonely solitude.
On fleeing Cordova they fell back once more into that life which they had led so long as children of the Prophet. From town to town they went and from village to village and crossroad to crossroad, carrying the word of Uriah's harsh God into the wilderness. But it was a life neither as pleasant nor as comfortable as life had been in the days of the Prophet, for there was nothing about the voice or the face or the body of Uriah which stirred men to tears of repentance and women to frenzies of hysteria. Uriah was merely repellent and cold. Gifts of money and of food must have been slender and infrequent and Annie, it appears, beyond pumping the wheezy melodion for the services, did nothing to help her brother. Nevertheless in those days a man of God was looked upon as touched by a Divine fire that set him aside from other men, and so Uriah was tolerated and respected.
They accomplished most in remote and lonely communities where the arrival of a traveling preacher was the peak of excitement from one year's end to another, where souls were craving salvation as a change from the monotonies of harsh weather and dreary landscape. But Annie Spragg contributed nothing save that uncertain touch upon the melodion. Even that disturbing power of seduction come down to her from the Prophet she seemed to have armored and locked away in the depths of her wounded soul. More and more she became a solitary, more and more she wandered through woods and fields, taking for her friends only the birds and the animals.
At some period during their long wanderings (and they went as far west as Boise and as far east as Carthage) Uriah came at last to be ordained a legitimate preacher, qualified by his church and fit to be given a flock and a house where he might rest a little from his long and wandering atonement. But even then God saw fit to give him only a little peace, for wherever he went, he was driven on again in a little time. People disliked him and they distrusted the queer Annie and her silent, mysterious ways. Uriah's hatred of women grew with advancing age and as women were the best defenders of priests he failed in his mission, for his female parishioners came to look upon him as a poor thing who was a feeble preacher with a harsh, weak voice in which there was only the monotonous grey and bitter scale of denunciation. The women of a parish were the natural antagonists of a preacher's wife and she of them, and Annie Spragg was worse than the most helpless clergyman's wife. The women she ignored. She did not call upon them or go to the Ladies' Aid or make mother hubbards for the missionary society. She merely sat at home, mysterious and silent, surrounded by the outlandish wild things she had made her pets.
And so at last when Uriah Spragg had passed his fiftieth birthday, they came to the church at Winnebago Falls, a miserable and dying parish worthy only of one whose life had been a failure. The building itself was a primitive affair of unpainted wood, long in need of repair, which stood in a poor part of the town between the railroad yards and the river, and his flock was made up of the remnants of a migration of poor whites who, abandoned by their strength in the course of a western migration, had settled down in apathy along the mud flats. They were a poor lot, undernourished, superstitious and fearful. Most of them could not read or write, but they were all Children of God who possessed souls, and Uriah, whose only ambition was atonement, took up his task without complaint.
The preacher's house stood on the outskirts of the town, a poor wooden affair like the church, half hidden from a highway which was neither city street nor country road, by great cottonwoods and a thicket of untended lilacs, syringas and woodbine. Great clumps of burdock, emblem of poverty and the sordid, had taken possession of the yard and grew close against the old house. Beyond it stretched an abandoned terrain grown over with sumach and wild cherries, which in summer served mercifully to hide the fragments of old buggies and baby-carriages, tin cans and bicycles, dumped there when they ceased to be any longer of use to the citizens of Winnebago Falls.
Into this house Uriah and Annie Spragg moved the few primitive things which made up their household furniture. The pay was three hundred dollars a year and "contributions," but "contributions" from a flock which itself lingered on the fringes of starvation could not have been great. Still they were for a little time secure and safe from change, since it was impossible to assign Uriah to a lower charge.
Not long after they had moved in, Annie Spragg was discovered foraging along the river and on the fringes of the dump heap, collecting bits of wood. With these she constructed by her own hands a crude enclosure which she began to fill with pets. To the members of her brother's new flock she remained a mystery, since no one spoke to her even when they came to the house, unless by chance she happened to open the door and usher them in silence into a parlor furnished with three chairs, a worn carpet, two religious chromos and a rubber-plant. People saw her sometimes in the town, wandering along the street, peering into shop windows at things which she could never afford to buy. She had begun even at that date to appear extremely eccentric. Her clothes were queer and out of date, with a skirt which always trailed far behind her through dust or mud, regardless of the weather. But she was very clean, and even in those days wore white cotton gloves. People who encountered her at the door of Uriah's house noticed that she wore them even when opening the door, and Mrs. Bosanky, the drunken old Irish woman who came up sometimes from the flats to help her clean the house, said that Miss Annie wore the gloves even when cooking and cleaning and doing the washing.
Within the crude enclosure among the burdocks at the back of the house there came to be sheltered rabbits and guinea-pigs, three or four stray cats, a crow with a broken wing and an old and bony mongrel dog whose broken leg Miss Annie Spragg had mended with great care. The thicket about the house had long been a refuge for birds and after she came their numbers increased. People said it was strange that Miss Annie Spragg's cats never annoyed the birds and that even bluejays and sparrows lived in the thicket in peace with more timid winged things.
And then one morning old Mrs. Bosanky arrived leading on a string a young he-goat that had been left behind by an Irish family which had set out for Oregon. He was a fine creature, with black intelligent eyes and a long fine shining coat as black as night. And after a time the town became used to a new sight, more extraordinary than any of the others. It saw Miss Annie Spragg walking in the evenings after her work was done along the road toward Meeker's Gulch, a lonely and almost impenetrable marshy thicket some four miles to the north. The he-goat walked beside her in the most docile fashion without even the constraint of a leading string, and when dogs ran out from the houses along the road to bark at the queer figure of Miss Annie Spragg, he arched his back prettily and bent his head and beat the earth with his pretty shining black hoofs. She took him there to feed upon the wild sweet clover that grew high on the edges of the country road. Sometimes when people passed along the road while the goat was feeding, they encountered the green eyes of Miss Annie Spragg watching them through the black veil she always wore, and they hurried on, filled with the nameless and ancestral fear that attacks children in the dark.
Uriah, too, sometimes walked along the county road that led to Meeker's Gulch, but never at the hour of sunset. He chose the morning and the middle of the day. Heat seemed to have no effect upon his great shambling body, not even the thick damp heat of the fertile prairies. He was fifty-one and then fifty-two and life and the atonement he had planned seemed only to withdraw further and further from him. There were men and women who presently had stopped coming to his church and others who, for reasons he could not understand, hated him. He had done his best, his duty; he had been hard and conscientious toward Annie as well as toward himself, yet none loved him, none asked his aid. He still possessed his gigantic physical strength, but he was becoming an old man, with hair turning white. The bitter chiselled lines in his face were becoming great hard gashes that gave the countenance a perpetual look of anger and hatred. The pale blue eyes sank deeper and deeper into their cavernous sockets. And the ungainly body, denied since the beginning the pleasures for which nature intended it, began like the bodies of those who abuse the pleasures of the flesh to be racked with obscure but devastating pains. At times he could no longer stand erect for the pain in his spine. People saw him day after day walking along the country road, his body bent with pain, still in the same old posture, with the great bony hands clasped behind him, composing his bitter sermons as he walked or calling fiercely upon God for strength.
There had never been much love in the harsh body and even the little that there had been appeared to have burned itself out in the flame of his strange passion for Leander Potts. But neither was there any hate in him, but only that thing which is less than human—duty and the sense of atonement for the sins of his father the Prophet and for the sins of his unchaste sister. He came at last never to walk in the town but always in the open country. Once a year he went away to attend for three days the convention of his church. It was his only diversion.
Among the farmers who lived along the road to Meeker's Gulch there was one of German descent called Ed Hasselman, who kept cows and supplied milk for most of the citizens of Winnebago Falls. He was a hard-working man, but the curse of drink was on him. Sometimes he would stay sober for months and then one day the appetite would take possession of him and he would become like a madman, staying drunk for days and weeks. Sometimes it was whiskey and sometimes it was only hard cider, but his drunkenness possessed always the same wild quality of bestiality. At such times he was seized with nightmare visions and went out of his mind, and then a woman called Maria Hazlett who kept house for him would have to deliver the milk in Winnebago Falls. When she appeared the whole town knew that Ed Hasselman was drunk again. She was a fat, blousy woman with a moustache and Ed Hasselman had never married her, but she was accepted as next best to being his wife. No one knew her well, for she was a silent woman who appeared to accept all that life brought her without comment or complaint. She was never heard even to complain of Ed Hasselman's drunkenness and the long hours of back-breaking work which it imposed upon her. She seemed content with him. She had been an illegitimate child, brought up on the county poor farm, and at eighteen she had gone to work for Ed Hasselman when his wife was still alive. When the wife died Maria Hazlett simply stayed on.
One morning, a day or two after Uriah Spragg had gone off to the annual church convention in Dubuque, Maria Hazlett appeared delivering the milk and as she went from house to house she spread a strange story, telling it alike to hired girls, housewives and men she met in the street. It went through all the town.
She said that in the early morning when Ed Hasselman had gone out to the barn to help her with the milking, he had seen the figure of Miss Annie Spragg black against the sunrise hurrying across the open fields from the direction of Meeker's Gulch and with her was the black he-goat. She was not going toward Meeker's Gulch, mind you, but away from it, back to town. Ed had been drinking a little, Maria Hazlett said, but not enough so that he didn't know what he was seeing.
Some put the story down as a drunken hallucination of the milkman and others guarded it, turning it over in their minds, savoring all its possibilities, but in the end everyone came to know it and it served only to deepen the isolation which surrounded the strange brother and sister. They came to be looked upon a little as though they were strange animals brought from a far country, which might be regarded safely from a distance. Here and there in the town, but mostly among the members of Uriah Spragg's own flock, murmurs began to arise against them, and strange rumors that they were both mad and that Miss Annie Spragg at least deserved being shut up. Surely it was not respectable to have such a woman as the sister of one's preacher, and sometimes people who belonged to other churches—Methodists and Baptists and even the haughty Congregationalists—treated the Reverend Uriah Spragg and his sister as comic figures. But worst of all, the old black story of the Prophet, leader of the Spraggites, never long dead, raised its head. It was a story never far distant in the memories of all the prairie people and in the years since the Prophet's mysterious end it had grown in exaggeration and unwholesome detail. Uriah and Annie Spragg were two of the products of the Prophet's colossal lust and as such were the accursed of God and the beloved of the Devil. There was even talk of riding Uriah Spragg out of town upon a rail, and there were dark stories that Annie Spragg was much more to him than a sister.
It came to a crisis one hot Sunday morning in August when Uriah Spragg went as usual to preach to the remnants of his flock in the decaying wooden church, and he found his own church door locked against him. Across it had been nailed three planks and on one of these was fastened a bit of paper on which was written in half-illiterate handwriting:
We want none of the spawn of Cyrus Spragg.
We want no more of you.
We want a good preacher or none at all.
We are sick of being laughed at.
Until further warning the church will be closed.
Take warning and do not try to force yourself where you are not wanted.
Darius Curtis.
Alexander Bostwick.
He did not attempt to tear loose the planks and force an entrance to his church. For a little time he simply stood quite still in the high grass staring at the paper, and then, turning slowly, he walked away with his head bowed and his great cruel hands behind his tired back. As he left the churchyard, passing through the rusted gate, there arose behind him from the thicket of sumach a loud derisive laugh. The committee had been hiding there to watch him.
It was the end. There was nothing left.
At two o'clock in the afternoon of the same day Maria Hazlett, drowsing in the heat with the reins hanging loose over the dashboard of the milk-wagon, was roused sharply. Her team had shied at something that lay on the edge of the road and very nearly threw the wagon into the ditch. Stirring herself to action, she halted the team to find that almost beside her, among the high sweet clover, lay the body of a man. Being a courageous and unsqueamish woman used to hard farm work and butchering, she got down heavily and turned the body over on its back. She saw then that it was the Reverend Uriah Spragg, and that although the body was still warm he was quite dead. It needed Maria's calloused nature to regard the sight without turning ill. His face was no longer the face of Uriah Spragg, but she recognized him by the white hair, the rusty black clothes and the great hands that were like the cruel claws of a bird of prey. He had been beaten savagely from head to foot by some sharp instrument. Even his clothing had been ripped and torn in the mad fury of the attack.
There was no one in sight. The murder had been done at noonday on the county road in the very midst of the flat prairie where there was neither tree nor bush nor dwelling to hide the murderer.
All that day and during most of the night crowds streamed out the county road to stare morbidly at the spots of blood in the dust at the edge of the tall sweet clover. Crowds hung over the fence of the old house where they took Uriah's broken body back to his sister Annie. Crowds trampled the vulgar burdocks into the ground. No one saw Miss Annie Spragg save the sheriff and two sweating and stupid policemen who said that she received them in white gloves and took the news calmly enough—"Although that maybe was because she was cracked."
After three days they buried him, and Miss Annie Spragg, who did not take the trouble to put on black or put off her flower-trimmed picture hat, tacked up a notice on the front fence that she was going away and that her furniture was for sale. She would have gone perhaps overlooked and in solitude as she had always been, but for the dark rumors which began to be heard. It was said outright that she had killed her brother and that everyone knew that crazy people were far craftier than sane ones. At last a committee from Uriah's own church, feeling perhaps that they were not above suspicion, called upon the sheriff to make an investigation and "clear the honor of Hanna County by fixing the guilt for the murder of the Reverend Uriah Spragg." People, moved perhaps by some dark mistrust, began to hint that the black he-goat had played some part in the crime. No one had found the weapon with which Uriah Spragg had been beaten to death and Joe Hutton, the undertaker, told a story that the wounds on his body were like those that might have been made by the twin prongs of a pair of horns. It was true that since the day of the murder no one had seen the he-goat.
And so they arrested Miss Annie Spragg and questioned her, although they could draw no intelligible story from her muddled and perhaps crafty answers. Next they searched her, calling in two women from Uriah's church to strip her naked. She made no resistance, only looking at them quietly out of her disturbing green eyes. At the very beginning when they took off the white cotton gloves they made a strange discovery. On the palms and the backs of both hands there were red scars, as if they had been branded there with a hot iron, and as they undressed her they found other scars like them on the tops and soles of her feet and one on her right side just below her breast; and on her brow under the fringe of thick red hair were other scars that might have been burned there by placing on her head a crown of jagged hot metal. On her back were the healed blue scars of flogging. But they could get from her no answer as to how she came by these scars. Though clearly they were the scars of wounds, she led them craftily to believe that she had been born thus.
Awed a little and unable to find even a suspicion of her guilt, they let her go back in peace to the old house behind the lilacs, following close behind her in order to search the place. In the bare small room where Uriah Spragg had slept they found a long cruel blacksnake whip and across the hall in the room of Miss Annie Spragg they discovered a strange contrivance which at first puzzled them. It consisted of a rusty pump-chain, fastened in the middle to one of the beams in the ceiling just above the bed. To the two ends were attached crude handcuffs fastened with locks equally crude. They questioned Miss Annie Spragg for two hours and at the end of that time they learned that Uriah Spragg had locked her into the handcuffs each night after she had gone to bed. Only on three nights a year when he had gone to the church convention was she free.
At the back of the house a crowd of curious gathered once more, peering in at the windows and breaking down the cellar door, for the mob no longer looked upon Annie Spragg as a human creature with the rights of a citizen like themselves, but a kind of monster who filled them with a hungry desire to destroy her. There seems to have been an unnatural intensity in their feeling against her. She was to them no longer a woman, or even human. At length three bold citizens in an excess of virtue broke down the fence built so laboriously by the hand of Miss Annie Spragg herself to shelter her pets, and there on the beaten yellow earth they found what they sought—three great stains made by blood.
It was then that old Mrs. Bosanky, for once sober and in her right mind, pushed through the crowd and told her story. Miss Annie Spragg, she said, could not have committed the murder because she, Mrs. Bosanky, had been in the house all day on the day that Uriah Spragg was found beaten to death on the edge of the county road. She took her oath to it, calling upon the Virgin Mary and all the Irish saints to witness that she was telling the truth. She explained delicately that she had not told her story until now because the murder had upset her and since then she had been drinking a little in order to quiet herself.
But the blood—She could explain that too. It was the blood of the pretty black he-goat. On the morning of the day the Reverend Uriah Spragg was murdered, he had killed it himself with an axe.
Since they could find nothing against Miss Annie Spragg save that she was a little moonstruck, they dropped the case and annoyed her no more, and the mystery remained unsolved, an epic in the history of a town where little ever happened. Some even felt a little sorry for her when the stories got about that she had been beaten and branded by her brother, but none approached her save drunken old Mary Bosanky.
She went away at last, so quietly that no one knew she had gone until long afterward. Only Mrs. Bosanky knew where she had gone, for she had asked her and received the answer, "To Italy." And when Mrs. Bosanky asked her why, she had answered, "Because I lived there once." And Mrs. Bosanky, who could neither read nor write, thought Italy must be a town in the next county and took no more notice of it.