The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg/Chapter 8
THE citizens of Winnebago Falls came long before she died to think of Mary Bosanky simply and primitively as a town character, placing her in the category of those who were a little less than human. Most of them thought of her until her death simply as a drunken old Irishwoman who worked a little when she was sober, who went along the streets muttering to herself and who died in the end at the county poorhouse. But none of them had seen her as she stepped ashore from a sailing ship at New Orleans in the year of the Great Irish Famine. Then she was twenty-six, buxom, strong as a man, and handsome with black hair and blue eyes and a fine high color. She could neither read nor write but she boasted when drunk that she was descended from the Kings of Clare. Toward the end it was a boast that she used more and more frequently, in the fashion of those who invoke blue blood to compensate for the disappointments of this life. And with Mary Bosanky there was great need for compensation. There was the worthlessness of Michael Bosanky and the poverty of the shack in which they lived by the railroad, and most of all there was Shamus, her son, who was so beautiful to look upon and so different from other sons. She knew that all the blood of all the kings of Ireland could not brighten the wits of Shamus.
And all her life she had as well to bear the cross of her own stormy nature, which was that of one who never found life quite fine enough to satisfy her desires. In the beginning when she was young and had her strength and vitality she managed somehow to wrest from life a little of what she asked of it, or at least she was young enough then to delude herself into believing that she had. She found a strange excitement in everything—in the wharves and the river boats, the negroes and the markets of New Orleans and then for a little time on the river boat where she worked for the wife of the captain. She had a kind of rollicking good nature that was always hungry for adventure, and when adventure did not come she grew bored, and when she grew bored she imagined grievances which convinced herself that she was a creature abused and exploited, and this in turn gave her a reason for quitting the place where she worked and moving on to a new town or a new country. Before she was thirty she had been a chambermaid, a cook, a dishwasher in a Cincinnati saloon. She had cared for children and even worked in the fields at harvest time. She lived almost the life of a man, save that she was always virtuous because rooted deep in her savage and superstitious nature there was a fear of priests and of the life after death. She was terrified of thunderstorms and of corpses and heard strange noises in the night. There were no even, monotonous plains of contentment in her life. Her mood was either one in which she went all day singing ballads from her home county or one in which she went about praying and moaning and saying her rosary. At the age of twenty-eight she found herself washing dishes in Rafferty's saloon and lunch-room on the edge of Winnebago Falls where the tracks of the Iowa, Nebraska and Western Railroad crossed those of the Trans-Mississippi Freight and Passenger Company. In those days they were building railroads everywhere and it was always the Irish who did the work, so Rafferty's saloon was filled a large part of the time with wild Irishmen drinking and carousing in the hours when they were not shoveling earth and stone to bring prosperity to sleepy places like Winnebago Falls.
Among the Irishmen was one Michael Bosanky, a great red-haired giant of a fellow two years older than Mary, who drank and roared and sought to make life constantly more exciting than it could possibly be. He was a devil with the ladies and he tried to be a devil with Mary, but she would have none of him save on the terms that the priests held holy and respectable, and in the end the banns were published and they were married, drawn together by an attraction which had its roots in that mutual hunger for a life that was better than any life can be.
It was the beginning of Mary's real trouble, because she was tied to Michael by a force stronger than banns and marriage ties, stronger than her fear of priests and of Hell. It was a force that would not let her quit her job and go on to the next town. She was in love with Michael in her own passionate and possessive way and it was a love as violent as the very natures of herself and Michael. She could not imagine living without him. The sight of his great brawny figure reeling across the tracks from Rafferty's saloon gave her a kind of fine palpitating excitement she had never discovered in all her adventures. And it was thrilling to live with Michael because he was roaring drunk a great part of the time and he threw things at her and tried to beat her. But she was a strong woman and the attempted beating often turned into a brawl that ended in the wildest of lovemaking. She discovered almost at once that Michael was no good, but that did not vanquish the certainty that life with him was a fine and glorious affair.
He lost one job after another and presently Mary went back to working out, not this time at a regular job, but by the day, sometimes cooking, sometimes washing, sometimes scrubbing floors. She made a little money this way, but Michael always took it from her and went across the tracks to Rafferty's place. All of Winnebago Falls came to know Mary Bosanky. She worked for the best families like the Weatherbys and the Fosdicks. They grew fond of her and they pitied her hard life, but it never occurred to Mary to pity herself. Michael never chased after other women any longer. He seemed to find her enough for him.
And presently when Mary became a little weary of Michael's perpetual drunkenness she began, too, to drink and life at once became brighter. They drank together and the fights they had were magnificent. Sometimes one emerged with a blackened eye and sometimes the other and sometimes both. She began to grow undependable among the best families of Winnebago Falls and so to lose her work.
When she was thirty-nine something happened which Mary regarded as a miracle. For nine years she had prayed to all the saints of fertility and now at thirty-nine she was going to have a baby. On the advice of the priest she even gave up drinking, which was for Mary a great sacrifice. The child was born in the two-room shack by the railroad. It was a pretty baby, a boy, curiously strong and healthy, with black hair and blue eyes like herself. He was strong enough even to survive the rough treatment that was certain to meet any child born into the world of Bosanky's Shanty. She called him Shamus after her father from whom she had not heard in fifteen years. As he grew older he was slow in walking and in making himself understood.
But when Shamus was old enough to go to the parish school it was clear that there was something wrong with him. He did not learn things like other children and he could remember nothing of his lessons. He was not an idiot. It was more as if there were a part of his brain that had never existed. The other children tormented him and so he came to play alone and to invent extraordinary games. At home his only playground was the railroad-tracks and there he found his way miraculously in and out among the locomotives and shunting trains. At nine he was still among the six-year-old children in the parish school. At ten he ran away four times within a month. Once he was missing for two days and Mary Bosanky, who loved the child with the love which mothers have for children who are different, wandered over the whole countryside searching for him. He was discovered at last on Ed Hasselman's farm by Maria Hazlett, Hasselman's housekeeper, asleep in a thicket in the midst of a flock of sheep. After that they gave up trying to teach him anything and he was allowed to run wild. When he was thirteen he began to have visions. He would fall down in a kind of trance and remain unconscious for hours and when he awakened he told wonderful stories of having been to Heaven and seen the golden streets and the angels walking about. He heard wonderful music and his great friend was Saint John the Shepherd.
Since neither Shamus nor drinking made life seem grand enough, Mary and Michael came to discover new ways of elevating their spirits. One way was their expeditions to a place called Lakeville, which was a sort of cheap summer resort for the Germans of Winnebago Falls. There was at Lakeville a round deep lake of cold clear blue water where the fishing was good. On its banks there was a grove of trees with cottages that were little more than shacks set in their shade. Mary and Michael seemed to know without planning it when the time had come to go to Lakeville for a carouse. Together they would set out on foot to walk the fourteen miles along the county road to the north past Ed Hasselman's farm and Meeker's Gulch. A friend of Mike's, the foreman of the road gang, had a shack there where they could stay. They always took plenty of whiskey with them and left Shamus behind in the shanty. Sometimes they would sleep out of doors on a sand-bar under the moon and sometimes in a rowboat made fast among the lily pads and the tall shaking reeds near the shore. And always there was wild drinking and wilder lovemaking, as if Mary were still a handsome young girl instead of a middle-aged woman bloated and saddled by drink.
And Shamus, left to himself, took to wandering more and more often, and farther and farther. He never slept under a roof. Sometimes if the weather was warm he slept in a thicket or a ditch and if it was cool, among the sheep or among the cattle in the open sheds built in the fields to shelter the beasts from the winter blizzards. The farmers of three counties came to know him and to feed him when he came their way. He was harmless and sometimes he would help them in the fields without asking any pay. He invented games for the children and made them whistles from the willows that grew along the streams and marshes. He did not make them simple primitive whistles but whole sets of pipes bound together with willow bark on which they could play tunes. He was skilful with his hands and gentle in working about beasts. At sixteen he was strong as a man and possessed of a strange dark beauty not to be found among the blond heavy German farmers. He went about in rags, his clothing torn by briars and barbed wire fences. Sometimes a farmer's wife gave him a shirt or an old pair of overalls. He had a dark skin with a fine high color, black curling hair, blue eyes and small ears that were pointed at the tips. He knew about weather and could tell the farmers when it would be safe to cut their hay and take in their wheat. There was really nothing very strange about him but the curious vacant look in his eyes, his strange love for beasts and his way of not seeming at times to understand when people spoke to him.
The year that he was sixteen his mother came back alone one morning from Lakeville and tried to explain to Shamus that his father was dead. He had fallen overboard from a rowboat and been drowned. At least that was what people thought. It was what Mary thought, for she didn't really know what had happened. She had awakened sober to find herself alone in the boat in the middle of the lake. Michael had disappeared. They made an effort to drag the lake but no trace was ever found of Shamus's father. There was a legend that the lake had no bottom; at least no one had been able to reach the bottom with a sounding line.
For a time Mary, sobered a little, gave up drinking and went again to working regularly. She began too to find a compensation for Shamus's dull wits in the miraculous visions which he had. These were more frequent now and more complete in their details. She fancied that God had made her the mother of a saint. The stories of his visions went the round of the parish and all the county. But Shamus did not abandon his habit of wandering off into the open country for days at a time. When he was gone Mary found life insupportable and took again to the bottle.
They had been town characters for years when the Reverend Uriah Spragg and his sister Annie came to live in Winnebago Falls and old Mrs. Bosanky, when she was sober enough, went to work for Annie Spragg. Shamus Bosanky and his mother were the only people in the town poorer than Uriah and Annie Spragg and Annie Spragg was the only person in the place who would any longer give Mary Bosanky work to do.
Sometimes Shamus went with his mother to the weathered wooden house hidden by lilacs, syringas and burdock where the Spraggs lived. Miss Annie Spragg fed them and was kind to them and presently they came to be her only friends in Winnebago Falls. She showed Shamus all the animals and birds that lived in the wooden enclosure behind the house and after a time it was as if he became one of them. He would come day after day to spend his time there, playing with them and teaching them tricks. The rest of the tale comes from Ed Hasselman and Maria Hazlett who kept house for him on the farm near Meeker's Gulch. Their part of it happened long after Uriah Spragg was murdered and Annie, questioned and tormented, had been allowed to disappear.
Since Shamus had first run off as a little boy he had been friendly with Ed Hasselman and Maria Hazlett. They always fed him and took no notice of his goings and comings, and from the first they seemed to accept him without question. Sometimes he stayed about the farm for days sleeping among the animals and helping in the fields. He was a great help to Maria Hazlett at the periods when Ed retired into drunkenness. At the time he told them the story he was thirty-four years old. It was only a little time before his death.
It was at the beginning of one of Ed Hasselman's spells and Shamus appeared one evening just at dusk out of the woods back of the house. They had finished supper and the milking was over and Maria was washing the cream separator and the milk crocks outside the kitchen door under the great catalpa tree that grew there. As the sun had gone down a great burning harvest moon came heavily up out of the prairie and Ed on the doorstep with a flagon of hard cider beside him sat playing on his concertina snatches of half forgotten tunes that he had heard as a child in Dorfsweiler, his father's village of the Black Forest. Maria got Shamus some cold ham and some hard cider and bread and cheese and he sat eating and listening shyly on the edge of the stone coping about the spring.
He finished his supper and as it grew darker he got up presently and began to dance, not any set dance, but a series of steps which he had made up himself. It was a dance composed mostly of mad leapings and caperings so violent that remains of his ragged clothes fell apart leaving him naked to the waist under the hot August moon. Ed Hasselman drinking more and more, gave Shamus more and more to drink and played the concertina more and more wildly while Shamus danced with his black curling hair flying about his dark face. And all the while Maria, her work finished, sat on a milking stool watching the whole scene with a face on which there showed neither astonishment nor interest. She accepted the scene just as she had appeared to accept everything since she had left the poorhouse as an orphan and gone out into the world. Thus she had accepted the long trial of Ed Hasselman's drunkenness and the discovery years earlier of the body of Uriah Spragg in the ditch by the county road.
At length Ed Hasselman became too drunk to play and Shamus grew weary of his dancing and the two of them sat quietly drinking and looking at the moon. And presently Shamus told them the story which no one in Winnebago Falls ever believed because they said that Shamus was a half-wit and that Ed Hasselman was drunk. But Maria Hazlett was not drunk. She never drank. She simply sat there listening quietly. She was content with her world as she found it.
It had happened years earlier before Uriah Spragg was murdered and when he still lived with his sister in the wooden house by the town dump. Shamus was about twenty years old at the time and he had been off wandering for days and was on his way home because he felt one of his visions coming on. It was dark and he had been hurrying across fields and through woods for hours when he reached Meeker's Gulch. It was a lonely marshy place overgrown with sumach and witch-hazel so dense that even stray hunters rarely penetrated it. But Shamus wasn't afraid of it. In the depths of the wild swamp he felt at home. It was only people who frightened him.
It was, too, a hot still night like the night he sat telling the story under the catalpas to Ed Hasselman and Maria Hazlett, with a red heavy August moon climbing the prairie sky. There was not a breath of air stirring, yet as Shamus penetrated the swamp he noticed an odd thing—that all the leaves of the sumach and witch-hazel, the oaks and the cottonwoods, were dancing with a gentle motion as if stirred by a gentle breeze. They kept up a faint whispering and presently he was aware of a faint perfume like that of wild honeysuckle and he began to hear snatches of faint music which seemed to come out of the very sticks and stones and the trunks of the trees. It was sweet low music like the sound of the fifes in the Grand Army parade on the Fourth of July, only it was softer and less shrill. He thought one of his visions was coming on and so he hurried, pushing his way through the thicket with such violence that most of his clothes were torn from his body. He was looking for some open grassy space where he might fall down and lie for hours in a state of unconsciousness.
Then as he pushed through the witch-hazel he came suddenly upon an open space where the thick marsh grass had been trampled down in a wide circle and in the moonlight he discovered two dancing figures, one very white and the other as black as the shadows cast by the copper moon. One was Miss Annie Spragg and the other was the black he-goat. She was quite naked with her long red hair falling to her knees. There was a wreath of honeysuckle on her head. The black he-goat capering prettily with his delicate black front hoofs raised in the air followed her round and round the trampled circle. For a little time Shamus stood watching them from behind the trunk of a great oak tree and presently, as if he could not help himself, he joined in the dance.
It was sunset of the following day when he came to his senses and found himself lying on the bruised grass in the middle of Meeker's Gulch.
When he had finished his story he slipped quietly to the grass and fell into a sleep beneath the catalpa trees. Maria Hazlett rose and covered him with a feather-bed and then raising the half-conscious Ed Hasselman got him into bed. In the morning she had to deliver the milk on the milk route in Winnebago Falls, because Ed was taken again by one of his spells. It was two years after this almost to the day when Shamus went off for the last time wandering across the country. His mother had been sleeping quietly in the shanty by the railroad-tracks when she was awakened in the middle of the night by the thunder that terrified her. Rising, she began to sprinkle holy water about the shanty and to call upon the saints to protect her. When she went into the kitchen where Shamus slept she found his bed empty. Despite her terror of the storm, she went outside and called his name again and again into the screaming prairie wind. But she got no answer. In the flashes of lightning she found no trace of Shamus but only thick black shadows and the distant lights of the railroad switches. He was gone into the wild storm and she could not find him.
When the sun came up the next morning he did not return and she went to the police, who laughed at her craziness, not knowing what Shamus was to her. They telephoned about the county but no one had seen any trace of him. It was Maria Hazlett who thought where he might be found. That evening when she went to fetch the cows from the pasture by Meeker's Gulch she went into the swamp and there in the thickest part she found him. He was lying on the thick grass, which had been trampled down in a wide circle. He lay on his back in the shadow of the big oak with one arm thrown over his head. His clothes were all torn and the rain had plastered them close to his supple body. His black hair lay in ringlets over the dark forehead. She thought he was asleep at first or in one of his trances, but he was dead. There was no mark of any kind on his body.
She picked him up and managed to carry him to the edge of the swamp, where she laid his body on the grass beside the brook until Ed Hasselman could come and help her get it back to the house. Dead, he seemed to her more beautiful than ever. It was odd, she told Ed Hasselman, that he had never appeared to grow any older. He must have been thirty-eight when he died but he looked no older than he had looked at twenty. Perhaps, she said, it was because he was half-witted. People like that didn't seem to grow old. They belonged to a world of their own.
The church buried him in consecrated ground, so Mary's soul was at peace. After that she was never sober again and at last they took her out of the filth and squalor of the little shack, off to the poorhouse. One morning three weeks after they brought her there the keeper found her dead in bed. She was seventy-seven years old, a queer dried-up wisp of a woman who had once been the fine high-colored Mary Bosanky. In all those seventy-seven years life had never once been fine enough for her.