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Ebook has 116 lines and 7522 words, and 3 pages

Transcriber's Note:

THE HAND

Jerry Sohl

Alice knew that Dobie was a good dog, even if he did have an alarming habit of hunting down rabbits and gophers. But one day he brought her--

Alice McNearby was washing breakfast dishes and looking out the kitchen window at the November sky when she first spied Dobie. The way he was sneaking up to the house she knew he had killed something.

She dried her hands on her apron and tried to put down the suspicion that gnawed at the edge of her mind as she went to the door. During the past month Dobie had killed a cat, a pheasant, two rabbits and a field mouse and it seemed it would be only a question of time until he got one of the chickens or even one of the suckling pigs. That would be all Mac would need to throw one of his wild spells and he'd probably take a gun to Dobie as he had threatened to do. To make it worse, Dobie seemed to know how Mac felt and often growled at him. Mac didn't growl back but the look in her husband's eyes was enough to convince her Dobie's continued existence was in doubt.

It was a wonder to Alice that Mac hadn't done away with him already, judging from the comfort she derived from the dog. Dobie never fretted, never whined and seemed so appreciative of everything she did for him. She had scolded him for his killing but found herself unable to put her heart in it because he seemed to love it so. Instead, she always managed to clear any bones away before Mac returned from town or came up from the barn and she was thankful he seemed as yet unaware of the brown dog's hunting nature.

Now it appeared she'd have to cover up for the dog once again and she opened the door. Dobie was under a bush half way across the barn yard, his kill still in his mouth. He was circling around, and she knew he'd soon be on his stomach enjoying his feast.

"Dobie!" she called in a low voice, hoping it would not carry to the barn.

Dobie's ears came up. He looked her way.

"Dobie!... Come here, Dobie!"

The dog was undecided, looking at her, unmoving for a moment. Then his tail started flicking, he lowered his head and came up to her.

Then she saw what he had in his mouth and her blood stopped and only a great effort on the part of her heart started it going again.

It was a human hand, blood still oozing from the severed wrist.

The way she said it, the way she looked--something made the dog drop the hand. It fell to the ground, limp, palm down.

Dobie, head hung, tail down, ventured forward, nuzzled her hand. But Alice could not tear her eyes from the thing on the cold ground. She had cared for Dobie like a baby ever since someone dropped him off out in the country and she had adopted the name Dobie because a passing child had called him that and it seemed like a good name ... and she loved him.

But this, this hand. That was too much.

She looked around, saw a milk pail, put it open end down over the hand and carried two large rocks from the garden border to put on top to secure it. She didn't want it to be gone when she brought Mac back to see it.

She heard her ring on the telephone--rather early for Mrs. Swearingen or Mrs. Abbey wasn't it?--but ignored it. There was something else she had to do and do quickly. For the first time in months she felt thankful for Mac's presence. Surely he would know what to do. Though it was cold, she was unmindful of the fact that she did not wear a coat as she hurried to the barn; she was thinking instead that perhaps she should have answered the phone in case it might have been someone other than her women friends, possibly something in connection with the severed hand. She shuddered as she remembered how it had looked.

Alice found Mac in the loft. He had a forkful of hay over the opening when he saw her below. He stopped, narrowed his eyes before he slowly brought the hay back to the loft floor and leaned on the pitchfork.

"Dobie's found something," she said and wished her voice hadn't quavered so.

Mac spat a blob of tobacco on the floor above her. "He's a no-good dog," he said. "Scares the pigs. Always sneakin' around. Ought to be rid of him. Should have got 'round to it before this. What did he find?"

"A hand." She swallowed ... and shivered.

"A what?"

"A hand. A human hand." She suddenly took pride in the fact that she was telling him something he didn't know and that he was interested. "I don't know where he got it."

Mac put down the fork and lowered his burly frame over the edge of the opening and came down the ladder without a word. He followed her up to the house and she was thankful Dobie was nowhere around. When he kicked over the pail she was gratified to hear his sharp intake of breath.

He turned to her, his eyes narrower than she had ever seen them. "You take a good look at it?"

She nodded, looked down at the way the fingers were bent upward as if the hand were holding an invisible ball. She heard Mac spit, looked at him running his fingers along his stubbled jaw.

"It ain't human," he said. "Anybody with any sense could see that. It's got six fingers."

Just then the phone rang again. It seemed to come from a long way off and Alice hadn't consciously noticed it until her husband said. "Ain't you goin' to answer the phone?" And then she went to the door, dazed and wondering. She turned before she went in.

"What are you going to do with it?" she asked.

"You just go in and gab with those women folks," he said. "I'll take care of it."

"Shouldn't we call the sheriff?"

The phone was Mrs. Swearingen who told her that she had been trying to get her for the last half hour ever since she heard about that ship that crashed and wasn't it awful and that a person wasn't safe in his bed asleep any more with these planes flying around and crashing--and so far from an airport, too. Mrs. Swearingen was surprised that Alice had noticed no smoke and didn't she know the wreck was closer to the McNearby place than it was to the Swearingens?

"It's right south of your lower forty on the old Carnahan land, Alice. I'd figure it at about a mile from your place. Lots of people down there."

And then there was the call from Mrs. Abbey who told her she'd come from the crash site and wasn't it a peculiar plane with those funny windows and that once-broken-one somebody had patched up from the inside.

"The sheriff won't let anybody go near it," Mrs. Abbey said. "He says it's a space ship and the army ought to have a look at it first. But I saw him trying to find where to get in. Except for that broken window and that crumpled nose it don't look too bad off. Big clouds of smoke were shooting out the tail when I first got there but it's not smoking any more. Really, you ought to go down and see it, Alice."

Alice told her husband about it. He had gone back to the barn and she didn't see the severed hand anywhere on the way there.

"So that's where it come from," he said. "Good thing it didn't land on my place." He spat and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his overalls. It always bothered Alice when he did this because the stain was so difficult to get out but she had long ceased trying to change him. "If it'd landed here I'd of blown it up like a stump."

"Shouldn't we go down and see it?" Alice asked, knowing too late she had phrased the question the wrong way.

"Curiosity killed the cat," he said, and there was the faintest glimmer of a smile on his face but it was only fleeting. "Let everybody else go down and I'll get my work done while they're standin' around with their mouths hangin' open. I'm runnin' a farm and I aim to run it right."

"I think I'll go down." She tried to make it have resolve but didn't quite succeed.

He glared at her and spat again. "Then git," he said. He threw down a large forkful of hay and she had to jump out of the way. She went right after dinner.

She saw a silver cylinder that looked ever so much like pictures of guided missiles she had seen in the newspapers except that this one was bigger than any of them. Its nose was dug she could not tell how far into the earth and some of the metal on the sides was battered and bent and the tail was she guessed about a hundred and fifty feet in the air. It was about twenty-five feet across.

There were clusters of people about and she recognized many of them she hadn't seen for a long time and she was glad she had come because it gave her a rare chance to visit; Mac seldom cared for just visiting. She talked to the Blaines, the Purveses, to the Gordon children whose parents had let them remain at the wreck site even after they had gone home for chores, to the Barfords and Hocholters and many others. They asked about Mac and she offered her usual excuses for him.

While she was there she saw an army car driven up. She watched while some men got out and went through the roped-off area and pounded and scraped on the cylinder and then stood off looking at the tail of it, scratching their heads.

When she went home she was surprised to see how far the sun had moved across the sky and hoped Mac wouldn't be upset by her prolonged absence. She was gratified to see that he wasn't in the house. She petted Dobie for a while before she went in to stir up the stove and prepare supper.

During the meal Alice tried to tell her husband something of what she had seen at the wreck site but if he paid any attention to her he didn't reveal it. He had propped up a farm equipment catalogue against the sugar bowl and studied the pages without saying a word. She resigned herself to eating in silence with this great hulk of a man before her and reflected that this night was no different from most of the others. She wondered what it was that made him the way he was, so intent on his farm to the exclusion of everything else, including humanity. It was a fetish, an obsession that didn't pay off because she couldn't see that they were better off than the Swearingens or the Abbeys or any of the others in the neighborhood.

When he was through he simply got up, put on his overcoat and went outside. In a few minutes she could hear the car start and knew it would be another lonely evening. Mac would be home when he felt like it, reeking of liquor but handling it well. She did not begrudge him these absences because the man obviously needed something to take his mind off his work. But she wished she had some comparable escape.

She had got out her writing board, had settled herself comfortably with pen in hand in Mac's big chair and had even put the date on the letter to her mother who lived in Canada when she heard Dobie's excited bark.

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