Send Him to Glory

The connection isn’t obvious, but I can see it, nonetheless.

Back in my sophomore year of high school Shirley Jackson’s riveting short story “The Lottery” was required reading.

First published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948—the same day the Berlin Airlift began--“The Lottery” takes place in what initially seems like a typical small town where the people are gathering for an event of some kind.

“The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny,” the story begins, “with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day.”

This clear and sunny day quickly takes a horrific turn, however, as the townspeople conduct a bizarre and bloody ritual that involves stoning one of their neighbors to death.

I remember being so disturbed when I read the final lines of “The Lottery”—and I’m not the only one.

The story caused such a stir that The New Yorker was inundated with hate mail and many people cancelled their subscriptions. The Union of South Africa-where stoning was legal at the time—banned the story.

It’s been years since I’ve thought about “The Lottery,” but the story came to mind last week while I was watching an episode of the old western TV show Have Gun Will Travel.

The episode is called “The Burning Tree” and it was first aired on Feb. 9, 1963, the same day the Boeing 727 made its first flight.

In the story, our hero, Paladin, is transporting a sort of frontier Bluebeard who is charged with murdering seven of his wives, including the daughter of one of Paladin’s friends.

No Place to Stop

After learning that a local Osage Indian chief has died, Paladin and his prisoner, Fairchild, stop at a small village with a big problem.

It turns out the Indians have a custom that dictates that a chief must be buried with a fresh scalp “to send him to glory.” And they've been known to grab some of the locals.

In response to this problem, the townspeople have taken to buying condemned prisoners from other areas and leaving them tied up on a hill for the Indians to scalp.

And now they want to buy Paladin’s prisoner.

Paladin refuses to go along with this arrangement and challenges the townspeople, pointing out that he could be lying about Fairchild just to get the $100 in blood money.

“You people are so anxious to save your own skins you didn’t even question that possibility,” he says.

He suggests the sheriff and his men hand over an old lady to the Indians, “and when you finish with her you could start on the lame and the blind and the sickly.”

“There’d be enough unfortunates in this community to keep you people safe for a long time,” he says. “When you start to evaluate human life to decide who can and who cannot survive then there's no place to stop.”

There was something so unsettling about this story that I thought of Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece. They are quite different and I’m certainly not saying that an old TV show is on a par with her work.

The people in Jackson’s story are bound by a tradition that no one dares question, while the settlers are acting out of fear. But both resort to unspeakable acts.

Things get out of control in TV show, but Fairchild does not lose his hair to the Osage tribe. Paladin tells the townspeople to encourage the Indians to use a totem scalp “and you’ll never hear from them again.”

Maybe not, but fear, ignorance and their disastrous consequences show no signs of going away.