The Night of the Hunter (23 page)

Gracious! If you hain't a sight to beat all! Where you from?

John could not find his tongue.

Where's your folks? Speak up now.

He stared at the big, man's shoes on her feet, crusted and heavy with garden mud.

Gracious! So I've got two more mouths to feed! All right. Git them clothes off now and throw 'em yonder in the grass. Ruby'll wash 'em.

Neither child moved.

Mind me now! Mind!

John slowly began unbuttoning his little shirt and the old woman stooped and began tugging at Pearl's knotted shoelaces. The oldest girl, Ruby, moved from the kitchen doorway, grinning with a flash of white teeth. She bore a washtub to the grass beside the pump and began filling it with gushing cold water. The strange children stood staring as John and Pearl took their clothes off. John listened to the sharp, nasal chant of the pump handle and stared at the washtub. He shivered at the prospect. And yet his heart was curiously warm within him with the unreasonable illusion that he had come home.

“Oh, the gold! The precious, precious gold! The green miser'll horde ye soon! Hish! Hish! God goes 'mong the worlds blackberrying!”

—
MELVILLE
,
Moby-Dick

She was old and yet she was ageless—in the manner of such staunch country widows. Gaunt, plain-spoken, and hard of arm, she could stand up to three of the toughest, shrewdest cattle dealers in Pleasants County and get every penny she thought her hog was worth. Or if pork was off that year she would butcher and can her own sausage and smoke her own hams and have enough left over to present the preacher's family with a nice meal of spareribs. In the summer she sent the children into the woodlands and brush filth with buckets for berries, and it was her old, wise hands that taught their young fingers how to pick them and schooled their eyes in the ways of berry-finding. She had a cow and she churned her own butter and sold it at New Economy wrapped in cool, damp swaths of immaculate muslin. She had chickens and their eggs went to market, too, in a bright yellow basket spread across with a napkin. From the fat of her butchered hog she made soap, standing in a drenching March rain beside her brawling iron kettle in the back yard till the task was done. Fifteen miles downriver at Parkersburg a waitress had short-changed her and that was a quarter of a century before and she had never gone to that town again.

Widowed a full forty years before, she had raised a son and seen him off into the world but she had soon grown lonely in the haunted stillness of the old home and so there had never been a time in the quarter of a century since that her house had not sheltered a child. And children were easy to come by in the river lands. Many a dark-haired farm girl lost her wits to an August moon and the mouth of a cunning lover and found herself, after he had gone away to work in Pittsburgh or Detroit, with the fruit of their ecstasy squalling and unwelcome in her poor mother's kitchen. Once the child was weaned and toddling it was to Rachel Cooper's door that he was carried, like as not, and there was never the bad word uttered for what he was: poor little wood's colt. On Sundays his mother might come for a visit and a walk with him in the fields and at sundown he would be returned to Rachel's bed and board, unprotesting. She fed her children till they were rosy and full, scrubbed them till they were red and squalling, spanked them when there was cause, and taught them the Lord's tales on Sabbath mornings. That very summer she had packed her ugly cardboard suitcase and gone to Chillicothe to visit her own boy Ralph, who was forty-three now and doing well in real estate and married with a nice wife and four grown girls of his own. But the years had improved Ralph. Prosperity had given him a taste for Oriental rugs and expensive modernistic furniture and a big new Victrola and, truth to tell, he and his wife Clarice had been embarrassed by the old woman's visit. She was really no one you would want to show off: that tough, ruddy old woman with the country smell still strong in her shawl and her hands all broken and red from laundry lye. She had stayed with them three days and fretted and growled at them for having so many forks at each place at supper and she chased the little Negro maid away from her bedroom each morning and made her bed herself. And when Ralph's boss and his wife came to dinner unexpectedly that night she had sat afterward on a straight chair in the farthest corner and laughed at the wrong times and picked nervously at her fingers and acted such a perfect fool that she could have killed herself with self-reproach. She took the noon bus for home next day and had ridden out of the strange town furiously angry at something or someone in the world that had made her feel so coarse and out-of-date. Clarice had not liked the stone pitcher of maple sirup she had brought in her basket of gifts for them; nor the Mason jar of cucumber pickles, nor the green-tomato relish. Rachel felt certain that they had thrown these things away after she got on the Greyhound bus and rode away, waving her little handkerchief at them (the fancy one that she never used and always kept in her bureau drawer under the little cloth bag of dried rose petals)—mincing and smiling at them from the bus window; trying to act like a lady Ralph would be proud of calling his mother and then grumbling and quarreling with herself all the way home because she had even cared, because she had even tried to put on a show. And then when the big bus hissed to a stop at the crossroads she got out and thanked the driver and stood alone in the river wind, in that country silence, and smelled her house down the road, smelled her little orchard and smelled her good black land, and that was when she felt the grand, old surge of comeback in her heart. Ralph was gone from her house—gone from her thoughts—and that was the way Life meant it to be, and then she heard the three little girls come screaming and shouting toward her across the field and she thought: Why, shoot! It don't matter. I got a new harvest coming on. A new crop. I'm good for something in this old world and I know it, too.

They had a wild happy supper together that night. She sent home the neighbor woman who had stayed with the children in her absence and then she got busy fixing the things she knew they all liked. She even opened a jar of watermelon preserves, and the children knew that this was indeed special: this treat never appeared except at Thanksgiving or Christmastide. She had brought them each small presents from the Chillicothe five-and-ten and after supper everyone opened her gift and screamed and squealed with joy and kissed the old woman until her lips began to purse and pout with impatience and she shoved them gruffly away and shook her shoulders angrily lest they discover in her face all the love that was there.

There were three, the children: Mary, the youngest, child of a half-breed Cherokee harvest hand from Paden City and a waitress in the Empire Eats at New Economy. Mary was four, with raven-black hair as straight as a mare's tail and eyes like dark little pools of stump water. Clara, eleven and thin as a rail, with the smile of one who had not been smiling long—a thin, aimless child with freckles like bits of butter floating in the churn, with crooked teeth and foolish rag-doll eyes. Ruby, thirteen and big and shapeless and stooped from being with the other smaller ones so much and trying always to be down there sharing their world with them, not missing a trick. Ruby was Rachel's problem girl. She broke the Mason jars when Rachel set her to scalding them at canning time; she broke the warm, brown eggs when her big, wooden fingers gathered them from their cool, secret hiding places about the yard; she tripped on milk pails full and sent them splashing. And yet when her hands touched a little child she was transformed and her eyes shone until, like lamps, they illumined the pale, ugly flesh of her face. And so when old Rachel would go to prayer meetings on Wednesday she left the girl with the other two—little Mary and Clary. And when she returned she would find those two on the floor at the red, naked feet of the strange girl: reciting little bits of Psalms Rachel had taught them all by winter lamplight or playing cat's cradle with a length of butcher's twine.

And this was the house of Rachel Cooper—a strong tree with branches for many birds. And so the coming of two more did not make much of a difference. They were children and they were hungry and they needed love and a bath and a spanking and sometimes Rachel would think when she looked at them, any of them: 'Deed to God, sometimes I feel like I'm playin' a big joke on the Lord. Why, when He comes looking for old folks He won't even see me—He'll see them kids and maybe He'll just pass on by and say: Why, shoot! That there's a
mother!
I can't take her!

At night when they were in bed she would come down and stand in the kitchen for a spell and think: It's my last harvest. My gathering of summer's best and last sowing.

To John she was a perfect and agonizing enigma: an unfathomable mixture of female authority and tenderest motherliness. He loathed her those first few days and spoke not one single word of answer, or request, or denial to her in all that time. Sullenly, stubbornly, tragically the boy submitted to her disquieting scrub brush, her fierce, unflagging ministrations to his long-untended hair, her spankings when it came his turn to receive them. When she gathered the children about her once a week, on the grave, sweet Sunday dusks with the harvest moon hung full-blown as a chilled, fresh melon on the hills above the river; arrayed them on little square carpet stools about her in a semicircle and read them a story from the Scripture, John remembered only the voice of Salvation that he had left screaming and frothing among the cattails on the river shore upon that dreadful night of their exodus.

John, you hain't heard a word I said.

He did not lower his eyes from the lamp, did not move his hands from his knees. He might have been carved from pine, for all his movement. And then she knew it would be wise to let him be and not try to speak to him too much or to make him answer, knowing in her wisdom that the dark, frightened bird that crouched shivering and hurt in the deep forest of his mind would one day poke its bright eye through the leaves and presently (if she paid no special notice) it might hop out onto a limb and then they would all hear it singing brightly and boldly some afternoon and only then would they turn and pretend to be surprised and welcome it to their picnic cloth.

Pearl, in that autumn, was so hungry for love that she would have turned and taken suck from an old ewe. And soon she had edged little Mary over just a mite to share in the old woman's most favorite and tender partiality. Pearl adored Rachel and it was a devotion scarcely less than that she felt toward the girl Ruby. Ruby took complete charge the night the strange new children first slept under Rachel's roof. John rebelled when she attempted to undress him for bed and Rachel intervened, but it was Ruby who held Pearl in her arms until she was asleep and could be laid trusting and smiling, thumb tucked between her pouting, sweet lips, beneath the cool, fresh sheets of the old spool bed in Rachel's attic room. John lay awake beside his sister that night in a perfect agony of misgivings. He had not felt such rejection of his fortunes even in the darkest days when Preacher had put in his first appearance at Cresap's Landing. It was not that he believed old Rachel might be in league with the blue men who had dragged off his father or even with the insane evangelist. This was curiously worse: it was as if in some unutterable and beguiling way Rachel schemed against the very identity of him. John had grown so accustomed to the climate of flight and danger and to the clear definition of Life's mortal enemies that somehow Rachel's goodness seemed more darkly perilous than any of the others. And yet in the time to come, as the days stretched into weeks and the weeks wound like country lanes among the shaking, burning leaves of Indian summer and the end of harvest was upon the land, it seemed to John that what he had felt that morning on the sandbar when old Rachel had come upon them there, that sense of coming home, might be true. He found that his chafed spirit rankled less and less beneath the stern, wholesome regimen of Rachel's household.

One night they were all at the black stove making seafoam candy: old Rachel and the girls prattling and carrying on over the buttered tins where the candy pieces were to be spread to cool. He sat apart from them, alone on the back stoop in the crisp air, under the moon in the black walnut tree beyond the washhouse. He had almost thought for a moment that he would like to go indoors and stand close to them, not to say anything because he could not speak yet, but just to stand, to be one of them, perhaps to touch the old woman with his hand, to let her know that the broken bird in the dark tree stirred its wings and tried them and already thought of the morning when it would venture upon those outer limbs and try its voice upon the stillness.

On the night when Rachel read to them from the Bible about Moses he had been moved even more.

Now, old Pharoah—he was the King of Egyptland! she cried, spreading her hard old hands across the tissue-thin pages of the Scripture. And he had a daughter and once upon a time she was walkin' along the river and she seen something bumpin' and scrapin' along down on a bar under the willows, back in the cattails where the devil's darnin' needles was flashin' in the mornin' sun. And do you know what it was, children?

No! gasped Ruby and Clary and Little Mary and, hearing them, Pearl cried out, too.

Well now, it was a skiff washed up on the bar, whispered the old woman, her black eyes twinkling in the light of the kitchen lamp. And who do you reckon was in it?

Pearl and John! cried poor, big Ruby.

Not this time! cried Rachel. It was just one youngin—a little boy babe. And do you know who he was, children?

No! cried Ruby and Clary and Little Mary and Pearl in a single voice.

It was Moses!—a king of men, Moses, children, that was to grow up to lead his people out of the wilderness—to save them all from death and pestilence and plague.

John heard it and came to them that night, drawn irresistibly by this tale that was so completely his own, and sat boldly in the circle, beside Ruby's carpet stool, and listened some more, and the old woman wisely paid him no mind.

The river brought the time of gold into the valley. Up in the woods the hickory nuts rained their dry patter throughout the still afternoons and there was smoke in the air and the ghosts of Cornstalk and his young martyred Princes stalked the land again and the hunters' guns boomed and racketed in the hollows and soon the frost would come to blacken the yellow pawpaws. John had come home. The bird was freed and had flown into the sun to return each dusk to its nest. All the love of that house had been too much for him: it was in the butter, in the smell of the clean clothes that Rachel patched and sewed each night where they had torn them, in the odor of fresh bread on fall afternoons and in the nasal, hearty crackle of her impatient voice when she hailed them in for supper. And yet despite this capitulation John kept his eyes on the river road, and guarded the doll in his sister's arms with unremitting vigilance; harking ever for the clop of that strange horse on the windy, midnight highway, for the creak upon the threshold, the whisper of the hunter's steel. Not through any logic, but through a grim and pragmatic cynicism of instinct, John knew within his heart, within his flesh, that the idyll would be broken in the end: that upon one day before the snow fell again he would hear that sweet and fateful voice drifting clear and dreadful through the affrighted autumn dusk.