The Orphan (14 page)

“I think she likes it that way,” Douglas said.

But there are factors Douglas knows nothing about. The next three nights I sneak into Mrs. Stumway’s woods, make my way to the old stone house sitting in its welter of maples and oaks and raspberries, and the one faint oil lamp burning in an upstairs window, and I wait until that lamp is turned down and blown out. Then I leap silently to the porch roof, old, sagging, but still sound, creep along the side of the house to the old lady’s window and listen through the screen until she breathes regularly. It is quite easy to tell when she is sound asleep. She snores like a rusty windmill. Then I insert one long claw, flip the hooks on the screen and slip into the bedroom, crouch down beside her bed on the nubby hooked rug that pictures curly flowers in a circular garden, and I whisper in her ear. She is between seventy and eighty years old, pure white hair, some of which has fallen away and left a bald spot on the crown of her head, no teeth at night, a high broad forehead with fine wrinkles, a long thin nose and a sharp chin that points at the ceiling as she sleeps among her big pillows and snores great long squeaky windmill snores. Her hands are large with long fingers that have not lost their look of grace in age, although they are covered with brown patches. The hands look as though they might still play a piano or some stringed instrument. She sleeps on her back, her hands lying on top of the patchwork quilt.

I whisper Charles’s name: “Charles Cahill, a good boy.” Over and over I whisper it, thinking how absurd this is, and yet something prompts me that the procedure is not without effect. I have resisted the impulse to explore her house at night, for if she should wake and hear me, she might suspect a prowler, and I do not want to frighten her. That, I believe, would be the wrong approach, although I had thought of frightening her so that she would need a protector. The whispering campaign I am conducting in Charles’s behalf is an interesting experiment, and it pleases Charles.

***

The two boys turned off the road into Mrs. Stumway’s driveway which was not really a driveway anymore since a cottonwood tree had fallen across it years ago and had not been removed. It was a twenty-foot-long turnaround where the grocery delivery man’s truck pulled in once a week to bring the old lady’s provisions. Charles carried a watermelon, one of the long light green ones, as a propitiatory gift. Douglas was full of doubt, but rather excited about what Charles was attempting. As they crashed through the underbrush toward the back porch, Douglas expected any second to be shouted at. He was jumpy and irritated at catching his brace in the raspberry creepers. When the voice did come, it startled him so that he fell to one knee.

“Get out of there, you damned kids!” came a strong voice from the dimness of the back porch which had curtained windows all around it.

“Mrs. Stumway,” Douglas called, getting back to his feet. “We brought you a melon.”

“You got no business botherin’ me, you damned kids,” the voice shouted again. “Now git, before I get my rock salt after you.”

As far as Douglas knew, the old lady had no rock salt, nor a shot gun to fire it in anyway, but she was full of threats.

“This is my friend, Charles Cahill, Mrs. Stumway,” Douglas shouted at Charles’s prompting. Charles held the green melon in front of him like a sacrificial baby held out to the wrath of Moloch.

There was silence from the porch, and Charles wondered if the nightly whispering sessions had made some difference in the old lady’s feeling about strangers.

The back door opened with a creak of the spring and the old lady appeared, wearing what looked like an aviator’s helmet minus the goggles, so that her white hair stuck out like little cold flames all around her face. She wore a long, featureless brown dress that fell straight from her neck to her ankles, giving her the look of a fake tree trunk with an old lady’s face peeping out of the top.

“Douglas Bent,” she said, as if naming the boy for the first time in the history of the world. “Come in here, and bring your melon friend there too.”

The boys walked into Mrs. Stumway’s kitchen, expecting to find an indoor counterpart of the wilderness outside, but the kitchen looked like any farm kitchen, perhaps cleaner than most, with a serviceable sink and pitcher pump, a kerosene cook stove and an enamel top table that looked surgically clean. The light was dim because every window was grown over with ivy, four o’clock vines, and ornamental bushes gone savage. In Charles’s mind it seemed almost like an undersea cavern with the greenish flickering light from the wobbling leaves and intermittent sun.

“You!” Mrs. Stumway said so suddenly that Charles jumped. “Put that melon on the cutting board. I suppose you kids want something, bringing me a melon. But I can’t imagine what it would be. You steal my fruit soon as it comes on the trees, worse than jays and magpies.”

Charles tried to think of some way to put the old lady in a better mood, but every time he opened his mouth to speak, she shot out something of her own that silenced him. Douglas was turning back and forth as the old lady went from cupboard to table, getting out plates and forks, trying to get some word in also. He was about to leap into a silent space in her monologue when she bent over the kitchen cabinet, but as he was about to say Charles’s name, Mrs. Stumway straightened up, pulling something long and gleaming from beneath the silver drawer. She whirled about swinging a giant blade that looked as long as her arm.

“Ha!” she said, swishing the blade back and forth.

“Charles!” Douglas screamed involuntarily, stumbling back and bumping into Charles who was also moving backward.

The old lady looked at the boys over the long blade and grinned so that her artificial teeth shone like a row of skulls. “Scared you?” she said. “This is from the Philippine Islands. My baby brother, Adam, brought it back with him from when he was there fighting the Moros. It’s called a bolo knife.” She waved it again, but a bit less militantly.

“And it’s very good for melons,” she said, walking to the cutting board. She raised the long knife in both hands and brought it down clean and hard, right through the middle of the melon so that it stuck in the cutting board. “Damned knife. Haven’t had a melon for a ugh, long time, ugh.” She could not pull the knife free.

Charles came forward and worked the long blade loose from the cutting board and handed it back to the old lady. She sliced circles of melon for all three, and they sat at the enamel table and ate them with old iron forks with black wooden handles and long tines like pitchforks. The old woman studied Charles quite openly as they ate, asking him about his home, parents, whether he went to school, and Charles did his best to charm her and play on what he imagined were her sympathies.

“I never did know any father or mother, ma’am,” Charles said, his face looking as if he were about to cry. “My uncle used to make me work in his store till nine o’clock every night, and then I had to sweep up and wash floors and windows on Saturday mornings, so I just ran away one time when I got sick of it.”

Douglas looked at Charles with amazement. He had never heard that version of the other boy’s life, and he didn’t know whether to believe any of his tales now or whether to be angry or delighted at Charles’s facility at lying. Mrs. Stumway nodded her head in the aviator’s cap and clucked disapprovingly at appropriate points in the story.

“So you ran off when the work got hard?” she said, astonishing Charles who had thought he was getting her approval.

“It was awful hard, ma’am,” Charles said, at a loss which way to proceed. “And sometimes he licked me with a strap.”

“Some boys need it,” she said, smiling her even false teeth at Charles who felt less certain of himself now.

“Charles would like to go to school and learn to read and write, Mrs. Stumway, but he’s got no place to live,” Douglas said with a desperate edge in his voice. “He’s been hiding out in our barn, but if my Dad finds out about him, he won’t be able to stay.”

“Maybe your father could use an extra hand with the hay, Douglas,” the old lady said, spitting a line of melon seeds into her plate.

“But Charles said that he didn’t ...”

“Didn’t want all that work, hah?” the old lady broke in. “Well, I’m not surprised.”

“Wait a minute,” Charles said. “I’m not afraid of work. I worked plenty where I come from. But I don’t want to get Douglas in trouble with his family. He’s been a good friend. I thought you might need someone around to kind of straighten up outside, get that brush out of the driveway and such.”

“Oh, you’re welcome to stay here and go to school, Charles Cahill,” Mrs. Stumway said, looking directly into his eyes. “I just didn’t want you to think a couple of sprouts like you could put something over on an old lady.” She put her hands on the table and looked at Charles, the corners of her long mouth turned up sharply. Her face, seamed and foxed with age as it was, reminded Charles of someone, abut he couldn’t say who. He smiled at her with what he imagined was his most winning and ingratiating smile. He had a place.

Charles found that although the old woman had an acid tongue and sometimes accused him of being lazy, she did not often lose her temper, and did not insist that he do much work around the place. On the following Tuesday when school began in the one-room brick school just across the road and down a bit, Charles felt quite at home with Mrs. Stumway and was looking forward to learning to read.

It was no surprise to Miss Jessie Wrigley on that first day of school to find Charles applying for entrance to the first gade. He was as big as any twelve-year-old and could not read his own name or even spell it properly, for that matter. She had signed up William Seaboldt last year for first grade, and he had been fourteen. He had attended no more than a month before he ran away, and she hoped that this poor orphan boy whom Mrs. Stumway had taken in would stick to his studies. Certainly he was promising looking, but then she read in the note from Mrs. Stumway that he had good looks and a winning manner, but was not a worker or very persevering. She looked at him, standing in front of her desk amid the other children in all eight grades who were signing up for their year’s school, and she wondered if his good appearance would not work against him. He had obviously got the little crippled Bent boy in his spell and was earnestly working on some of the other boys, telling them some outrageous story about his days riding the freights.

“Charles Cahill,” Miss Wrigley said, “will you move one of the larger desks over into the first grade row? We don’t want you breaking one of our little desks.” She smiled at him to help soften the disgrace of his being in first grade row, but he appeared not to have the slightest embarrassment at his position. An unusual boy, she thought, watching his easy. way with the other children. Different from most of these farm children who are so shy and wordless, she thought. I wonder if he is a fast learner?

For his part, Charles was as delighted with Miss Wrigley as he was with having a home and being accepted in the farm community. He had walked in with Douglas that Tuesday morning and joined the circle of children around the teacher’s desk expecting to confront some old crone of a spinster woman who would smack his hands with a ruler if he did not do as she said. Instead he found a young, mild looking woman with short brown hair and a direct manner that made the children feel at ease because they always knew how she felt. If someone did poorly on a lesson and Miss Wrigley was displeased, she would say to that child, “That bothers me, Mary, because it makes me feel that you don’t care about learning to be a civilized person.” And the child would usually feel that it was only right that Miss Wrigley feel that way. Charles admired this approach to the manipulation of others, which was how he felt about it, and learned to use it himself as best he could. He was also rather taken, even on that first day, with Miss Wrigley herself. She was short, not much taller than Charles, with a compact, efficient looking body that Charles liked to watch. Her school clothes were ordinary enough, even drab, some browns and dark greens with an occasional white blouse to set off, but she seemed to Charles to possess a quick grace that did not need ornamentation. And most of all he admired her learning. She seemed to Charles to know everything in the world, and he wanted passionately to know what she knew, to move with her assurance through the stories, the histories, the mathematical problems he watched her doing for the higher grades. And although he was not, as Mrs. Sturnway had surmised, a willing worker in the fields or around the house, he worked for Miss Wrigley in the name of learning.

I have, of course, noticed the increase in my own size. That is no surprise; and the other changes, the strange sort of itching I feel that must be the beginnings of sexual need, the impulses I have to pull strange pranks and tricks on humans when I am hunting at night, these might be expected in a growing creature and are reflected by Charles’s behavior in the human world in daylight. But there are other changes in my world less explicable. For one thing, some mysterious force has made it impossible for me to enter the old Stumway house without shifting back into Charles. This is baffling to me, as I cannot imagine anything that would prevent me entering any human habitation unless it might be armor plate and giant locks. In the second week of my living there I slipped out at night as usual, and upon my return, I was unable to cross the threshold of the back door. I tried a window downstairs, my own room window upstairs, and all was the same. Something I could not even imagine kept me from entering. As I would put my head through the window, I would feel faint, and my heart would begin to pound in my ears, a sensation I have never had before would twist my guts, and only my moving back from the house would relieve the feelings. And yet, once I had shifted to Charles, I walked in through the door with no harm or adverse feelings. The danger here is something to ponder, something to find out about, but as long as Charles is immune to this force, I feel relatively safe. It is only that, among the other changes developing in my life, this one is the more worrisome, the more nagging because it is inexplicable, and I do not know if the old woman is responsible or if it is some effect of which she is unaware.