The Orphan (26 page)

I concentrate and shift.

Charles sat up, took Claire’s head in his lap and shook her, patting her cheeks and watching her eyelids. “Claire, Claire, wake up. There’s people out there. I’ve got to go out and holler to them.” She hunched her body up with the cold. He shook her again and then rushed to the door where he had some difticulty getting the boxes away and the door open. The cold wind hit his face, and he realized as it made his eyes feel stiff that they would indeed have frozen to death. It must be twenty degrees below zero. He stepped out into the knee-deep snow, noticing the tracks were blurred as the Beast had said. The Beast? He pushed the strange idea out of his mind. His feet and hands already prickled with cold as he took a few steps out into the snow, hearing it snap and creak under his shoes. Down the road a pickup truck had stopped where the Auburn had gone over the embankment. Men were moving up and down the ditch and around the pickup. One of them suddenly noticed the tracks and pointed to Charles. He waved wildly and motioned them to come to the shed. Behind him he heard Claire stirring, and then she appeared in the doorway of the shed, hugging herself with cold.

“Oh, Charles, my head,” she said thickly. “What did you do with your fur coat?”

In the middle of January, Charles received a small cardboard package with a letter enclosed:

My Dearest Young Hero,

I’m sure I saw you carrying this stone amulet on the night I was so very foolish and endangered both our lives. The repairmen who worked on my poor car found it and kindly returned it. If it is not yours, then we have perhaps discovered an ancient archeological site of pre-Colombian relics, and I should make a career of running my car into ditches in hopes of finding more. A friend of mine here in Chicago says it is certainly a rare piece, and he offered me an interesting sum of money for it, so if you would like to sell it sometime in exchange for a year of college, let me know.

You will be gratified, dearest Charles, to know that I have thought carefully over our last words together at the train station, and I have turned over a new leaf. I have not once visited the Caledonian Isle since leaving your side, and it is my intention to become a complete Blue Nose. Thanks to you, Charles, I have not only had my life saved, I have had it renovated. I do remember you with much affection, and please remember that my invitation to visit or stay with me in Chicago or wherever I might find myself living is heartfelt and genuine. Keep well and stay as high minded and courageous as I remember you.

Love,
Claire Lanphier

Charles felt that last admonition keenly, for he had been increasingly aware of the burgeoning of some power within him that obsessed his waking moments and took over his dreams with an endless movie of rape and seduction. In school he was for the first time having trouble concentrating on studies, his mind seeming no more than a skittering steam bubble on a burning hot surface. In attempting to memorize the exports of Great Britain’s colonies, he would find his eyes fixed on the pleasing lines of Betty Bailey’s calf, or the fascinating mystery of Flossie Portola’s bosom, or even the swing of Miss Wrigley’s skirt as she walked briskly up the aisle between the desks. His face would burn hotly, and he would curse what he felt was the Beast power inside him that turned his mind and his dreams into a bawdy house of lust. But it was still January, colder that year than many old residents could remember, and there was at least the distraction of cold outdoor sports and long tramps through the snow rabbit hunting with the Bent boys.

After he received the amulet from Mrs. Lanphier, he seemed miraculously cured. There were still times of daydreaming in the overheated schoolroom as he would catch sight of Brenda Gustafson’s secret smile when she looked at him, or as he touched Betty Bailey’s hand when taking a paper from her and saw her flirtatious look at him, but possession of the stone interposed a barrier between Charles and the unbearable fires of lust he had begun to suffer. In dreams he still found himself doing the most hideously wonderful things, having sexual adventures that would have worn out a Casanova, but these were dreams. Reality had now, at least, taken on a sane appearance again, and he could once again concentrate on school work so that Miss Wrigley smiled more often now and encouraged him again after what she called his “slump” at the beginning of the semester. There was no longer the urge to get up and go out in the middle of the night so that power inside him could romp in the snow and kill things in people’s barns. Charles did not often think of what he might remember from those nights right after Christmas. It was another sort of dream, and if some of the boys at school mentioned wolves coming down from the north and terrible depredations on local livestock, Charles resolutely shut away any sort of memories he might have of those nocturnal massacres, resisting the impulse to say, “That’s a lie, Harry. It wasn’t four sheep. It was only two.”

In February came the big snow. At the end of the first week in February, with a foot of snow lying old and hard on the ground, it began to come down heavily one afternoon. Charles and the other children sat in the schoolroom gazing as if hypnotized out the tall windows at the thickness of the snowfall. They could not see the cottonwood trees in the middle of the school yard, and then the fox-and-geese track nearer to the building could not be seen, and then it was as if the whole world had sunk beneath a whirling sea of snow, and there was nothing beyond the windows but the crash and tumult of flakes. Charles imagined he could feel the building foundering in the ocean of snow as his balance became disoriented by the sight of all the windows of the schoolroom filled with the same endless looming and whirling whiteness. Gradually the classes stopped. The students stood at their desks or walked as if in sleep to the blank white windows. Miss Wrigley laid down her big history book and stood, one hand on her hip, the other touching her cheek, looking at the windows where nothing could be seen but snow.

They went home early that day, farmers and their wives meeting some of the children on the road to help them home in the blinding storm. No vehicles moved on the highway, so that it became merely a flatter stretch in the arctic whiteness, a guide to the filled in lanes and driveways that led to the invisible houses looming suddenly out of the white darkness as people fought with heads down through snow that was at first pleasantly exciting, then a tiresome nuisance, and finally became a menacing and impersonal danger that even the children began to feel uneasy about. Once inside again, the farm families would stand by the windows as the afternoon darkened and look blindly out into the storm as the children at school had, mesmerized by the sudden emergence of nature’s possibilities for destruction and bland horror.

No one in the local community died that night, though many gained a new respect for what was called in Charles’s geography book “the temperate zone.” In nearby places where the great storm covered the earth and filled the atmosphere for more than eight hours, there were deaths among all warm blooded creatures who found themselves lost in it. Cows and sheep died standing helplessly mired in snow deeper than they could walk in, people in cars and buses would start out for help and get lost in the white darkness, go in circles, and finally stop to rest, to be found days later mere humps in the level sea of snow. Two sisters in Wisconsin started home from an afternoon party, became separated in the early darkness and both died less than two hundred feet from their own back door, coming toward their house from different directions. A middle-aged man left his wife in their car with the engine running and the heater on while he went for help. He floundered off into a deep, snow filled ditch, wore himself out, stopped to rest and froze to death. His wife died before he did, of carbon monoxide poisoning while the car engine idled on until it ran out of gas, and then it got very cold so that they could not tell, three days later when the car was found, if she had frozen or died of gas poisoning. Out of a bus load of children who were returning from a skating trip to a local lake, the driver and four children died trying to reach help alter the bus missed the road at a turn and ran off into snow so deep it came up over the bus windows. The rest of the children remained with an eighteen-year-old counselor who built fires out of the bus seats and saved everyone by huddling them like chickens that night for warmth until they were found next afternoon by a contingent of skiers. And worse than the snow itself was the insidious cold that came shortly after, dropping temperatures as much as thirty-five degrees in three hours. Trains moved more slowly, following the rail plows, cities began to run short on supplies of milk and eggs, the road plows began to break down after thirty-six hours of steady use, and three days after the big storm, another arctic mass of air moved in from the Northwest, dumping another foot of snow on top of the already devastated Midwest.

After the first big snow on Friday, there was a day’s shoveling to do, a few wandering stock to be found, brought home and fed, supplies of food to be checked over, and wood and coal to be piled for the coming weeks. And by Sunday afternoon it was play time for the farm boys who found the snow too deep to hunt in and too heavy on the lanes for sleds, so they resorted to digging caves in drifts that were in some places fifteen feet high. Charles, Douglas, and his brothers built a labyrinth of tunnels in the long drift that ran like a delta from the corner of the highway bridge near the Bent farm across the creek bed and far along the drainage ditch. In a solidified wave of blinding white the drift covered over the wing of the bridge, filled completely the twelve-foot-deep creek bed and lifted to a graceful curl beyond the corner of a long low implement shed. Charles had been the first to see the possibilities and had begun a small tunnel along the hard blue ice of the creek where the edge of the drift stopped at the bridge. Soon they had tunnels going in half a dozen locations, a large room big enough for Douglas to stand up in and were installing elaborations like shelves and ventilation shafts.

Charles sat, panting, his hands numb from digging, his white breath clouding the whiteness of the tunnel. The light filtered in at the top of the big room, a frosted whiteness like a heavy cover of cirrus clouds on a bright day, and further down the sides the whiteness shaded to blue gray, and back in the tunnels it was a darker gray, but near any source of light the tunnel walls and ceiling were a sheer sugar white, whiter than salt, whiter than clouds, Charles thought, with a dark line near the floor that showed the stratum of the old snow.

A scream from outside frightened him, a scream of rage. It sounded like Rudy. Then there was a whoomp sound like a huge fist plunging into a giant pillow. Some snow sifted down his neck. He looked up at the lightest part, the ceiling of the big room, as the whoomp came again. More snow fell, and he crawled out along the tunnel that ended at the creek bed. It was brighter outside the tunnel, so that he blinked while listening to the cries and curses from the Bent boys. They were up on the highway bridge. He looked up in time to see a bundled form come sailing off the bridge rail and smack down into the snow caves, causing the tunnel Charles had just come out of to cave in with a cloud of bursting snow. Charles cried out. They were jumping down off the bridge wrecking everything. He climbed into the drift trying to get at the boy who was trying just as hard to get out and away. It was Paul Holton, covered with snow and laughing.

“Hey, sucker, you’re busting up our tunnels,” Charles cried, trying to get at the floundering boy.

Another form came leaping off the rail to smack into the area of the big room, and it went down like the crystal palace with a cloud of snow shooting out of the tunnels. Charles was crying out with anger now, and he almost had Paul.

“Now cut it out, Paul,” Charles said, grabbing at the boy and getting his cap. But Paul got away up onto the highway, and Charles turned to see Kick Jones emerging from the drift. “Hey, we been working a long time,” Charles began, but then he saw another figure on the bridge rail, the tall figure of Carl Bent, dark against the sky. With a whoop he leaped and landed spread eagled on the area Charles had just left. It collapsed.

Charles was silent, climbing up to the highway where Douglas was standing watching the other boys leap off the bridge rail to demolish the tunnels and rooms they had spent the whole morning building. Charles felt angry, but he was thinking about jumping too when he saw Doug had tears in his eyes and stood awkwardly watching as Rudy climbed up on the rail. When Douglas shouted out from beside him, he flinched in surprise.

“Fat ass Rudy! Fat ass Rudy!” Douglas said, his tears overflowing.

Rudy turned from his height on the bridge and snarled at his brother, “Shut your mouth, you cripple.” And he turned to leap off the rail.

Douglas took three quick steps, his still leg slicing two wide arcs on his right side, and as Rudy left the rail, Douglas grabbed one pants leg tripping him up. Rudy squealed and fell face down into the drift. Douglas leaned over the rail watching as Rudy crawled backward out of the hole he had dived into. The older boy’s face was packed with snow in eyes, nose, mouth so that he looked as it he was wearing a plaster cast on his head.

Rudy cleaned his face as he climbed back to the bridge, murder in his eyes. Charles moved next to Douglas, hoping the brothers Wouldn’t fight if it meant involving him.

But Rudy never stopped to talk or consider. He climbed up the drifted bank, got to the road and came straight for Douglas. Charles instinctively stepped aside, but then grabbed at Rudy’s coat as he began pounding on his brother with both fists, snorting and panting curses. Douglas tried to fend off the blows, covering his head with his arms, and before Charles could figure what to do, Rudy had swung a fist under Doug’s arm hitting him squarely in the nose. Douglas screamed and turned away.

Charles pulled Rudy away, pushed him hard a couple of times until Rudy got the idea he would have to fight Charles if he kept on.

“It ain’t your fight, big hero,” said Rudy panting. “He ain’t your brother.”