The Orphan (27 page)

“Leave him alone,” Charles said.

“You ain’t nobody,” Rudy said, his face red. “You’re only an orphan, and you ain’t really nobody.” He stepped back and a cool smile came on his face. “You ain’t really smart. You’re just gettin’ in Miss Wrigley’s pants.”

Charles did not for a moment know what he meant, having some vague image of a pair of pants hanging on a hook while he went through the pockets, but in the next instant he heard Kick Jones and Carl Bent laughing as they leaned against the bridge rail, and his face flamed red.

“Everybody knows he’s teacher’s pet,” Kick said.

“He stays after school and gets some free feelies,” Carl said, grinning.

Charles stood astounded as their meaning broke over him. At first he could not believe what they meant, and then he could not believe that they had so quickly turned against him. Like most people, Charles had the inborn notion that everyone loved him, at least those who had nothing against him. Now he was finding out that all of these boys harbored a secret grudge because he had advanced in school so quickly. It was too much to take in all at once, and he stood there with his mouth open stupidly while they taunted and laughed. Behind him, Douglas snuffled while his nose dripped bright red drops into the snow.

“He’s a big lover all right,” Paul Holton said, sauntering back from the spot he had run to when Charles was alter him. “Flossie says he’s hot stuff. She says he tried to do it to her.”

“That’s a lie,” Charles said, feeling guilty for his daydreams. “And if you’re stupid, it’s not Miss Wrigley’s fault.” He felt confused facing the four boys who leaned in a row against the bridge rail and grinned at him. There seemed nothing to say to them that would make an impression. They stood relaxed, a jury that had made up its mind. Charles felt convicted. There was nothing he could do, short of attacking all four of them and getting the tar beaten out of him.

“Charles is going to be a great man,” Douglas said suddenly, sounding as if he had a bad cold because his nose was still full of blood. “He’s smarter than all of you stupid farmers put together.”

The four boys along the rail laughed and pointed at Charles and Doug. Charles knew it was hopeless and turned to pull Doug away, but the younger boy was enraged. His face was smeared with blood as if he had been painted with a brush, and a large red drop welled from each nostril. He looked like a war casualty, Charles thought.

“You’re just jealous about him because he’s going to pass you all up this year, and it took you all this time to get in the grade you’re in, and Paul can’t even do his multiplication tables past six, and Carl can’t read big words, and ...”

Charles had him by the neck of the coat, dragging him away. He would get them both bloodied, and he might feel like getting beat up, but Charles knew how it felt and was not eager to feel it again.

“That don’t matter,” Rudy said, grinning. “You’ll always be a cripple.” And when Douglas wrenched away from Charles, Rudy added, “And I seen you jerkin’ off last night in the outhouse.”

Then Douglas went insane with rage, tearing part of his coat collar off as he pulled away from Charles’s grasp and tried to get at his brother. Rudy easily stepped in and hit Douglas twice more, once in the face, once on the top of the head, until Carl told him to stop.

Douglas was staggering, his eyes glazed. “Tattle tale, tattle tale, hanging on the bull’s tail; when the bull takes a pee, you’ll have a cup of tea,” he screamed in a high baby voice, chanting it over and over until Charles took him by the arm and began walking him to the house. The boys at the bridge rail were still laughing and making obscene signs when Charles got Douglas to the Bent house and put him in the care of his mother. Inside the warm house he heard the screaming of the youngest Bent, another boy, born early in December, and he listened to it with sudden clarity. It was a child, and it would grow up to be a boy, then a young man, go to school, get a job, get married, have children, maybe become famous. He could do that, the baby. And as Charles mumbled something to the angry Mrs. Bent and backed out of the house to start the walk home, he kept thinking about the baby’s cry, how it was born, how it would live. He walked back up the lane ignoring the boys still standing on the bridge. It wasn’t really important, what they said. But what mattered could not be changed. He might beat them up one at a time, maybe even Rudy and Paul at the same time, but it wouldn’t make him be any different. He felt the cold, buzzing stone in his pocket, the leather thong he had put through the hole and pinned into his jacket so he would not lose it. If he did not have this, what would happen?

Was he, Charles Cahill, the only creature of his kind in the world? Or was it like Doug when he jerked off in the darkness thinking his was the only guilt in the world? Was everybody like him? But they didn’t ever show it. Maybe the whole world is like me, Charles thought with a sudden burst of illumination. But the next moment he knew it wasn’t true. The notorious gangsters in Chicago like Machine Gun Jack McGurn who had just got killed battling police, they were murderers, but most people weren’t. Animals were animals, people were people. But what was he? As he approached the dark stand of woods and the hidden house of the widow Stumway, Charles felt again the uncertainty, the empty feeling of fear in his guts that he always felt thinking back about what had happened at Thanksgiving. For a time then, he had simply not existed. He had no memory, no feeling of being when the Beast had shifted into someone else by mistake. He recalled the thing that stood in the dim bathroom of the Boldhuis house, looking at its giant bulk of power and terror, and feeling that it was part of him. But then he knew that wasn’t right, because of the strange shift that the Beast remembered but he did not. And he knew he had it all turned around. It was not part of him, even if it did save him from death and try to keep him from getting hurt. It was only trying to survive. He was part of it, and he would exist only as long as that power needed him for its own ends, whatever they were. Unless he could always have the stone, what Mrs. Lanphier called his “amulet.” If he always had that with him or in the house he was in, couldn’t he be like other people?

He stood on the widow Stumway’s back walk that he had shoveled off yesterday and watched blankly as snow started to drift down again. Looking into the dark trees back of the house as the snow began to fall harder, he could see the image of that powerful creature he remembered from the mirror. It was fearful, horrible, teeth like knives, small mean ears set close to the back of the long muzzled head, the heavy rounded shoulders that could lift a ton of automobile. He thought of Beauty and the Beast, the light-hating figure of Grendel, the wicked ones, the unhappy ones. Was he waiting for a hero to come along and rub him out?

***

Charles grew wary of his conduct, always giving some excuse when Miss Wrigley wanted him to stay after school to do extra work or to talk further about the lessons, talks that Charles had loved before and missed so that he gritted his teeth thinking about them. He hated the thought of giving in to the suspicions and gibes of the other boys, but what if all the kids thought things like that? His manner grew noticeably cool toward the girls, noticeably more reserved and deferential toward the older boys. Miss Wrigley recognized the signs and thought he was having growing pains, seeking entrance into the secrets of manhood. She felt a warmth at her own understanding.

By the end of March, it seemed winter had been forever. Snow had become a way of life, as it is to Eskimos, and then almost overnight in the first week of April, it was gone. Rain began in the night, rain and a warm southwest wind that carried with it odors of growing things and warm wet earth that the farmers and their families had not smelled for an eon of cold. Charles woke in the night to hear the rain like low voices on the roof. He slipped out of bed, surprised at how warm it suddenly was, so warm he could not see his breath. He lifted the window and opened the little wooden vent on the storm window. The breeze that came through that little slot melted something, like the icy crystals that had prevented the little boy from seeing truly in the Snow Queen story. Something around Charles’s heart fell loose, and he prickled all over with a new excitement. Spring!

The warm weather might not last, and there might be more snow, they said, but the odors in the air, the birds returning, the cows going crazy, running with their tails in the air, the dogs dancing in the school yard, the horses rolling in the fields, all said spring was near, spring was coming, coming at last, and like a frozen river thawing, Charles felt the cold bands of winter snap and his heart leap forth. He wanted to be strong, to show off for the girls, to do dangerous and idiotic feats so they might watch and see he was bravest, strongest, most handsome of all. But of course, the other boys felt the same way, so his own behavior appeared perfectly natural to Miss Wrigley who stood at the tall windows during lunch hour watching the boys swarming up those dangerous old cottonwood trees to see who was brave enough to get into the dead fork at the top, who was enough of a fool to leap from the third branch and grab the lower branch, swing out and drop. And the girls would stand along the edge of the building or sit in the new grass around the south side of the old tool shed and pretend not to look, giggling in the way girls do when they are being performed for by boys in the spring.

Two more months, she was thinking as she watched the primitive rites going on in the school yard. Two more months of living with those dreary people in their dreary round of labor and silence, of trying so hard to make a mark on these children, to give them something more to think about in their lives than bringing crops in and whether a cow was going to freshen or not. Miss Wrigley was still young enough to be idealistic, hardly into her mid twenties yet, but her two years in this country school had taught her that in the pursuit of ideals one might very well lose one’s own life. She had determined to return to the university, to get past this isolation, the wearing away of her soul against the many uncaring faces that had to be taught the same things again and again. But at that thought she felt ashamed. There were rewards, children like Sally and Douglas, and of course Charles.

What a puzzling person Charles was, she thought, watching him now in his distinctive red shirt. He waved at the other children from the top of the cottonwood, standing on one foot in that dead fork that might break. Well, she thought, they must do that. But he has grown up in less than one school year, grown almost into a man from a boy not much bigger than Douglas to a man as tall as Waldo. And how old was he, really? A mystery, but surely destined to be a great success in the world. If he didn’t kill himself, she thought, watching him swing down like Tarzan from the cottonwood. Now he was running alter Kick Jones who waved a jacket around his head. They had so much energy, these boys, like young horses. She stiffened as she saw Charles tackle Kick Jones and a fight begin in earnest. They were hitting each other in the face now. She raised the window and screamed, but it did no good. As she was about to turn away and run into the yard to stop them, she saw the Jones boy suddenly break away, still holding the other boy’s jacket. Now Carl Bent had tackled Charles and was holding him down. Miss Wrigley ran for the door as the screams from outside began to take on a serious tone. She arrived to find Carl Bent on the ground doubled up like a snake that has been stepped on, Charles running to the far corner of the yard where Kick Jones was in the act of throwing something into the flooded creek.

“Charles’s gone crazy,” Mary Mae Martin said, her eyes wide with fear. “He hit Carl so hard, and he said he’d kill Kick for taking his jacket.”

The other girls were moving toward the schoolhouse, the noon hour being about over and the boys having got too rough again. Miss Wrigley stopped a moment to see if Carl was all right, but he only groaned and would not speak except to motion her away. She turned to scream at Charles who seemed indeed to have gone crazy, for he had leaped the barbed wire fence and was sliding down the creek bank in the mud and high water of the spring rains. She ran to the corner of the yard as Kick Jones came limping past with blood running out of his mouth. She looked at him with concern, but he only shook his head.

“Charles!” Miss Wrigley screamed at the tall boy who was waist deep in the flooded creek. “What is it? Charles?" But he would pay no attention, only groped around harder to find what the Jones boy had thrown. He would not answer any of her questions and ignored her command to come in, that the noon hour was over. She finally turned away, more hurt than angry that he would ignore her so for anything, a jackknife or some piece of foolish wealth, even a love token from a girl. She felt a childish sense of rejection and became angry at herself for that. She marched back into the schoolhouse, ignored all questions about Charles, sent Kick and Carl home to be repaired, and began the afternoon lessons with a firm and unfaltering voice.

At a quarter to four, Miss Wrigley decided it was enough and dismissed the children. Charles had never returned, and she assumed he had gone home, since he was probably a mess from being in the creek. She walked down the back stairs to the basement landing to make sure the back door was locked and glanced out past the school yard at the brimming creek. As she turned away, she caught a movement, a head appeared in the coils of muddy water. Good Heavens, Charles! She wrenched at the back door, tried to find her keys to unlock it, fumbled with the right key that would not go into the lock, finally got the door open and dropped the whole ring of keys as she rushed out across the yard screaming.

“Charles! Charles, get out or there. You’ll die. Oh, Charles.” She had a time getting through the old sagging barbed wire, catching her skirt in several places. And the muddy field was over her shoe tops. Charles’s head appeared again downstream from where he had been before. He stood up in the chest deep water, leaning against the swift muddy current and looked at Miss Wrigley as if he had just heard his death sentence. She was frightened by the lost look on his face as much as by the fact that he might have been in that freezing water for more than three hours, unless he had gone home and come back. She stopped, ankle deep in the mud of the bank and held her hand out.