The Orphan (5 page)

Later, in a sharp triangle of shadow I trap two rats behind the manure pile, and bite their heads off, although I do not like to eat rats. It is an irritable, moping sort of night, full of strange sounds along the creek bank that I cannot understand, muskrats I do not care to chase, weasels I cannot find, a stupid pheasant hen that eludes me. In the wet dew of dawn I slink back to the house. Robert sleeps until they wake him for church.

Anne and Robert were allowed to stand up in the pew so they could see when everybody stood up to sing. Anne knew one of the songs, but of course Robert knew none of the words, so he just made “ah-ing” sounds while everybody else sang. Walter, Vaire’s husband, thought that was fine and smiled down at him. Walter was a red-faced young man with wavy blond hair and a hearty manner with boys. He had talked to Robert all the way to the church, as the two of them sat in the front seat of the Buick while Vaire and Anne sat in the back. He talked about school next year and selling insurance, things Robert was not interested in because he could smell Vaire sitting behind him and constantly wanted to turn around and look at her.

The telling about God turned out to be a different thing altogether.

“Is there a hell?” the preacher began. “My friends, I know you may wonder at a question like that. But I have heard people today ask that question, young people, followers of the false gods of science and the almighty dollar, followers of their own pleasure.”

The preacher appeared to be very old, the oldest man Robert had seen yet. He had almost no hair, and many large freckles on his head and face, and a wrinkly wattle under his chin like the turkeys on Martin’s farm. He seemed very unhappy all through the telling about God, and did not actually tell about God at all.

“They ask me as a man of the Holy Word if I
think
there is such a thing as HELL!” His voice broke, rising to the pitch of that last word. “If I THINK there is a Hell. My friends, as if I ever had the right to think such a thing when I KNOW there is a HELL because the Bible says so!” Having leaned increasingly forward over the podium toward his listeners, he now stepped back until Robert could only see the top of his head like an overripe canteloupe resting on the top rim of the podium. Then his face appeared again.

“They ask me if I can believe in Hell when God is Love. Whether I can think about God sending anyone to burn in everlasting fire. Whether there can be a God who would let his children be in pain forever? And I say to them, YES! YES! For God is a God of Love. He is a God of infinite mercy, and He will not allow his wayward children to become the innocent victims of Satan, of EVIL! He has told us all there is a Hell. He has told us we must obey Him, must worship Him as the fountain of everlasting life, and that if we do not, if we insist on going against His commandments, if we do not believe the sacrifice His Son Jesus Christ made for us on the Cross - then surely we
shall
find out there is a Hell. Surely we shall find that there is a place reserved there for US! And yet they will ask me: Preacher, is there a Hell? Can this thing be? And I say to them, and I say to you this fine morning when all of God’s creation is singing and bursting with the glory of spring, I say to you, Yes, there is a Hell. Yes, there is damnation. And it is eternal. It is the fire that never stops, the pain that nothing can wash away, the loss of heaven compounded with the torments of bodily and spiritual pain that will NEVER end.”

Robert felt sick and a bit dizzy. He wished a breeze would come in through the tilted windows, or that he had one of the yellow straw fans.

“It is an unrelenting and never ending pain. It is the pain you have never felt on this earth. It is the pain sent by God Himself for those who will not believe in Him. It is the just punishment for Evil, for following false gods, the evil and false gods of selfishness and Mammon, the false gods of pleasure and of the forgetfulness of Heaven and Salvation. EVIL, my friends, EVIL is your enemy. EVIL is the Satan in our midst who never rests, who wants you to forget God, forget Jesus looking down from His Cross and asking you for your heart, the Satan who is always at your side tempting you with the bounty and pleasures of the flesh. And that very Satan who will tempt you to Hell if you let him, will tempt you to the fiery pit where tortures await you, where the rending of that same flesh is Satan’s pleasure, where his devils all clawed and fanged will drag you down bodily into the pit where they may tear your flesh, where they may burn your miserable body forever, FOREVER!”

Robert was aware of my anger underneath it all. The old man felt rotten inside. I shift momentarily out of pure rage, and one extended claw scores the oak pew deeply under my angry grip. Then I recover, thinking of Vaire, of her beauty. I shift back. Had anyone seen the flickering shift?

Robert felt fear as he looked at the deep gash in the oak pew, a fresh white cut as if a whirling saw blade had nicked the wood. He put one small hand over it and looked up at Walter’s face, then at Anne sitting beside him. Walter seemed absorbed in the sermon, which continued as a sort of ugly chant; Anne was slumped awkwardly into herself, her chin down on the lace collar of her pinafore. She was asleep sitting up. Robert could feel the cut beneath his hand, but he knew it had been a simple accident. He looked past Anne at Vaire and met her wide blue eyes staring down at him. Her mouth had compressed into a scarlet line. He looked directly at her with all his innocence, holding the gaze but not smiling. She held the stare a moment, then released her held breath with a gasp as if she would take the next breath and scream. Robert held her eyes with his, looking at her with all the love of her beauty that he felt, with all his innocence. Vaire shook her head slightly, breaking the eye contact, looked about her as if about to appeal to the church full of people, caught the sound of the preacher now winding up his sermon with a series of rhetorical periods, looked down at her hands in her lap. She rummaged in her blue cloth purse, found a hanky and began dabbing at her face. Robert looked away.

***

Aunt Cat had gotten a box down from the top of her closet. She set it on the dining room table, carefully pulled its top off and drew out a long, thick book of black pages bound with metal rings and with many pictures attached to each page. She and Robert looked through the last pages in the book where there were pictures of Vaire and Anne and Walter, and some pictures of a pretty, black haired woman standing with a tall, heavy looking man in a suit. They looked bright and happy. The man had a white flower in his lapel.

“That’s Renee and her husband, Billy, when they were married,” Aunt Cat said. “Here’s their little girl, Wilhelmina, and here they are when Mina was a year old.”

“Is this book all about your family?” Robert wondered. There seemed to be thousands of pictures earlier in the book. He thought Martin and Aunt Cat must have hundreds of children.

“Yes, it’s pictures that go back to the first Kodak we had in my mother’s family. See here, toward the front. That’s me in the long dress and the funny hat.” She laughed and motioned for Martin to come over. “Look at this one of Claire, Martin. I don’t recall this one. Look at her in that suit. Wouldn’t she just have a fit?” Aunt Cat and Martin both began to laugh at a faded picture of a frowning young girl in a funny black suit that covered her whole body. She was standing in ankle deep water with an out-of-focus lake behind her.

“Is she your daughter too?” Robert asked.

“Oh my, Little Robert,” Aunt Cat said, widening her eyes. “That’s my very own Claire, my sister, when we were just girls, oh thirty years ago and more.”

Robert tried to think about that, but time in such quantities was a blank.

“Do you love all your families?” he asked seriously.

Aunt Cat caught his tone. “Yes we do, Little Robert. And we love you too, for now you are part of our family.” And she gave him a hug and kissed his cheek.

“Is love when you’re in a family?”

“That’s how you
get
a family,” Martin said, winking at Aunt Cat.

She turned and looked at the man, smiling in a certain way again. Robert watched with a hungry look. What was it that they were doing? That invisible thing that went between them sometimes? He watched and listened, but he couldn’t understand it.

“Do I love you?” he asked Aunt Cat.

“Well, I think you might, sometime.”

“Don’t I now?”

“Robert, you are so funny. Only you can know if you love someone. We can’t know before you do.”

He thought about that for a minute. I begin to listen from far back, for this conversation is having strange effects. Emotional waves are originating from somewhere within Robert.

“Do I love you like this?” he asked, suddenly putting his arms around her neck and crawling into her lap.

She caught him in her arms and hugged him.

“Yes, Little Robert,” she said. “That’s the way.”

The tall one named Gus carries the jug. When the others want a drink they have to ask Gus, and he keeps one finger crooked through the eye of the handle while they drink. They crunch along the right of way in the cinders, stumbling over the ends of ties now and again. I keep up with them in the weedy ditch with my head just touched by the moonlight coming across the high rails. If they look they might see my head listening to them, floating along silently in the white moonlight.

“Yer fullashit, Tommy,” says the old man, the one who is sick inside. “You ever gonta make a buck again, it gonta be selling quarts of your blood fer antifreeze.” He coughs and spits.

“That’s better’n you, you old fart. You ain’t got any to sell.” Tommy’s shoulders hump as if against the cold, although it is a hot night. His legs are so thin his pants seem to be walking by themselves.

“We can make some dough picking strawberries soon,” Gus says, swinging his big head from side to side. He holds the jug up so even I can see there is only about a fourth of it left. “Pick a couple, eat a couple....” His words trail off as he takes a sip delicately from the mouth of the jug as it receiving a kiss.

“Yah,” the old sick one jeers. “Workin’ fer the fat farmer. You know the farmers making money outta this depression. They the ones doing all right. Nobody makin’ any money but the farmers and the pol’ticians now.”

“That’s the god’s truth,” says the short man in the ragged suit coat, the one who is usually silent. “Groceries comin’ up outta the ground.”

“Farmers ain’t so rich,” Tommy says. “I got an uncle’s a farmer, and he ...”

“Tenant farmer,” the short man says.

Tommy whines his voice when speaking to the short man. “He ain’t. He’s got forty acres of muckland, and he ain’t rich. He works his ass off.”

“Well, that muss be what happened to you, punk,” says Gus, taking a long stride and kicking at Tommy’s rear. “No more ass than a sandhill crane.”

“Lay off a him, Gus,” the short man named Rusty says very low and menacing.

“Punk,” Gus says, but he stumbles across the rails to the other side of the track.

“Gimme a drink of that dregs you got there, Gus,” Rusty says.

“I’m savin’ the rest for my nightcap,” Gus says. “My money bought it, and I’ve give it most away already to you thirsty bastards.”

“You tight assed jack roller,” Rusty says, and he leaps over the tracks at Gus, knocking the bigger man sideways before he can get ready.

They scratch around clumsily in the cinders like two boys in a schoolyard, and I think they must have had another jug, for both are nearly falling down drunk. Then the short man gets an advantage and brings his knee up between Gus’s legs. Gus howls. and drops the jug, going down in the weeds at the edge of the embankment.

“Gimme some too, Rusty,” the old man wails.

Rusty tips up the jug, pouring much of the wine over his panting mouth instead of into it.

“Shit, Rusty, yer wasting it all,” the old man is sobbing.

Rusty holds the jug up until the moon shines clear through it, and then he tosses the jug away in my direction. I almost catch it. After Gus has gotten up silently and is limping on after the others, I pick up the jug and smell it. The fumes make my head widen suddenly. I stick my tongue into the jug and by tipping it up get a few drops. It is like golden fire, burning, beautiful to the tongue. I want it, and shake my head with baffled desire.

I slip through the tall weeds to the concrete wing of the bridge footing and listen. The old one is coughing and coughing down by the creek. The others are sitting up close to the concrete arch.

“You guys had any guts, we’d make a lot more than two bucks off a sack of soap.” The voice is the low, raspy one, Rusty’s.

“I ain’t goin’ to get tossed in the cooler,” Tommy says. “None of my family ever been in jail.”

“Yeah, I know,” Rusty says. “There’s about enough guts between the three of you to pull a dead cat off a manure pile.”

“Whatta you gonta do, big mouth,” says the old man, trying to catch his breath. “You gonta walk up to one of these rich farmers with their big dogs and shotguns and sheriff’s bulls on every highway, and you gonta say, gimme some money?”

Rusty staggers out from under the shadow of the bridge and stands half in the moonlight urinating out into the weeds. His body wavers slowly back and forth as if he were under water, moving with a slow current.

“Here’s your wine, Gus,” he says, his chin down in his coat. He tries to get the buttons on his pants closed, cannot make them work and finally gives it up. He staggers back into the shadow of the bridge.

“How would you do it, yer so smart,” Gus says to him.

“Same way you go for a handout,” Rusty says. “Only it’s a bigger handout, see?” I listen to his body lying back in the dirt. They are all settling down, curling up like homeless dogs to sleep.

“Come along the lane, you know? The lady’s maybe out hanging clothes, the old man’s in the field with the hands. You make a pitch to do some odd jobs while the rest of us wait somewheres.” His voice is getting smaller, almost a whisper. He is falling asleep.

“And then what?” Gus is still sitting up.

“And then you get the old lady for bait,” Rusty whispers.