The Orphan (8 page)

“I’ll come out if you’ll go back,” says a high clear Voice.

I jump, then flatten back in the weeds. The voice is Robert’s, and it comes from inside my own mind. He is making a deal with me. I have the urge to laugh. I think the words, “If you don’t come out now, we will both have great trouble, maybe be killed.”

“Promise you’ll go back.”

“I can’t. They have seen me. It would be a danger to you also.”

“Promise!”

The men at both ends of the hedge are closer, coming slowly, spread out into the cornfields. It is too late to run now without having to fight with some of them. As Robert’s voice screams inside me the one word again, I hear something, a metallic rumbling, then a far off whistle, slightly elevating in pitch. A train is coming, fast.

Now the men at the south end of the hedge hear it too. They are hollering and running back around the hedge. I begin to slip through the weeds in their direction.

“The Lakeshore. The Lakeshore!”

“Get that handcar off the right of way!”

“C’mon, get your ass in gear. That baby’s gon splatter us all over the county.”

The south end of the hedge is free of men now, and I begin running faster. I arrive at the end of the hedge to see half a dozen men in work overalls struggling with the iron-wheeled platform, trying to get it off the tracks as the train appears to swell in size down the track, trailing a flat plume of smoke back along its length. Its black, blunt form approaches at unbelievable speed, the details of the iron engine face becoming clear so fast I have trouble seeing it all. The men on the track have the handcar derailed but sideways on the track. They will not make it. The train whistle begins a shattering scream, the pitch rising unbearable. Only two of them are still trying to get it off the track, the rest are running down the embankment as the train’s wheels begin to grind on the iron rails, a thousand metallic notes higher than the ear can hear, couplings crashing like hammers on anvils back down the length of the train. I stand up to watch the sight as the last two men dive away, one on each side of the track and the towering black engine seems to gobble up the little handcar and blow out its wreckage in a giant blast. A terrific smashing of wood and clanging of iron, and one heavy iron wheel comes sailing over the hedge, spinning and flailing its torn-out axle like the stem of an iron flower cut by the mower. A shower of wood splinters bounces back along the length of the black engine as it rushes on past in spite of its squealing brakes. As the engine flashes past above me, I see the white round faces of two men ducking away from the cab window.

Behind me I hear again the men coming along the hedge. They are running now, shouting. I double back on the railroad side of the hedge in the shadow, and when I am half way back, I see the men gathered around the wreckage of their handcar. The train is on beyond me, just coming to a stop, its last car a hundred yards up the track. I slip down into the creek, up the embankment and across the tracks almost crawling on my belly. On the other side is a small stand of oaks and maples that leads into a woods. I have made it.

Now that I have been clearly seen by two groups of people, there will be much more difficulty getting out of this country. I must have the ability to shift so that I can pass unnoticed. And Robert is now a part of me. I promise him that we will go back to the farm for just a little bit. After two nights in an abandoned pump house, I return to spend a whole day in the Nordmeyer’s hayloft in the dusty dry heat, peeking out of the cracks in the hay door as black automobiles drive in and out of the lane, people come in black clothes and go in and out the front door. I have never seen people use the front door of the farmhouse before. Many of them are weeping. I recognize Vaire, Anne, and Walter, and see another group that must be the other sister, her husband and child. At intervals in the long, hot day I sleep, trying to recuperate my senses that seem to have been deranged by the battle and flight. I wake to see the narrow sunbeams striking down from tiny cracks and holes in the roof, standing like wires and ribbons and slender pillars in the dusty air. It is quiet in the high, empty loft, like an aisle in the forest when the sun shines down through morning mist. I am thirsty, but cannot go down for a drink until dark. I push back the thirst and wonder at the numbness of my senses. The part of me that is Robert is clearly delineated by a sick sensation inside me. I push it all away and resolve to sleep until dark.

I wake to feel the need for Robert to appear. I have never felt this before. I concentrate and shift, easily.

Robert stepped carefully in the dark to avoid getting slivers from the old, rough plank floor. He carried a rag that had the harmonica tied up in it. The barn was quiet, the cows asleep, the dogs chained up outside the big sliding doors. Biff came over to Robert dragging his chain and wagging his heavy tail, his head down as if it was all his fault.

Robert stood outside the back screen. No one was awake inside, but there was a lamp burning in the living room. The screen was not hooked. Robert opened the door and walked carefully in across the scrubbed dark spots on the porch floor. The kitchen was very clean and empty looking, and the dining room table had been set up again and polished. In the living room, sitting across two sawhorses, was a gray, oblong box made of metal with rod-like handles along the sides. The top of the box was laid back so that it opened up like Aunt Cat’s jewel box on her dresser. Inside, the box gleamed with slick cloth that looked almost wet, it was so shiny. The lamp was sitting where the radio used to be, on the little side table with the spindly legs. It was turned low, the flame unmoving as if it were painted in a picture.

Robert could not see into the coffin, so he had to pull a chair from the dining room. Standing on the chair; his hands on the edge of the long box, Robert looked in at Martin, who appeared to be sleeping with his hands folded on his chest. Robert had never seen Martin asleep, had never seen him so still. He had always been working, walking about the farm, telling Robert things about the animals and about planting and caring for crops. Now his eyes had disappeared behind the walnut burl wrinkles, his mouth closed hard on something, as if he were gritting his teeth, and the corners turned down in disapproval. He wore a black suit that Robert had never seen either, and a white shirt that was starchy clean, and a blue necktie. It looked like Martin, Robert thought, but it certainly was not the happy old farmer Robert had known. He gazed for a long time, leaning closer as if to catch a breathed word or see the beginnings of a smile, as if Martin were only teasing him as he used to do, pretending to be angry. Then it seemed the face began to change indeed, and the wrinkles to move outward into a smile, the eyes to flutter and perhaps would have opened if Robert had been able to watch one more moment.

“Robert!”

The voice was a loud whisper, as if from off stage, calling back an actor who had entered at the wrong cue. Vaire stood in the dining room door in a long quilted robe, her face a white oval in the half light. Her eyes seemed unnaturally large, owl eyes looking into the darkness. Then she walked quickly over to Robert and was hugging him in her arms, against her warmth, kissing the top of his head and crying, putting his skinny little body inside her robe and closing him in.

Robert at that moment began to sob and shiver as he had on that first night. He suddenly felt so weak he could not stand, sick in his stomach, dizzy in his head. He hugged Vaire and cried against herslloulder as she cried against his hair.

***

Robert had to say something, of course, about the creature they thought had carried him out of the farmhouse that day. To his advantage was the fact that he actually did not remember much of what had happened, at least not very clearly. His own emotional turmoil and the sudden shift blurred his mind so that he retained only the terror and the blood and the sight of the old farmer with his glazing eyes and torn chest. He held to the harmonica as if it were the talisman of his safety and told his fragmented story to the family, the deputy coroner, and some state police officers who looked very large and efficient in their gray uniforms and Sam Browne belts with pistols holstered under leather flaps. The testimony of the section gang whose handcar ended up as a handful of decorations on the Lakeshore Limited helped confuse the issue, for their accounts were highly imaginative, only two of the gang having had a clear glimpse of what came out of the tool shed that morning. Roger Rustum and Thomas Prokoff gave conflicting accounts also: Rustum maintained the creature had jaws like a shark and bear-like arms, while Prokoff saw it more as a mountain lion sort of thing. Oliver Hackett gave no account of anything, as he remained heavily sedated to allay the pain of the tuberculosis which would shortly kill him.

The evidence would not have convicted a sheepstealing dog, and the authorities wanted to believe it could have been an ape escaped from a circus that had been in Cassius the week before. Telegraphed inquiries to the circus, however, ruined that theory, as nothing had escaped, not even the geek.

Further evidence of the strange creature’s existence began to arrive at police headquarters in half a dozen Michigan towns as soon as the evening paper carrying the account of the incident hit the streets. In the next weeks people saw every sort of nightmare monster from King Kong and the Wolf Man to Frankenstein’s creation, with King Kong running ahead by a margin of three reports to one of any other type.

Vaire and Walter had taken Robert to their house in Cassius and given him the room across the upstairs hall from Anne’s room. There he slept in a vast, sagging double bed with springs that talked to him whenever he moved at night. The bed, like the house itself, belonged to Grandmother Stumway who was Vaire’s grandmother and Aunt Cat’s mother. Robert, trying to line up these adults in ascending generations, believed she must be nearly as old as the earth itself.

Robert is comfortable, but sometimes I feel like slipping away and heading for the woods, except that the wide publicity I have received would make traveling difficult. Vaire has seen my form on two occasions, although the one time in church was probably hallucinatory and perhaps not even consciously remembered. She would casually approach the subject of the strange animal at odd times, after breakfast when Anne and Robert were carrying dishes to the sink, when the three of them were picking tomatoes in the back garden, when dressing for bed. She would wonder aloud how the creature had got into the farmhouse so suddenly, and answer her own question by saying it might have come in during the night and been hiding somewhere, or that it had leaped in through the back door and been the cause of the fatal shot from Gus that killed her father. And what had become of the thing, she would wonder, while Anne and Robert waited for the direct question they knew was coming.

“Poor Little Robert. You were probably too frightened to even remember where the creature came from, weren’t you?”

“I was really scared,” Robert would say while Anne looked at him curiously. She had gained a new respect for him now that he had been carried off by a mad gorilla and barely escaped with his life - and Grandfather Nordmeyer’s harmonica. That last always puzzled Anne, as it did some others in the family, for Robert had been holding the harmonica knotted up in the rags of his nightshirt when Vaire had surprised him that night at the coffin.

Walter was inclined to be stern with Vaire when she brought up the subject on an evening after the children had been put to bed. In his forthright and clear-sighted opinion, no such creature existed. The thing was a wild dog that had been hiding in the house overnight and been frightened out by the shotgun blast and started biting people. Little Robert had simply been mad with terror and run away. His ruddy, open face seemed almost to convince Vaire while he was talking. It seemed all quite correct and true to life as she knew it when Walter sat calmly in the long dim parlor of their house and looked directly into her face and said, “It’s nothing but mass hysteria, Vaire. It’s the same as people believing they’ve seen the Indian Rope Trick. Once they’ve been told something supernatural or horrible has happened, they begin embroidering on it, and soon it’s all out of hand.”

“But a dog couldn’t have carried Little Robert away.”

“Of course not, dear,” Walter would say, certain on this point. “The poor tyke ran away. The dog probably knocked him around, and he ran and hid in the barn. That is where he was hiding, didn’t he say?”

“Yes, but for three whole days while those people were searching all over the farm? I’m sure some of the men must have looked up in the hayloft, and that’s where he said he was.” Vaire honestly hated to contradict Walter in anything. He was such a good person. But it really was inconceivable to her that the little boy had hidden naked in the loft for two days and a half while the farm was swarming with deputies, detectives, tracking hounds, and newspaper reporters.

This always exasperated Walter, so he would refill his pipe, which he had recently taken up as an aid to his public image. The refilling and lighting and adjusting took some time and gave him the look of someone with all the answers at hand, although at times when he spoke without taking the pipe out of his mouth it would swing wide as if on a hinge and he would have to be fast and ungraceful to catch it. And then when the process was completed, his answer was notably weak.

“Well, what else could it be?” he would ask finally, as if the lack of an answer were proof of the superiority of common sense in all matters.

I am in the habit of lying in bed for sometime in the dark shifted into my natural form to relax. It is comforting, even in cramped places, to be oneself again, and additionally, I can then easily listen to any conversations taking place downstairs. In fact, Robert would have been able to hear most of it if he had gone to the register in the floor of his room and pushed it open slightly, as it was a square hole with a register grate on both sides that opened into the corner of the dining room ceiling nearest the sliding doors to the parlor. Sitting on the floor, looking into the warm darkness through my screen and listening like a prisoner to the orchestration of the summer night, I hear Aunt Cat, Walter, and Vaire who are sitting around the dining room table drinking some of the home-made wine from the farm. Aunt Cat has had more than enough of the wine already, and Walter keeps trying to slow her down, although he is powerless before the tall, older woman who brushes off his remarks as if he were a child.