The Orphan (9 page)

“But you’ve said many times, Mother,” Walter says, “that you couldn’t recall clearly what the creature looked like. Now you’re saying you can remember exactly.” He begins filling his pipe again, scraping it out with the handle of a spoon.

“You can’t say everything to strangers, newspaper people, detectives, and the like. You don’t know what they’re up to,” the older woman says.

I listen to Vaire whispering to her mother about the wine, that it is good, but too much is no help for grieving, and her mother saying back that nothing is any good, but wine is better than most. The conversation becomes more carefully noncommittal on Walter’s part, more pointedly angry from the farm woman. Vaire comments that the children are sleeping right above them, but Aunt Cat is not to be put off. She has something to say, and it appears she is going to say it.

“Don’t sit there, Vaire, Victoria, my very own and very first daughter, and tell me you did not see that thing.”

“Now, Mother, if a big wild dog came leaping in ...” Walter was saying, but he was being ignored.

“I saw it, Mother, but I can’t remember it exactly. You know that man had my arm twisted up and then he was jumping around waving the knife and screaming, and I thought he was going to kill me.”

“When that thing. stood up in the back doorway over your father’s body,” her voice rising now, “and looked right at us.” And she stopped for emphasis and to take another drink. “With Martin’s harmonica in its teeth!”

I am listening so closely now that I am almost not breathing. Perhaps I have underestimated the human capacity to accept the strange.

I hear Walter’s chair scraping back, Vaire getting up also. The older woman making sounds of moving around. They are all standing now.

“You saw it, Vaire!” She is almost screaming. “There was no little boy near that thing, no Little Robert near it, and it had poor Martin’s harmonica in its mouth, that he played that very morning while I made breakfast.” She stops and sobs, but angrily, and then says, still weeping, “Vaire, did you
see
it? Say. Did you see it standing in the back door? Those big unnatural eyes, those jaws?”

“Yes, Mother,” Vaire says very softly.

“You’ve got good eyes, Victoria. You saw it.” I can hear from her slurred words now she is drunk. She keeps sobbing while she says again, louder, “You saw it.” There is a pause and then suddenly she seems to turn on the two young people.

“What was it wearing?”

“What, Mother?” Vaire asks, her voice full of fright. Walter comes in with the same question. “Wearing?” he says.

“It was wearing Little Robert’s nightshirt!” she screams, and the words make my fur erect suddenly in that hot August night as if a blast of snow from the north woods had engulfed me.

“Oh my heavens. Oh, Mother,” Vaire is saying.

“I’m going to get Doctor Fleishman,” Walter says. “Mother, sit down.” Walter is being stern.

“Are you afraid to say it, Victoria?” Mrs. Nordmeyer asks. “Are you afraid to say what that Rustum person said, that it was a fiend from hell?” She is screaming loudly now. “Well it was. It was. A fiend from hell, and it killed my husband.”

I am standing near the window now, listening to everything: Walter is starting the car in the driveway; Mrs. Nordrneyer has apparently fallen to the floor, and Vaire is getting something in the kitchen. I extend my unused senses: Anne is asleep. There is no one on the street where Walter’s car is swinging its headlights away toward the corner where the streetlight is hidden by maple trees. No one is approaching.

“Mother, Walter’s gone to get the doctor. Put this under your head, and here’s a cold cloth for your face.”

The older woman’s voice is so soft her daughter must have trouble hearing it: “What can it be, Vaire?” she is whispering. “What can it be?” She rolls her head on the pillow. I can almost feel her eyes burning holes in the floor where I crouch. She is whispering again.

“It’s up there, you know. Up there with Anne, up there in your house, living with you, the devil, the fiend from hell.”

“Mother, please. You’ve got me so upset.” Vaire is crying too now. “But you can’t say that about a little child no older than Anne. It can’t be such a thing, Mother.” And she is weeping openly now.

“What does it want?”
the older woman goes on whispering in so eerie a way that my fur prickles again. She is frightening
me
.

“Mother, please stop,” Vaire is wailing now. “You’re scaring me.”

I wait for Vaire to come up the stairs, but she does not come. She is apparently torn between her mother and her child, and the fear is overbalancing her to stay downstairs until her husband returns. I hear no more words from the older woman, only mumbling as her mind fades out. In a few more minutes the car returns with the doctor, and there is a roomful of masculine solidity and heartiness to replace the wavering fear that had infected us all. By the time anyone comes to check Robert, he is in his bed asleep, sweat on his head from the hot August night, his nightshirt rucked up around his stomach.

***

Little Robert is an enigma to me now. He knows of the superstitious feeling of dread he evokes from Aunt Cat, and the often poorly concealed nervousness shown by his beloved Vaire. He is really only comfortable with Anne and other children who have no unconscious fears to make of him a sort of freak. But he does not want to leave the family, and I am reluctant to force him away, although I am sure I could do that if it were necessary for survival. It is strange to think about his getting stronger each day in his own personality, harder to reason with, harder to subdue if he does not want me to shift out for an evening’s run in the dark fields. I wonder if I have created a monster, and the thought makes me smile into the terrified eyes of the rabbit I have just caught and am about to eat. The rabbit has not been much fun to catch, being a cross with the tame ones the people in the town raise for food. It is large, brown, and fat, with a wattle of fat under its neck, very unlike the lean, fast cottontails I would catch in Martin’s hedge rows and creek banks. But it tastes very good, almost sweet like chicken or lamb. My tastes are becoming more fastidious also, I find, spitting out chunks of hide and fur. I no longer enjoy bolting small animals whole but find myself picking them apart for the good bits and wasting much of them. Perhaps I too am becoming civilized and will soon be eating Red Heart dog food in three delicious flavors out of a can.

But the warm. summer nights retain their full, sensuous charm as I lope through the pastures and newly cut grain fields outside of town. I sense the sleeping cows under the dark umbrella of a maple tree in the corner of a pasture, and the muskrats are lying in the mouths of their tunnels in the creek banks, sniffing for crawdads and minnows; the cats are out, their eyes shining like lanterns as late automobiles pass on the streets and country lanes. The crickets and frogs make angular sounds along every ditch and stand of weeds. The earth is good to my feet as I pace quietly, feeling very much a part of life and breathing in scents of the crawling, hopping, running life of the night, the hungers appeased so easily in the summer nights, the animal feeling of fullness and happiness that forgets the freezing winter and the stupid torpor of a burrow under the snow with the stomach slowly shrinking in on itself and the cold making the heart slow and the brain numb and without even dreams.

I look up at the sliver of moon that barely makes shadows in the darkness. There is something else, something that has been growing and making my mind seem to itch strangely. I feel it sometimes even when I am trailing a fox and get a whiif of her musk. Robert feels it watching his beloved Vaire. It is like wanting to kill and eat luxuriously but without hurting the animal I am killing and eating. Indeed, it is a paradoxical feeling I have not had before, and can only attribute to Robert’s growing strength as a personality, something humans experience that is spilling over into my own life. It is something then that I must deal with, for it seems now that I am committed to existence with the human. They are strange, terrible, suffering creatures, but I am one of them now that Robert has come into being. This feeling can be savored like any other sensation, and so I am content with it, even though it is an irritation. Any sensation, even pain, is to be experienced and is better than no sensation at all.

Willie Duchamps knew not to walk directly up to the Woodsons’ porch. He had been shouted at several times by both Vaire and Walter for his meaningless cruelties and pranks. He had tied cats’ tails together, put a firecracker under a dog’s collar, told Anne some words with which she had innocently horrified her mother’s friends, and worst of all from Walter’s viewpoint, had in a random fit of rage chopped the Woodson garden hose into thirty-eight nearly equal pieces with Walter’s own hatchet. Surveying his front yard full of what looked like red macaroni one Sunday morning, Walter had stomped back into the living room and said, “The Duchamps boy does not ever set foot on this property again.”

The problem was made nearly insoluble by Willie’s father, who, it was rumored, was a whoremaster besides being a late-shift bartender at the George Washington Tavern in downtown Cassius. He had the look of a shaved gorilla, when he shaved, and had got rid of his long suffering wife by beating her so badly that she was forbidden by the court to return to him and left forever to live somewhere in Colorado with her widowed sister. Bart Duchamps was not a neighbor one approached angrily or holding Bart’s rascal boy by the scruff of the neck and uttering threats. Bart often beat Willie until he could not stand up or go to school for days, but he would, so he claimed, kill anyone who harmed a hair of his boy’s head. All of this was neighborhood gossip and easily picked up from any of the many children in the two- or three-block area of the outlying district of Cassius the Woodsons lived in. Willie was nine and too old for either Anne or Robert to play with anyway, Vaire would say, and she had no idea why he hung around instead of playing with boys his own age.

It seemed pretty obvious to Anne that the reason he hung around was that he liked to bully and play tricks on the littler ones, and besides, she said to Robert as they sat in the porch swing and watched Willie throwing rocks at a cat he had trapped under his front porch, Shirley was his girlfriend. Shirley was a skinny black-haired girl of about six or so who lived two houses up the street from the Woodsons. She had no real mother or father, Anne told Robert, but lived with her grandmother and a middle-aged couple who said they were her aunt and uncle but who were not at home much. Anne made a lot of the fact that Shirley was almost a year older than she and yet was not in school and would not begin until fall when Anne did. She was sickly with some sort of recurrent weakness that put her in bed for a week at a time, and in Anne’s opinion was not as smart as she seemed to think she was. Shirley was Willie’s special friend, which meant she not only shared in the interesting games a resourceful nine-year-old could think up but also received second hand the overflow of the beatings he got from his father. She was a surly child with a pale face and dark circled eyes that most often looked at the world with ready rejection, since she had experienced more of that response herself, evidently, than any other. Her grandmother was of some foreign extraction and looked a lot like the witch in Anne’s Hansel and Gretel book with drooping nose and hairy moles distributed in unlikely places on her face. She was not an unkind woman, Robert thought after she had given him half an apple one afternoon, but she did look terribly witchy in that black dress and with her gray hair hanging down like moss around her face.

Willie had spotted Robert immediately as a prime mark, as he was almost wholly innocent, small for his age, pliable and gullible enough to believe the wildest tale Willie could think up. The fact was, Robert was intensely curious about Willie, for he had had no experience of such gratuitous meanness and found it both exciting and repulsive. After a chat over the back fence one morning, Robert managed to slip away from Anne and walked down the alley with Willie and Shirley to the river bank where the old storm drain emptied into the channel. Some ways back in the storm drain, which was over six feet square at the opening, they had a secret hideout. A large chunk of masonry had fallen out of the wall forming a cave that had obviously been used by tramps now and then. Willie had found a blanket for the floor and some candles, and he and Shirley had set up housekeeping in the musty but properly secret hideway. As for Robert, he found the situation so different, dirty, and forbidden that he instantly adopted Willie as his leader.

The three of them sat in the dark burrow off the storm drain eating an orange Willie had stolen from Capp’s fruit stand. Robert could have brought some from the Woodsons’, but it was more like bandits this way.

“Don’t eat the white part,” Shirley. said in her squeaky voice. “G’ma says it’ll give you worms.”

“That’s crap, Shirley.” Willie said, tearing off a big piece of the white and eating it. “It’s raw p’taters that gives you worms. Any dummy knows that.” He split off a section and handed it to Robert who sat on the concrete edge of the cave opening. “Here, Robert, you’re part of our gang now.”

“Thank you,” Robert said, taking the orange slice. “It’s a great cave you got here. We can play robbers and nobody can ever find us.”

“We do more than playin’ robbers, don’t we, Shirley?” Willie said, finishing the orange and rubbing his mouth on his sleeve. Shirley giggled and rolled her little dark eyes up so the whites showed, nodding her head so her black hair that looked like it needed washing flopped over her forehead. Robert hadn’t the slightest idea what they were talking about.

“Do you want to be part of our gang and never tell anybody, not even your dad and ma, where the hideout is and what we do?” Willie said, holding Robert by his shoulders and looking into his eyes.

Robert looked back into the greenish dark eyes in Willie’s narrow face and nodded his head. “You got to swear on the bones of your ancestors,” Willie said, digging his fingers into Robert’s shoulders so that it hurt.