The Orphan Read online

  “That’s fine, Robert,” Mr. Sangrom said, stretching his arms out so that his two long, white hands rested directly in front of Robert. “I’d like it if you would put your hands on top of mine, Robert,” he said. “You see, I am able to feel the magnetic currents in your body, and I will be able to understand your answers better this way.”

  Robert put his hands on the backs of the long, white fleshed hands that rested before him like plaster casts. They felt soft and wrinkledy and cool, like a toad’s back. He heard Walter make some sort of coughing sound from his chair in the corner of the room, and looked at the window seat where he could see Vaire’s silhouette against the bow windows still gray with twilight. She was sitting sideways with her hands in her lap, and it made Robert feel brave to see her sitting there. He looked at Aunt Cat, but she was in a shadow and was only a tall, angular form like a black paper cutout sitting at the other end of the table.

  “Now, Robert,” Mr. Sangrom began in a very steady voice that seemed to be speaking only to Robert so that only he could hear it. “You are very comfortable here with your family, and you are safe here, and it is getting late in the evening, so I would not be surprised if you were to get a little bit sleepy sitting here in this dark dining room.”

  Robert felt that he was a little bit sleepy, even though his nose still hurt and he worried about Anne. He did feel safe here, and he was not afraid of the man with the polished hair, and so he listened to what the man was saying. It seemed to be making him more sleepy all the time, but he wasn’t going to sleep really. It was more like he was thinking himself into a dream, maybe letting the words make a dream for him, since that was easier, and then he was really dreaming, but he was still listening to the man’s words which seemed to be taking his hands and leading him along somewhere in the dark.

  “You remember that morning when it rained, don’t you. And you remember coming downstairs that morning and the man that grabbed you and made you sit at the table, don’t you, and that there were bad men in the house who were going to hurt your Uncle Martin and Aunt Cat, and then Aunt Vaire was there too and the men were going to hurt her too. You remember it all, don’t you. And you didn’t like those bad men.”

  Robert, listening, felt being led back into the farm kitchen, as if he could see the scene again, being grabbed by the chicken faced young man and sitting at the table. Now Vaire was there, holding his hand, and the tramp in the torn coat was making her red in the face, and his blood was pumping hard in all of his body. He wanted something very large and strong and vicious to come and help Vaire because the man was going to hurt her. It was coming, but he was afraid. It was coming and he wouldn’t stop it anymore. But if it came, he would not be able to stay, and Martin would be killed. Robert fought the power for a time, watching the red haired man hurting Vaire. And then all motion slowed as he felt his wanting torn in two directions. He would not let the bad man hurt Vaire. But he couldn’t let the great power come out because then Uncle Martin would get shot. So it all had to stop. But he couldn’t know about that. That didn’t happen yet. So it was all right and he couldn’t help it anyway. The power pushed against his will to stop everything. A voice said, “That’s it. Let it come! Let it come!” And time began to move again. The red haired man pushed Vaire against the table. Things moved faster now, his hesitation gone like a still movie frame lost into the past as the projector started again. Time was moving, and the red haired man was taking Vaire away to hurt her. Someone said, “She needs help! Robert! Help her! Help her!” And now the man is pushing Vaire past his chair. It is really happening. I have to save her. I will bite….

  I wake at the shift, feeling disoriented and outside myself as I have never felt before, the room emerging into existence unexpectedly as if I had been wakened from hibernation too soon. Strange people in the room, dangerous people. I cannot be here. I push against the table, where is it? The kitchen of the farmhouse where Rusty, no, the dining room of the Woodson house, who is that dark man with his mouth stretched wide as if he will scream? I push back hard on the chair and forward on the table and think hard, Robert!

  Aunt Cat and Vaire screamed in the same key harmonically, the older woman standing up so that her chair smacked backward onto the floor, at the other end of the room Vaire standing at the window seat with her hands over her mouth, Walter knocking his head back against the wall behind his chair and uttering some curse. Now the man with the polished hair pulls his hands out from under something on the table and screams falsetto as the table moves screeching across the polished floor, Robert’s chair crashes over with the weight of something much larger than he.

  Mr. Sangrom fell as he pulled away from the table, hitting the sideboard hard enough to knock the ornamental lamp off onto the floor where it smashed and the electric filament went out in a blue glare, leaving the room dark.

  “Get the lights!”

  “Help! Help! Help me,” cried an unfamiliar voice from the floor beside the table. Mr. Sangrom was on the floor.

  The lights went on as Walter got to the overhead light switch. The dining room flooded starkly with light. The two women stopped screaming. Mr. Sangrom lay tangled on the floor with his chair and the shattered lamp. He was wringing his hands tenderly. The two women stood at opposite ends of the table looking at Little Robert who stared across the table blankly as if still in a dream.

  “My hands,” Mr. Sangrom said in a pitiful voice, holding his hands up for the women to see. “It has clawed me, the demon has clawed me,” he whined.

  His hands were bloody with several long, deep scratches on the back of each one. Walter walked to the table. His face looked stunned as he took Mr. Sangrom’s hands and looked at them wonderingly.

  “Jesus,” Walter said stupidly, holding both of Mr. Sangrom’s hands as if he and the other man were preparing to dance. “Look at this.”

  Robert sat down weakly on the floor. He was just waking up. What had happened? I too am dazed, wondering if I shifted or not. I have been asleep, and I have shifted in my sleep? I have never done that, and I think it is impossible, but something has startled me into full awareness while Robert is still present. Robert felt light, as if he could drift away on a breath of air. He stood up, looking at the adults in the room. They were all looking at him with horror on their faces, and the dark haired man was waving his bloody hands at him.

  “Now will you believe me?” Aunt Cat said, standing very straight at the end of the table. “Now that you’ve seen with you own eyes?”

  “Look what the demon did to me,” Mr. Sangrom wailed, his smile turned upside down, his polished hair in sticky disarray over his forehead. “This is not work for a spiritualist,” he said in his high, hurt voice. “You need a wild animal trainer, Frank Buck, a cage.” He kept walking back and forth, holding his wounded hands up for everyone to see while Walter turned back and forth mechanically, like a tin, target in a shooting gallery.

  “Here, Mr. Sangrom,” Vaire said, coming back from the kitchen where no one had seen her go. “Wrap your hands in this wet towel. I have some mercurochrome upstairs. I’ll get it.”

  But Mr. Sangrom wrapped his hands and did not want to stay in the house. He walked unsteadily to the front door, making a wide detour around Little Robert who stood beside his fallen chair in his nightshirt which had a long tear down the front.

  “No. No, thank you, Mrs. Woodson,” Mr. Sangrom said. “I am finished with this case. Mrs. N., I am afraid I am not the one you want. I am a spiritualist and a worker with hypnotism. I am not an exorcist, I am not a dealer with such things as I have seen and felt tonight. I am not accustomed to dealing with such physical, such awful things.” He continued to stand at the door, aware that Mrs. Nordmeyer’s car was his only hope for quick escape, and yet wanting to bolt away from the house as if it were on fire.

  Robert was awake now, looking from Aunt Cat to Vaire to the discouraged Mr. Sangrom, now so different from the suave, dark man who had put his white hands on the table for Robert’s own hands t
o rest on. He felt sad, looking at these people, at beautiful Vaire who looked sideways at him but not directly, at Walter, whose head was cocked on one side with his face drooping as if he were still stunned and who did not look at Robert at all; and at Aunt Cat who looked him in the eyes with a hard, impenetrable stare, as if she were trying to hate him. He understood what had happened and also that he could not stay here, perhaps could not stay himself, understood that perhaps this was the same as his last night on earth, for only with these people could he be himself. And he had done something unforgivable to these people. He wanted to cry, but he could not. He stood there watching the people wake up to themselves, begin to be their own personalities again after such a shock as he had accidentally given them. Walter’s eyes came back into focus, and he began to speak in the old way, the confident, masculine way he had, of mass hypnosis, and how Sangrom had put them all under, and Aunt Cat began to shout at him, cursing as Robert had never heard her do, and Vaire speaking comforting words to Mr. Sangrom who was still standing in the doorway, wanting to get away and looking with fear at Robert. And Robert listened to all of this, his fingers feeling down the long rip in the front of his nightshirt, a rip he could not have made with both little hands, knowing how that rip had happened, and knowing it was not his fault. He began to be angry, very angry at these grownup people who would now do something terrible to him when he had only wanted to live among them and love them and learn about what it was to be a little boy growing up with other children, wanting to be a little boy and be loved. He grew angrier so that his face suffused with blood, and he thought about Mr. Duchamps getting hit with the hail and about Willie crying over him and the big shouldered man getting up in the icy grass and hitting Willie and knocking him down on the ground and Willie hurting Anne, and Martin’s face with the rain streaking his gray hair across his dying eyes, and Aunt Cat staring at him in horror, and the need he felt to come back to them all, to his beautiful Vaire and brave Anne, and how he wanted to love them if he knew how, if only he could know how to do it, and now he would not ever be able to do it, and he must run away in the night and hide again, and he thought about the dirty men under the railroad bridge and their sickness and cruelty, and about the dogs on the farm and the snakes in the chickenhouse and being in the cowbarn with Martin and the cats getting squirted with milk and now it was all gone, and about Rusty and the smell of him and his cold hatred that smelled like rotting fish, and remembered what it was like in the cold rain dancing with Willie and the sandwich game and Anne reading to him from the book about Happy, and now he had to run away again, be something else, someone else, forever, because they had made him do something he didn’t want to do, and that Mr. Sangrom, he was glad of the claws that had sprung out by accident, because there was no way now to get back into the family again, no way for them to know him, Little Robert, because they had pushed him into something else, no way for it not to be; there was no way to go back even to this afternoon and not go to the hideout and not want ever again to play the game with Willie, and not even come in to supper but run and hide under the porch so Mr. Sangrom would go away and it all would not have happened, no way for it to be anything but right now with all these suddenly strange people hating him, afraid of him, no way for it to be anything but now, NOW!

  Little Robert screamed and ran directly at Mr. Sangrom who shrank back so Robert slipped past, through the screen door and down the porch steps into the warm darkness. As he ran down the black tar street toward the hanging light at the far corner, his tears making the light all glittery and bouncing, he heard a woman’s voice calling his name.

  PART II

  *

  SECOND PERSON

  (1)

  There is much I do not know about the world I have been living in. I must learn to read, know more about humans and their ways, what they are capable of. Now I keep alert, travel at night, do not attempt to shift. I sense no feelings of fear or alarm in the houses I pause near at night. There is no general alarm in the countryside. Whether they we looking for the boy, I do not know, nor can I at this moment care. I travel southwest, following a feeling that I do not question. I do not pause long enough to consider making a burrow or hideaway, only sleep at night in thickets, hedges, empty outbuildings, and one night in an abandoned house on an old mattress. The tramps who had been living there thought I was a large wild dog in the dark when I woke and growled at them. But it is not pleasant, and for the first time I do not find it fun to run at night. The weather continues wet with thunderstorms and showers night and day soaking the ground, and I cannot avoid leaving tracks sometimes. There are so many fields being harvested of hay, so many creeks and rivers to cross, fences, towns to be avoided, farms and their ever present dogs.

  Tonight I am curled up in a large concrete drain tile hanging from a sand bank over a vast lake of water that I cannot see across, and although it is comfortable to lie and watch the lightning streaking from cloud to cloud out over the lake, there is a feeling of irritation that I have not felt before, as if I had a wound somewhere that ached. I will know when I have arrived at the proper place, however far that may be, and there I will attempt to shift into an appropriate form to continue my human life.

  ***

  Judging by the children I have seen, this boy must be between nine and twelve years old. He sits in the back of a half sunken old rowboat that is tied to a large willow tree and sticks out into the river. He wears a straw hat and the bib overalls all the farm boys wear, and his fishing pole is a length of ordinary sapling with string tied to the end of it. While I watch, he catches two fish that have whiskers and apparently bite or have stickers. I am not familiar with this fish and almost fall into the river straining for a better look at them. They are greenish black on the back and straw yellow on the belly and have wide mouths. The boy seems dissatisfied with them but puts them on a string he has dangling in the water so they cannot get away. I have studied him for some time, allowing his personality to shape my feelings, and now I am almost ready. I extend my perceptions but find not even a dog near, only squirrels and at the farthest extremity, the bend of the river, a couple of ducks in the reeds. I begin my concentration, the name comes closer as I feel my self contracting to a fine point like a brilliant spot of light, and it says itself in my mouth as the shift occurs: Charles Cahill.

  I am still present at the shift, as I usually am when a new person arrives. Charles holds the overalls I have stolen for him in his hands looking at them. They are smaller than they should be. He is bigger than I expected him to be, a bit larger I think than the boy in the boat down below the bank. He gets to his feet and walks unsteadily back to some bushes and tries to get into the overalls, but they are much too tight. I wonder as he is struggling and laughing to himself how I have shifted into so much larger a human than I had anticipated. For a moment I have the impulse to try again, as this person seems foreign to me, but I recall that for more than three months now much of my existence has been in a very different person, much smaller and younger, so perhaps I am only reacting to the change. I do not see how I could possibly shift into a person antithetical to myself. But he needs some clothes. I am about to take action on that matter when suddenly, before I can stop him, he has dropped the overalls and is running toward the high bank where I had lain hidden. I gather myself to shift back, but hesitate to perform such a thing in midair, for we are sailing off the bank, over the head of the startled boy in the old rowboat, and crashing into the river head first.

  Charles Cahill comes to the surface blowing a spout of muddy water in the air. Apparently he is as comfortable in the water as I am, swimming easily out further into the current before looking back at the white faced boy in the rowboat who has dropped his pole in the water and is watching it float away.

  “Hey,” Charles hollered, “did I scare ya?”

  “Yeah, and it’s not funny. That’s the only line and hook I got, and there it goes,” the other boy said with anger.

  “Jump in and get it
then.”

  “I can’t swim.”

  Charles swam back toward the boat, kicking powerfully against the current, picked the fishing pole out of the water, watching for the hook on the end of the line. “Here.” He handed the pole to the boy in the boat who eyed him curiously.

  “Thanks. Who are you?”

  “Charles Cahill. Who are you?”

  “Douglas Bent. I live up on the rise back there in the white house with the big double silo barn.”

  “Yeah, I seen it,” Charles said, hanging onto the boat and drifting his legs out in the current. “Sure is a big place. How come you ain’t hayin’ like everybody else?”

  “Oh, my Pa lets me fish when I want,” the boy in the boat said, looking away.

  “Must be a swell Pa you got. I seen a bunch of men and boys out in the oat field that must belong to your farm. They was workin’ pretty hard, it looked like.”

  “I don’t do so good in the hayfield,” Douglas said, looking straight at Charles as if he wanted to hit him.

  “How come is that?” Charles said, rocking the boat and sloshing the water in its bottom from side to side.

  “Quit it,” Douglas said. He raised one leg and laid it on the gunwale of the boat. It looked like he had a silver bolt through his foot. “’Cause I’m gimpy.”

  Charles examined the bolted foot, discovering it was a U-shaped brace that extended up into the boy’s pants leg. The foot had a shoe on it and looked rigid. “You got a crippled leg?” Charles said as if it were a marvelous new invention.

  “I had infantile paralysis when I was little,” Douglas said, putting the leg back into the boat. “I can get around okay, but it’s no good for workin’ hay or like that.”