The Orphan Read online

  “Well then, you don’t have to sweat yer ass out in the fields or carry them heavy milk cans or any of that stuff,” Charles said eagerly.

  “I’d rather,” said Douglas. “But Ma says you don’t always get your druthers.” He smiled crookedly as if he wanted to cry.

  Charles realized he could not make a good thing of it, and that probably Douglas didn’t spend much time thinking about it. “Well, at least you got a family and a place to sleep,” Charles said, chin on the back of the boat. “I ain’t got nothing, not even any clothes now.”

  “You haven’t got any clothes?” Douglas said, his eyes big. “What happened?”

  “Oh I stopped to swim back by the railroad bridge this morning, and I know better than to leave clothes around like that, but I just hopped off a freight, and I was hotter than a hot box, so I shucked ’em off and dived in, and I swum right back, but they was gone.”

  Douglas took his hat off and wiped his forehead. His hair was shiny black, plastered to his head with sweat. He had deep brown eyes and a kindly face with an unfortunate turned up nose that seemed out of place with his broad upper lip. Charles studied his face for a moment. Douglas looked more like a frog than he should, Charles decided, and at that moment, Douglas smiled happily and then opened his mouth and laughed.

  “And you been running around all day from here to the railroad tracks without any clothes?” Douglas laughed tentatively, then found it really funny and rocked back in the boat, fanning himself with his hat. “You went right by old lady McGee’s place, I bet,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “And if she saw you sneaking around her place naked, she’d call out the National Guard.”

  Charles got to laughing too at that, and he swore he had danced in old lady McGee’s front yard using rhubarb leaves for fans like Sally Rand at the World’s Fair. Douglas laughed until he cried, Charles watching and liking the smaller boy for his humor. After awhile they got quiet.

  “Don’t you live anywhere?” Douglas said.

  “Oh sometimes I sleep in a drain tile, sometimes in an old house like a hound dog,” Charles said truthfully. “I ain’t got no real home.”

  Douglas thought about that for awhile, looking Charles in the eye to see if he was kidding.

  “What grade are you in?” Douglas asked, trying to trap the other boy.

  “Never been in no school,” Charles said. “But I’d sure like to go.”

  “Never?”

  “What grade are you in?”

  “I’ll be in fifth this year. I skipped a grade last year, and now I’m in the same grade as Rudy. Rudy’s my next older brother,” Douglas added.

  “I bet old dumb Rudy likes that,” Charles said, grinning. He was beginning to feel cold in the water.

  “He’s not really dumb,” Douglas said. “But how’d you know he didn’t like it?” Then his face lit up. “Oh, yeah, I see.” He looked at the other boy with a more respectful eye.

  “I don’t s’pose you could give me a hand,” Charles said, shivering a little.

  “You mean to get out? Oh, you mean to get some clothes and like that?”

  “Yeah. I’d work for ’em, or pay you someway. but it’d have to be after awhile, ’cause I ain’t got anything now except my good looks.” And Charles grinned.

  Douglas looked thoughtfully at the bigger boy, so comfortable seeming in his big strong body, a smooth swimmer, smart about people, and had probably had thousands of adventures. He took a deep breath. “I’ll get you some of Rudy’s or Carl’s old ones. Carl is my oldest brother,” he said.

  “Lord, how many brothers you got?”

  “Just two, but Ma’s pregnant and we’ll probably have some more by Christmas, Pa says.”

  “Well, I’d be your friend forever if you could get me decent,” Charles said, putting his feet down and squishing through the mud toward the bank. “If old lady McGee sees me in her front yard again, she’ll just die of fright.”

  ***

  I have been comfortable in this large, airy barn that is filling up with hay and has a dozen fine Holstein cows in its stanchions and two horses and a yearling colt at the other end. There are all sorts of nooks and doorways I use, and the dogs quickly learned they must leave me alone. But the situation has been strange. I find myself in a double-double life situation, with Douglas bringing clothes and food to Charles whenever he can, pretty much in return for the stories Charles tells him of his adventures, although where he has picked up these tales is quite beyond me. I seem to have shifted into a person with an endless gift for lying entertainingly, and that is exactly what the young Bent boy likes. Now I will make arrangements for attending school. It begins week after next, and I am determined to learn to read. I had thought that perhaps Charles with his facile tongue would lie his way into a place in the one-room brick schoolhouse that is less than a mile down the road from the Bent farm. But as it turns out, no lying is necessary, thanks to Mrs. Stumway, a widow living alone in her large stone house not more than a quarter mile from the school.

  She was pointed out to Charles one day when he and Douglas were slipping through the fence into her apple orchard. It was no longer an orchard, really, only a few straggly trees with wormy apples, but it was safely away from the house and hidden in the five-acre forest which was what the old lady had left of all the land she and her husband had once owned. Her house was invisible from the road, the whole five acres surrounding it being covered with oak, maple, fruit trees, some pines and other evergreens, buckeyes, lilacs grown into eight-foot hedges, and hazel bushes. Dense thickets of raspberries and gooseberry filled in the chinks, so that Mrs. Stumway lived like an old widowed rabbit in the midst of an inaccessible briar patch. Her neighbors had long ago given up trying to be friendly or even communicate with her after her husband had died some fifteen years past, and for most of them it was of little interest whether she lived in that impenetrable tangle or had died and been absorbed by it. Except that she appeared at her mailbox every few days in good weather, they would have believed she no longer existed. She was sharp tongued with those who professed good intentions and violent with those who professed anything else. An itinerant scissors sharpener and odds and ends salesman who occasionally visited the area told a tale of being beaten with a mop handle for trying to flatter the old lady into buying a bar of scented soap.

  Charles listened to Douglas telling about the old Stumway widow, eating his fill of her apples while sitting on a low branch and studying the back of the house which could be dimly made out through the dense tangle of trees and undergrowth. It seemed to him there might be a possibility in such an old lady if she were approached right. Douglas said she had given him a piece of cake once because she felt sorry for his having a bad leg, but that she didn’t like either of his brothers at all, and was probably not fond of his family in general. Charles thought she was showing nothing but good taste in that, for he did not like either of Douglas’s brothers either, finding both of them surly prisoners of the farm work, practically slaves of their father, working alongside the farm hands Mr. Bent hired but getting no pay for their work. They were both in a perpetual state of suppressed rage that left them either exhausted or dangerous most of the time.

  “Doug,” Charles said, putting his hands on the smaller boy’s shoulders, “you are going to find me a place in the world.”

  Douglas looked doubtful. “If you’re thinking about living with Mrs. Stumway, you’d better forget it. She’s about as friendly as a gar fish.”

  “Maybe so, but I think a person living like she does needs me around to help ’em, especially since I’m so handy and could fix things up and clean up that rat’s nest she lives in.”

  “I think she likes it that way,” Douglas said.

  But there are factors Douglas knows nothing about. The next three nights I sneak into Mrs. Stumway’s woods, make my way to the old stone house sitting in its welter of maples and oaks and raspberries, and the one faint oil lamp burning in an upstairs window, and I wait until tha
t lamp is turned down and blown out. Then I leap silently to the porch roof, old, sagging, but still sound, creep along the side of the house to the old lady’s window and listen through the screen until she breathes regularly. It is quite easy to tell when she is sound asleep. She snores like a rusty windmill. Then I insert one long claw, flip the hooks on the screen and slip into the bedroom, crouch down beside her bed on the nubby hooked rug that pictures curly flowers in a circular garden, and I whisper in her ear. She is between seventy and eighty years old, pure white hair, some of which has fallen away and left a bald spot on the crown of her head, no teeth at night, a high broad forehead with fine wrinkles, a long thin nose and a sharp chin that points at the ceiling as she sleeps among her big pillows and snores great long squeaky windmill snores. Her hands are large with long fingers that have not lost their look of grace in age, although they are covered with brown patches. The hands look as though they might still play a piano or some stringed instrument. She sleeps on her back, her hands lying on top of the patchwork quilt.

  I whisper Charles’s name: “Charles Cahill, a good boy.” Over and over I whisper it, thinking how absurd this is, and yet something prompts me that the procedure is not without effect. I have resisted the impulse to explore her house at night, for if she should wake and hear me, she might suspect a prowler, and I do not want to frighten her. That, I believe, would be the wrong approach, although I had thought of frightening her so that she would need a protector. The whispering campaign I am conducting in Charles’s behalf is an interesting experiment, and it pleases Charles.

  ***

  The two boys turned off the road into Mrs. Stumway’s driveway which was not really a driveway anymore since a cottonwood tree had fallen across it years ago and had not been removed. It was a twenty-foot-long turnaround where the grocery delivery man’s truck pulled in once a week to bring the old lady’s provisions. Charles carried a watermelon, one of the long light green ones, as a propitiatory gift. Douglas was full of doubt, but rather excited about what Charles was attempting. As they crashed through the underbrush toward the back porch, Douglas expected any second to be shouted at. He was jumpy and irritated at catching his brace in the raspberry creepers. When the voice did come, it startled him so that he fell to one knee.

  “Get out of there, you damned kids!” came a strong voice from the dimness of the back porch which had curtained windows all around it.

  “Mrs. Stumway,” Douglas called, getting back to his feet. “We brought you a melon.”

  “You got no business botherin’ me, you damned kids,” the voice shouted again. “Now git, before I get my rock salt after you.”

  As far as Douglas knew, the old lady had no rock salt, nor a shot gun to fire it in anyway, but she was full of threats.

  “This is my friend, Charles Cahill, Mrs. Stumway,” Douglas shouted at Charles’s prompting. Charles held the green melon in front of him like a sacrificial baby held out to the wrath of Moloch.

  There was silence from the porch, and Charles wondered if the nightly whispering sessions had made some difference in the old lady’s feeling about strangers.

  The back door opened with a creak of the spring and the old lady appeared, wearing what looked like an aviator’s helmet minus the goggles, so that her white hair stuck out like little cold flames all around her face. She wore a long, featureless brown dress that fell straight from her neck to her ankles, giving her the look of a fake tree trunk with an old lady’s face peeping out of the top.

  “Douglas Bent,” she said, as if naming the boy for the first time in the history of the world. “Come in here, and bring your melon friend there too.”

  The boys walked into Mrs. Stumway’s kitchen, expecting to find an indoor counterpart of the wilderness outside, but the kitchen looked like any farm kitchen, perhaps cleaner than most, with a serviceable sink and pitcher pump, a kerosene cook stove and an enamel top table that looked surgically clean. The light was dim because every window was grown over with ivy, four o’clock vines, and ornamental bushes gone savage. In Charles’s mind it seemed almost like an undersea cavern with the greenish flickering light from the wobbling leaves and intermittent sun.

  “You!” Mrs. Stumway said so suddenly that Charles jumped. “Put that melon on the cutting board. I suppose you kids want something, bringing me a melon. But I can’t imagine what it would be. You steal my fruit soon as it comes on the trees, worse than jays and magpies.”

  Charles tried to think of some way to put the old lady in a better mood, but every time he opened his mouth to speak, she shot out something of her own that silenced him. Douglas was turning back and forth as the old lady went from cupboard to table, getting out plates and forks, trying to get some word in also. He was about to leap into a silent space in her monologue when she bent over the kitchen cabinet, but as he was about to say Charles’s name, Mrs. Stumway straightened up, pulling something long and gleaming from beneath the silver drawer. She whirled about swinging a giant blade that looked as long as her arm.

  “Ha!” she said, swishing the blade back and forth.

  “Charles!” Douglas screamed involuntarily, stumbling back and bumping into Charles who was also moving backward.

  The old lady looked at the boys over the long blade and grinned so that her artificial teeth shone like a row of skulls. “Scared you?” she said. “This is from the Philippine Islands. My baby brother, Adam, brought it back with him from when he was there fighting the Moros. It’s called a bolo knife.” She waved it again, but a bit less militantly.

  “And it’s very good for melons,” she said, walking to the cutting board. She raised the long knife in both hands and brought it down clean and hard, right through the middle of the melon so that it stuck in the cutting board. “Damned knife. Haven’t had a melon for a ugh, long time, ugh.” She could not pull the knife free.

  Charles came forward and worked the long blade loose from the cutting board and handed it back to the old lady. She sliced circles of melon for all three, and they sat at the enamel table and ate them with old iron forks with black wooden handles and long tines like pitchforks. The old woman studied Charles quite openly as they ate, asking him about his home, parents, whether he went to school, and Charles did his best to charm her and play on what he imagined were her sympathies.

  “I never did know any father or mother, ma’am,” Charles said, his face looking as if he were about to cry. “My uncle used to make me work in his store till nine o’clock every night, and then I had to sweep up and wash floors and windows on Saturday mornings, so I just ran away one time when I got sick of it.”

  Douglas looked at Charles with amazement. He had never heard that version of the other boy’s life, and he didn’t know whether to believe any of his tales now or whether to be angry or delighted at Charles’s facility at lying. Mrs. Stumway nodded her head in the aviator’s cap and clucked disapprovingly at appropriate points in the story.

  “So you ran off when the work got hard?” she said, astonishing Charles who had thought he was getting her approval.

  “It was awful hard, ma’am,” Charles said, at a loss which way to proceed. “And sometimes he licked me with a strap.”

  “Some boys need it,” she said, smiling her even false teeth at Charles who felt less certain of himself now.

  “Charles would like to go to school and learn to read and write, Mrs. Stumway, but he’s got no place to live,” Douglas said with a desperate edge in his voice. “He’s been hiding out in our barn, but if my Dad finds out about him, he won’t be able to stay.”

  “Maybe your father could use an extra hand with the hay, Douglas,” the old lady said, spitting a line of melon seeds into her plate.

  “But Charles said that he didn’t …”

  “Didn’t want all that work, hah?” the old lady broke in. “Well, I’m not surprised.”

  “Wait a minute,” Charles said. “I’m not afraid of work. I worked plenty where I come from. But I don’t want to get Douglas in trouble
with his family. He’s been a good friend. I thought you might need someone around to kind of straighten up outside, get that brush out of the driveway and such.”

  “Oh, you’re welcome to stay here and go to school, Charles Cahill,” Mrs. Stumway said, looking directly into his eyes. “I just didn’t want you to think a couple of sprouts like you could put something over on an old lady.” She put her hands on the table and looked at Charles, the corners of her long mouth turned up sharply. Her face, seamed and foxed with age as it was, reminded Charles of someone, abut he couldn’t say who. He smiled at her with what he imagined was his most winning and ingratiating smile. He had a place.

  Charles found that although the old woman had an acid tongue and sometimes accused him of being lazy, she did not often lose her temper, and did not insist that he do much work around the place. On the following Tuesday when school began in the one-room brick school just across the road and down a bit, Charles felt quite at home with Mrs. Stumway and was looking forward to learning to read.

  It was no surprise to Miss Jessie Wrigley on that first day of school to find Charles applying for entrance to the first gade. He was as big as any twelve-year-old and could not read his own name or even spell it properly, for that matter. She had signed up William Seaboldt last year for first grade, and he had been fourteen. He had attended no more than a month before he ran away, and she hoped that this poor orphan boy whom Mrs. Stumway had taken in would stick to his studies. Certainly he was promising looking, but then she read in the note from Mrs. Stumway that he had good looks and a winning manner, but was not a worker or very persevering. She looked at him, standing in front of her desk amid the other children in all eight grades who were signing up for their year’s school, and she wondered if his good appearance would not work against him. He had obviously got the little crippled Bent boy in his spell and was earnestly working on some of the other boys, telling them some outrageous story about his days riding the freights.