The Orphan Read online

  “Charles Cahill,” Miss Wrigley said, “will you move one of the larger desks over into the first grade row? We don’t want you breaking one of our little desks.” She smiled at him to help soften the disgrace of his being in first grade row, but he appeared not to have the slightest embarrassment at his position. An unusual boy, she thought, watching his easy. way with the other children. Different from most of these farm children who are so shy and wordless, she thought. I wonder if he is a fast learner?

  For his part, Charles was as delighted with Miss Wrigley as he was with having a home and being accepted in the farm community. He had walked in with Douglas that Tuesday morning and joined the circle of children around the teacher’s desk expecting to confront some old crone of a spinster woman who would smack his hands with a ruler if he did not do as she said. Instead he found a young, mild looking woman with short brown hair and a direct manner that made the children feel at ease because they always knew how she felt. If someone did poorly on a lesson and Miss Wrigley was displeased, she would say to that child, “That bothers me, Mary, because it makes me feel that you don’t care about learning to be a civilized person.” And the child would usually feel that it was only right that Miss Wrigley feel that way. Charles admired this approach to the manipulation of others, which was how he felt about it, and learned to use it himself as best he could. He was also rather taken, even on that first day, with Miss Wrigley herself. She was short, not much taller than Charles, with a compact, efficient looking body that Charles liked to watch. Her school clothes were ordinary enough, even drab, some browns and dark greens with an occasional white blouse to set off, but she seemed to Charles to possess a quick grace that did not need ornamentation. And most of all he admired her learning. She seemed to Charles to know everything in the world, and he wanted passionately to know what she knew, to move with her assurance through the stories, the histories, the mathematical problems he watched her doing for the higher grades. And although he was not, as Mrs. Sturnway had surmised, a willing worker in the fields or around the house, he worked for Miss Wrigley in the name of learning.

  (2)

  I have, of course, noticed the increase in my own size. That is no surprise; and the other changes, the strange sort of itching I feel that must be the beginnings of sexual need, the impulses I have to pull strange pranks and tricks on humans when I am hunting at night, these might be expected in a growing creature and are reflected by Charles’s behavior in the human world in daylight. But there are other changes in my world less explicable. For one thing, some mysterious force has made it impossible for me to enter the old Stumway house without shifting back into Charles. This is baffling to me, as I cannot imagine anything that would prevent me entering any human habitation unless it might be armor plate and giant locks. In the second week of my living there I slipped out at night as usual, and upon my return, I was unable to cross the threshold of the back door. I tried a window downstairs, my own room window upstairs, and all was the same. Something I could not even imagine kept me from entering. As I would put my head through the window, I would feel faint, and my heart would begin to pound in my ears, a sensation I have never had before would twist my guts, and only my moving back from the house would relieve the feelings. And yet, once I had shifted to Charles, I walked in through the door with no harm or adverse feelings. The danger here is something to ponder, something to find out about, but as long as Charles is immune to this force, I feel relatively safe. It is only that, among the other changes developing in my life, this one is the more worrisome, the more nagging because it is inexplicable, and I do not know if the old woman is responsible or if it is some effect of which she is unaware.

  The other change is even more surprising, and is much more pleasant. I am crouched in the weedy corner of a field with a huddle of sheep about twenty yards away beginning to make their loose fright noises in the darkness. I expect any moment to have to take care of the dogs that are inevitable in such a situation. I do not often go for a lamb now, but this night I am hungry and not in a mood to make do with rabbits and chickens. I wait for the dogs and extend my spatial sense to find them. They are there at the corner of the tall manger affair from which the sheep get their hay. There are two of them, sheep dogs of some sort, large quiet beasts that creep up on one and bite suddenly without barking. I will have to deal with them, for they have scented me. I feel their arousal and fear as they come creeping along the fence row in the weeds. I will deal with them quickly, for they make me full of rage, and I am hungry. I sense them clearly now as their vibrations reach my spatial sense, and I feel myself repelling them, hating them for interrupting me. Suddenly I am startled, for they have stopped coming toward me. They are turning about, standing up and trotting away back toward the distant barns. I stand in the weeds, showing myself, but they do not turn. In fact they are running away now, dashing as if in a race to see who can most quickly leave the flock unprotected. Can they be going to get the farmer? I stand as quiet as a tree stump listening, reaching out to the distant barns with my senses. They reach the barns and crouch down facing the fields. They are more than a thousand feet away now, at the very limit of my perception, and they are lying down as if nothing was happening. I keep them in the corner of my perceptual field and walk among the sheep who are petrified, of course, and pick out a fat lamb. The dogs have not moved. Amazing!

  I move to the next field, across a small creek, and have my meal. The lamb is delicious. No sign of the dogs as I dig a small hole to bury the leavings. It will not do for the farmer to know that something has eaten his lamb. Better to let him think it was simply stolen. Perhaps the dogs are cowards, but I must know. On the way back to the Stumway place, I try it again: slipping up to a barn, I wait until the dogs begin sneaking around sniffing for me, and then I make the feeling of repulsion toward them. They stop, stand up as if in broad daylight, and walk back to their beds under the back porch of the farmhouse. Perhaps there is more to it than this. I extend my senses for animal life and find a cat sneaking about in the barn looking for mice. I make a feeling of greed, of hunger strong in my already sated body. I feel that the cat must come to me. I watch carefully, feeling for where the cat is. She stops stalking the mice and comes obediently out the barn door, tail in the air as if she were going for a saucer of milk, out the big door, tail waving gracefully and steps right up to me where I crouch in the shadows. I could have picked her up and eaten her, although I detest eating cats. She stands there looking around in the darkness, oblivious of me. I release the feeling from my mind, relax the feeling of attraction in some way, I am not quite sure how, but I feel the spell is broken. The cat suddenly bristles and blows up like a balloon, every hair erect, spitting her fear at me, backing up in terror. I laugh softly and she turns and races across the yard to a tree and vanishes up the trunk.

  The implications of this new power are enormous. I must try it out carefully to determine its limits. Could I, for instance, make a larger animal or a human obey my feeling? One thing it does ensure is a ready supply of food without my having to run after it.

  ***

  Charles picked up the knack of reading as if he had only forgotten it for awhile instead of having to learn it from the beginning. By mid-October he had finished Elson Reader, Book II, which was what the second graders were using, and he could do carry addition and mark-off subtraction, and Miss Wrigley considered him her star pupil among the twenty-seven students. Some of the other students were not so happy with Charles because he made them look less than intelligent with his pertinent questions and his astounding progress, but most of them liked his fresh, outgoing manner and his willingness to try any game or feat they could think up. A tribute to Charles’s good nature, Miss Wrigley thought, was the fact that he had not to her knowledge had a single fight since coming to the school, something of a record for new boys. Charles’s secret on that subject was simple. He told the challenger, and there were several in the first week of school, “I don’t know much about fighting
fair, ’cause I always had to fight guys with knives and stuff. So if we fight, I hope you fight dirty, ’cause that’s what I do.” His opponent usually had second thoughts at that, recalling Charles’s gory tales of battles among the tramps on the railroad and in the hobo jungles. So far, Charles had not had a battle, and he could usually kid his enemy out of his anger and save both their faces.

  At softball, which was the only game the farm boys played, besides such chase games as cops and robbers and red rover, Charles was an apt learner, but was somewhat slower than in the academic field. It was at softball that he learned that some of the strange power I had discovered that night in the sheep pen carried over to his life. The star pitcher in the school was Ronald Borsold, called “Runt” because he was small and compact. Runt Borsold was thirteen years old with powerful arms and a sharp eye, and he was known for fanning the softball batters on the opposing team. Charles happened to be on the opposite team one afternoon when Runt was pitching and was finding it humiliating that he could not hit the ball. After two strikes of his second time at bat had gone by, he was beginning to get angry. The infield chatter was getting to him. He was sweating out the next pitch, knowing it would zip by as the others had, and he suddenly thought strongly, “Pitch it to me easy!”

  The next pitch sailed in like a feather and Charles smacked it out into the tall grass around the old outhouse, a home run off Runt! Charles’s team bruised him considerably with pounding on the back and head when he crossed home plate well ahead of the long, bouncing throw from a suddenly awakened left fielder.

  Runt Borsold was standing on the pitcher’s bare spot in the grass looking at Charles as if he had just levitated himself six feet in the air. The next batter benefited somewhat from Runt’s astonishment and got a single off a bouncing ball past second base, but the rest of the batters had the same difficulties hitting him as they usually did. By the time Charles came to bat again, he was wondering also what had happened and allowed the first strike to go by without trying the command he had used before. But at that point, I am aroused by the emotional effect the game is having on Charles, and I force the feeling I had used on the animals to emanate, an effect that made Charles feel a strong emotional reaction, an emotional “command” to the pitcher to “throw it easy!”

  And here it came, like a piece of cake, sailing in. Charles got set and whammed it over the far left field barbed wire fence, another homer for sure, as that fence was so seldom hit that any ball going over it was an automatic home run. Both teams were screaming now, some of the players on Runt’s team supposing he had sold out for some secret reward from Charles. It did look bad for Runt, but in the next minutes he redeemed himself from that charge by leaving the pitcher’s spot in tears, an almost unforgiveabie expression of emotion among the boys. Obviously, he was not selling out, but had been the victim of some unaccountable lapse.

  Charles was freely said to have given Runt the evil eye, and his stock as a softball player went up a thousand points. Charles, when he was able to get a thoughtful minute to himself, felt the reality of his power over the other boy and wondered how he could make it works for him. He decided to try the big experiment at once. He tried to command Miss Wrigley, and it didn’t work. It was simply a failure. He worked himself up to an artificial pitch of emotion and silently commanded her to walk over to his desk with a book he wanted from the “library,” a single set of bookshelves in the front of the room by the piano. Sitting at her desk marking papers from the seventh and eighth grades, she look up once and, catching Charles’s eye, smiled faintly at him, but she made no move to get the requested book. Charles was heavily disappointed at the failure of what had seemed to him an easy road to getting whatever he wanted in the world. His experiment that same evening with Mrs. Stumway he counted worse than a failure. It had a reverse effect, causing her to get angry with him over his not having carried the kitchen garbage to the pit behind the house. And when Charles tried it a second time, thinking with all his will power that the old lady should fetch him an apple from the kitchen, she looked up from a long letter she was reading, just as if she had felt the command and said, “Charles, I want you to paint the outhouse this weekend.” He retreated to his homework, thinking angrily that the power over Runt had been a fluke. I know differently, but Charles does not understand when I try to tell him that the power is functional rather than whimsical.

  Charles and Douglas Bent hitched a ride with the grocery delivery man one Saturday in October for a fishing excursion. They got off near the dam just inside of town and climbed down the jutting stone ledges beside the old power house on the north side of the river. The river was higher now, with a solid green sheet of water pouring over the full width of the dam and frothing down the fish ladders on either side. Across the river they could see the public landing below the new power house with its line of fishermen and were glad they had come to the north side where only a few kids were fishing. They noticed that no one was catching much on this side, but they baited their hooks with worms and tossed them into the calm, deep water between the end of the dam apron and the old sandstone wall of the abandoned power house. The water looked metallic and dangerous with deep eddies.

  “There ought to be some bass in there,” Douglas said.

  “I’d settle for a red horse or maybe a buffalo,” Charles said. He had picked up the fish names rapidly from Douglas, but had never caught anything. “Or maybe a blue pig or a green sheep or a purple chicken,” he said, making Douglas laugh. Charles liked to make Douglas laugh, and the smaller boy in turn enjoyed Charles’s ability to do so, often ending with tears in his eyes from his friend’s absurdities.

  After they had fished awhile in silence, Douglas said, “You getting along okay with Mrs. Stumway?”

  “Yeah. She’s not so bad. I’m supposed to paint the outhouse this weekend, but she didn’t say anything when I asked if I could come fishin’.”

  “Does she make you work much?”

  “Nah. She’s funny. Y’know, I’m living there and eating her food, and she don’t really make me do much at all.” Charles said it as he thought about it, and realized it was true, and that he hadn’t really thought about that. Maybe she’s rich, he thought, and said, “Maybe she’s rich, you think?”

  “I don’t know. Ma says her and Mr. Stumway used to own all the land around where her little woods is now, and where the school is and everything, but that they sold it all and quit farming even before her husband got sick.”

  “She must have some money,” Charles said, not really interested. “I think she gets checks in the mail, ’cause she gives an envelope to Mr. Graham every week, and always talks to him about it for awhile.”

  “That’s probably just his pay for the groceries,” Douglas said.

  “No. She pays him cash money for those,” Charles said, watching the swirling water. “Anyway, she’s okay if you like eggs for breakfast every morning of the world and sardine sandwiches for lunch and pork chops for supper.”

  “That’s not so bad,” Douglas said. “You don’t have to pick peas and tomatoes or shuck sweet corn if you don’t want to, and I have to, and I don’t get much better food than that.”

  “You don’t have to paint a dirty old outhouse that’s so rotten the flies all moved out last week.”

  Douglas laughed. “That’s nothing. I had to paint all the storm windows last week, and that’s a bugger because you gotta watch the glass, and …”

  There was a sudden fountain of water from the pool where they had dropped their lines. For an instant, Charles thought a giant fish was coming out after them, but then both boys realized someone was rocking them. They looked around at the few other boys lined up along the ledges, but none of them looked guilty. The water rose up again in a huge splash, getting both of them wet. They heard laughter from overhead and looked up. On the ledge of the old power house building, some fifteen feet over their heads, a face peered, laughing evilly. The hair was red and stuck up in every direction, and the face lo
oked unnaturally pale.

  “Look out,” Charles said as another piece of sandstone came plummeting past them into the pool.

  “Hey up there, you damned idiot,” Charles yelled at the white face, “we’re tryin’ to fish down here.”

  Another stone followed, this time missing the river altogether and smashing into the ledge not a foot from where Charles sat. “Hey, goddammit,” he yelled, “you gonna hit somebody.”

  “It’s a city kid,” Douglas said, and there was fear in his voice. “They do things like that for fun.”

  “You sound like you’re afraid of that red headed piece of horse apple up there,” Charles said, grinning. He put his pole down and scrambled up the ledges toward the corner of the old sandstone building where projecting flagstone-sized steps led up to the ledge where the rock thrower was hiding. As he grabbed a projecting stone to begin the climb, Douglas shouted, he glanced up just in time to see the white face and red hair again, but not in time to duck away from the stone that hit his left arm a numbing blow at the elbow.

  Charles sat down hard on the ledge, holding his arm. It felt like a baseball bat had hit it. His rage flared, and with the pain in his arm running up into his neck he thought savagely, “Jump in the river, you sonofabitch,” and said aloud, “Oh, goddammit!”

  Douglas shouted again, and something hit the water at the same time, something a lot bigger than the rocks that had been coming down. “He jumped in,” Douglas shouted, and the other boys along the ledges were all standing up now too and pointing into the roiling backwash at the end of the dam apron beyond the fish ladder.

  “Look at that. There he is,” they were shouting.

  Charles looked and saw the white faced boy being rolled in the heavy backwash below the dam. The crazy fool had leaped all the way over the pool where they were fishing and right into the worst part of the river, the wash below the dam where the falling water hit and curled back on itself. Sometimes barrels and old logs would be caught in the wash for days before they got loose. He would drown sure.