The Orphan Page 2

  “And who knows when that’ll be?” he said, smiling.

  After the sheriff had driven down the lane, Robert felt more at ease. He had not known certainly how entangled he might become with the law.

  “You’re not going to give me away?” he asked, looking up at Aunt Cat and Martin in turn.

  “Little Robert,” the woman said, smiling, “Martin and I are not going to give you away.”

  “It would be nice to know where you dropped from,” Martin said. “But if you’ve got a touch of amnesia, well, it’s not your fault.”

  “Does the … does that word mean I don’t remember?”

  “That’s right, but you’ll probably have it all come back to you one of these days,” Martin said. There was something like a frown on his face, Robert thought, but it was hard to tell. His brown face was so seamed and creased. You could always tell when he smiled though.

  “If I remember, and I don’t have umnesia, then I have to go away with the sheriff?”

  The two adults looked at each other. “Well,” Aunt Cat said, “if you do remember, won’t you want to go home to where your own folks are?”

  “I guess I’ll keep the umnesia for awhile,” Robert said, sliding off the chair. “Can I go out and play with Biff?”

  ***

  Martin would carry Robert around the farm, showing him the barns, the corncribs, the chicken and brooder houses, the milk house and the tool shed, talking in a low toned, expressive murmur as if it were all a secret between Robert and him, as if one day all this would belong to the little boy. Robert loved riding on the solid arm that held him as if he were a hawk being trained for flight. He shouted over the tractor noise as they disked the new cornfield, asking even more questions, for his mind was empty and waiting for the whole world. And the farmer would squint up his eyes so they almost disappeared in the walnut burl wrinkles and laugh quietly at all the questions, and answer them all. In the early morning, Robert would go to the barns for milking, carrying a tiny galvanized pail the farmer had found somewhere, and he would have a try at the milking, working on the “stripper” teats at the back while the old farmer sat tilted forward on his one-legged stool, his gray head against the Guernsey flank, making the front teats squirt in rhythm and fill the big buckets with sudsy warm milk that the cats cried after. And sometimes a cat would sit patiently beyond the cow’s swinging, lion tail and Martin would bend the teat and squirt a long stream of foamy milk right into the cat’s mouth, the cat sitting up, taking it in the eyes, ears, whiskers, chest, everywhere just to get some in her mouth, and Robert leaping around and laughing until he cried to see the cats all happily bedraggled with milk and Martin murmuring a low laugh against the cow’s red flank that dented just right for his head to fit in while he milked her. Robert thought it all seemed to fit together perfectly, the nests fit the chickens, the chicks just filled the warm brooder hood, the cows fit their stanchions and walked along the lane to the pasture in a line that just fit the path they had worn. All of it seemed right and perfect, even the smells of manure and sheep dip and fly spray, all the pungencies of the farm, seemed to fit in their places in the whitewashed barn and the animals’ houses laid out so neatly around the big, hard-packed barnyard.

  One morning coming downstairs late in his nightshirt, Robert’s hair bristled and I almost shifted, hearing new voices coming from the living room. There was also a strange, rhythmic train of sounds that accompanied the voices. I had never heard music before, nor had Robert, but then I had not attended to the doings of humans much until now. A group of voices was going up in pitch, then down, seeming to smile and shout at the same time, their words slurred and drawn out in unison. Shrill scrapings and whistling noises accompanied the voices, keeping pace with them. “We’re glad to see ya!” they screamed, and then the music broke off and someone said as if suddenly finding it was spring, “It’s the Breakfast Club!” And there was a lot of garbled laughter and hooraying. Robert was appalled that this was taking place in the living room and presented an obviously frightened face to Aunt Cat who was calmly preparing some bread dough in the kitchen.

  “Good morning, Little Robert,” she said, her arms floured to the elbow. “Oh my, what’s wrong, little fella?” she said, suddenly catching his expression.

  “Somebody’s in there,” Robert said, looking toward the living room where the voices were proclaiming their intention to “march around the breakfast table.” The voices sounded flat, as if they were speaking through a narrow crack.

  Aunt Cat looked down at him for a long minute, abSently rubbing flour off her arms. Then she began to laugh and picked him up, making long flour marks on his nightshirt, and carried him into the living room.

  “Look here, Little Robert. Look at that. There’s not a soul in here. See?”

  Robert looked around. The living room was deserted except for the old upright piano, the upholstered sofa and chair, and the usual bric-a-brac. The voices were coming out of an arch-shaped thing that at first looked like a chair back.

  “That’s the radio, Robert,” Aunt Cat said, jiggling him on her arm as if that motion would help to settle the knowledge in his head. “Didn’t you ever hear a radio before? My goodness, child, where have you been? I thought all little boys nowadays listened to Jack Armstrong and Dick Tracy.”

  Robert did indeed become so enthralled with the radio that he had to be pulled away for meals for a few days. I was equally taken with the music, and often was dissatisfied with Robert’s choice of program, his taste running to Buck Rogers, while I would have searched the dial for Benay Venuto or the Merry Macs. In the sitting around time after supper, Martin would listen to the deep voiced Boak Carter and the news, and Aunt Cat would turn to One Man’s Family or the Easy Aces. The conflict generated between Robert’s need for adventure tales and my own intense curiosity about music led finally to a standoff on the radio question, one of the few times I found myself interfering in his life. We had to take turns listening. To the Nordmeyers, it must have seemed the little boy simultaneously possessed an obvious love of mystery and adventure and a peculiar need to listen to almost any kind of music. He would be pressed to the gothic speaker of the Philco for the serials and even some daytime shows like Helen Trent; and later he would sit glumly, almost angrily in a chair at some distance from the set listening to Guy Lombardo, but would protest violently if anyone offered to change the station.

  The kind of music Robert liked best was Martin’s harmonica playing. The farmer would take the old Hohner from his shirt pocket and play “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” or “Peanut Sat on a Railroad Track,” or “Pop Goes the Weasel,” with a real pop in it, and Robert would smile until his jaws hurt. He even got so he could play a few notes predictably, so that Martin made up a simple tune consisting of in and out notes in a descending scale. They made up lyrics together (to the tune of “Put Another Nickle In, In the Nickelodeon”) and the first one they made went like this:

  In a little cubbyhole

  Sits a tiny mousie-O

  Playing on her piccolo

  To make her whiskers shiver.

  There came to be a dozen or so verses eventually, some of which made no sense at all, but Robert would play the in and out tune until Aunt Cat was driven from the room. It seemed to be something only Martin and Robert could stand for very long.

  One evening after supper, Martin and Aunt Cat sat in the dining room listening to the radio, each drinking beer from a tall brown bottle, a thing they did so seldom that both Robert and I were interested in it. Robert expressed a desire for some beer. Aunt Cat said it was not for children, but Martin thought that a little beer wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  “Just a little bit now,” said Aunt Cat. “You don’t know what influences …” Her sentence trailed off into a significant look, to which her husband raised his eyebrows and nodded while he poured Robert half a glass.

  The light golden fluid sparkled as Robert drank off a big mouthful and choked it down, his throat trying to close it out while h
is little boy honor made sure it went down. As it hit Robert’s stomach, I felt it as strongly as if I had swallowed a piece of green rhubarb. It is a rare thing for me to be involved when I have shifted. For the most part I am a detached observer, partially because my usual senses are in abeyance and I find the scene rather boring, and partly because the physical nature of the shift seemed to be such that I could not really interfere very much without forcing a transformation back into my natural form. But the beer had something in it wholly new and exciting to me, something that ran instantly through Robert’s veins and my own with such a meaningful, tingling pleasure that I almost flickered into my natural form standing directly in front of the farm couple. As it was I must have wavered a bit, for I heard Aunt Cat laugh and say, “Look at the poor little thing shudder. Now Martin, you take that away from him.”

  I clutched the glass tighter and tossed off the remainder before the farmer could take the glass from me.

  “He’s bound to have it,” Martin said, laughing and taking the empty glass.

  I heard their words from a distance as the alcohol spread instantly through my nerves, giving me an acute tickle of pleasure. I wanted more. But Robert’s eyes were watering and his mouth was spurting saliva. His face grew white, and a ripple of muscular spasm ran up his body. It reached his stomach just as Martin got his big blue handerchief over the boy’s mouth. The second spasm, Robert, and Martin made it to the kitchen sink at about the same time, whereupon Robert ridded himself of that which had been such a pleasure to me. Even though he detested the idea of drinking another drop of beer, Robert did notice later, at my prompting, that Martin kept the brown bottles stored in the milk house tank behind the big ten-gallon milk cans.

  (2)

  The rind of the old moon slips down the wide sky. It is warm and pleasant to sit in the grass behind the milk house sipping at my third bottle of beer. They are all mine, all mine, the nest of brown, elongated egg-like bottles of beer I am holding between my furry thighs. Fortunately I am a slow drinker, for it takes only two bottles to disable my judgment and make me the silliest creature in all nature. I laugh and roll on the wet grass for the pleasure of feeling the blood rush tingling from one side of my drunken body to the other. I roll over and it rushes back, numb to tingly, tingly to numb. I roll and scratch up the grass and laugh until I am foaming at the mouth.

  The Nordmeyers have two yard dogs, one a large female Springer Spaniel named Josie, the other a witless German Shepherd named Biff. Josie leaves me alone, crawling under the brooder house whenever I appear. Biff has never learned anything in his life. He is so stupid that he swallows the cockleburrs he pulls out of his fur, unable to think of anything else to do with something that is in his mouth. He hears something (me!) behind the milk house, and while Josie is retiring to her hiding place, I hear him tiptoeing up to surprise me. I lie flat in the grass, my body spreadeagled like a bear rug, my jaws yawned open. Bill springs. from behind the milk house, stiff legged and masculine, expecting to find a neighbor dog. He has no nose, really. I look up at him from behind my gaping muzzle, trying not to laugh.

  Biff stands there, astonished at the bear rug in the grass. He approaches inch by inch, stretches his neck out, jerking back at an imaginary sound, stretching again to sniff my outstretched paw. Suddenly I snap my jaws shut loudly and grab him by the throat. He cannot make a sound and coils up like a salamander trying to get away.

  “Nice Biff,” I say, holding him by the neck, not choking him much. “Wanna play, Biff?” I roll over on my back and hold him with all four paws, just tight enough so he can’t get away. The minute I let go of his throat he begins to squeal. I have never heard a dog squeal before. It is an interesting sound. I set him on his feet with his back to the milk house wall. He stands hunched up, a dog hunchback. Very funny. I reach out to pat his head, and he crumples as if I had hit him. I get down, butt in the air in dog play position. He stares at me from his crumpled shape. I get up and hop about him like a big demented bunny. His eyes roll, and he looks as if he wants to become part of the cement wall.

  Then it seeps through my foggy brain. I really do want to play with him, roll on the ground with another creature and bite in fun and rough each other up. Could I shift into a dog shape? The thought unsettles me. I giggle. Biff groans. The two dogs are always playing, running in circles, rolling on the grass, chasing the bull Humphrey out in the back pasture, going halves on a rabbit.

  I get down on all fours. “Now watch this, Biff,” I say playfully. I concentrate as much as the beer will allow, on Josie. JOSIE, I think, trying to pull my mind into a doggy point. JOSIE! Something happens. Biff jerks back, bumping his head against the wall. I am almost Josie, but my head and shoulders remain me. Must look awful. I try again. I concentrate. Shift. This time I’ve got it. I look back over my shoulder: dog from ears to black spotted tail. I wag the tail. Biff is terrified, looking at my legs. Oh cripe. I am a large edition of Josie but I have four of Little Robert’s legs, pink toes and all. As I close my eyes to concentrate again, Biff makes a break for the corncrib where he has a hidey hole. I follow him slowly, shift back to my own form and peer under the building at the drooling, quivering dog.

  “Just a minute, dammit,” I say to Biff. “I’m doing this so we can have some fun.”

  It is becoming difficult to hold an image. All this concentration with my weakened mind is tough to do. I manage another shift. No. Wrong again. I hear Biff scrabbling back further under the crib, banging his head and elbows on the floor joists. I am dog on one end, nothing on the other. I look like a horrible, dog faced caterpillar. Biff begins to howl a deathly, hollow sound from under the crib. Maybe I can’t be a dog. It is like squeezing a balloon. One part gets squeezed into the right shape, but another part pooches out wrong, so to speak. I let it go and shift back to my natural form.

  “Ooooeet?”

  Damned smartass owl. I catch his vibrations from the first branch of the walnut tree next to the garden fence. I slip into the shadow of the fence, drift across and under him while he swivels his head around and asks again, “Oooooeet?” I leap.

  “Gotcha!” I bite into him so fast he doesn’t have time to blink. I do not notice the porch door opening a crack. The owl tastes of mouse, and I drop to the ground to rub my muzzle in the grass. Thunder crashes from the back porch, and the tree splatters bark just over my head.

  Shotgun!

  Running low and fast, sober as a weasel in a henhouse, I zip along the fence and over the creek embankment. Damn! Whenever I eat a bird that farmer sneaks up on me. Raising my head slightly in the weeds I feel about for the man with the gun. Still behind the back door, he is shielded by the screen. I can barely detect him. The door slides open, and Martin edges out mto the shadow by the rain barrel. He walks into the faint moonlight as far as the garden gate calling Biff and Josie, neither of whom appear. He disappears back onto the porch, and I hear the click of the hook on the screen. He fades from my perception.

  What has he seen? I mentally lay out his line of sight from the back door to where I stood to eat the owl. He couldn’t have seen much in this light, a shadow standing on its hind legs against a tree, running along a grassy fence row. But I am forgetting Robert. Martin might easily check his room before returning to bed. I take a step up the bank when another sound comes from the porch. Crafty hunter! He is still there, invisible and undetectable behind the screen. I freeze, turning up my hearing to the limit, seeking through the metal screen with my spatial sense. There he is, lowering the gun, walking back into the kitchen. Gone. No lamps are lighted. Maybe that means he will not check Robert’s room, but I do not take the chance.

  I slip out of the weeds, follow every shadow over to the peach tree beneath Robert’s window, carefully inch my way up through the thick branches until I can reach up and grab his windowsill. With one claw I flip the sash up hard so it jams sideways near the top. In the next instant I hear Martin’s footsteps coming along the hallway, I swing up through the window and drop to the
floor of the room. The instant I hit the floor, I shift, so that Little Robert seemed to have just turned from the open window as Martin’s stocky shadow appeared in his doorway.

  “What was it, Daddy?” I congratulate Robert on the “Daddy.” Every distraction helps, for I do not know yet what the farmer has seen.

  “Sorry to wake you up, Robert,” the farmer said, walking softly to the naked boy who stood by the open window. “My goodness, you always take your nightshirt off. You’ll catch your death. Must have been a stray dog out there rummaging around. I had to take a shot at him. They’re a bad lot, you know.” He carried Robert back to bed.

  “Now you stay under the covers. I’ll shut your window.”

  From the bed, Robert could dimly see Martin’s heavy shadow struggling with the window. It was jammed tight.

  “How’d you get your window in this kind of fix?”

  He grunted and strained and finally with a heave pulled the sash out of the frame altogether with a ripping, splintering sound that brought Aunt Cat striding into the room, a tall, flat shadow, angry and holding her robe tightly around her.

  “I swear, Martin. What are you doing? First it’s shoot ’em up at midnight, and now what’ve you done? Look at that. My Lord! Ripped his window right out. What in the world?”

  The ensuing explanations and arguments were more than enough to take Martin’s mind off of what he might have seen, and Robert dropped into sleep as suddenly and softly as an owl would take a mouse.

  Now that Robert is no longer locked in at night, it is no trouble for me to slip away for a good rabbit chase in the open fields or some sneaking around creek and hedge rows for more sporting game like foxes, mink, or even wild dogs. One moonless night near the end of May when the seedlings are just beginning to give the fields a tamed and ordered look, I slip out as usual, leave Robert’s nightshirt in the barn, and relax. It is always a relief to shift back after a long time in changed form. The world springs back into its real shape, night sounds take on their old meanings, my spatial sense fills me with confidence as I perceive each living shape and movement around me, and I feel my eyes dilating with predatory efficiency. My claws are sound in their sheaths, and my hide prickles with joy under the fur. I am fast and gleeful, and nothing can stand in my way or escape my grasp. I feel like singing, or killing something, or running a fox to ground and telling her my secrets while I hold her neck tightly, staring into her bulging red eyes, then setting her back on her feet and tweaking her tail to make her run. How complete is the freedom of the natural body and its perceptions, its beautiful muscles that coil and spring, leap and bunch, and hold the bones in their trance of motion and speed.