The Orphan Page 7

  Robert at that moment began to sob and shiver as he had on that first night. He suddenly felt so weak he could not stand, sick in his stomach, dizzy in his head. He hugged Vaire and cried against herslloulder as she cried against his hair.

  ***

  Robert had to say something, of course, about the creature they thought had carried him out of the farmhouse that day. To his advantage was the fact that he actually did not remember much of what had happened, at least not very clearly. His own emotional turmoil and the sudden shift blurred his mind so that he retained only the terror and the blood and the sight of the old farmer with his glazing eyes and torn chest. He held to the harmonica as if it were the talisman of his safety and told his fragmented story to the family, the deputy coroner, and some state police officers who looked very large and efficient in their gray uniforms and Sam Browne belts with pistols holstered under leather flaps. The testimony of the section gang whose handcar ended up as a handful of decorations on the Lakeshore Limited helped confuse the issue, for their accounts were highly imaginative, only two of the gang having had a clear glimpse of what came out of the tool shed that morning. Roger Rustum and Thomas Prokoff gave conflicting accounts also: Rustum maintained the creature had jaws like a shark and bear-like arms, while Prokoff saw it more as a mountain lion sort of thing. Oliver Hackett gave no account of anything, as he remained heavily sedated to allay the pain of the tuberculosis which would shortly kill him.

  The evidence would not have convicted a sheepstealing dog, and the authorities wanted to believe it could have been an ape escaped from a circus that had been in Cassius the week before. Telegraphed inquiries to the circus, however, ruined that theory, as nothing had escaped, not even the geek.

  Further evidence of the strange creature’s existence began to arrive at police headquarters in half a dozen Michigan towns as soon as the evening paper carrying the account of the incident hit the streets. In the next weeks people saw every sort of nightmare monster from King Kong and the Wolf Man to Frankenstein’s creation, with King Kong running ahead by a margin of three reports to one of any other type.

  Vaire and Walter had taken Robert to their house in Cassius and given him the room across the upstairs hall from Anne’s room. There he slept in a vast, sagging double bed with springs that talked to him whenever he moved at night. The bed, like the house itself, belonged to Grandmother Stumway who was Vaire’s grandmother and Aunt Cat’s mother. Robert, trying to line up these adults in ascending generations, believed she must be nearly as old as the earth itself.

  Robert is comfortable, but sometimes I feel like slipping away and heading for the woods, except that the wide publicity I have received would make traveling difficult. Vaire has seen my form on two occasions, although the one time in church was probably hallucinatory and perhaps not even consciously remembered. She would casually approach the subject of the strange animal at odd times, after breakfast when Anne and Robert were carrying dishes to the sink, when the three of them were picking tomatoes in the back garden, when dressing for bed. She would wonder aloud how the creature had got into the farmhouse so suddenly, and answer her own question by saying it might have come in during the night and been hiding somewhere, or that it had leaped in through the back door and been the cause of the fatal shot from Gus that killed her father. And what had become of the thing, she would wonder, while Anne and Robert waited for the direct question they knew was coming.

  “Poor Little Robert. You were probably too frightened to even remember where the creature came from, weren’t you?”

  “I was really scared,” Robert would say while Anne looked at him curiously. She had gained a new respect for him now that he had been carried off by a mad gorilla and barely escaped with his life - and Grandfather Nordmeyer’s harmonica. That last always puzzled Anne, as it did some others in the family, for Robert had been holding the harmonica knotted up in the rags of his nightshirt when Vaire had surprised him that night at the coffin.

  Walter was inclined to be stern with Vaire when she brought up the subject on an evening after the children had been put to bed. In his forthright and clear-sighted opinion, no such creature existed. The thing was a wild dog that had been hiding in the house overnight and been frightened out by the shotgun blast and started biting people. Little Robert had simply been mad with terror and run away. His ruddy, open face seemed almost to convince Vaire while he was talking. It seemed all quite correct and true to life as she knew it when Walter sat calmly in the long dim parlor of their house and looked directly into her face and said, “It’s nothing but mass hysteria, Vaire. It’s the same as people believing they’ve seen the Indian Rope Trick. Once they’ve been told something supernatural or horrible has happened, they begin embroidering on it, and soon it’s all out of hand.”

  “But a dog couldn’t have carried Little Robert away.”

  “Of course not, dear,” Walter would say, certain on this point. “The poor tyke ran away. The dog probably knocked him around, and he ran and hid in the barn. That is where he was hiding, didn’t he say?”

  “Yes, but for three whole days while those people were searching all over the farm? I’m sure some of the men must have looked up in the hayloft, and that’s where he said he was.” Vaire honestly hated to contradict Walter in anything. He was such a good person. But it really was inconceivable to her that the little boy had hidden naked in the loft for two days and a half while the farm was swarming with deputies, detectives, tracking hounds, and newspaper reporters.

  This always exasperated Walter, so he would refill his pipe, which he had recently taken up as an aid to his public image. The refilling and lighting and adjusting took some time and gave him the look of someone with all the answers at hand, although at times when he spoke without taking the pipe out of his mouth it would swing wide as if on a hinge and he would have to be fast and ungraceful to catch it. And then when the process was completed, his answer was notably weak.

  “Well, what else could it be?” he would ask finally, as if the lack of an answer were proof of the superiority of common sense in all matters.

  I am in the habit of lying in bed for sometime in the dark shifted into my natural form to relax. It is comforting, even in cramped places, to be oneself again, and additionally, I can then easily listen to any conversations taking place downstairs. In fact, Robert would have been able to hear most of it if he had gone to the register in the floor of his room and pushed it open slightly, as it was a square hole with a register grate on both sides that opened into the corner of the dining room ceiling nearest the sliding doors to the parlor. Sitting on the floor, looking into the warm darkness through my screen and listening like a prisoner to the orchestration of the summer night, I hear Aunt Cat, Walter, and Vaire who are sitting around the dining room table drinking some of the homemade wine from the farm. Aunt Cat has had more than enough of the wine already, and Walter keeps trying to slow her down, although he is powerless before the tall, older woman who brushes off his remarks as if he were a child.

  “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.

  (5)

  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.