Psyche (10 page)

Puffing with the effort involved, she got to her feet, and, walking with unaccustomed speed, crossed to the door and jerked it open. For a moment, bereft of the power of speech, she simply stared at the child who, having struggled free from her blankets, sat upright on the doorstep looking up at her with miserable, blue-eyed bewilderment.

Taking in the smudged evidence of many tears, and the ugly lump on the small head, Mag felt her heart turn over.

“For the luvva Mike,” she breathed softly, “it were a stork.” And without further hesitation, she stooped, picked the child up in warm, competent arms, and carried her into the shack.

“Butch! Come out here quick. Somebody's been and dumped their kid on us in the night.”

There was a wordless rumble of shocked disbelief from behind the green curtain, followed immediately by Butch himself, his head thrusting forward from his great shoulders, his small eyes blinking rapidly as his limited intelligence attempted to accept the unacceptable.

The child was heavy, but Mag continued to hold her, rocking her gently, murmuring quiet reassurances in a wordless language no child could fail to understand.

“Well, I'll be——” Butch began, and, unable to finish the sentence, was forced to find it complete as it was. Shaking his bullet head from side to side, he gaped at his large spouse as if she had at that moment outdone all past performances in the way of miraculous conceptions.

Feeling the child's tense body begin to relax, seeing fear replaced in wide eyes by an instinctive, touching trust, Mag put her down, settling her against lumpy pink cushions on a sagging red couch. “There now, you feel better, don't you, kid?” Over her ample shoulder, she addressed Butch. “Get her a cuppa milk.”

“Are you sure”——

“That she'll drink milk? Don't be so damn dumb. All kids like milk. Here, baby, what's your name? Tell Mag, What's your name?”

“Are you sure it's a girl?” Butch roared in a deep, bull-like
voice that was curiously unterrifying for all its volume. “Them blue eyes and yellow curls don't mean nothin'. Why, when I was a kid, I had——”

The big woman regarded him with a withering contempt that reduced him to silence. “Do I look like I was born yestidday, you big baboon? Now, get a hustle on with that milk.”

Butch was, and always had been, more than satisfied with Mag. She suited him. But there were times when he felt dimly that she did not accord him quite the deferential respect he deserved as man of the house. This was one of those times, but he nevertheless did what he had been asked because he could not think of anything else to do.

Mag, leaning close to the child, narrowed long-sighted eyes to look at the embroidery on the front of the simple white nightgown. “I believe you got your name right on you, haven't you, kid? Now, hold still, and let Mag take a look.” Frowning, she concentrated on a pattern of letters which she actually had no trouble in deciphering, but which made no sense to her, could not be formed into syllables she could pronounce. “P—S—Y— No, t'ain't possible. Mebbe it's the kid's initials or somethin'.”

Butch, by this time standing beside her with a slopping cup of milk in his large, hairy hand, said, “Mebbe it's some furrin' name.”

“Could be,” Mag replied doubtfully. “For the luvva Mike, what would the kid be wantin' with a saucer!” Leaving him to decide for himself what he would do with the saucer, she took the cup from him and carefully held it to the child's mouth.

Psyche took a tentative sip, said “Milk!” in a pleased tone of voice, and, putting her own small hands on either side of the cracked white cup, proceeded to dispatch its contents as fast as she could.

Standing back, her hands on her hips, Mag said, with a pride she was quite unaware of, “Why, the kid can talk some. She's real bright, ain't she?”

“How old you reckon she is?” Butch asked.

“More'n two, and less'n two and a half.”

“You sure?”

“Sure I'm sure. Ain't I helped my old woman to raise eleven kids?”

“What you aimin' to do with her?”

Psyche, having finished the milk, climbed down off the couch, and, walking with a not quite certain balance, carried the cup over to the table which was level with the top of her head. With enormous care, she reached up and set the cup down. This done, she turned to look up at Mag with a radiant smile. “All done. Go home now?”

The pages from the calendar on Sharon's rosewood desk fluttered into the wastebasket, days falling into eternity as irresistibly as the bronze leaves drifting down from the oak trees in the garden. Fourteen —fifteen—sixteen—the gulf which could no longer be measured in hours was now sixteen days wide
.

On the morning of the sixteenth day Sharon sat in the office of a police inspector whose long, tired face reflected a defeat he would not admit in so many words
.

Looking over his head at a large wall calendar as cruel as her own, she avoided his eyes and the message in them which she could not—would not—accept. As long as she lived, it was a message she would refuse to accept from anyone, ever
.

The policeman, seeing the unconscious firming of her delicate mouth, and the desperate determination in blue eyes beneath level dark eyebrows, read her thoughts as clearly as if she had said them aloud. He knew her quite well now; knew that her apparent fragility masked strength; knew that there was warmth behind the cool reserve with which she usually faced the world; knew that she possessed not only imagination and a quick perception, but a mind as clear and keen as any he had ever encountered. And, knowing all these things, he was afraid she might—because of rather than in spite of her unusual gifts—perhaps destroy herself in the unending pursuit of a hope which he already saw as hopeless
.

In the sixteen days following the kidnapping, the kidnapper
had been twice identified with reasonable certainty, the second time more than half-way across the continent; but there the trail had ended. That he had parted company somewhere along the way both with the child and the car he had been driving, was accepted by the police as fact rather than conjecture. But in what order, or where, or under what circumstances he had done this, it had been impossible to discover. All they knew was that, somewhere across a staggeringly wide course, the child, with a fawn's protective colouring and lack of scent, had disappeared without leaving a trace behind her; had, despite the scope and efficiency of the machinery set in motion to find her, vanished into thin air. She might be still alive—or she might be dead
.

For the first time, the policeman found himself thinking of her as an individual, and estimating her chances of survival, not simply in terms of days and years, but as a person whose heredity and environment might well be diametrically opposed in their twin influences on her
.

He became aware that the young woman opposite him had risen to her feet, and that the long silence that had fallen between them marked the termination of an interview as painfully fruitless as the many that had preceded it
.

Getting up quickly, he shook hands with a formality he found both foolish and oppressive. If she had thanked him for anything at all, he felt he could not have borne it
.

“We will continue to do everything in our power,” he told her quietly
.

“You have done everything—already, haven't you?”

She is telling me that we have given up, he thought bitterly, and really she is right. “We will continue to do everything in our power,” he repeated
.

Her shoulders very straight in a black coat whose sombreness she had deliberately defied with a frivolous red hat, Sharon walked to the door
.

“Good-bye,” she said, and then added, with soft violence, “I will never give up—never!”

During her first ten days at the shack Psyche often bumped a hurt on her head which took that long to heal, but to Butch and Mag's awe and amazement she never once cried on these occasions. She rarely wept at all. When she did, her tears were like a summer storm, coming in a brief, fierce deluge, without warning or apparent cause. The second time this happened, Mag, casting around for something with which she could be diverted, gave her a multi-coloured feather duster that she had ordered from a mailorder catalogue and never used. The feather duster failed in its immediate purpose, but Psyche was rarely to be found without it after that. She caressed its soft brilliance, talked to it by the hour, dragged it behind her both inside and outside the shack, and never went to bed without it. At night, when Mag tucked her up on the ancient couch in a corner of the tiny, cluttered store-room that paralleled the bedroom, its motley harlequin head would be on the pillow beside her fair one. And when the oil lamps were lit, and the miner and his wife were settled in the main room, if they listened they could hear the gentle murmur of an unintelligible, one-sided conversation that never seemed to reach a conclusion, that would cease only when Psyche fell asleep, and would be resumed in the morning as soon as she woke.

“It's kind of like a doll for her, ain't it?” Butch said.

“More like a person, almost,” Mag answered slowly. “It's like as if it were someone she's known before.”

“She's a good kid.”

“Yeah, she's a good kid.”

“It don't seem right that a kid like that should be in one of them orphan places.”

Mag sighed. “There ain't no other place for a kid whose folks don't want it.”

During the daytime Psyche kept very busy exploring the shack, a pastime that seemed of consuming interest to her. It was almost as if she were looking for something. Returning again and again to the places through which she had just methodically searched, she seemed unable to convince herself that the next time it would not, miraculously, be there. When the game became simply a game, and nothing more, it would be difficult to say, but as time
went on her repeated examinations of the limited premises became more leisurely than they had been, and she would pause to rattle things that would rattle, and to attempt to rattle things that would not. Having found her way under the sagging couch, she would stay in hiding there and make small noises until Mag good-naturedly chased her out with a broom not often used for any other purpose. Given a spoon to lick, or a dry crust on which to sharpen her few small white teeth, she would linger on the doorstep in the sunlight talking to Feather Duster.

“She ain't much trouble,” Butch said.

“She ain't no trouble at all,” Mag told him firmly. “Kids an' dogs an' cats, they're all much the same when you come right down to it. You gotta feed ‘em an' give ‘em a place to lay down, that's all.”

They had had a dog once, and a number of cats which had gone on to their reward in a variety of ways, all of them abrupt. But they liked small creatures, and, though they were not consciously aware of any lack in their lives, were lonely when they were without one. Unfettered by the doubts and fears that would have been theirs if they had been more gently reared, they tackled the crisis that fate had seen fit to send them with direct simplicity. Equally simply, they drifted into a decision that was never declared in so many words.

During a hot Indian summer. Psyche grew brown beneath a brassy, cloudless sky, and, allowed to trip and fall and pick herself up again unaided, learned how to walk steadily on bare feet whose soft soles gradually assumed the consistency of shoe leather. In a face the colour of an over-ripe peach, her eyes were startlingly blue, and her short curls were bleached by the sun to palest gold. She grew thinner, the baby fat melting away from straight, strong bones, but otherwise she appeared to thrive on a diet consisting chiefly of pies, fried meats, and canned goods. Small hands, never entirely clean, became useful instruments adept at buttoning the weird costume that Mag had fabricated for her out of a vast pair of pink cotton bloomers.

That this outfit would have to be improved upon if she were to stay at the shack was obvious, and the evening when Mag sat
down with a department-store catalogue and laboriously wrote out a clothes order, she inscribed, in so doing, adoption papers as formal as any that would ever be taken out.

2

T
HE
first snows of that year, falling early in december, found psyche an integral part of a way of life that was to be hers for nearly fifteen years. Chords of memory, touched from time to time by vaguely familiar harmonies of sound and colour, would occasionally upset and bewilder her, but, too young to retain specific mental images of any other existence than the one she now knew, she was on the whole perfectly happy.

Trusting, friendly, but even as a small child physically undemonstrative, she met the rough kindliness and unspoken affection of the miner and his wife with a response that was, by chance, exactly right. Independent, easily amused, increasingly loquacious, she fulfilled their need without demanding anything of them that they could not give. Her natural, and almost immediate, adoption of their own vernacular served to identify her with them as nothing else could have done. That she should, in addition to this, take a childish pride in the shack and its well-worn contents, pleased them enormously and added a lustre to it which it in no way deserved.

The shack, practically indistinguishable from dozens of other tarpaper habitations scattered across the broad swath of slag surrounding the mines, differed from these others only in that it was more remote than most. Sufficient unto themselves, Butch and Mag had chosen to separate themselves from the herd, and
had, in this way, achieved the dignity of independence; the single dignity possible under circumstances against which they rebelled only in theory. They shared, in common with their kind, a fatalistic recognition of the harsh fact that they lived in a world that could exist only as long as the mines continued to produce; a conjectural span that might just possibly last a man's working lifetime, but that might, equally possibly, terminate as abruptly as a turned-off fountain. Big business, manipulating stocks and shares, could ill afford long-term advance notices of the death of a mine; and the men who first laid hands on the rich ore destined for so great a variety of transmutations, were cogs in the machine too small for any real consideration.