The Night of the Hunter (24 page)

One night, sensing that he might want to talk, Rachel sent the other children off to bed but kept John with her in the kitchen. She bent her head, squinting through her poor, taped-up, crazed spectacles at the darning of their tattered stockings under the golden circle of lamplight.

Git ye an apple from the cellar, boy. And git me one, too.

He obeyed, pounding down into the cellar, happy that she had kept him up after the others to make this a special time for him alone, to set him upon a chore whose fruits they would share. He clambered up the side of the great barrel and stretched his fingers deep inside among the chilly, clustered heaps of last year's McIntoshes. And when he had found two without rot or blemish he scampered back to the kitchen, washed them at the pump, and gave one to Rachel. Now she set her darning-gourd abruptly aside, bit crisply into the fruit, and glared at him with that tart, twinkling grimness that he had come to recognize as all the world's safety.

John, where's your folks? she said suddenly.

He lifted his eyes to her and said the word plainly, knowing its awful truth.

Dead.

Dead, she nodded with finality and let that matter be. And where you from?

Upriver, he said. A ways.

Well, I know that, John! I didn't figger you'd rowed that John boat up from Parkersburg! Have you any kin?

He shrugged.

Kin, she repeated. No aunts, no uncles, no grandfolks?

I don't know, he said.

Far up in the dark, above the house, above the world, the vast locust voices began their insensate, rackety skirl. And suddenly, and with a tenderness that nigh broke the old woman's heart, John reached out his hand and laid his fingers on her old knuckles.

Tell me that story agin.

Story, honey? Why, what story?

About them kings, he said. That the queen found down on the sandbar in the skiff that time.

Kings! she scolded. Why, honey, there was only one.

Oh, no, he said. I mind you said there was two.

Well, shoot! Maybe there was! Yes, come to think of it—there was two, John.

And she fetched the old Bible and read him the tale again, in a soft, gruff voice because she did not dare let him see how she felt just then, and changed the story around so that there were really two in the bulrushes, in the basket, in that lost and ancient time.

Git to bed now! she cried at last, rising with angry, moist eyes and smacked his bottom smartly before her as he fled up the kitchen steps. Git to bed now and no nonsense. Gracious, it's nigh eight o'clock and we've all got to be up tomorrow bright and early to fetch them eggs and butter to town.

He lay in bed that night, hearing a strange steamboat blow softly down somewhere under the lower stars, and he thought for the first time: Well, maybe he won't come at all now and maybe it wasn't none of it real and maybe there wasn't even any Mom and Dad or none of it and I am a lost king and Pearl is a lost king, too.

The trip to New Economy with the week's butter and eggs was the great event toward which each of the seven other days moved. Upon this day Rachel dressed each of them in his best and together they went to the river landing where the old ferryboat made its dozen daily trips to the Ohio side. At this ferry landing there stood an ancient locust tree upon which, hung on a leather thong nailed into the bark, was a battered brass bugle. More times than not, the ferry captain dozed with a Western magazine over his face up in the cabin of the rickety little gasoline boat and it was the custom of travelers on the other side to wake him with the bugle to come and fetch them across. Rachel always carried a bit of the fresh, clean muslin she used for straining jelly so that she could wipe off the brass mouthpiece of the bugle that was not uncommonly crusted and bitter with the tobacco juice of its previous user.

Dirtiest critters under God's blue sky!—Men! she would scold and then lift the horn to her mouth to blow a lusty, impatient trump across the glassy, silent stream.

In New Economy they had a good restaurant meal at the Empire Eats and when the day's trading was done and if their produce had brought a good price, Rachel would take them to Ev Roberts's pharmacy and treat them all to an enormous, communal sack of licorice drops and sometimes ice-cream sodas. Then it was back to the ferry again with empty baskets and high spirits and roaring appetites for supper. Folks turned on the streets to stare after Rachel Cooper and her brood. Every woman with children of her own envied the proper, obedient way the children followed the old woman's polka-dot skirts. Men, respectful of Rachel's hard, shrewd bargaining sense at the cattle auctions, bowed to her, tipped their hats, spoke words of greeting. When they passed Ev Roberts's bench out in front of the drugstore on their way to the street again the late-afternoon loafers and whittlers had suddenly gathered.

Hi, Miz Cooper.

Howdy, Gene.

Got two more peeps in yore brood, I see.

Yes, and ornerier than the rest! she cried. Don't kids just beat the Dutch now! Just look at them two little ones—Pearl and Mary. I'll swear I scrubbed them two till they was raw 'fore I come over here this mornin'.

Where'd ye git them new ones, Miz Cooper?

Driftwood! she cried. Just plain driftwood warshed up on a bar!

And then she could have cut her tongue out for saying that: for letting those loose-jawed scalawags know anything about those two. Nine chances out of ten that boy John had fibbed to her about having no folks and next thing she knew some WPA family would come rattling and banging up the yard in a busted-down fruit truck and claim their two lost biddies and light into Rachel for kidnaping them in the first place. Rachel bit her tongue angrily and hurried the children toward the ferry. Sure as sin, some father would show his face in town and those gossips would tell. And sure as sin he would come a-hunting his kids.

As a matter of fact, it was not three days later that the stranger with the funny hands bought Ruby an ice-cream soda and a movie magazine in Ev Roberts's pharmacy and told her what pretty eyes she had.

That summer Rachel had arranged for Ruby to learn sewing from Granny Blankensop—an aged, widowed seamstress who lived with her daughter across the river at New Economy. Each Thursday evening Rachel tied up a fifty-cent piece in the girl's handkerchief and gave her two dozen eggs' tuition in a yellow basket. Then she took her to the ferry landing and saw her safely on board the little boat which was to be met on the Ohio side by Granny Blankensop's middle-aged and unmarried daughter Nevada. At nine Rachel would come back to the landing to meet the girl. It seemed to her that nothing in this procedure could permit the disastrous encounter between Ruby and any of the ornery farm boys and evening loafers who lounged on the bench in front of Ev Roberts's drugstore.

Yet, the first night Nevada Blankensop was to meet Ruby at the New Economy landing she was, in fact, overcome in her bedroom after two tumblers of her mother's dandelion wine. And so Ruby had stood in bewilderment on the alien bricks and pondered what she was supposed to do next, what the purpose and meaning of her mission there might be. It was something Rachel wanted her to do. It was something she was supposed to learn that would make her a better girl. Through the branches of the chestnut trees along Water Street she saw the bright lights of New Economy. She heard the drifting, random sounds of men's easy voices and the music of a radio and the noise of an occasional flivver. Now as she moved into the glitter of Pike Street things began happening. The night above her was filled with golden, winding wires of light and stars that winked off and on like enormous, sweet fireflies. The men on the evening bench saw her then: the whittlers and the tale tellers and the watch traders and the killers of time. And Ruby had found the world.

Rachel never knew. The eggs and the basket were often forgotten in that sweet, breathless scuffle down on the road berm under the pawpaw leaves and when Ruby got off at the West Virginia landing she would be empty-handed and Rachel would think: Well now, if Granny Blankensop don't have her nerve—keeping my very best egg basket.

Ruby lived for those Thursdays. She had found a wonderful thing that she could do well: something that never went wrong like gathering eggs did, like washing jars did, because there was nothing to drop, to break, to spill, to forget. And on the dozen occasions that Nevada Blankensop had actually been there to meet her and take her up to the house, fusty and thick with the smell of old women's sleep, Ruby had squirmed and twitched her buttocks on the split-bottom chair the whole time of the sewing lesson: heeding not a smidgen of it; learning not so much as a single, twinkling stitch. One night she had lain in her bed in a perfect trance of yearning and thought desperately: I just can't wait till Thursday! Because that's five sleeps away! I'll steal the money from Rachel's sugar bowl and go there tonight—to the river—

But she had been afraid to do that and waited anyway and that Thursday night Nevada had the vapors and was not there to meet her and she had fairly run to that place in the street in front of the drugstore where the eyes of the evening loafers awaited her.

That's her right yonder! whispered Macijah Blake to the stranger, nudging him and pointing to the girl moving down the street. That's Ruby and I reckon she'd be able to tell you what you want to know about them two new ones Rachel took in here a while back!

The stranger had appeared in New Economy that afternoon and hitched his horse to the iron courthouse fence and wandered away while the mare munched and tore at the untended grass. At dusk he had sought out the evening loafers and told them the story that he had repeated in a hundred dusty crossroad gatherings until he could say it now by rote: how he was a preacher of the Gospel looking for his no-account wife who had run off with a drummer and how his two blessed children had gotten lost in the scuffle. He told them how he had gone a-hunting and a-wandering through the bottomlands all that summer and how he had tracked down a dozen lost lambs and none of them his. A little boy and a girl with a doll? Yes, thought Macijah Blake, that was them. But
she
would know for sure—that bad girl Ruby—and it was Thursday and chances were she'd come over to town tonight. The others moved away from him with that disgust he seemed to arouse everywhere now. All but Macijah Blake and he stayed to point Ruby out as she came to stand before the assemblage of them: waiting in the dust of Pike Street with her big shoes close together and her fingers locked around the basket handle.

You're Ruby—ain't you, my child?

He had come right over to her, had not sidled up as the others always did, sneaky as sheep-killing dogs. This itched her curiosity. He was older than them, too, and stronger somehow and his eyes were strange: handsome and old and cruel as Herod.

Ruby, I'd like to talk to you, my dear.

Yes, she said. Yes, I will if you'll buy me a chocolate soda.

What? You'll what?

And the evening loafers were all laughing and catcalling again and she knew suddenly that she would do it for him for nothing because he was so wonderful.

Watch out, Preacher! She'll drag ye down in the dust right there in the middle of Pike Street if ye don't watch her.

He turned and glared at them.

Shet your dirty mouths! he boomed across the stillness. Shet 'em!

So she waited, smiling at him, loving his grand, manly sternness; basking happily in his anger and the violence she could feel like the warmth of a radiant stove against her body.

I want to ask you a question, girl. And if you'll answer me God's truth I'll buy you whatever it was you said.

A chocolate soda, she repeated, and he took her into the drugstore and Ev Roberts's nephew waited on them and while Preacher watched her, seething with impatience, she began to eat.

Now it's time for you to keep your share of the bargain, he said. Will you tell me—

But without answering she slid from the wire chair at the table and wandered off with wanton, swaying hips to the magazine rack and stood with the basket still heavy against her thigh and leafed through a new movie magazine and thought how beautiful she must be.

Will you tell me?

Buy me this? she smiled, her small eyes shrewd and bargaining, and he cried: All right! All right! and went to lay the money on the marble and came back to her side, waiting, glaring with choking impatience into the pale-pink gums of her wanton mouth.

Ain't I purty? she said suddenly.

And he smiled and relaxed then, knowing how he could get her.

Why, you're the purtiest gal I've seen in all my wandering! 'Deed, I never seen such purty eyes in all my born days! Didn't no one never tell you that, Ruby?

No, she breathed hoarsely. No one never did.

And then she danced over to the big brown mirror over the soda fountain and grimaced coquettishly at the image behind it. He came and brought her back to the table and made her sit and finish the soda while he told her some more about her pretty eyes, and when the soda was gone, the last of the sweetness sucked through the gurgling straws, he made her give him the movie magazine until she had kept her share of the bargain.

Two little youngins, he said. There's two new ones over at your place, ain't there, Ruby?

She nodded dumbly.

What's their names? he whispered, bending closer.

Pearl and John.

Ahhh! And when did they come to live at your house?

She frowned, recollecting.

This summer?

She nodded again.

And is there—a doll? Is there a doll anywhere that either of them—

Pearl, she said. She has a doll. Only she won't never let me play with it. She won't let none of us kids play with it and Miz Cooper says us to leave her doll alone because it's hers.

Ahhh! Yes!

Pearl and John, she said again pointlessly and belched softly and tasted the soda again and stared longingly at the movie magazine he held away from her.