The Orphan (13 page)

Little Robert screamed and ran directly at Mr. Sangrom who shrank back so Robert slipped past, through the screen door and down the porch steps into the warm darkness. As he ran down the black tar street toward the hanging light at the far corner, his tears making the light all glittery and bouncing, he heard a woman’s voice calling his name.

There is much I do not know about the world I have been living in. I must learn to read, know more about humans and their ways, what they are capable of. Now I keep alert, travel at night, do not attempt to shift. I sense no feelings of fear or alarm in the houses I pause near at night. There is no general alarm in the countryside. Whether they we looking for the boy, I do not know, nor can I at this moment care. I travel southwest, following a feeling that I do not question. I do not pause long enough to consider making a burrow or hideaway, only sleep at night in thickets, hedges, empty outbuildings, and one night in an abandoned house on an old mattress. The tramps who had been living there thought I was a large wild dog in the dark when I woke and growled at them. But it is not pleasant, and for the first time I do not find it fun to run at night. The weather continues wet with thunderstorms and showers night and day soaking the ground, and I cannot avoid leaving tracks sometimes. There are so many fields being harvested of hay, so many creeks and rivers to cross, fences, towns to be avoided, farms and their ever present dogs.

Tonight I am curled up in a large concrete drain tile hanging from a sand bank over a vast lake of water that I cannot see across, and although it is comfortable to lie and watch the lightning streaking from cloud to cloud out over the lake, there is a feeling of irritation that I have not felt before, as if I had a wound somewhere that ached. I will know when I have arrived at the proper place, however far that may be, and there I will attempt to shift into an appropriate form to continue my human life.

***

Judging by the children I have seen, this boy must be between nine and twelve years old. He sits in the back of a half sunken old rowboat that is tied to a large willow tree and sticks out into the river. He wears a straw hat and the bib overalls all the farm boys wear, and his fishing pole is a length of ordinary sapling with string tied to the end of it. While I watch, he catches two fish that have whiskers and apparently bite or have stickers. I am not familiar with this fish and almost fall into the river straining for a better look at them. They are greenish black on the back and straw yellow on the belly and have wide mouths. The boy seems dissatisfied with them but puts them on a string he has dangling in the water so they cannot get away. I have studied him for some time, allowing his personality to shape my feelings, and now I am almost ready. I extend my perceptions but find not even a dog near, only squirrels and at the farthest extremity, the bend of the river, a couple of ducks in the reeds. I begin my concentration, the name comes closer as I feel my self contracting to a fine point like a brilliant spot of light, and it says itself in my mouth as the shift occurs: Charles Cahill.

I am still present at the shift, as I usually am when a new person arrives. Charles holds the overalls I have stolen for him in his hands looking at them. They are smaller than they should be. He is bigger than I expected him to be, a bit larger I think than the boy in the boat down below the bank. He gets to his feet and walks unsteadily back to some bushes and tries to get into the overalls, but they are much too tight. I wonder as he is struggling and laughing to himself how I have shifted into so much larger a human than I had anticipated. For a moment I have the impulse to try again, as this person seems foreign to me, but I recall that for more than three months now much of my existence has been in a very different person, much smaller and younger, so perhaps I am only reacting to the change. I do not see how I could possibly shift into a person antithetical to myself. But he needs some clothes. I am about to take action on that matter when suddenly, before I can stop him, he has dropped the overalls and is running toward the high bank where I had lain hidden. I gather myself to shift back, but hesitate to perform such a thing in midair, for we are sailing off the bank, over the head of the startled boy in the old rowboat, and crashing into the river head first.

Charles Cahill comes to the surface blowing a spout of muddy water in the air. Apparently he is as comfortable in the water as I am, swimming easily out further into the current before looking back at the white faced boy in the rowboat who has dropped his pole in the water and is watching it float away.

“Hey,” Charles hollered, “did I scare ya?”

“Yeah, and it’s not funny. That’s the only line and hook I got, and there it goes,” the other boy said with anger.

“Jump in and get it then.”

“I can’t swim.”

Charles swam back toward the boat, kicking powerfully against the current, picked the fishing pole out of the water, watching for the hook on the end of the line. “Here.” He handed the pole to the boy in the boat who eyed him curiously.

“Thanks. Who are you?”

“Charles Cahill. Who are you?”

“Douglas Bent. I live up on the rise back there in the white house with the big double silo barn.”

“Yeah, I seen it,” Charles said, hanging onto the boat and drifting his legs out in the current. “Sure is a big place. How come you ain’t hayin’ like everybody else?”

“Oh, my Pa lets me fish when I want,” the boy in the boat said, looking away.

“Must be a swell Pa you got. I seen a bunch of men and boys out in the oat field that must belong to your farm. They was workin’ pretty hard, it looked like.”

“I don’t do so good in the hayfield,” Douglas said, looking straight at Charles as if he wanted to hit him.

“How come is that?” Charles said, rocking the boat and sloshing the water in its bottom from side to side.

“Quit it,” Douglas said. He raised one leg and laid it on the gunwale of the boat. It looked like he had a silver bolt through his foot. “’Cause I’m gimpy.”

Charles examined the bolted foot, discovering it was a U-shaped brace that extended up into the boy’s pants leg. The foot had a shoe on it and looked rigid. “You got a crippled leg?” Charles said as if it were a marvelous new invention.

“I had infantile paralysis when I was little,” Douglas said, putting the leg back into the boat. “I can get around okay, but it’s no good for workin’ hay or like that.”

“Well then, you don’t have to sweat yer ass out in the fields or carry them heavy milk cans or any of that stuff,” Charles said eagerly.

“I’d rather,” said Douglas. “But Ma says you don’t always get your druthers.” He smiled crookedly as if he wanted to cry.

Charles realized he could not make a good thing of it, and that probably Douglas didn’t spend much time thinking about it. “Well, at least you got a family and a place to sleep,” Charles said, chin on the back of the boat. “I ain’t got nothing, not even any clothes now.”

“You haven’t got any clothes?” Douglas said, his eyes big. “What happened?”

“Oh I stopped to swim back by the railroad bridge this morning, and I know better than to leave clothes around like that, but I just hopped off a freight, and I was hotter than a hot box, so I shucked ’em off and dived in, and I swum right back, but they was gone.”

Douglas took his hat off and wiped his forehead. His hair was shiny black, plastered to his head with sweat. He had deep brown eyes and a kindly face with an unfortunate turned up nose that seemed out of place with his broad upper lip. Charles studied his face for a moment. Douglas looked more like a frog than he should, Charles decided, and at that moment, Douglas smiled happily and then opened his mouth and laughed.

“And you been running around all day from here to the railroad tracks without any clothes?” Douglas laughed tentatively, then found it really funny and rocked back in the boat, fanning himself with his hat. “You went right by old lady McGee’s place, I bet,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “And if she saw you sneaking around her place naked, she’d call out the National Guard.”

Charles got to laughing too at that, and he swore he had danced in old lady McGee’s front yard using rhubarb leaves for fans like Sally Rand at the World’s Fair. Douglas laughed until he cried, Charles watching and liking the smaller boy for his humor. After awhile they got quiet.

“Don’t you live
any
where?” Douglas said.

“Oh sometimes I sleep in a drain tile, sometimes in an old house like a hound dog,” Charles said truthfully. “I ain’t got no real home.”

Douglas thought about that for awhile, looking Charles in the eye to see if he was kidding.

“What grade are you in?” Douglas asked, trying to trap the other boy.

“Never been in
no
school,” Charles said. “But I’d sure like to go.”

“Never?”

“What grade are you in?”

“I’ll be in fifth this year. I skipped a grade last year, and now I’m in the same grade as Rudy. Rudy’s my next older brother,” Douglas added.

“I bet old dumb Rudy likes that,” Charles said, grinning. He was beginning to feel cold in the water.

“He’s not really dumb,” Douglas said. “But how’d you know he didn’t like it?” Then his face lit up. “Oh, yeah, I see.” He looked at the other boy with a more respectful eye.

“I don’t s’pose you could give me a hand,” Charles said, shivering a little.

“You mean to get out? Oh, you mean to get some clothes and like that?”

“Yeah. I’d work for ’em, or pay you someway. but it’d have to be after awhile, ’cause I ain’t got anything now except my good looks.” And Charles grinned.

Douglas looked thoughtfully at the bigger boy, so comfortable seeming in his big strong body, a smooth swimmer, smart about people, and had probably had thousands of adventures. He took a deep breath. “I’ll get you some of Rudy’s or Carl’s old ones. Carl is my oldest brother,” he said.

“Lord, how many brothers you got?”

“Just two, but Ma’s pregnant and we’ll probably have some more by Christmas, Pa says.”

“Well, I’d be your friend forever if you could get me decent,” Charles said, putting his feet down and squishing through the mud toward the bank. “If old lady McGee sees me in her front yard again, she’ll just die of fright.”

***

I have been comfortable in this large, airy barn that is filling up with hay and has a dozen fine Holstein cows in its stanchions and two horses and a yearling colt at the other end. There are all sorts of nooks and doorways I use, and the dogs quickly learned they must leave me alone. But the situation has been strange. I find myself in a double-double life situation, with Douglas bringing clothes and food to Charles whenever he can, pretty much in return for the stories Charles tells him of his adventures, although where he has picked up these tales is quite beyond me. I seem to have shifted into a person with an endless gift for lying entertainingly, and that is exactly what the young Bent boy likes. Now I will make arrangements for attending school. It begins week after next, and I am determined to learn to read. I had thought that perhaps Charles with his facile tongue would lie his way into a place in the one-room brick schoolhouse that is less than a mile down the road from the Bent farm. But as it turns out, no lying is necessary, thanks to Mrs. Stumway, a widow living alone in her large stone house not more than a quarter mile from the school.

She was pointed out to Charles one day when he and Douglas were slipping through the fence into her apple orchard. It was no longer an orchard, really, only a few straggly trees with wormy apples, but it was safely away from the house and hidden in the five-acre forest which was what the old lady had left of all the land she and her husband had once owned. Her house was invisible from the road, the whole five acres surrounding it being covered with oak, maple, fruit trees, some pines and other evergreens, buckeyes, lilacs grown into eight-foot hedges, and hazel bushes. Dense thickets of raspberries and gooseberry filled in the chinks, so that Mrs. Stumway lived like an old widowed rabbit in the midst of an inaccessible briar patch. Her neighbors had long ago given up trying to be friendly or even communicate with her after her husband had died some fifteen years past, and for most of them it was of little interest whether she lived in that impenetrable tangle or had died and been absorbed by it. Except that she appeared at her mailbox every few days in good weather, they would have believed she no longer existed. She was sharp tongued with those who professed good intentions and violent with those who professed anything else. An itinerant scissors sharpener and odds and ends salesman who occasionally visited the area told a tale of being beaten with a mop handle for trying to flatter the old lady into buying a bar of scented soap.

Charles listened to Douglas telling about the old Stumway widow, eating his fill of her apples while sitting on a low branch and studying the back of the house which could be dimly made out through the dense tangle of trees and undergrowth. It seemed to him there might be a possibility in such an old lady if she were approached right. Douglas said she had given him a piece of cake once because she felt sorry for his having a bad leg, but that she didn’t like either of his brothers at all, and was probably not fond of his family in general. Charles thought she was showing nothing but good taste in that, for he did not like either of Douglas’s brothers either, finding both of them surly prisoners of the farm work, practically slaves of their father, working alongside the farm hands Mr. Bent hired but getting no pay for their work. They were both in a perpetual state of suppressed rage that left them either exhausted or dangerous most of the time.

“Doug,” Charles said, putting his hands on the smaller boy’s shoulders, “you are going to find me a place in the world.”

Douglas looked doubtful. “If you’re thinking about living with Mrs. Stumway, you’d better forget it. She’s about as friendly as a gar fish.”

“Maybe so, but I think a person living like she does needs me around to help ’em, especially since I’m so handy and could fix things up and clean up that rat’s nest she lives in.”