The Orphan (28 page)

“Come out now, Charles,” she said softly, urging him by stretching farther over the creek bank and waving her hand at him.

He looked at her, his face streaked with mud, his hair muddy and stuck to his skull. His eyes were dull, and his whole body shivered in spasms which he ignored. He ducked under again in a whirl of water. She waited, slipping down the bank a bit more, digging in the heels of her ruined shoes. Five dollars, she thought irrelevantly, gone in the mud for this crazy boy. Char1es’s face reappeared, sputtering in the same place he had been.

“Charles, if you don’t come out of the water now, I’m coming in to get you. I’ve aheady ruined my best pair of shoes, and this wool skirt is the last good one I’ve got, but I’m going to come right in there after you if you don’t come out.”

To her intense amazement, Charles stood in the chest deep water and began to weep, his face crumpling up like a baby’s while the tears rolled out and mixed with the creek mud, and his body shuddered in great spasms. Miss Wrigley muttered something, stepped out of her shoes, leaving them standing fixed in the heavy mud as it she had been plucked out of them and carried off to heaven, and walked unsteadily down into the icy water. It was unbelievably cold as it rushed around her legs, then up to her waist, and then she stepped on a slanting stone and fell forward so that she went in over her head and came up gasping and spitting. She walked forward resolutely until she had the boy’s arm in both her hands. She pulled him with all her strength, feeling the heavy drag of the creek water urging them both downstream. Charles came along, docile enough now, weeping and shuddering, his skin ice cold to her touch. She got him out, through the fence and into the schoolhouse where she began poking up the fire in the back stove that had almost gone out. When it was going again, she threw her cloth coat around Charles’s shoulders and told him to take off his clothes. She dried his muddy hair with her scarf and went back to the girls’ cloak room to find something she could change into. There was nothing but her own raincoat that she had left there a week ago when it had rained in the morning and turned beautiful in the afternoon. She peeled away her wet clothes and put the raincoat on, holding it tight around her shivering body. When she came back, Charles was hunched down beside the stove, the coat pulled around him, his wet clothes scattered on the schoolroom floor.

Miss Wrigley put her arms mound the boy’s shoulders. His body shuddered in regular waves now, and when he looked at her, she saw his skin was blue.

“Oh, Charles,” she said, hugging him and rubbing his back vigorously. “What was so important? What could he have thrown in the creek that you would risk getting pneumonia for?”

“My amulet,” he said, but his eyes looked dull, as if he hardly realized she was there, as if he might be simply repeating something he had been saying to himself for hours.

She continued rubbing him, feeling shivery herself. “Were you in that creek the whole time?”

But he would not answer except to repeat the same phrase. She wondered how she was going to get him home, and what she was going to do herself, wearing only a raincoat and her hair all draggled and wet. It was not far to the widow Stumway’s house, just across the road and a couple of hundred yards down the highway. She was just thinking about going back to the creek bank for her shoes when she heard the front door slam shut. She half turned, her arm still around Charles’s shoulders. Paul Holton stood in the hall door looking at her strangely, his little round mouth hanging open. She felt the direction of his gaze and realized he was looking at her bare legs where the raincoat had pulled away when she kneeled down. She pulled the coat down over her leg and said with as much authority as she could, “Paul, Charles has been in the cold creek for just hours, and he’s going to be very sick unless we can get him home and into a warm bed right away. Now you run down the road to the Peaussiers and tell them I’m in trouble and must have help. See if there’s someone there that can drive the car so we can get this boy home fast.” She looked hard at Paul who simply stood there as if he had not heard what she said.

“Paul!” she screamed viciously. “Will you do that?”

“Yes, ma’am. Go to Peaussiers and get a car. Yes ma’am.” He turned and bumped into the door jamb, as he went out running.

***

He was in his bed, but it kept changing to the snow storm. It was so cold, and then he was burning, burning in a forest that was on fire, the trees all like huge candles burning all the way down, and he had to slip between them. And then he was holding the amulet, but it was big, bigger than he could carry, and it kept wanting to fall on him, it was so big, and he had to keep pushing against it to keep it from falling on him. The dream went on so long that he forgot there was any other world, that he was a person living in a world that did not change momentarily from cold to hot. There were only the dreams, and now it was getting hotter all the time, and it never got cold, just hotter and harder to breathe so that it seemed the air was like smoke or like soup that he had to try hard to breathe in and breathe out, and then he was under water and was breathing the water, and at first he was frightened to death that he would drown, but then he realized he was breathing the water, and it was not hurting him.

“I can’t say, Mrs. Stumway,” the short, bald man in the tweed coat said. “It’s not like the movies where the doctor comes out and says everything’s all right. The fever’s not going any higher, I don’t believe, but I can’t promise he’ll pull out of it right away.” He shook his head, putting his stethoscope back in the little bag. “There’s not much more to do now. Not really a case for the hospital, since his condition appears stable and his breathing has cleared some.”

Mrs. Stumway stood in the door of Charles’s bedroom, pale and narrow in her old brown dress, looking down at the quiet face of the orphan boy. “He’s really not my kin, Doctor Mervin,” she said, her hands together in front of her. “But he’s such a good boy, and my daughter says he saved her life when she wrecked her car at Christmas. I hate to see the poor thing sick. He’s so active. Such a good, strong lad.” She followed the doctor downstairs to the door.

“I’m not saying he’s out of the woods,” the doctor said, pulling his coat around his shoulders, “but he’s young and he’s getting good care. If his breathing gets to sounding stopped up and rattly again, you call me, no matter what time of the day or night. All right?”

Something was in the water with him. He tried to see it, but it was always behind him, like his shadow when the light was in his eyes, he couldn’t ever get a good look at it. He could hear what it was saying, and he wondered how anybody could talk under water.

“It’s your body, Charles,” the voice was saying softly. “You’re in charge of it, and I must let you get well. I can’t do that for you, Charles. You do make some foolish mistakes sometimes.”

Charles felt anger, but somehow the water, which was warm like a hot bath, made the anger less strong. He couldn’t really be mad, so he just listened and felt the water pull at him and lull him until he stopped dreaming altogether and went really to sleep where there were no dreams at all.

Miss Wrigley had visited him, he saw when he opened his eyes, and there must have been a doctor there, because there was a doctor smell in the room. She had left his jackknife and the old husking gloves he used when he played softball. And the jonquils in the tall vase were probably her idea. He took a deep breath, but his chest still hurt considerably. It felt as though something had hit his chest many small blows, for it ached all over like a big bruise, but it was easier to breathe, and his eyes felt less burning hot and sandy the way they had. It was dark except for the lamp out in the hall that threw a long dim bar of light across his floor. He tried to sit up and his head throbbed so that he dropped back in pain. Well, he was not dead, anyway. And then he thought about what he had lost.

It was nearly two weeks later when Charles wobbled out the door into the sunlight of late April. Leaves were speckling the woods like a flock of butterflies, and the birds were singing, dipping between the branches. Flowers were poking up everywhere around the house, and the squirrels that had been so hungry they tried to eat the roof off of the house during the bad snowstorm were racing up and down the trees, chattering as if they had never almost died in the cold, as if the world was always going to be warm and wonderful now and winter was gone forever. He walked to school with Douglas who had come for him, trying to be happy and pleasant, although he felt in his heart the stone-heavy weight of his loss, the new insecurity that he knew he must endure now. Douglas seemed more than usually quiet.

It was not the same, Charles felt, sitting in the third row from the windows, the sixth grade row with Runt Borsold, Mary Mae Martin, Paul Holton, and Brenda Gustafson. The lessons were all dull, and it hardly seemed worth the effort to read the books anymore when just by moving his eyes slightly to the left he could watch Flossie Portola trying to flirt with him, or just by leaning back and whispering over his shoulder could ask Brenda to scratch his shoulder, which she would softly giggle and do with one sharp fingernail so it made his hair prickle. And he couldn’t get his mind on the homework that Miss Wrigley gave, coming to school more often than not without ever looking at it after a night of running wild in the fields. It wasn’t that he was tired. That sort of thing did not tire him. It was just that the books seemed irrelevant. He did not meet Miss Wrigley’s eyes anymore, did not speak up in class much, and seemed more interested in the outside of the school than the inside now. Miss Wrigley looked a bit sad and stern at him occasionally, but she did not get angry or curt with him. She did not ask him to stay after school anymore, either, Charles noticed. with some relief.

The last PTA meeting and party of the year was held on a warm night in May. Charles hardly entered the schoolhouse, but stayed outside with the other boys, smoking cigarettes and swapping dirty stories. They came in to be recognized once and stood around awkwardly while Miss Wrigley announced the attendance awards and grade awards for the year. And Charles had to come to the front of the room once to receive a special award, a walnut plaque with a little brass plate on it with his name and the date and his grade level achieved engraved on it. He suffered with a red face while Miss Wrigley stood very formally and handed him the plaque while the kids and the farmers and their wives all clapped. Then she held out her hand for him to shake, and as he took her hand he looked up and saw the disappointment in her eyes, and he held her hand a second too long and blushed. Then he sped out into the dark again and had to go through the snide comments and jokes of the other boys. He had learned to take it now, feeling they were only doing what they needed to do, confronted with Charles as the teacher’s favorite, as he admitted now that he had been. But they didn’t pursue it. There was something else going on.

“C’mon out to the old tool shed,” Runt said in a hoarse whisper. “Carl’s got an eight-page-bible.”

Charles had heard of these wonders, but had never seen one. Inside the tool shed that held the mower and hay rake that were used on the school yard in summer, a crowd of boys was humped in one corner, a flashlight gleaming intermittently as they shifted around, watching something on the dirt floor.

“Geezus!”

“Wow, look at that!”

“Quit shovin’.”

“He ain’t shovin’,” another voice said. “He’s creamin’,” and there was a low snicker from the group as if it were a single organism responding.

Charles worked his way forward and looked over shoulders at what the flashlight was pointing to on the floor. He saw a small opened book with black and white drawings on it, and for a moment he could not make out what the drawings were of, but then someone turned a page and a clearer set came into view. Buck Rogers and Wilma Deering, naked except for their helmets, were engaged in a fantastic orgy, using some sort of ray to enlarge their organs, until on the last page there was a huge phallus spouting enormous amounts of sperm while the woman flew off into a corner. Charles found himself panting as someone turned back to the first page and began it again.

“God, Carl, where’d you get it?”

“Oh, I bought it off a high school guy for half a buck.”

The tool shed got hotter and mustier by the minute, and the heap of boys writhed and cursed and said obscenities as the pages were turned. Charles felt tense as a slingshot pulled tight, looking at the crude pictures and knowing it was all ridiculous, but wanting to see them more, wanting to feel this tension more, wanting it to be greater and greater, until someone knocked the light down and Carl grabbed his book and the whole group burst out of the tool shed whooping and hollering and chasing each other around the dark yard.

When they had worn themselves out, they went to sit on the dark outside stairs, listening to the gabble of adults inside as the refreshments were served. Charles said he was going to get something to eat, and some of the boys went with him while some stayed in the dark, grumbling they didn’t want any old cardboard pie and Koolaid. Inside the school again, the light was blinding for a moment, and then Charles found the refreshment table, took a plate full and looked around for a chair. Flossie waved at him and patted a desk beside her own. He went over and slouched down in the desk grinning at her.

“I always thought you were going to be different, Charles,” Flossie said, licking pie crumbs off her lips. “But there you are, out in the dark with the rest of the dumb boys.”

“I got tired of being a gentleman,” Charles said. He took a great gobble of the cherry pie.

“I’ll bet you haven’t,” she said archly “You’re just being careful so the other boys won’t kid you so much.” She put her hand on his arm. “What made you stay in that creek until you caught pneumonia?”

“Lookin’ for something.”

“Looking for what? Honestly, Charles, I never heard of such a crazy thing.”

“Something of mine.”

“Well, you must have really wanted it to just about die for it. Honestly, Fern and I were so worried. Did you know we came to visit when you were so sick, but Mrs. Stumway wouldn’t let us come up?”