The Night of the Hunter (3 page)

I serve the Lord in my humble way, Ben.

Then, says Ben Harper softly, how come they got you locked up in Moundsville penitentiary, Preacher?

There are those that serves Satan's purposes against the Lord's servants, Ben Harper.

And how come you got that stick knife hid in your bed blankets, Preacher?

I serve God and I come not with peace but with a sword! God blinded mine enemies when they brought me to this evil place and I smuggled it in right under the noses of them damned guards. That sword has served me through many an evil time, Ben Harper.

I'll bet it has, Preacher, grins Ben and presently Preacher goes up into his bunk and lies there a while longer muttering and praying to himself and scheming up new ways to get Ben to tell him where he hid that ten thousand dollars in green hundreds. It's a game between them. And in a way it is Ben Harper's salvation—this little game. In three days they are coming to take Ben up to the death house and a body has to keep busy with little games like this to keep from losing his mind at the last. A little game—a little war of wills. Ben Harper and Preacher around the clock—day after day. And Ben Harper knows that it is a game that he will win. Because Preacher can talk the breath out of his body and Ben will never tell a mortal, living soul. But Preacher keeps on; stubborn, unremitting. In the quaking silence of the prison night: Listen, Ben! Where you're goin' it won't serve you none. Tell me, boy! Buy your way to Paradise now! You hear, boy? Mebbe the Lord will think twice and let you in the good place if you was to tell me, boy. Tell me! Have a heart!

Go to sleep, Preacher.

Salvation! Why, it's always a last-minute business, boy. There's a day of judgment for us all, Ben Harper, and no man knows the hour. Now's your chance. Mister Smiley and Corey South is both dead, boy! Can't nothin' change that! But if you was to let that money serve the Lord's purposes He might feel kindly turned toward you. Ben, are you listenin' to me, boy?

Shut up, Preacher! Ben whispers, choking back a giggle at the game, the furious little game that keeps him from thinking about the rope upstairs and his own shoes swinging six feet above the floor of the drop room.

Listen, Ben! See this hand I'm holdin' up? See them letters tattooed on it? Love, Ben, love! That's what they spell! This hand—this right hand of mine—this hand is Love. But wait, Ben! Look! There's enough moonlight from the window to see. Look, boy! This left hand! Hate, Ben, hate! Now here's the moral, boy. These two hands are the soul of mortal man! Hate and Love, Ben—warring one against the other from the womb to the grave—

Ben listens to the familiar sermon; shudders with a kind of curious delight as Preacher writhes the fingers of his two tattooed hands together and twists them horribly, cracking the knuckles as the fingers grapple one hand with the other.

Warring, boy! Warring together! Left hand and right hand! Hate and Love! Good and Evil! But wait. Hot dog! Old Devil's a-losin', Ben! He's a slippin' boy!

And now Preacher brings both hands down with a climactic crash on the wooden bench by the bunks. Then he is silent, crouched in the darkness, smiling at the glory of God in his evil fingers and waiting to see if his little drama has done anything to the boy in the lower bunk.

I could build a tabernacle, Ben, he whimpers. To beat that Wheeling Island tabernacle to hell and gone! Think of it, Ben. A tabernacle built with that ten thousand dollars of cursed, bloodied gold. But wait, Ben! Now it's God's gold. Thousands of sinners and whores and drunkards flocking to hear His word and all because you give that money to build a temple in His name. Listen to me, boy! You reckon the Lord wouldn't change His mind about you after that? Why, shoot, Ben! He wouldn't let them little old killings stand between you and the gates of Glory. Hell, no!

Ben rises on his elbow, tired of the game now.

Shut up, Preacher! Shut up and go to sleep before I climb over there and stuff your bed tick down your throat!

Silence again. Preacher up there in the darkness, in the thick, creosote silence of the vast prison. Preacher lying up there on his back with those tattooed fingers criss-crossed behind his sandy, shaggy head thinking how he can worm it out of Ben Harper with only three days to the death house. Ben stuffs his knuckles into his teeth till he tastes blood. The ropes beneath his straw tick squeak to the rhythm of his ague-like trembling. Ben Harper is quaking with agony beneath the little dream that the night's blue fingers reach out to him. Once more it is that winter afternoon on the river shore by the old house up the road from Cresap's Landing. He is looking into the moon faces of the children: Pearl stony and silent as a graveyard cherub and John's big eyes wide with everything Ben was telling him, while Pearl clutched the old doll against her body.

Where you goin' to, Dad?

Away, John! Away!

You're bleedin', Dad.

It's nothin', boy. Just a scratched shoulder.

But there's blood, Dad.

Hush, John! Mind what I told you to do.

Yes, Dad.

And you, Pearl! You, too. Mind now! You swore!

Now, from the corner of his eye, Ben sees the blue men with the guns in the big touring car coming down the road beyond the corner of the orchard. John's mouth is a white little line as his dark eyes follow the blue men. They circle and walk slowly in through the dead grass that rims the yard.

Now I'm goin' away, boy.

John's mouth breaks and trembles but then it tightens back into the thinness again. He makes no sound.

Just mind everything I told you, John.

Yes, Dad.

And take good care of Pearl. Guard her with your life, boy.

Yes, Dad.

Who's them men? whispers Pearl at last.

Never mind them. They come and I'm goin' off with them, children. Don't even waste time thinkin' about that now. Just mind what I told you—mind what you swore to do, boy!

Yes!

Swear to it again, John. Swear, boy!

I swear! I swear!

Ben Harper lies in his bunk now with the sweat beaded like morning dew on his forehead. He does not move lest Preacher may sense that he is awake, frightened beyond all reason or caution, and think that now is the time to break the seal at last and end his quest for the knowledge of the hidden money. But Preacher is snoring and mumbling in his sleep about Sin and Gold and the Blood of the Lamb, and Ben relaxes after a spell and watches the edge of the winter moon in the window, just the rim of it in the blue square of window with the corner of one of the wall towers black like a child's school cut-out with the sharp little machine gun sticking out. He closes his eyes, thinking of the day just ended. His wife Willa had been allowed to see him that morning. He looked at her there on the other side of the chicken wire and wanted to say things to her that he hadn't felt in a longer time than he could remember. Back in the spring of 1928 when they had run off to Elkton, Maryland, and gotten married and spent the first whole night together in a tourist cabin making love the way she had always wanted it to be instead of sneaking off somewhere to do it. He had thought about how all that honeymoon night they had listened to the whirr and roar of the roller skates in the big rolla-drome across the highway and that record that played over and over again, that one that went, Lucky Lindy up in the air! Lucky Lindy flew over there! and he had dreamed of the life they would have together in the house down in the bottomlands above Cresap's Landing and how he would get himself a raise at the hardware store and buy her a player piano. It was funny how it had always been a matter of money. Right up to the very end. Even that day at the prison she kept asking him about it—the ten thousand dollars he had hidden somewhere. She kept saying over and over that it wasn't going to do him any good and he had no right to leave her and the two kids without anything but that old bottomlands house her Uncle Harry had left her. Nothing but that and the clothes on their backs. But he would not tell. And it made him sick at his stomach to sit there on the other side of the chicken wire and see her mouth saying it over and over again until her face began to look for all the world like the face of Preacher; weak and sick with greed; the same greed that had led Ben to murder and the gallows. He watched her eyes all bright and feverish with hope of finding out, her little pink tongue licking her dry lips with the excitement of it and, at last her mouth gone slack with disappointment when she realized that he would not tell—that he would never tell.

That same afternoon Mister McGlumphey, his lawyer, had been to see him, too. There was no getting around it—they had all been mighty nice to him at his trial. Mister McGlumphey had done his very best to get him off with life imprisonment and the jury was as nice a bunch of people as you'd want to see and he thought to himself many times since: I wish them no harm nor vengeance in this world or the other. Mister McGlumphey had told him at the outset that it would sure go easier with him if he was to tell what he'd done with that ten thousand dollars and it was really then that Ben had made up his mind not to tell. Because any poor fool could see that it wasn't justice they were after—it was the ten thousand dollars. So Ben simply said that he wouldn't tell them even if they was to break his arms and legs to make him tell and Mister McGlumphey said they wouldn't do anything like that but they'd like as not break worse than that and he couldn't see any possible way to save him from swinging if he felt that way about it. And so Ben was more sure than ever that he was right. And he concluded with grim Calvinist logic that if he needed to tell them about the money to be spared the hanging then there was no real justice in the courts and so he would take his satisfaction with him to the grave. It was Sin and Greed that had brought him to Moundsville and it was Sin and Greed that was making them hang him. It was the face of Willa begging and wheedling behind the chicken wire. It was the face of Mister McGlumphey arguing. It was the voice of Preacher in the dark.

Where? Where, Ben? Where? Have a heart, boy. Where, Ben? Where?

He awoke. The corner of the moon was gone from the window. The blue square was empty except for the ragged thatch of Preacher's head inches from his own. Ben gathered himself slowly under his blanket and let his muscles coil like a steel spring and then lashed out with all his strength until he felt his hard fist crunch into the bones of the whispering face. Ben, you hadn't ought to have hit me! I'm a man of God!

You're a son of a bitch! Sneaking up and whispering in my ear whilst I'm sleeping! Hoping you could make me talk about it in my sleep! Damn you, Preacher! Damn you to hell!

Just the same you shouldn't have done it, boy! I'm a man of the Lord!

You're a slobberin' hypocrite, Preacher! Now get the hell back up in your bunk before I smash your head in! I'd as soon hang for three killin's as two!

Ben lies rigid now, listening as the other scrambles fearfully up into the rustling straw tick and falls back, mopping his bleeding nose and whimpering. Ben fell asleep and saw it clear as day: the little room and the rope. His Cousin Wilfred and old Uncle Jimmy John Harper got passes to a hanging back in 1930 and Wilfred got sick and had to be taken to a drugstore to be revived and cleaned up and Uncle Jimmy John wouldn't even talk about it when he got back home and every time one of Ben's kids would come to him with a rope and ask him to take the knots out of it he would shoo that youngster out the kitchen door. Ben could see himself plain as day: in the little room and a man was putting that rope over his head and he saw then that the man was Preacher and Preacher laughed when they sprang the trap and Ben was falling, falling, falling. He sprang up in the bunk, striking his head against the wall. What did I say, Preacher?

What, Ben?

Now he was scrambling up into Preacher's bunk and his fingers were around Preacher's throat like a ring of baling wire. I said something in my sleep just now! What did I say, Preacher?

Nothin'! My God, nothin', Ben!

You're lyin', Preacher! Goddamn you, you're lyin'!

He tightened his fingers—pressing his thumbs into the gristle of the man's windpipe until Preacher's breath came rattling and gasping. Then he took the hands away for a moment.

I said something! What did I say, Preacher? What! What!

Ben lifted him by the shoulders and flung him against the wall and banged his head against the stone to the rhythm of his words. Now the other convicts were yelling and banging for silence along the row.

What! What! What! What!

Preacher gasped and choked.

You—you was—you was quotin' the Book, Ben.

I which?

You was quotin' the Scripture! You said—you said, And a little child shall lead them.

Ben let go then and got back down in his bunk again and rolled up one of his socks and stuffed it into his mouth before he went back to sleep, and next morning when he woke to the siren's vast, echoing contralto the sock was still in his mouth, foul-tasting and thick on his dry tongue, but he knew, at least, that he had not talked. He spat it out and grinned across the cell at Preacher, dressed and shaved long before the morning siren blew. His nose was swollen and his eyes were puffed and black from the blow Ben had given him. Ben laughed out loud. Nothing would ever stop Preacher. Already the glitter was back of those hunting eyes; already the question was forming again behind those thin, mad lips. A feller almost had to hand it to Preacher.

Ben?

What, Preacher?

I'll be leaving this place in another month. You'll be dead then, Ben. Dead and gone to make your peace with God! Now if you was to tell me, boy, it might go easier. Why, Ben, with that ten thousand dollars I could build a tabernacle that would make that Wheeling Island place look like a chickenhouse! I'd even name it after you, boy! The Ben Harper Tabernacle! How's that sound? It'd be the glory of them all, Ben! The finest gospel tabernacle on the whole Ohio River!