The Night of the Hunter (7 page)

John?

Yes.

Is Mom home?

Yes.

Is she in bed, John?

Yes. Go to sleep, Pearl.

All right, John. Good night.

Good night. Sleep tight, Pearl! Don't let the bedbugs bite!

The little girl lay still for a bit, breathing thoughtfully into the matted wig of her doll.

John?

Yes?

What's bedbugs?

Hush up, Pearl! It's time you was asleep!

She lay still a moment more and then commenced scratching furiously and sat upright in bed.

Does bedbugs tickle when they walk, John?

Hush, Pearl. Go to sleep. That's just a joke when you say, Don't let the bedbugs bite. There ain't no such a thing. Now go to sleep!

Pearl watched the whirling pictures in the light the yard lamp made on the wallpaper.

Tell me a story, John. She sighed, her eyes lost in the fancies of the dancing shadow branches. John lay still and squinted his other eye.

All right. If you'll lay back down and keep the covers on you so's you won't catch your death of cold.

Pearl shot down under the sheets again and tucked her legs up tight against her breast, hugging the doll and waiting for the story to start.

Once upon a time—there was a rich king—

What's a rich king, John?

Never mind! You'll see what it means directly, Pearl. There was this rich king and he had a son and a daughter and they all lived in a castle over in Africa. Well, one day this king got carried away by bad men—

Pearl loathed the story now. But still she was silent, thankful enough to hear any story at all; comforted by the droning voice muffled beneath the quilt.

—And before he got carried off he told this son to kill anyone that tried to steal their gold. Well it wasn't long before them same bad men come back to get the gold—you see they missed that on the first trip—and these bad men—

The blue men? whispered Pearl, in a perfect faint of dread.

John stopped telling the story. He turned his head away from the dancing things and shut his eyes against the fresh, wind-smelling pillow.

John! What happened to the king's gold? Did the blue men—

Go to sleep, Pearl! I forgit the rest of that story.

He shivered silently under the warm covers, his fingernails digging into his palms. Pearl sighed and put her thumb in her mouth. Presently she took the thumb out again and blinked at the doll on the pillow beside her.

Good night, Miz Jenny, she said softly. Don't let the bedbugs bite.

And she fell asleep. But John lay still awake, heeding on the winter wind the blowing bawl of a steamboat whistle upriver at the head of the Devil's Elbow where the channel straightened and ran up straight through the Narrows. The dark tumbling wind was rollicking with river ghosts. John thought of some of the tales old Uncle Birdie Steptoe used to spin on the deck of his wharfboat on dreaming summer afternoons: of the dark river men—gone now and cursed and lost in the deep water's running. Simon Girty riding with the Shawnees against his own people; the soldier Mason running with the devil Harper to ravage the river from Cave-in-Rock clean to the sugar coast; Cornstalk and Logan and the young chiefs in the black buffalo robes. Old Uncle Birdie carried the tales down through the river years from a lost time, tales spun round the smoking oil lamps of a thousand wharfboats from Pittsburgh to the Delta. John rose from his pillow when he heard the thick, even breath of his sleeping sister. Slipping from bed John tiptoed across the frosty boards of the floor and fetched his broken cap pistol from the pocket of his jacket. For a moment his own shadow loomed vast and threatening in the golden arena on the wallpaper. The small boy scowled, clenched his chattering teeth, and brandished the little gun.

I ain't scared of you none! he whispered hoarsely and made a fierce devil's face at the shadow. And he watched in fascination as it mocked him. The shadow hunched down when John hunched down, it twisted when he twisted, and it bent grimacing to one side when he did. Blue man! Take that!

His mouth shaped the words as his finger pressed the trigger of the broken toy and in his mind the wonderful roar of powder filled the silence. But the shadow did not fall. When John lifted the pistol above his head and danced on his numb white toes the shadow danced and waved his pistol, too. John clicked the toy pistol once more, a
coup de grace,
and stumped grimly back to the bed. Now the shadow man was dead. He and his kind would come no more to drag the king from his castle by the sea. Beside the body of his sleeping sister John snuggled his face into the cold, sweet pillow and pressed the toy gun underneath where he could get at it in a moment. And then something in the wind's dark voice caused him to open one eye again to the square of yellow light on the wall. The shadow man: it was smaller than before but it was still there. He pondered it a moment, lying quite still, his heart thundering in his throat. Yes, to be sure it was the shadow of a man in the yellow square of light from the yard lamp: a very silent, motionless man with a narrow-brimmed hat and still, straight arms. John's tongue grew thick as a mitten at the growing dread within him.

I ain't scared of you, he whispered to the shadow man and the wind rattled the window like pressing hands.

The shadow could not really be there. John was not there to make it. And yet there it was: the neatest little shadow man in the world and he could see it unmistakably and it was not make-believe like the clown and the peddler and the prancing horse that the branches made. John slipped out of bed again and crept to the window. He pressed his nose to the icy pane and stared across the deserted snowy yard to the place where the single yellow flame bloomed in the glass box like a golden fish in a bowl of light. Then he saw the man by the roadside. The man stood in silence, motionless, staring speculatively toward the house like a traveler seeking a night's lodging.

Go away, man! whispered John, his flesh gathering for a paroxysm of trembling.

Off down the river the eleven-o'clock train of the Ohio River Division of the Baltimore and Ohio screamed twice and hurried off panting among the bottom farms. There was no regular depot at Cresap's Landing and often the late train from Moundsville stopped at the crossroads to let off travelers or drummers to make their way as best they could the half mile into Cresap's Landing and a room at Mamie Ernest's boardinghouse.

I ain't scared! I ain't scared! whispered John and saw after a moment that his dread had been unnecessary. It was really a most plain-looking man. He stood shivering for a moment longer in his cheap gray suit and his old gray hat and even as John watched he moved back into the shadows again and off up the road to Cresap's Landing. Now the old winter branches made the dancing horse again on the golden square and the clown with toothpick legs frolicked on the mad wind. John crept back into the bed and huddling close to the warm body of Pearl thought carefully to himself: Just a little gray man in a little gray suit and a little gray hat and he's gone. A pleasant man, too, one would guess. For even now as he wandered up the road for Mamie Ernest's he was lifting his high, clear tenor to the cold night and singing a sweet old gospel tune.

Willa said he was a dirty old man and used to forbid John to go there. But to the boy the old wharfboat at the landing seemed the most perfect kind of home. It wallowed against the lapping slope of the shore—a crumbling houseboat scarcely better than the cheap floating shacks of the shantyboat trash down the shore under the willows at the edge of Jason Lindsay's meadow. Willa had taken Pearl to work with her that morning and John had a few hours to spend as he chose. Uncle Birdie was just having morning coffee. When the old man spied John standing timidly on the bricks by the narrow gangplank he threw up his knotted hands and ran to the door.

Bless my soul if it hain't Ben Harper's boy John! Hop up, boy!

John smiled, and Uncle Birdie motioned him up the plank.

Come on in, boy, and have a good hot cup of coffee with me. Does your maw let you?

John's eyes fell.

By damn, it don't matter if she does or don't! We'll have ourselves a cup anyways. I say a feller ain't worth a hoot without his morning coffee. Hurry up, there, boy, and shut that door! It's cold enough to freeze the horns off a muley cow!

John crept into the narrow little cabin and sat on a salt box by the stove.

Now! cried the old man, fetching the coffeepot and pouring John's cup full. How you been? 'Deed, I hain't seen you for a coon's age, Johnny!

I been mindin' Pearl, said John.

Birdie cracked his old fist in his leathery palm.

Pshaw, now! Hain't it a caution what women will load onto a feller's shoulders when he ain't lookin'! Mindin' girls! Shoot! That hain't no job for a big feller like you!

Oh! said John promptly. I don't mind, Uncle Birdie. Pearl needs someone to mind her.

Well, now, yes, I reckon that's so. I reckon with your pap gone—that sorty makes you the man of the house, so to speak! 'Scuse me, Cap, while I sweeten up my coffee a little. A man of my years needs a little snort to get his boiler heated of a mornin'.

John watched as the old man reached under the bursting leather rocker in which he sat and fetching up a pint bottle of crystal liquid splashed generously into his coffee. He sipped it, sucked his wet white mustaches for a moment, and then fixed John with his twinkling blue eyes.

And how's your maw, Johnny?

Well she's fine. She's workin' up at Mr. Spoon's place now.

Go away, now! She is? By granny's, it hain't ever' boy in Cresap's Landing whose maw works in an ice-cream parlor! Bet she can sneak you out a dish of tutti-frutti anytime you take a notion, eh, Johnny?

Oh, no! She don't like me or Pearl hangin' around her at work. She's took Pearl up there with her today but it's kind of special.

And so you figured it was time you come down and paid old Uncle Birdie a call, eh, boy?

John wriggled his cold toes in his shoes and moved closer to the cherry-red woodstove. Beyond the dusty window the river was flaked with shards of spring ice. The early thaw had begun and in a month the cattails in the shallows would lift their brown thumbs to test the first spring wind. John wandered to the window and stared at the half-sunken boat down the shore below the landing.

Ain't nobody stole Dad's skiff, he observed softly.

Ain't nobody goin' to, neither! cried Uncle Birdie. Ain't nobody hadn't better try! I keep my weather eye on them shantyboat trash down the shore. There hain't a one of them wouldn't swipe that skiff if I was to let 'em. I figger another three–four weeks the weather'll be fit for me to wade down and git her up on the bank. Then I'll give her a good calkin' and a new paint job and this summer I'll learn you how to lay as good a trotline as ever your daddy did, boy.

John came alive at the prospect. He remembered the times when his dad was home and on summer days that flashed with dragonflies they had gone fishing for channel cats as far down river as Middle Island Creek.

Ah! Look, boy! Looky yonder! cried Birdie, motioning up river through the windowpane. There comes the
Sarah T. Blake!

A stern-wheeler had appeared small and white on the bend, trailing a dirty string of smoke up from her stacks to stain the pearly winter sky.

Ain't like the old times, Johnny, sighed Uncle Birdie, sloshing another helping of liquor into his morning coffee. Many's the forenoon I've cleared five big Pittsburgh packets at this very wharf.

John nodded gravely at the thought of these faded wonders.

Why just this mornin' at breakfast I was talkin' to the new boarder up at Mamie Ernest's and he—Daggone it, anyways, boy! I knowed I had somethin' to tell you and here it clean slipped my mind till just now. That new boarder! He knowed your dad!

John grew small and silent, crawling deep within himself, listening with every nerve of his body now.

Yessir! You see old Mamie's been sweet on me for years now and she gives me breakfast up at the boardinghouse ever' single mornin' and this very mornin' this stranger was here and we got to talkin' friendly-like and he said he knowed Ben Harper. Well sir, I piped right up and—

The blue men, said John.

Which? said Uncle Birdie. Why, no—he was a preacher and I'll swear to it. Anyways he wanted to know about you two little lambs—meanin' you and little Pearl—and he said he was just itchin' to do somethin' to help you folks out if there was anything at all you needed. Well now he was the kindliest-turned feller a body could ask for.

Where did he know Dad?

Birdie's face fell and he fumbled in his pants for his whittling stick and penknife.

Well, boy, I'll not hide the truth—it was up at Moundsville penitentiary when they had your dad there. This here feller was chaplain and that's how come he got to know Ben. But wait, now! Don't get the idee he's one of these here glum-faced, fun-killing old holiness preachers, now. Why, he was just as jokey and pleasant as a Wheeling drummer with a easeful of samples.

John handed the coffee cup back to the old man unfinished.

I gotta go now, Uncle Birdie!

Aw, well, shucks now, boy! You just got here.

Well, I told Mom I'd be back for Pearl. She don't like us kids hangin' around Mister Spoon's place too much.

All right then, Cap. But mind what I promised you now—about the skiff. First nice day we git I'll haul her up and git to work fixin' her up and then you and me'll go fishin'.

John did not turn back as he ran up the narrow board to the landing and hurried against the wind that blew down Peacock Alley from the hills. Behind him he heard the shrill whistle of the little stern-wheeler as she passed Cresap's Landing in mid-channel. Now as John rounded the corner by Jander's Livery Stable he saw them clearly through the window of Spoon's Place and his heart rose thick and cold in his throat. There was the man in the gray suit and the gray hat sitting at the soda fountain smiling and talking with little Pearl kicking her legs over the edge of the marble counter and Willa standing flushed and pleased with her hands folded in her apron while Walt Spoon and Icey stood by with prim, pleased smiles on their faces as they harked to the stranger's words. He was talking to them all and they were just eating it all up like a kitten eats cream, and John thought his heart would stop beating altogether because the stranger had Pearl's old doll in his hands now and he was bouncing it up and down on the little girl's knee like it was nothing but the plainest, commonest doll in the world.