The Night of the Hunter (9 page)

John thought: Is God one of them? Is God on the side of the fingers with names that are letters like the letters on the watch in Miz Cunningham's window?

There now! Willa was saying to Pearl. You look just grand. Aren't you happy we're all going on a picnic with Mr. Powell?

Yes. Oh, yes!

John thought: But I can't hate Pearl. Dad said I couldn't hate her because she is mine to protect with my life. But I am scared. I am scared more than I was ever scared of dark or wind or the twisting bubble world, but then I reckon Dad was scared, too, when the blue men took him away, but he was brave and that's what you have to be.

Preacher appeared in the hallway. Willa and Pearl ran to greet him and John knew Willa would be holding Pearl and the doll up to kiss and be kissed by Preacher and there was nothing he could do to stop that.

John? John? Come on, now! We're leaving!

Off on the sweet morning wind he heard the foolish, womanly hoot of the little steamboat at the wharf. He turned and pushed through the screen door and into the kitchen to where they were. His hair was flattened and itching where she had wet it down and brushed it slick-flat and his thighs scratched and tingled against the harsh cloth of his good Sunday knickers.

Ah, there's my boy! There's the little man! Good morning, John.

'Morning.

He tried to smile because they might ask him questions if he didn't smile.

Willa, you were truly left a priceless legacy when Brother Harper passed on! These fine, fine youngins!

Willa flushed with pleasure and patted Pearl's curls more neatly against her shoulders.

Priceless beyond the worth of much fine gold, Preacher said, the laughter of these precious little children!

John stared. The finger named H reached over and chucked him under the chin. John thought: She says he is a man of God. And so God is one of them; God is a blue man.

Yes, Willa said. I'm right proud, Mr. Powell. Such a comfort they've been to me.

John thought: I wish it was night. I wish I was in bed under the comforter. I wish the wind was blowing and the darkness was being because I am not as much afraid of them as I am of the finger whose name is H.

Well, I reckon we'd best be gettin' down to the boat! boomed Preacher.

They followed him, the picnic basket in his hand, and in Peacock Alley it was spring and the warped mossy bricks of the pavement were covered with little green wings from the silver maples and they crunched under their feet, and the air was blue and green and yellow with little broken soft pieces of sun that blew on the river wind. At the wharf John spied the face of Uncle Birdie, and Willa stiffened when the old man waved courteously and she told John he should not speak to that dirty old man. Then John saw Walt Spoon and Icey and a lot of other people on the landing and by the wharfboat the little stern-wheeler lay waiting, its stacks puffing white clouds impatiently into the raspberry-cobbler sky.

Forevermore! What a pretty day! sighed Willa, her cheeks pinched pink by the air, her eyes sparkling with happiness.

Well, sure! It's spring—that's why it's so purty, laughed Walt Spoon and led them all through the wharfboat and up the little plank onto the boat. There was really no cabin. They sat in the shelter of the little boiler deck by the railings where they could look out over the broad expanse of rich, motionless river and the rolling hills of spring beyond the water and in its reflection another spring, another world.

Here, John! Come and set by me and Pearl and Mr. Powell.

John obeyed, stiff with fright that had long gone beyond the prerogative of anger or protest; moving now to the dumb bidding of muscles he had set in motion from an earlier outset. He squatted by the borrowed folding chair (there were a dozen on the deck, borrowed from the funeral parlor) beside his mother and listened as Icey Spoon chattered on about a lantern slide show some missionary fellow was going to give at the church and he could smell the steam of the boat and the smell of Walt Spoon's pipe and back in the wharfboat Uncle Birdie Steptoe was picking out a silly tune on a rusty banjo.

Gracious! cried Willa, when the whistle blew again, surrounding them for an instant in a shivering glass ball of sound.

Land's sakes! We're moving! cried Icey, and old Friend Martin, the preacher at the church, lifted his enormous palm as if on cue, and Nelly Bloyd, the choir leader, raised her sweet soprano voice in the hymn. They were all singing now: the voices of different texture and size mingling together into a curious and pleasant chord.

Shall—we—gather at the r-i-v-e-r! Where bright angel feet have tro-od!

John watched the land move, the wharfboat move, the world moving slowly away from them with the dark water's intervention stranding them somehow upon the river's implacable face, and he thought: It will be all right because Pearl is sitting on the other side of him and the doll is where he can't see it. Nothing will happen. It will be all right.

We—will—walk and worship e-e-ver! All the happy, golden d-a-ay!

So they sang on for an hour and between hymns Walt Spoon called out the river points and hamlets as they passed them: That's Sunfish yonder, folks! Over there is Petticoat Ripple! Yonder is Grape and Bat Island! We're passin' Sistersville already! I declare, Mother, this little boat makes right fair time, don't she?

Above them the chattering puffing of the steam engine and the occasional shrill scream of the whistle left stuttering echoes among the environing hills and set yard dogs bawling and howling in the bottom farms along the shore. The air was unbelievably rich and sweet with the temper of the season: the river smell like the incense of some primal pagan fertility.

Why are you so still, boy?

John lifted his eyes at the question, beyond the fingers, beyond the dead-gray vest and the stiff paper collar and the black tie. He shrugged swiftly as small boys do and then grinned, the perfect picture of a fool.

I'd figure a boy like you would be mighty excited—takin' a ride on a real steamboat.

Still he said nothing in reply. John, I don't believe you like me very much. He could not make the lie with his mouth and so he sat mute and blushing. Willa, chattering happily with Icey Spoon and Nelly Bloyd, did not overhear Preacher talking to the boy and Pearl was dreaming, her eyes lost in the magic mirror of the passing river, the doll's face pressed close against her pink bonnet brim.

Aw, have a heart, boy! I think you made up your mind not to like me from the first.

And John thought: When I walked on the tall fence in Jason Lindsay's meadow that time I walked with my feet going very carefully so that I wouldn't fall and that is how I must make myself be when he is looking at me. Eh, boy? What?

He lifted his gaze now and met Preacher's eyes steadily. Was there something quite calm and deadly in those eyes now? The glitter not of ice but of chilled blue steel?

Perhaps you better start trying to like me, smiled Preacher, ominously.

He paused a moment, letting the words sink in, before he went on.

—Because your mamma likes me, John! John clenched his teeth until his spittle tasted like pennies under the tongue.

—And your dear little sister Pearl likes me, Preacher went on, with a mock cajoling warmth. And if both of them like me and you don't—why, then that makes you different, John. Now, don't you think you might try to like me just a little? You don't want to be different do you? No—yes.

He thought: Because when you tell a lie it must be to keep from saying a worse thing. Then lying is not a sin and God will not punish you. (But what if God is one of them?)

Ah, that's the boy! boomed Preacher. Did you hear that, Willa my girl?

He turned and pressed his hand gently upon her shoulder so that she turned laughing, in mid-sentence.

Pardon?

John! cried Preacher. He says he likes me!

Icey intervened, her face flushed and kittenish.

Why, of course he likes Mr. Powell! she cried. He's a fine boy! He likes all his elders—don't you, John?

Now the boat whistle blew three shrill blasts and they moved from the channel toward the grove of trees on the West Virginia shore where in those pale, sweet reaches shone the white spire of a country church and, among the fences, the pale stones of the burying ground.

We're here! We're here! cried Willa with a child's happiness, and John sprang suddenly to her side, clasping her hand, having thought in one sudden, wonderful moment that she had cried: He's here! He's here!

Is Dad—

The picnic joy washed from her eyes for that moment and the smile faded on her mouth.

John, how could you be that mean? To mention
his
name to me today!

But I thought—I thought you said—

He stumbled away from her, foolish and clumsy among the braces and chairs and the steam and the stirring, stiff legs of the standing people and he kept thinking over and over: Because if I cry then they will know something is wrong and then they will guess that I know something that I would die before I would tell any of them.

Then the little boat scraped on the brick landing, the green and fair wind blew, and up in the meadow behind the grove the little country church woke suddenly as if in greeting and began striking soft golden notes of April sound.

They spent the morning solemnly trimming the grass on the little mounds of earth and wrenching winter weeds away from the carved names and the foolish sandstone angels and the little inlaid enamel pictures above the lost and faded dates. They set jelly glasses of Johnny-jump-ups at the headstones and carried little pails of water from the faucet at the edge of the grove. The wind blew gently all the morning and white clouds glided slowly across the blue sky like strange, grand frigates. And so until noon there was no other sound but the snip-snip of grass scissors and the hushing sigh of sickles and the occasional scratching cry of a spring bird soaring in restive and feral joy into the untroubled sky. They ate late in the afternoon. John had carried his share of water pails and stood by the unmarked grave of his father while Willa wept and Pearl stood beside her hugging the old doll until the older ones walked away again and then she began the questions again.

John?

Yes.

Where's Dad?

I don't know, he said truthfully and Willa intervened then with thick sandwiches for each of them: ham salad between thick slices of salt-rising bread fresh that morning from Icey's oven. John watched them eat but held his own sandwich untouched, still warm and yielding within the wax paper. He returned to his father's grave and stood for a moment perplexed and scowling at the fresh earth.

Listen here, now—he began clumsily, and then abandoned it because it was just a pile of dirt and he had been foolish enough for a moment to think that it was really
him
there and that maybe he could have made his dad say that it didn't really matter—that it was all right to tell them after all because it was more than he would be able to endure: holding it all inside. Then suddenly he could not believe that anyone alive or dead could be there no matter what the older people said or that any of it had any reality at all: the square eroded slabs with the little names, the numbers, the pictures of the sad, smiling ladies and the little dimpled stone babies. These were the great stone toys of a giant who had grown weary of his play and wandered away long ago. It was a joke of some kind. It was just letters—like the letters on Preacher's fingers.

John, are you sick? she said.

No, Mom.

Then why don't you eat your sandwich?

Not hungry, Mom.

Well, now, I don't want you pestering me going home on the boat this evening. There'll not be a drop of food to eat then.

He unwrapped his big sandwich slowly, regarded it with faint distaste an instant, and then dutifully bit into it. He did not like the smell of Icey's salt-rising bread. It had the sour smell like when someone is sick. But he ate valiantly, chewing the hunks of sandwich in his dry mouth.

Ah, here's my boy!

His mouth stopped chewing, then began again. He swallowed in dry agony.

How about a bite out of that sandwich, boy?

John said nothing, heard nothing but the vast and enormous clanking of the watch in Preacher's pocket: the gold watch of his dad's that Willa had given him.

Aw, have a heart, boy, whined the voice, and the hand named Love reached out for the sandwich.

John looked at the fingers and the blue letters of false love and thought: Which is more dangerous? Which is worse? When he is joking like this or when his eyes turn blue like the steel of the pistols in the hands of the men by the smokehouse that day. He held the sandwich out.

Tut tut, boy! I don't want your sandwich. That was just my little joke.

John turned suddenly, threw the sandwich into the rank winter grass, and moved off again. After a bit he found an Indian arrowhead in the sandy earth and brushed it clean and polished it and felt curiously safer with it in his pocket and then he saw them on a wood bench by the roadside: his mother and Preacher. The others had gone off, flushed and giggling, knowing how it was with lovers, letting them be alone. John looked at his mother's face—flushed and glowing the way it had used to be when Ben Harper came home from work and kissed her in the door. After a bit Willa called to him and stood up smoothing her skirts. She had seen the others moving again toward the landing with their baskets and garden tools.

Come along, boy! We're leaving now.

On the boat again he saw that it was nearly dark and there were black clouds over the Ohio hills and the faint grumble of thunder like a dog growling under a porch and he suddenly thought that he had forgotten something; felt suddenly as if there were still a question he should ask the man under the mound. But then he remembered again that there was no one really there.

Why are you afraid? he asked himself.

Because of the rain, he told himself. Because of the lightning and the thunder.