The Orphan (2 page)

Robert did not know how to answer this. Should he say yes? And then what? What sort of question was that?

“You can understand us, can’t you, son?” said the farmer, squatting down beside Robert’s chair. Robert looked into the old man’s eyes set deep in the walnut burl wrinkles. They were light blue with broken red veins, and the lids looked tired. He wondered how old a person had to be for his eyes to get tired like that.

“Maybe he’s foreign,” said the woman, returning to the stove and breaking eggs in a pan. “But he’ll eat, I suppose.”

“Come on now, boy, tell us your name,” said the farmer, very lightly stroking Robert’s hair.

There was a question he could answer, at least. “Robert Lee Burney,” he said in a surprisingly clear, high voice.

“There now,” said the farmer, smiling. “You just didn’t have anything else to say, hey?”

“Well, if he’s got a name, he’s got a place in the world,” said the woman. “And it won’t likely be ours.”

The farmer stood up, his hand still lightly resting on Robert’s head. “He’s welcome here until he finds that place.”

The woman turned halfway from the stove, looked straight into the farmer’s tired eyes. She had to look down slightly. Robert watched the look and the subtle change he saw in the woman’s expression puzzled him, a softening, something
less difficult
was the only thing he could think of as he watched the tall, homely woman in the cotton print dress and apron looking down the slight incline of her gaze into the blue eyes of her husband. The hand on Robert’s head touched lightly but did not shake or waver. He watched the woman’s face change, and something beyond his understanding passed between her and the man. He suddenly wanted to know what that was, more than I had wanted the dove last night, more than he wanted the bacon and eggs he smelled frying in the pan. She turned back to the stove, pushing up some hair wisps that had come down out of the mass of gray-streaked black hair she had tied up in a bandana.

“You’re so soft hearted, Martin, you’d take in a hurt Indian and make him a new tomahawk.” But she said it in a different voice, as if it were an aside, and now the matter of whether Robert would stay or not had been settled.

“I’ll call the sheriffs office after a bit, Cat,” the farmer said. He too acted differently. Somehow the question had been resolved. Robert was mystified.

“Well you can tell him we got lots of room here,” the wife said. “And he’s not going to be a bit of trouble. Except for a couple pair of overalls and some dove eggs for breakfast now and then.”

They both laughed.

***

To the many questions from the farmer and his wife, and later from the sheriff, Robert could honestly answer that he did not remember.

“But you do recall your right name?” Sheriff Kendall asked for the third time.

“Yes sir,” Robert said, and repeated it.

The sheriff was tall and bent over with hardly any hair and a little round stomach that made Robert think he must have swallowed something big like a snake does. The sheriff had written a few things down in his notebook with a yellow pencil. But now he had put the notebook away and was, as he said, saucering and blowing the coffee Aunt Cat had poured him. He put the cup down and swung around to Robert suddenly.

“
Habla usted Espanol
?”

Robert jumped, but looked blank.

“Well, Mrs. Nordmeyer, I just don’t know what to say.” The sheriff tipped up his saucer to pour the cooled coffee back into the cup. “This little feller seems bright enough and well mannered, and he’s not from the migrant camp, probably, or he’d know Spanish.”

“Martin and I have agreed that he can stay with us, if it’s not against the law or anything,” Aunt Cat said. She put a protective hand on Robert’s shoulder.

“Oh, it ain’t against the law, I guess.” The sheriff smiled. “It ain’t if I don’t file the missing person report right away.”

Martin came stomping back into the porch, scraped his feet and walked on into the dining room and sat at the table. He was sweating through his blue shirt.

“Got the bales in your pickup, Len,” he said, wiping his forehead with his bandana.

“You’d oughta waited, Martin. I was going to give you a hand with them.”

“No trouble.” Martin squinted his face up, concerned. “What do you think about this young man now? Is he legal?”

“Oh, I think we can let it ride for a bit.” The sheriff got up from the table, tucking in his khaki shirt. He picked up his ranger hat from the chair. “The township’s got enough expense right now. And it don’t make good sense to ship the boy away until we know more about where he came from. I’ll get the judge to appoint you foster parents in the case until some more evidence comes in.” He jammed the hat down square on his bald head as if he were a floor lamp putting on its shade. Robert thought he looked better with his hat on, more like a Texas Ranger, maybe.

“And who knows when that’ll be?” he said, smiling.

After the sheriff had driven down the lane, Robert felt more at ease. He had not known certainly how entangled he might become with the law.

“You’re not going to give me away?” he asked, looking up at Aunt Cat and Martin in turn.

“Little Robert,” the woman said, smiling, “Martin and I are
not
going to give you away.”

“It would be nice to know where you dropped from,” Martin said. “But if you’ve got a touch of amnesia, well, it’s not your fault.”

“Does the ... does that word mean I don’t remember?”

“That’s right, but you’ll probably have it all come back to you one of these days,” Martin said. There was something like a frown on his face, Robert thought, but it was hard to tell. His brown face was so seamed and creased. You could always tell when he smiled though.

“If I remember, and I don’t have umnesia, then I have to go away with the sheriff?”

The two adults looked at each other. “Well,” Aunt Cat said, “if you do remember, won’t you want to go home to where your own folks are?”

“I guess I’ll keep the umnesia for awhile,” Robert said, sliding off the chair. “Can I go out and play with Biff?”

***

Martin would carry Robert around the farm, showing him the barns, the corncribs, the chicken and brooder houses, the milk house and the tool shed, talking in a low toned, expressive murmur as if it were all a secret between Robert and him, as if one day all this would belong to the little boy. Robert loved riding on the solid arm that held him as if he were a hawk being trained for flight. He shouted over the tractor noise as they disked the new cornfield, asking even more questions, for his mind was empty and waiting for the whole world. And the farmer would squint up his eyes so they almost disappeared in the walnut burl wrinkles and laugh quietly at all the questions, and answer them all. In the early morning, Robert would go to the barns for milking, carrying a tiny galvanized pail the farmer had found somewhere, and he would have a try at the milking, working on the “stripper” teats at the back while the old farmer sat tilted forward on his one-legged stool, his gray head against the Guernsey flank, making the front teats squirt in rhythm and fill the big buckets with sudsy warm milk that the cats cried after. And sometimes a cat would sit patiently beyond the cow’s swinging, lion tail and Martin would bend the teat and squirt a long stream of foamy milk right into the cat’s mouth, the cat sitting up, taking it in the eyes, ears, whiskers, chest, everywhere just to get some in her mouth, and Robert leaping around and laughing until he cried to see the cats all happily bedraggled with milk and Martin murmuring a low laugh against the cow’s red flank that dented just right for his head to fit in while he milked her. Robert thought it all seemed to fit together perfectly, the nests fit the chickens, the chicks just filled the warm brooder hood, the cows fit their stanchions and walked along the lane to the pasture in a line that just fit the path they had worn. All of it seemed right and perfect, even the smells of manure and sheep dip and fly spray, all the pungencies of the farm, seemed to fit in their places in the whitewashed barn and the animals’ houses laid out so neatly around the big, hard-packed barnyard.

One morning coming downstairs late in his nightshirt, Robert’s hair bristled and I almost shifted, hearing new voices coming from the living room. There was also a strange, rhythmic train of sounds that accompanied the voices. I had never heard music before, nor had Robert, but then I had not attended to the doings of humans much until now. A group of voices was going up in pitch, then down, seeming to smile and shout at the same time, their words slurred and drawn out in unison. Shrill scrapings and whistling noises accompanied the voices, keeping pace with them. “We’re glad to see ya!” they screamed, and then the music broke off and someone said as if suddenly finding it was spring, “It’s the Breakfast Club!” And there was a lot of garbled laughter and hooraying. Robert was appalled that this was taking place in the living room and presented an obviously frightened face to Aunt Cat who was calmly preparing some bread dough in the kitchen.

“Good morning, Little Robert,” she said, her arms floured to the elbow. “Oh my, what’s wrong, little fella?” she said, suddenly catching his expression.

“Somebody’s in there,” Robert said, looking toward the living room where the voices were proclaiming their intention to “march around the breakfast table.” The voices sounded flat, as if they were speaking through a narrow crack.

Aunt Cat looked down at him for a long minute, abSently rubbing flour off her arms. Then she began to laugh and picked him up, making long flour marks on his nightshirt, and carried him into the living room.

“Look here, Little Robert. Look at that. There’s not a soul in here. See?”

Robert looked around. The living room was deserted except for the old upright piano, the upholstered sofa and chair, and the usual bric-a-brac. The voices were coming out of an arch-shaped thing that at first looked like a chair back.

“That’s the radio, Robert,” Aunt Cat said, jiggling him on her arm as if that motion would help to settle the knowledge in his head. “Didn’t you ever hear a radio before? My goodness, child,
where
have you been? I thought all little boys nowadays listened to Jack Armstrong and Dick Tracy.”

Robert did indeed become so enthralled with the radio that he had to be pulled away for meals for a few days. I was equally taken with the music, and often was dissatisfied with Robert’s choice of program, his taste running to Buck Rogers, while I would have searched the dial for Benay Venuto or the Merry Macs. In the sitting around time after supper, Martin would listen to the deep voiced Boak Carter and the news, and Aunt Cat would turn to One Man’s Family or the Easy Aces. The conflict generated between Robert’s need for adventure tales and my own intense curiosity about music led finally to a standoff on the radio question, one of the few times I found myself interfering in his life. We had to take turns listening. To the Nordmeyers, it must have seemed the little boy simultaneously possessed an obvious love of mystery and adventure and a peculiar need to listen to almost any kind of music. He would be pressed to the gothic speaker of the Philco for the serials and even some daytime shows like Helen Trent; and later he would sit glumly, almost angrily in a chair at some distance from the set listening to Guy Lombardo, but would protest violently if anyone offered to change the station.

The kind of music Robert liked best was Martin’s harmonica playing. The farmer would take the old Hohner from his shirt pocket and play “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” or “Peanut Sat on a Railroad Track,” or “Pop Goes the Weasel,” with a real pop in it, and Robert would smile until his jaws hurt. He even got so he could play a few notes predictably, so that Martin made up a simple tune consisting of in and out notes in a descending scale. They made up lyrics together (to the tune of “Put Another Nickle In, In the Nickelodeon”) and the first one they made went like this:

In a little cubbyhole
Sits a tiny mousie-O
Playing on her piccolo
To make her whiskers shiver.

There came to be a dozen or so verses eventually, some of which made no sense at all, but Robert would play the in and out tune until Aunt Cat was driven from the room. It seemed to be something only Martin and Robert could stand for very long.

One evening after supper, Martin and Aunt Cat sat in the dining room listening to the radio, each drinking beer from a tall brown bottle, a thing they did so seldom that both Robert and I were interested in it. Robert expressed a desire for some beer. Aunt Cat said it was not for children, but Martin thought that a little beer wouldn’t hurt a fly.

“Just a little bit now,” said Aunt Cat. “You don’t know what influences ...” Her sentence trailed off into a significant look, to which her husband raised his eyebrows and nodded while he poured Robert half a glass.

The light golden fluid sparkled as Robert drank off a big mouthful and choked it down, his throat trying to close it out while his little boy honor made sure it went down. As it hit Robert’s stomach, I felt it as strongly as if I had swallowed a piece of green rhubarb. It is a rare thing for me to be involved when I have shifted. For the most part I am a detached observer, partially because my usual senses are in abeyance and I find the scene rather boring, and partly because the physical nature of the shift seemed to be such that I could not really interfere very much without forcing a transformation back into my natural form. But the beer had something in it wholly new and exciting to me, something that ran instantly through Robert’s veins and my own with such a meaningful, tingling pleasure that I almost flickered into my natural form standing directly in front of the farm couple. As it was I must have wavered a bit, for I heard Aunt Cat laugh and say, “Look at the poor little thing shudder. Now Martin, you take that away from him.”

I clutched the glass tighter and tossed off the remainder before the farmer could take the glass from me.

“He’s bound to have it,” Martin said, laughing and taking the empty glass.

I heard their words from a distance as the alcohol spread instantly through my nerves, giving me an acute tickle of pleasure. I wanted more. But Robert’s eyes were watering and his mouth was spurting saliva. His face grew white, and a ripple of muscular spasm ran up his body. It reached his stomach just as Martin got his big blue handerchief over the boy’s mouth. The second spasm, Robert, and Martin made it to the kitchen sink at about the same time, whereupon Robert ridded himself of that which had been such a pleasure to me. Even though he detested the idea of drinking another drop of beer, Robert did notice later, at my prompting, that Martin kept the brown bottles stored in the milk house tank behind the big ten-gallon milk cans.