Murder in the Wind (17 page)

Himbermark heard Johnny Flagan’s voice, raised above the wind sound, and he went to the doorway to hear better.

“… all stuck here until this thing blows itself out. It’s pushing the Gulf in on us, and we may have to move upstairs before it’s over. Now this pile here is the stuff out of the cars. We haven’t got much food or much to drink. I’ll take charge of it and dole it out to whoever needs it most if nobody’s got any objection.”

He paused and looked around expectantly. “Okay then. If you got anything in the cars that can be eaten or drunk up, we ought to get it before this thing gets any worse. The water may get kind of deep out there, and maybe we ought to get the luggage and stuff in here and get it all upstairs. I introduced myself to some of you. I’m Johnny Flagan. The Dorns over there, the couple with the kids, had some bad luck. Mr. Dorn got smacked on the head when that tree went down. Most of you can get your own stuff. But somebody should get the Dorns’ stuff out of the wagon. And get Mrs. Sherrel’s stuff too. I noticed a cistern out in back of here. The pipe running into the kitchen is dry, but it may just be clogged up, and there may be water we can drink in the cistern. I’ll go out and check that over. If there is, we’ll fill everything we got.”

“There’s some pots and pans in our station wagon,” Mrs. Dorn said.

“Fine. We ought to get those in here. And don’t forget flashlights. Bring all the flashlights in. Blankets, car robes. We’ve got to figure on being here all night the way this thing looks. We got to have some kind of sanitary arrangement too. We aren’t going to be able to go out in this mess. There’s a little room off the kitchen, a sort of pantry. The floor is rotten and some of it is gone, but the rest of the floor feels solid enough. Well use that as a kind of a privy. There ought to be water under the house pretty soon anyhow. Now let’s get this thing organized. Your name is Maiden? Suppose you and Bunny Hollis unload the Dorn car and the Sherrel car when you get your own cars emptied. Mrs. Sherrel, maybe you can get on the door and open it and close it for people as they bring stuff in. Just bring it in and put it in this room. Charlie, suppose you and these two young fellas carry it upstairs as they bring it in. We’ll get ourselves all straightened out here, and we’ll be cozy as if we were in a hotel.”

Charlie could sense the relief the others felt at having somebody to take over. And he felt a reluctant admiration for Johnny Flagan. The thirteen people had stopped being enclosed in their own isolated small groups and had become members of the larger group, co-operating for survival.

Hope Morrissey had been thinking about her father’s grove as the panel truck rattled steadily northward through the rain, Billy Torris driving, and Frank asleep in the back. She thought of how it was when the trees were in blossom. Then you would lie on your bed at night and the sweet heavy smell would come in through the screen and the blossoms made the trees look pale at night.

She liked to think about the grove, but she did not want to go back there. Her father, Sam Morrissey, was a silent man who drove himself every hour of the day. He had set out more trees than one man could handle, yet he made himself finish the work that had to be done, the endless spraying, pruning, fertilizing. He walked with a long, tired, lunging stride, big hands swinging, and when he came into the house he brought with him a smell of sweat so sharp and tangible that you thought it should be visible around him, like a cloud. He seemed but barely aware of his children, and spoke to them only when it was necessary. For all his labor he did not seem to gain ground. He was an unlucky man. The wind would change unexpectedly and drift the protective smudge away from the tender trees in the frosty night. When any piece of equipment broke down it was never an obvious and readily replaceable part that failed. It would be some obscure gear or pinion that was seldom known to fail. The parts would not be in stock. The equipment would sit idle until a new part could be obtained by air express from the factory. And then, more often than not, it would be a part for a different model. He could have made up for his bad luck by the intensity of his labor were it not for the streak of quarrelsomeness in him. He continually felt wrongly used by the pickers, the truckers, the packing plants, the Association. He brooded about the way he was being wronged while he worked. And when he could stand it no longer he would stop work and find the man at fault and tell him off.

Sometimes these discussions erupted into violence. And though Sam Morrissey was a powerful man, he was not difficult to knock down. The excess of anger made him squinch his eyes shut and charge with both big arms swinging wildly. Any man who kept his head could knock him down.

Elena Morrissey, his wife, was a soft, pretty, careless, silly woman. She felt that she had married beneath her station. If so it was a social distinction too narrow to be measured by any outsider. She liked gay colors in the house, but despised housework, and did only the bare minimum necessary for existence. She liked flowery print dresses and large-brimmed hats and tiny pocketbooks. She was a woman with a fabulous memory for dates, names, places, relationships. She spent a great deal of her time calling on friends. When she asked Sam to do something for her, which was often, she used the high clear patronizing voice of the mistress of the manse speaking to a groom.

They named their firstborn Jonathan. June Anne was born two years later, and Hope was born four and a half years after June Anne. Elena had her children with an ease and a quickness that seemed to her shameful and peasant-like. No nausea and very short labor. She had always considered herself delicate. The doctor who attended her when she had Jonathan told her she was as healthy as a horse. She did not become his patient again.

Jonathan died, quite grotesquely, when he was twelve. He was a sturdy boy and he spent every possible moment with his father. Because he imitated his father’s walk and his father’s silence, he seemed a rather solemn boy. His best friend was Taddy Western, younger brother of Sonny Western. They were almost the same age to the day. On Taddy’s twelfth birthday he asked for and received a bow and arrows. The bow was much too big for him. It had a fifty-pound pull. Neither boy could draw the arrows back as far as they should go.

The two boys were together on a bright sunny afternoon after school. Taddy found that he could draw the bow by sitting down, hooking the bow over his toes, and pulling the bow string back with both hands. As Taddy explained it later, they were taking turns rocking back onto their shoulders and shooting the arrows high into the air. Sometimes they could watch the arrow throughout its flight. Other times it would disappear in the high thin air, and then there would be a moment or two of delicious fright while they raced to the shelter of a tree and waited for the arrow to thud down, burying a good half its length in the ground. Jonathan fired the arrow that killed him. They lost it in the air. They ran under the tree. They waited. Taddy heard a flickering sound as the arrow came down through the leaves. Jonathan stood a moment by the tree, with four inches of wood and brightly feathered arrow end protruding from the top of his skull. Then he fell down and bled from the ear, but not very much.

After Jonathan’s death Sam Morrissey became more silent and sour than ever before. And he worked harder. He left the house at first light and many nights he worked by the blue glare of a gasoline lantern. Elena felt truly afflicted. Her firstborn, her only son, was dead. Her youngest child, her second daughter, Hope, was feeble-minded. June Anne seemed to be the only one left. Her mother would often look at her and weep. That made June Anne uncomfortable.

At the time of Jonathan’s death, Hope was five and a half years old. She could say a few words. She could not dress herself. She could feed herself messily. She was monstrously fat, dull-eyed, drowsy. Her skin was coarse, hard and shiny and there were bare patches on her skull. She slept between sixteen and eighteen hours out of each twenty-four.

By the time she was seven she had not improved. She was a great burden to Elena. Elena decided that Hope would be happier with other handicapped children. Elena took her to Jacksonville. Sam was too busy to go along. The people at the home seemed quite pleasant. Elena felt no sense of loss in parting from the child, though she simulated grief. She was shamed by her own high spirits on the way back. She felt as though the weight of the world had been lifted from her delicate shoulders.

Two months later the home requested that she and her husband visit them. They drove up on a Sunday. The people at the home seemed very proud of themselves. The family doctor had missed what seemed to them to be a rather obvious diagnosis. Hope had been born with an underactive thyroid. Her serious hypothyroid condition had so dulled her mind and body that any layman would have thought her feeble-minded. “In such cases, Mrs. Morrissey, medication seems to work an actual miracle.”

A miracle it was. A fat little girl with a clear skin, able to walk and talk and play and feed herself. She had a limited vocabulary, of course, way behind her age, but her eyes were reasonably alert.

They thanked everyone and took Hope home with them. Even though it had been explained, Elena could not feel toward Hope as she felt toward June Anne. Seven years was too long. In seven years she had become too accustomed to thinking of Hope as an ugly burden. She kept seeing the child in the light of the past years, and she could not feel love. It was an effort to simulate affection. Hope progressed quite rapidly. She was able to enter the first grade when she was eight. In the beginning she seemed both affectionate and eager to learn. But affection was too often repulsed. And all the children in the school knew her history. Many of them had seen her the way she used to be. They told the others, with suitable exaggeration. Hope withdrew quietly, sullenly, into herself, convinced that she was different, ugly, unloved, unwanted. Maybe, without June Anne in the house, it might have been different for her.

June Ann was a girl born to the adjective “most.” Basically she was a normal decent girl, adequate mentally but not brilliant. Well co-ordinated, but not exceptionally graceful. Friendly, but not overly charming. But a rare beauty befogged the eyes of the beholder. A rare and unusual perfection of both face and figure guaranteed that she should be considered brilliant, graceful and charming. In due time she believed herself to be as others described her. She accepted the knowledge without humility, yet without arrogance. She was as she was, and pleased by it. For her alone were her father’s rare gestures of affection, her mother’s constant ones.

Hope was the disinherited. Though she had a dull mind, she was not too impassive to be hurt. Nor to wonder about herself and find a refuge of sorts in the limited play of her imagination. It was an imagination that needed props, and props were there in the timeless legends of “The Ugly Duckling” and “Cinderella.” Both those stories made a deep and lasting impression on Hope Morrissey. Through childhood she felt as though she waited for her inheritance. The chrysalis would open and she would step out. The glass slipper would fit to perfection. When she was ten she quite suddenly became thin, nervous, unable to sleep. A series of basal metabolism tests showed that the thyroid had somehow reactivated itself. She ceased taking medication. She regained weight, and placidity. For a time she had thought that the princess was emerging at last, but it had not been true. Not this time.

There was no acceptance for her, not at home, not at school. Perhaps in a larger place than the small town near Ocala she could have found another outcast. But there she was entirely alone, and without resource. A more sensitive child could have been driven into mental illness by the isolation. But Hope was aware only of a restless discontent A great dull gray weight of discontent.

By the time she was fourteen she was a doughy, ripe-bodied girl, heavy, soft-fleshed, with no-color hair, dull blue eyes, careless of her person, uninterested in clothes. Though her teachers tried to force her assimilation into the group, the other children would have none of her. No boy cared to be seen with a girl he considered spectacularly unattractive.

During her fourteenth year her father broke his right arm in a fall. A man came to work for him. He was a migrant worker who had last worked up around Orange Springs, a lean stringy man in his middle twenties who looked much older. He was not so much evil as primitive. His name was Dinty Seral. He had a hawk’s face, pale weak eyes, a manner of servility, self-effacement. He watched the girl carefully and he stalked her with brute purpose. He raped her one rainy afternoon in a tool shed at the far end of the grove, and terrorized her with a knife blade at her throat, explaining precisely what he would do to her if she told. She did not tell. She met him whenever he demanded. Her abject fear of him faded quite quickly. She began to look forward to the quick and merciless interludes. They were, after all, the only change in the flat gray of her days. And it was the only acceptance she had achieved, ever. She took to following Seral about until he savagely ordered her to stop, fearing that her manner would arouse suspicion. She obeyed him.

It was in this way that Hope Morrissey found what was, to her, a satisfactory reason for her existence, a fulfillment, and a constantly growing need. The colors of her world were vivid at the times she was with Seral. At all other times they faded into grayness. Throughout the seven months that Seral worked for Sam Morrissey, her role altered subtly until by the time he was paid off and left, she had become, in her soft demanding way, the aggressor.

After Seral left her life was gray again. She had established her function, dimly classified it as the act for which she had been born and patterned, found that it was the only area of acceptance for her—and was then denied it. Had she more boldness she might have gone about in the community trying to find a substitute for Seral. She could probably have found someone with more need than taste. But she was caught up in the habit of isolation.