The Night of the Hunter (12 page)

Mr. Powell?

Yes. He'll come and beg you to tell him.

But I won't tell him, John! I won't tell
ever!
Not even Mr. Powell!

She lay back down, breathing heavily with her thoughts and then: John?

Who
has a big sticker knife?

Never mind! Go to sleep!

He lay thinking: Last Wednesday when he was out in the garden helping Walt Spoon spread bone meal he hung his coat on the doorknob and I poked around in the pocket when he wasn't looking and there it was only I didn't know what until I pressed that little silver button and it jumped out and shook my hand. I tried to get it closed but it wouldn't work and so I just stuck it back in his coat, open, and run home and I guess he never suspicioned it was me because he never said nothing.

Presently he fell asleep and he was big and strong and he had a blue gun and he was pointing it at Preacher and Preacher was not even scared at all and John kept shooting the gun and Preacher was really dead although he was pretending not to be and then his mother came in the room and took the gun away from him and said: John, you bad boy! Look who you went and shot! And he looked and, Oh, dear God, it wasn't Preacher at all, it was Ben it was Ben it was his dad Ben and it was too late because Willa took Ben out and hid him in the mound under the tree where the dark bird sings.

Willa thought: He looks so queer with no coat on, with his narrow shoulders in the white shirt and those suspenders and his paper collar on the bureau scarf. She felt warm and loving about him though, because it made her think how like little children men were underneath; how helpless and unpretending in their suspenders and no collar. Outside the little hotel a radio was blaring from an open restaurant down the street. They had taken a pleasant little room at the Brass House and it was her honeymoon and she kept thinking as she watched him lay Ben's old watch carefully on the dusty dresser: He is my husband and I love him. He is not Ben but I will learn to love him even more because he is a man of God. In a moment she would go down the hallway to the bathroom by the fire escape and put on her nice muslin nightgown and come back to him. It could not ever be the way it had been with Ben those nights in that old, lost summer with the roller skates thundering faintly out in the darkness at the rolla-drome and the record playing over and over: Lucky Lindy! Lucky Lindy! It could not ever be like the nights of that summer. She would make her mind forget that first hot pulse and gush of Ben's embrace and she would make it something else—something better—between herself and Harry Powell. She lifted the old nightdress from the cardboard suitcase and thought: Because the old clothes don't matter; the cheap, torn Teddy bears and the ragged stockings and the rundown shoes that I've always had to wear. Because I have one nice thing that I gave to Ben and I will give it to him, too—the only nice thing I ever owned: my body. Because it is clean and beautiful and not torn or wore out like the clothes.

Willa, are you going to get ready for bed?

Yes, she said. I was just looking at you, Harry—thinking how handsome and good you are.

Hurry along, my dear! We both need our rest.

Yes! Yes, of course, Harry!

She lifted his coat to hang it up for him and something thick and heavy in the pocket struck against the door of the clothes press. He did not notice when she put her hand in the pocket with a woman's wondering and took the thing out, stared at it curiously for a moment, with a softening of her smile, and then put it quickly back before he should see. She fetched her washcloth and soap and towel and hairbrush and went off to the bathroom with that smile still on her lips but twisted with faint puzzlement now.

It is a kind of a razor, she kept thinking while she waited in the hallway of the little country hotel while a drummer finished in the bathroom and she listened to the thin, rasping voice of the song on the radio down there in the spring street of the river night. A woman laughed in another room and a glass tinkled and a man began singing a coarse parody of the radio tune and the woman laughed louder.

He was in bed asleep when she returned. The lights were out. The ragged window blind flapped like the gray wing of a hurt bird beside the bed and she stared back at her pale sister in the mirror as she stood waiting and wondering if he would call to her.

The only pretty thing I ever did own, she thought. My body. Because even the muslin nightgown was gray from too many washings and the feathers on the slippers had withered and clung to one another since that long-ago night when Ben had won them for her at the shooting gallery at the Upshur County Fair.

Harry? she called softly.

He was snoring lightly. And the window blind flapped.

Fix that window, he said suddenly in a clear, wide-awake voice as if sleep and waking were no different to him; as if he could move swiftly from the world of dreams to the world of waking with no break in the sound track of consciousness; with only a flutter of his thin lids.

She rolled the blind all the way up, thinking: He was pretending to be asleep, he was pretending to snore. That is because he is embarrassed.

She slipped between the sheets, fresh and sweet from some country widow's washline, and lay for a moment listening to the radio down in the town and her own heart thundering and then she turned on her side and stared at the back of his head. She could hear his lips moving in the darkness with a small rapid sound like the feet of mice.

Harry? she breathed.

He stirred impatiently.

I was praying, he said.

Oh, I'm sorry, Harry! I didn't know! I thought maybe—

He turned suddenly and although she could not see his face on the pillow she could feel the anger in it.

You thought, Willa, that the minute you walked in that door I'd start in to pawing and feeling you in the disgusting, abominable way men are supposed to do on their wedding nights! Eh? Ain't that right, now?

No, Harry! I thought—

That's the kind of thing they make jokes about in those filthy burlesque houses downriver at Louisville and Cincinnati! Oh, yes, I've witnessed them with my own eyes! I made myself go, Willa, just so's I could witness with my own eyes the degradation and stink to which mortal men and women can fall!

Her eyes widened in the pitch-darkness of his looming face until they burned and her mouth grew dry as his words lashed her.

I think it's time we got one thing perfectly clear, Willa! Are you listening?

Yes, she moaned.

Marriage to me represents a blending of two spirits in the sight of Almighty God! I reckon it's time I made that clear, Willa!

She shut her eyes, hating herself for the shame and dirtiness and hurt she felt now and she prayed that he would stop but somehow she knew that he had just begun; somehow he seemed to have roused himself to sermon pitch and suddenly he got out of the bed and stood in the yellow light which the window cast into the cheap room: his thin, wiry arms moving stiffly in the sleeves of his nightshirt.

How are they any better, he said, than the Whore of Babylon?

She buried her mouth in the pillow and smothered a moan in the thickness of it between her teeth.

Get out of bed, Willa! he commanded, not violently, but with a dangerous edge of anger still in his voice, while with one arm he pulled the window blind clear to the sill. Now he moved across the room, his dry naked feet whispering on the boards, and snapped the light on. It flooded the room with its uncharitable yellow glare and a faint singing commenced in the golden bulb.

Get out of bed, Willa!

She obeyed.

Harry, what—

Take off your nightdress.

Harry!

Do as I say, Willa!

She obeyed with sick, trembling hands and stood at last, naked and blushing before him.

Now go and look at yourself yonder in that mirror.

Harry, please! Please, I—

Do as I say!

She felt her feet moving, felt the grain of the cold boards under her soles and then the thin, worn nap of the square of carpet by the bureau.

Look at your body in the mirror, Willa!

She made her eyes travel the miles upward and stared into the brown mirror, streaked and stained like the surface of some condemned and poisonous pool. She saw her breasts, still pretty and young and firm and the shoulders that Ben had used to kiss when she wore her bathing suit to the river.

What do you see, girl?

I—

She could see her mouth begin to curl and the vision went blurring then in a burning, yellow wash of tears.

You see the body of a woman! he cried. The temple of creation and motherhood! You see the flesh of Eve that man since Adam has profaned and filthied—has made into a vessel for the corruption and lust of his own rottenness!

He was pacing now, thin and mad and touchingly absurd in the white nightshirt.

Mind you, my girl, I'm not pointing you out as worse than the rest. But that body
—that
body—

He pointed to her shivering loins and the dark feathers of her quivering, convulsed belly.

—that body was meant for begetting children! It was not meant for the whoring lust of whoring men! That's filthiness! I say that's filthiness and the Devil's business, my girl! Do you understand that?

Yes! Yes!

Do you want more children, Willa?

I— No, I—

No! Of course you don't! It is the business of our marriage to mind those two you have now—not to beget more! And if not to beget more—then why should we soil our bodies with sex and rottenness? Ain't that talkin' sense, my girl? Ain't that the way the Lord wants it?

Yes.

He stood staring at her a moment longer, his head cocked a little to one side and that curious remoteness wandering in his eyes again; his face twitching a little as if he were straining to hear, to listen to a faint, far counsel from heaven.

You can get back into your nightdress now and stop shivering, he said.

She felt the gown fall over her hair and shoulders and crawled back into the bed, sick and drained of feeling, while he turned off the light and let the window blind up again. He stood for a moment by the side of the ancient brass bed with the street lights touching his profile of flesh and cheekbone with a thin line of gold.

I'm sorry. She shaped the words soundlessly with her lips, waiting for him to get into the bed, and watched him at last crawl stiffly under the sheets again and turn his back to her again and then listened to the dry, faint breath of his swift, whispered prayer running on as endlessly as a reel of film on an unillumined movie projector.

She lay on her back staring at a dark stain on the ceiling and thought to herself: He is right but just the same it is queer that he would know he is right because he has never had a woman ever in all his life. He is right, though. It is rottenness, all of it, and I'll ask Jesus to help me get cleaned and purified of those thoughts so I can be what Harry wants me to be. He is right: I mustn't never want that again because it is what he says: a sin and an abomination; even when Ben and me did it it was that and maybe God is punishing him and me for it now. Ben. Ben—

And just before she fell asleep she heard another sound and thought: Well, I must be wrong. He wouldn't be doing that!

But it was so. He was crying softly in his sleep like a child and all she could do was lie there in an agony of fear, not able to touch him in any way, not able to reach over into that strange land of dream deaths and save him, not able to do anything at all but soundlessly shape the words against the wrath of God's anger and God's mercy there in the dark room of the little country hotel: Good night, Harry! Good night!

But they were lost beyond recall, beyond answering, borne on the winds above the meadow.

The golden June morning quivered like water in the new leaves of the grape arbor. Pearl squatted with the doll Jenny and the doll was Willa now and the tomato stake with the rag wrapped around it: that was Mister Powell. Pearl stood them side by side against the bricks at the bottom of the arbor and sang a song because Willa and Mr. Powell were married and they had returned from their honeycomb. Now the scissors from the pantry flashed in her fingers as she cut out the green paper faces. These were the two children and she was a patient mother because when the wind blew those mischievous children would try to run away.

Now, Willa! You must make me my supper for I am very hungry.

Yes, Mister Powell! Right away, Mister Powell! And what about our two green children—Pearl and John?

Well, you can make Pearl some supper, Willa, but John is bad. Put John to bed without his supper.

Oh, no! I can't do that, Mister Powell! John is hungry, too!

Well, well, if he promises to be very good and stop being so bad.

Pearl tucked the jagged bits of paper tight between the bricks at the feet of the doll named Willa and the stick named Mister Powell. In the kitchen she could hear her mother rattling pots and plates for suppertime.

Now! cried Pearl, when she had fed her family. Now it's bedtime! Off you go, children!

But suddenly the errant wind swept fitfully through the vines. John and Pearl fluttered away from the child's helpless fingers, sailed, and drifted high over the buttercups, into the sky, over the sun.

Come back, you bad children! wailed Pearl. Come back!

We shall bow our heads in grace.

John waited till Pearl's eyes were closed and then he lowered his shaggy head over his plate of ham and hominy and shut his eyes. The light shone distant and red through the quivering lids and he waited, mouth watering, as the rich incense of a dish of watermelon preserve tickled his nose. Preacher's grace rolled on in interminable catalog. At last his voice rose to conclusion.

—Though we live under the curse of Cain, Almighty God, we turn our backs against the temptations of this mortal flesh. Bless this good food, Oh, Lordamighty, and let it build up our stren'th to fight the Devil's fiendish persuasions and the temptations of sex and gold and lust amen pass the bread please, boy.