The Night of the Hunter (22 page)

He caught a hellgrammite in a muddy, stagnant pond up on the bar and Pearl screamed at the dreadful, crawly, squirming thing as he speared it on a hook he had found in a rusty snuffbox in the skiff. He weighted a short length of line with a pebble and dropped it in the shallows, hoping that there might be in that bare foot of depth a hungry catfish. But it seemed useless after a bit and he retired to his stone again to stare bitterly at Pearl and think that somehow she was to blame for all of it. It was not easy: keeping always before him the realization of what it was he was fighting to protect. For it was more than his life and hers; it was that solemn child's oath that he had taken that day in the tall grass by the feet of his doomed and bleeding father. He ran to Pearl and snatched the doll from her clinging hands and looked to see if the safety pin still held closed the gap in the soft cloth body and, poking a finger through, felt the crisp bills of the dead man's plunder. Yes, it was really there: it was not a dark dream. Yes, he had sworn to save it and he felt his throat tighten, remembering suddenly how important and dreadful and irrevocable it is to swear to a thing.

By noon hunger had emboldened them to seek a farmhouse kitchen for a meal. The fat wife stopped her churning in the cool of the casaba vines along the stone porch and stared at them there on the stone stoop worn curved with time. She wiped her itching nose on a freckled forearm.

Hungry are ye? Well, where's your folks?

We ain't got none, said John truthfully, and hearing the words in his own ears gave a sudden, dreadful substantiation to the fact.

Well, sit down there and don't come trackin' up my porch with your muddy feet. I'll see if there's any potato soup left. Gracious, such times when youngins run the roads!

She waddled off to the kitchen, quarreling with life, and returned presently with big thick bowls of hot potato soup and three thick slices of homemade bread spread over with cinnamon-sweet apple butter. They finished in a breath and came and stood with wide, grave eyes, holding up the empty bowls, waiting for her to notice them again. She grumbled and took their bowls away and filled them again only this time there were no bread and apple butter. When they were finished John sensed that it would be wise to leave. The woman stood kneading her butter in a wooden bowl, squeezing out the sour buttermilk with a flat paddle with which she scored the sweet, golden pat when she was done.

Git ye filled up?

Yes'm.

Well, what do ye say? If ye was born ye must have had a ma and she should have learnt ye to say thanks for things.

Thank you, ma'am.

Thank you, said Pearl, making a feeble little try at the curtsy Willa had taught her at Christmas time two years before.

Go away! the fat woman's eyes seemed to say. Go away because you remind me of something dreadful in the land just now: some pattern that is breaking up: something going that is as basic and old as the wheeling of the winter stars. Go away! Don't remind me that it's Hard Times and there's children on the roads of the land!

And so they went back to the river and sat by the skiff until the wild, Indian paintbox colors of a river sunset swarmed against the west and the day shut like a door in their faces and they were alone with a cool breeze soughing in from the silent, flowing stream. Yet John was reluctant to embark again in the skiff. He felt a physical need to spend a night on land, with floor boards and earth beneath. The river was too beguiling and treacherous in her female moods of gently passing shadows and strange voices floating crystal-sharp across the ripples and lights passing like fallen stars among the dark, distant trees. Pearl yawned and suddenly the moon rose round and full across the river in the bluffs.

Come on, Pearl, he sighed, rising and reaching for her hand.

Are we going home, John?

He remembered a barn he had seen in another farm up the river road: a gray frame building set back three hundred yards from the home of its owner, under the green umbrella of an enormous sycamore. Down in the farmhouse someone was playing a mouth harp and a girl was singing and the lamp in the kitchen window was a dusty orange glow and John yearned, for an instant, for the kindness of a room and the sound of a voice that was loving kin.

Are we going to stay in that big house, John?

Shhhhh! Hush, Pearl! Yes!

That's a funny house.

It ain't a house, Pearl. It's a barn.

Pearl's nose itched and burned at the smell of the big house. Inside it she heard the gentle nudge and stamp of the cows and turned to John aghast and quaking.

John! There's big dogs!

Them's cows, he said gently. They won't hurt.

He found the ladder to the hayloft and showed Pearl how to climb it and presently they were settled in a great, prickling bed of sweet, fresh timothy with a fine broad window that surveyed the vast and silent bottomlands for miles on either side and beyond it the dark river. The moon swung high above the valley, lighting it almost to the brightness of dusk, making the river a shining ribbon of black glass and touching the spreading night meadows with the dust of its illumination.

Now, Pearl, warned John sternly, don't go near that big door yonder. That's where they put the hay in. If you was to fall out of there you'd kill yourself sure.

At his warning she shrank back and hugged him and they fell asleep thus, among the aromatic hay, while down in the meadows a whippoorwill cried and whooped its liquid laments and country yard dogs barked and quarreled in the faraway stillnesses. John had not been sleeping more than an instant until he heard it—faint yet distinct on the barely stirring air. He opened his eyes. The moon had not moved: it stood where it had been when his eyes had closed: half obscured by the beam and pulley which jutted over the aperture. Pearl had not heard, did not stir, asleep in untroubled conscience with her thumb between her pouting lips and the doll cuddled sweetly in the cradle of her arms. John half rose and stared off into the moonlit valley. Nothing moved, nothing stirred upon the ruts and dung clusters of the deserted barnyard, nor upon the far moonlit arena of the valley as far as his eyes could see. Yet as plain and clear as the song of the now-stilled field bird had been he had heard the faint, sweet rise of that unforgettable voice.

Leaning, leaning! Safe and secure from all alarms!

Leaning, leaning! Leaning on the everlasting arms!

John held his breath, harking, and then breathed it out quickly and breathed in again, holding it so that he could listen again, his eyes burning and straining through the dust of moonlight, ready to pick out the tiniest motion anywhere upon the vast, spreading tableland between the barn and the river. It was as clear and distinct now as if the tiny voice were in the mountain of hay at his elbow, and then suddenly in the distance John saw him on the road, emerging suddenly from behind a tall growth of redbud half a mile away: a man on a huge field horse, moving slowly and yet with a dreadful plodding deliberation up the feathery dust of the river road. The figure of the man and horse were as tiny as toys in that perspective and yet, even in those diminished proportions, John could make out each dreadful and evil line of those familiar shoulders. Now in a dozen farms on both sides of the river the hound dogs had come out to bark at the sound of the singing, and a tan beagle bitch emerged suddenly from beneath the porch of the farmhouse just below the barn and raced braying to the gate to herald the singer's passing. But the singing did not stop and the figure, moving still in that infinitely sinister slowness, passed directly below the house and was obscured again by a tall growth of pawpaws and still the voice continued unabated while John huddled in the hay with thundering heart. And even long after he had passed, faded down the road, lost in the moonbeams of the lower farms, John could still hear the faint, sweet voice and he thought: Don't he never sleep? Don't he never find a barn and climb up in the hay and shut his eyes like other mortals do at night or does he just keep on hunting me and Pearl to the end of the world?

In the hour that followed the dogs fell silent and the moon moved an inch. The whippoorwill began his argument again, but more softly now, as if his own voice had been humbled and affrighted by a thing that had passed in the night, a darkness that had brushed his wings like the mower's scythe.

At daybreak the children awoke and stole down to the barn door and when John had brushed all the straw from Pearl's skirt he made her put on her brightest morning smile so that they might present themselves at the farmer's kitchen for a bit of hot breakfast or at least a crust of biscuit and a dipper of cool water from the cistern. The gaunt young farmer's wife cried and prayed over them until they were sticky and smothered with her ministrations and had, indeed, fled presently before she could begin to ply them with questions. She had set such a poor breakfast table that it was scarcely surprising that she had not asked them to stay for lunch. For it was Hard Times in the land and larders held precious little extra for roadside wanderers. And so with the edge gone from their hunger and with unaccountably cheerful hearts the children returned to the river and set off again in Ben Harper's skiff. Pearl sat in the skiffs stern chuckling and playing with the doll Jenny while John whistled and fooled around with some lengths of leader, trying to unsnarl them and fastening them to some of Uncle Birdie's old hooks in the hope of catching a catfish or two. At Marietta they rolled grandly past the bustling little landing and not a soul noticed them. The showboat
Humpty Dumpty
was docked there that day and the cheerful piping of the calliope skipped across the live water like bright, flat pebbles of sound. John stood up in the skiff like a pirate and admired the grand sight from afar and Pearl lifted dancing eyes from the scolding of her doll. Farther downstream after the river had turned and straightened again they drifted in silence past a panorama of unrolling shoreline, of sleepy farms and drowsing woodlands and the swelling bosom of rich bottomlands in the full cry of summer's last harvest. The hay hands stood in the rippling grass and waved and hollered but in a moment their voices were gone and the unceasing river carried the children on into the sweet silences of the early morning. Still hungry, they had eaten the pork sandwiches in the greasy little paper poke the kindly farm woman had given them and now they dreamed, longing again for the home and solace that, to John at least, seemed never to have existed at all. On both sides of them the land unfolded like the leafing pages of a book and when John turned his eyes to the West Virginia shore he thought: I will be glad when it is dark because he is somewhere over on that shore, in one of those towns, along that winding road somewhere, and when it is dark he can't see us. Because he is still hunting and there is only the river between us and those hands. And as the warmth of the morning sun filled the air he fell asleep again and Pearl slept, too, cradling the doll, and John dreamed that he was home in his old bed again and Ben Harper was down in the parlor playing his favorite roll on the Pianola and Willa was clapping her hands and humming because she did not know the words and it was a thousand years ago.

When he opened his eyes again all motion was gone. The sun stood high overhead at noon and there were trees between it and his blinking eyes and on a root that jutted from the crumbling riverbank a redbird shrilled and scolded at him. A turtle, dusty and parched from the fields, labored scratching down the mudbank to the water, craning his wrinkled turkey neck toward the running stream. John thought: They make turtle soup but I'll be derned if I know how and besides I wouldn't know how to go about getting him open.

Pearl, awake before him, had wandered up into the grasses above the willows on the steep cliff that jutted from the meadow plateau and was gathering a bouquet of daisies. Each saw the woman at the fence at the same moment. Pearl's hand froze with the nodding daisies in her fisted fingers and John scrambled the length of the skiff and lifted the heavy paddle threateningly.

You two youngsters git up here to me this instant!

John's mouth, at the authority in this voice, fell agape and Pearl turned a frightened face to his.

Mind me now! I'll fetch a willow switch and bring you up
here jumpin'
directly!

John—half of a mind to run for Pearl and try to make it back to the skiff—merely stared. The woman was in her middle sixties, staunch and ruddy-faced and big-boned. She wore a man's old hat on her head and a shapeless gray wool sweater hung over her shoulders.

Now she snorted like a fieldhand and came over the fence a-straddling and snatched a switch of willow as she came, scrambling down the bank with the alacrity of a boy. John could not make himself move. The woman had caught Pearl up in her stout embrace now and was making for John, her big shoes squishing through the mud, the switch rising to catch his calves when they were handy.

Now git on up there.

Pearl, opening her mouth, began to wail; her face wrinkling and scarlet with outrage.

Don't you hurt her! cried John, quivering and standing his ground in the skiff bottom.

Hurt her nothin'! cried the old woman.
Wash
her is more like it! And you, too, mister! Now git on up there to my house and don't set a foot inside till I've fetched the washtub for the both of ye.

And she herded them grimly before her up through the meadow like angry little lambs and when she was within earshot of the gray frame house she began to shout to its inhabitants.

Ruby! Mary! Clary!

Above the rows of tomato plants, over the top rail of her neat, white fence, three children's faces appeared, bright as morning hollyhocks.

Yes, Miz Cooper! they cried in chorus.

Ruby—run fetch the washtub and fill it. Mary! Clary! Fetch a bar of laundry soap from the washhouse and the scrub brush, too.

And the faces disappeared and Miz Cooper shoved John and Pearl through her gate and then turned to survey them again, her lips pursed and working with anger.