The Frightened Ones

by Melba Marlett

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  THE FRIGHTENED ONES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  “The Frightened Ones” originally appeared in the collection The Frightened Ones. Copyright © 1956, 1984 by Melba Marlett. All rights reserved.

  *

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

  THE FRIGHTENED ONES

  The man in gray crossed the bleak November fields running low, keeping out of sight of the road. Few trees grew in the sandy northern Michigan soil, but there was an occasional heap of underbrush or a straggling hedgerow, and under cover of these he rested, panting, eyeing the gray sky, estimating the length of time until twilight. Darkness had always been his element and he would welcome it now.

  He cursed the roughness of the frozen earth and the clumsiness of his feet in their heavy prison shoes. Somewhere, somehow, he must get a car, and that would be very difficult. He dared not venture into a town, and casual motorists were almost non-existent in winter on these northern roads. The vision of his own two Cadillacs, hidden away in a Chicago garage, rose up before him, and he cursed again at the prospect of being at the mercy of some junk heap belonging to a backwoods farmer. Like any criminal, he detested lack of quality in the belongings of his victims.

  Scrambling to the top of a small hill, he threw himself on his stomach to look around. The only trace of human habitation in sight was a small house and a neat barn half a mile away. His sharp black eyes noted that no electric or telephone wires ran to the house. The poor boobs wouldn’t have much, but maybe he could get a change of clothing there, something to cover up the Prison Farm stamping on the back of his shirt. There might be a little money lying around too, and he could be a long way off with it before one of the hicks could plod into town to give the alarm.

  Half sliding, half running, he went down the hill toward the lonely farmhouse.

  * * * *

  John Stevens and his mother were having one of their arguments. Or maybe, thought John angrily, it was just part of the same argument they’d had for the whole six months since his father’s funeral. Whichever it was, he was sick and tired of it. Sick of being nagged at and tired of trying to explain that a man nearly eighteen years old didn’t need his mother to tell him what to do.

  “You don’t understand!” he shouted at her. “You don’t want to understand!”

  She kept stirring the soup on the stove. “I don’t know what’s come over you,” she said. “You were always such a good boy before your father died.”

  “Leave him out of this,” he said hoarsely. (It was true, he had been different then, secure in his father’s strength, not tortured and twisted by doubts, as now. But so had his mother been different.)

  The change began in the moment that they turned from his father’s grave and walked slowly through the thick June grass to the car the undertaker had provided. Even in his grief he had been proud of her that day, of her ash-blond prettiness accentuated by a black dress, of her self-control, of the way she said exactly the right thing to the friends and neighbors who came up shyly to say, “If there’s anything I can do, Mrs. Stevens—”

  “Thank you. I’ll make free to call you if there is. Thank you.”

  He whispered to her consolingly, “I can work the farm. Don’t worry, Mother.”

  “The farm? We’re going to sell the farm,” she said indifferently, flatly.

  He was shocked. “But I want to be a farmer, you know I’ve always wanted to. Why on earth—”

  “Not now. We’ll talk about it later.”

  Later, however, never came. When he tried to reopen the subject, she was tired or had a headache, and if he persisted, she turned irritable. “I’m not up to discussing it, John. Can’t you see that?”

  Well, he couldn’t. She hadn’t wept—not one single tear—and, except that she didn’t seem to want to talk to him, her behavior was as it had always been. Serene and cool, she went about her work, laying out clean clothes for him, having a hot meal waiting for him when he came in from the fields. “Aren’t the roses doing well?” she’d say.

  “I guess so, Mother.” Their conversations never rose above this inconsequential level.

  That first month he had been too absorbed in his sorrow to think. Everywhere he went, every day, there were so many reminders of his father: the corncrib, finished that very spring; the neat patching on Nellie’s harness; the new gutter for the pump; worst of all, his father’s old red sweater hanging on its nail just inside the barn door. John always touched the sweater gently as he went by, and it turned a little, revealing the darned sleeve and tire sagging pocket where his father had carried his pipe. More than one evening, frustrated by his mother’s silence, he went out to the barn to lean his face against the sweater and weep for all the warmth and cheer that his father had taken out of the world with him.

  The second week of July, as he turned into the drive from a trip to town, he saw the Farm For Sale sign standing sturdily on the rim of the front lawn. He stared at it for a long time, unable to realize that his mother had so betrayed him.

  She was sealing jelly glasses in the kitchen and she smiled nervously when he came in. “Well, how were things in town? Did Luther’s have the right land of paint?”

  “You’re selling the farm.”

  “I told you I was going to. We talked about it.”

  “No, we didn’t. You’re really selling?”

  She kept on working, not looking at him. “Why, what else could I do? The land’s worn out, the buildings are poor—”

  “That’s not true. The land is—”

  “And you have four years of college to get through. Plenty of time for you to be a farmer after that.”

  “College,” he said tonelessly. “I’m not going to college.”

  “Of course you are. Weren’t you third highest in your class? Your father always planned to—”

  “That was then. I can’t do it now. Where would the money come from?”

  “Why, from selling the farm. Where else?”

  Like a mole uprooted by the plow and thrown into strange, merciless light, he looked about him. This was Home. He loved it, could not imagine a life without it. He had supposed it would be here always, for him to come back to. Some of this feeling he tried to express to her, but Iris words were halting and inadequate and she cut him off with an amused look. “This old place? We’ll be lucky to find somebody who’ll take it off our hands.”

  In the face of such blasphemy he was speechless. His mother rattled on, moving briskly from table to stove. “I talked the whole thing over with Aunt Fay when she came up from Lansing for the funeral. She’s all alone in that big house and she’ll be glad to have us come five with her. We’ll pay our share, of course, and it’ll be a drop in the bucket compared to what you’d have to pay if you lived in a dormitory.”

  “Lansing?” he said stupidly. “Why are we going to live in Lansing?”

  “Because Michigan State College is there, silly.”

  But that was not the real reason. He knew it by the way her eyes refused to meet his. All through supper he sat silent while she related the details of the plan that she had conceived and executed without a word to him. There’ll be enough money to see you through, John, and a little left for my old age.” The false, overly sweet smile that he had noticed earlier in the day reappeared. “I may even get myself a job as a saleslady somewhere, to help out. I’d enjoy that, I think.”

  For a week he slept badly, pondering the reasons behind her nervous haste to get away. The answer eluded him. Whenever he was with her he was quiet and watchful; and day and night he was racked by a terrible homesicknes
s. He left his food almost untouched, but his mother did not notice. She had become a stranger. He no longer knew anything about her.

  From the day the For Sale sign went up, he stopped trying to work the land. Instead, he found a job at a garage in town, riding back and forth on his bicycle morning and evening. Besides the independence it gave him, there was the swapping of stories with the men who hung around the garage, the staying in of an evening to go to a show or shoot a game of pool, the pedaling home at midnight with juke-box tunes humming through his head. No harm in any of it, and it lessened his misery a little.

  His mother’s objections were indirect. “Don’t you want to come right home from work and review your trigonometry awhile tonight?” And once when she smelled beer on his breath she reproached not him but his new friends. “A wild, worthless lot, that crowd.”

  He answered defiantly, “I like them. You don’t have to.” He would not have admitted the savage delight he took in her perturbation.

  The last word, naturally, had been hers. Late in September she showed him a check. “Option money. I believe the Michaelsons are going to buy it.”

  “It’s—really sold then.”

  “I think so.” She went over to the mirror above the fireplace. “I believe I’ll go downtown tomorrow and buy a new hat.” She leaned toward the glass, smiling a little. “I saw one in Forster’s window that—You’ll need some new clothes too, John.”

  Watching her touch her hair and turn her head, he realized again that she was an attractive woman, and instantly the answers he had been seeking came to him. Life in this quiet place, with only a son, wasn’t enough for her. She had invented the flimsy excuse about his going to college because she needed stir and bustle and people, and she was going where she could find them. How bored she must have been, even while his father was alive, to be in such a hurry now! Perhaps she was dreaming already of a second and more satisfactory marriage. This, under the guise of self-sacrifice for her son’s future! Her lack of honesty revolted him.

  Disillusionment bitter in his mouth, he said carefully, “I’d like to ask you a favor. Will you give back the option money and sell the farm to me?”

  “Why, how could—”

  Rapidly, earnestly, he went on. “You’d have to wait awhile for your money, but you have Dad’s insurance to tide you over. You go on to Aunt Fay’s and I’ll stay here and work at the garage until I have enough for a down payment. After that I’ll farm the place and send you so much every month. You won’t lose anything by it, I promise.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said crossly. “Leave you here, all by yourself? Who’d look after you?”

  “I wouldn’t be alone for long. In a year or two I’d get married, maybe, and—”

  She laughed right in his face. “Hattie Monaghan, I suppose. And she’s only sixteen.”

  Patiently he kept on. “She won’t always be sixteen. ’Course it might not be Hattie. I haven’t thought much about—”

  “Oh, it’d be Hattie, all right, that shiftless father of hers is just waiting to palm her off on the first fellow that wants her. She’s pretty and cute and she’ll have six children by the time she’s twenty-five, and you’ll work your head off here in this backwoods all your fife looking after the slew of them. No, I won’t hear of it!”

  “Don’t talk to me as if I were a child!” he shouted. “I’m not a child!”

  She turned her back on him, decisively, and there was a grim determination in her aspect that forbade another word. He might have been a four-year-old having a tantrum instead of a young man seeking a plan on which to reconstruct his fife.

  From then on he made a point of coming home only to sleep. Actually Hattie was not important to him, but as he lay on the garage floor staring at the underbellies of automobiles his thoughts came back to the girl again and again. She dominated his mind as a symbol of the independence he coveted. Married, he would be a man, not a possession of his mother’s; and Hattie’s warm breathlessness and soft laughter would fill the void that his mother’s indifference to him had left. He made plans for an imaginary elopement. He tried to imagine what it would be like to live with the Monaghans until he had money enough to set up a separate place. Once he went so far as to call Hattie on the garage phone, but the line was busy and he did not try again.

  Thus, wavering and indecisive, bristling with the fury of the helpless, he came to the day of departure. Bricker’s grocery truck would come in a few hours to take him and his mother, bag and baggage, to the railroad station in town, and he was still quarreling, still trying to make a stand.

  “I won’t go with you,” he said roughly. “I’ve told you a hundred times, I’m not going.”

  His mother tied an apron over her black suit. “I’ll get us an early supper. There may not be a diner on the train.”

  “I don’t want any supper.”

  “Then get out of here, with your sulking and scowling!” Her eyes were bright and hard. “And have the decency not to make me come calling you when the truck gets here.”

  He slammed the kitchen door behind him and walked out to the woodpile in front of the barn. He was, finally, defeated. She was not going to unbend, and inexperience made him shy away from complete rebellion. All he could do now was to hate her. He picked up the ax and began chopping furiously, the white chips leaping up to sting his face.

  Wrapped in his misery, he did not hear the man approach. Suddenly, like an apparition, there he was, standing on the far side of the woodpile, watching. A tall, thin man, dressed in gray. A stranger.

  “Hello, kid,” said the man easily. “My name’s Jack Norwood and I’ve got a truck with a flat tire down the road a ways. Can I use your phone?”

  “We don’t have a phone. The nearest one’s two miles away, in town.”

  Norwood’s black eyes darted around the barnyard. “No car either? Must be mighty peaceful around here. How do you stand it, a young guy full of beans, like you?”

  “I’m used to it,” John said briefly. He propped the ax against the wood. “I work at a garage. Maybe I can help out.”

  “Hell, no. I need a new tire. My spare went flat this morning.”

  “I’ve got a bike I could ride into town on. Somebody’d come out from the garage.” The moment he made the offer he wished he hadn’t. He didn’t like this man’s face, nor the queer way he kept looking around. He added awkwardly, “Except I couldn’t get back in time for a—sort of date I’ve got.”

  The man chewed his underlip. “Your dad around? Or a brother, maybe?”

  “No. Just my mother and me.” (He shouldn’t have said that, he was handling this all wrong.)

  “She in the house?”

  “Yes, getting supper.”

  Norwood smiled and his manner became more authoritative. “Listen, I’m cold. Got an old coat or something I could borrow? Didn’t expect to be stranded out on the road like this. I ain’t dressed for it.”

  “Well, I don’t know—”

  Keeping his face toward John, the man made a quick, sidling semicircle toward the barn door. “How about this old red sweater? Just the ticket.”

  There was no time to object. Norwood was buttoning the sweater, nervy as you please. “I can find you something better than that,” John said weakly. He hated seeing his father’s sweater on this man, but he didn’t know what to do about it.

  “This’ll do.” The man smiled again, without mirth. “This’ll do fine.” He pulled the sweater well down and looked toward the house.

  “My bike’s right by the back door,” John said hastily. “If you’d like to ride into town yourself—”

  “Later, maybe. Let’s go in the house a minute. I’d like to get warmed up.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Come on!” He gave John a push that nearly knocked him down, still grinning to show it was all in fun. “Your mom might even shell out with a cup of coffee. If you asked her.”

  Here was the chance he’d been fighting his mother for�
�the right to take charge of what might be a serious situation—and he was flunking it simply because he didn’t know how to go about making a stand. How could he be sure that the fellow was dangerous, instead of just ignorant? You couldn’t knock a man down for borrowing an old sweater and asking for a cup of coffee! Reluctantly he led the way to the porch and noticed that Norwood had brought the ax along. The sight sent an added thrill of alarm along his nerves. He dared to say, “We usually leave the ax in the barn.”

  “Oh, thought I was helping you out. I’ll just leave it inside the kitchen door.”

  Inside the kitchen door. Not outside. That cinched it. The man was now in complete authority and, willy-nilly, John was the Trojan horse, taking the enemy into the citadel.

  By little signals, by putting all his anxiety in his eyes when Norwood wasn’t looking, he tried to warn his mother to be on her guard. She didn’t notice. Chatting placidly, she put another plate on the table, apologizing for the fact that their good dishes were already packed. Norwood ate supper with them, taking the seat nearest the door, where the ax stood. He spoke monosyllabically and John spoke not at all because of the schemes that raced through his mind. Remarks he could make that would lead Norwood to think they were not as cut off from assistance as they seemed. A way to get rid of the ax. The remembering of a forgotten errand that would excuse him from the table and give him a chance to go for help. All of these had shortcomings: either they left his mother at the mercy of the stranger or they might precipitate instant action on Norwood’s part. No. Better to stall for time and hope for the best.

  “You’re not eating, John,” said his mother.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I’ll see if I can find a jar of those peaches you like.” She went into the pantry room and he could hear the rustle of paper as she searched among the jars, all ready in their cartons.

  Norwood wiped his mouth and stood up decisively. “I’ve got to be going,” he said. The humorless smirk came back to his face and he reached a long arm over to Mrs. Stevens’ purse, lying on a chair. “Any money in here, I wonder?”