The Frightened Ones

by Melba Marlett

  John forgot about the ax. The sight of those insolent fingers pawing through his mother’s possessions made him angrier than he had ever been in his life before. “Put that down,” he said ominously.

  The man ignored him. “Ten dollars, for God’s sake!” he said. “That’s just like you dumb backwoods monkeys. Only ten bucks in the house!”

  John leaped for him, but the man was quick. His left hand whipped out and caught the boy low in the stomach, doubling him up, with a paralyzing pain. “Don’t try to fight in the big leagues, sonny. You’re lucky I don’t decide to wreck this whole place, just for the hell of it.”

  Gasping, John tried to straighten up. Then, through his giddiness, he heard his mother’s voice. “Drop that purse and get out,” she said.

  Inexplicably, Norwood changed his tune. “Listen, lady,” he whined, “this is all a big mistake. I didn’t mean—”

  The haze cleared and he saw now that his mother had a gun—his father’s old shotgun, which they kept in the comer of the pantry. She must have forgotten that it wasn’t loaded. “Get out of here!” she said, and he saw her finger whiten on the futile trigger.

  Norwood saw it too and backed away. “Don’t get excited, lady. I’m goin’.” But his hand was groping behind him for the ax. John saw it just in time.

  “No, you don’t!” he yelled, and snatched the ax away from the seeking fingers, lifted it above his head for the stroke that would lay the enemy at his feet.

  The man didn’t wait. He was out the door like a scalded cat, grabbing the bicycle as he passed it, running with it down the drive until he reached the road, where he vaulted into the seat and disappeared around the curve.

  Taking deep, triumphant breaths of the cold air that poured through the kitchen, John watched him go. The sensation of miserable helplessness was gone. Instead, he felt light, wonderful, shaken with inward laughter at the sight of a man running away from him! Closing tire door, he disdained to lock it. “If he tries to come back, I’ll settle his hash for sure!” he said, and meant it.

  The new confidence that had come to him had missed his mother. She was leaning against the sink, the gun drooping in her hands, her face alarmingly white. Gently he took the gun from her and led her to a chair. “It’s all right now, Mother. It’s all over. Here, I’ll get you some coffee.”

  In the moment of crisis, she had seemed to fill the room, but he saw now how little actual strength she had. She was all spirit, and his heart swelled with love and admiration for her. He put an arm around her shoulders and held the cup to her lips for the first few swallows. “You drink the rest of that and you’ll be all right.” He straddled the kitchen chair across from her and smiled reassuringly whenever her pitifully blank eyes looked at him.

  “The gun wasn’t loaded,” she said vaguely.

  “I knew, but I didn’t think you did.” He took one of her cold trembling hands and chafed it. His voice was respectful. “That took a lot of nerve. You’re a real, honest-to-God heroine.”

  Her face crumpled into weeping. “I’m not. I’m not at all. You don’t know how it’s been—” The great gasping sobs would not let her speak. She put her head down on the table and cried as if she would never stop.

  He waited until the worst of it was over. Then he brought cold water and sponged her face with it, talking softly the whole time. “We have to get you in shape,” he said. “Bricker’ll be along to pick us up in less than an hour. We’ll stop off at the police station to tell them about Norwood, and then we’ll go to the depot. You can’t get on a train looking like this.”

  “I’m not going to get on the train,” she said wildly. “It’s too much, to lose everything at once! First your father, and then my house—oh, I knew what was sensible and I tried, but I can’t, I can’t. Not even for you!”

  “Yes, you can. Come on, now. Pull yourself together.” He knelt beside her and raised her swollen face. “I know how you feel, and it won’t do. There’s no sense living in the past. You were right and I was wrong. We’ve got to go ahead. Just the way you planned.”

  She looked at him then, and saw him. “I’m sorry. I—it was your father’s sweater and the funny look on your face—and when he hit you, I wanted to kill him!”

  “It’s all over. Don’t think about it any more.”

  “All right. I’ll try.” She wiped her eyes and smiled shakily. “I’m all in pieces. No good to you at all. I can’t even think what’s still to be done.”

  He began picking up the dishes, briskly. “Never mind,” he said. “I’ll take care of everything. Count on me.”

  * * * *

  “Anything else, Ella?” asked Mr. Sims, stuffing the groceries into a big brown bag. “Here’s a little pack of candies I’m throwing in for the kids. Wouldn’t hurt you to have a few, either.”

  Ella Mack smiled shyly at him. Mr. Sims had always been kind to her, from the days when her eyes barely came above the level of the counter. She had been a plain, undernourished child, beset by the care of younger half brothers, anxious over the health of a frail, weak mother, terrified of her rough, loudmouthed stepfather; and Mr. Sims had made her feel important, somehow, and valuable and pretty. He still made her feel that way, now that she was a plain and unattractive twenty.

  “I’ll call Jimmy to carry these out to the car for you, Ella.”

  The customary terror in which she lived rushed back, expunging the little interval of warmth and safety. Jimmy Blake had gone to high school with her, and she would be expected to talk to him: a few words about the weather, or the condition of her family’s old black Ford, or the doings of people whom they both knew. She was not equal to it, her timidity forbade it. “I’ll carry them myself, Mr. Sims. I’m used to lifting things.”

  He helped her himself then, fussing a little about her driving the five miles home without a heater in the car. “Seems like your family ought to care a little more about you,” he said, “seeing as how you do all the work for them. If you don’t insist on your own rights, Ella, nobody will.”

  “I guess I’m not much of an insister, Mr. Sims.”

  Pulling away from the curb, she felt gay and a little reckless. Though she dare not be more than five minutes late getting home, she risked making a little circle of the town, seeing all the lights come on through the dusk. The State Police Post, next to the bank. The movie house, where she had never been allowed to go. Elnicky’s Bar, her stepfather’s hangout. The high school. The little house where Miss Lewis lived and where Ella might have lived too, if everything had been different.

  Thinking of Miss Lewis always made her feel good, and she was smiling as she left the town behind her and headed out on the state road. Miss Lewis was the school district’s nurse, with her office in the high school, where Ella had first met her. That day Miss Lewis had been rushed off her feet giving eye and teeth examinations to four hundred incoming freshmen, and she had picked on Ella for help, at random.

  “You, girl. What’s your name? Well, Ella, I need a hand here. Keep these fresh packages coming, and jot down what I tell you to on these cards. All right, Jim, sit down here and let’s have a look at you. Last time I saw you, you were seven and had the measles. What’s the idea of coming in here all grown up and making me feel old?”

  Ella had helped Miss Lewis all that morning, shoulder to shoulder, as if they were equals. Miss Lewis didn’t give a lot of directions and fuss at you; she gave you a job, took it for granted that you had the sense to do it, and turned her attention to her own work. At noon she threw herself into a chair and looked up at Ella.

  “You’re good,” she said. “The principal usually assigns me a girl for an assistant. Couple of hours’ work every day, pays a dollar an hour. How’d you like to be the girl this year?”

  It was the first time in her life that Ella had been asked to make a decision of her own, and she made it quickly. “I’d like to, Miss Lewis.”

  “I’ll fix it up then. You realize it’ll mean you’ll have no study periods. You�
�ll have to do all your studying at home.”

  “I can do that.”

  She did, too, though she suffered for it. Her stepfather, Gus, jawed at her every day. “A big girl, fourteen, settin’ around with her face in a book when she ought to be helping her maw! Let me tell you, Miss High-and-Mighty, you’re not going to get at them books till you’ve done every last thing that needs to be done in this house!”

  Her mother, half ill from yearly birthing or miscarriage, tried to stand up for her. “Ella does more than she ought to, as it is. She has a right to an education.”

  “What’s a woman need education for? All these laws about kids having to go to school till they’re sixteen! Poppycock!”

  The thing that saved her was the ten dollars she brought home each week. Gus came to count on it. She handed it to him each Friday evening and he would be off to Elnicky’s, stumbling home any time after midnight. It was worth the price to her, to have the long evening alone with her mother and the kids, all of them free from Gus’s bruising tyranny. They became quite gay, those evenings. The children popped com, laughing and chattering, and Ella and her mother set each other’s hair and looked through the mail-order catalogue at the new styles. When Gus complained during the week of not feeling well, they lived on pins and needles lest he be not well enough to go out Friday night. Fortunately Gus was always well enough for that.

  She said nothing about her home to Miss Lewis, ever, but somehow Miss Lewis came to know. At the beginning of Ella’s junior year Miss Lewis said, “It’s not right that you can’t have a pretty dress or two and some new shoes. How do you expect to go to the class parties? You earn the money, you’re entitled to spend some of it.”

  “I wouldn’t be allowed to go to any parties anyway. My goodness!”

  Miss Lewis looked thoughtful. “Would it help if I went out and talked to him, Ella?”

  “No, oh no. It would make it worse.”

  “Is he going to let you graduate?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  The nurse’s eyes twinkled behind her glasses. “I rather thought he might, considering those ten dollars a week. What are you going to do after you’re through school?”

  “Nothing,” she said bleakly. “I’ll just be home all the time then. Gus doesn’t believe in women working—outside the house, that is. He doesn’t mind how hard they work there.”

  “He seems to like a little extra money coming in. Where will be get it?”

  “The boys’ll be old enough to have jobs then. Paper routes or working in a store. He’ll have their money.” “You’ll be eighteen next year, Ella. Your own boss. You can do whatever you want to then.”

  “There’s nothing I want to do, really, except go to college, and that’s out of the question.”

  “St. Luke’s Hospital isn’t out of the question.” Miss Lewis sat forward on her chair, starch rustling. “Now listen. You’re intelligent and conscientious, and you have a real ability for nursing. If I recommend you to St. Luke’s, they’ll take you into training and it won’t cost you a cent. It’s a hard profession, nursing, but a good one. How about it?”

  Ella closed her eyes on the marvelous vision and swallowed. “I couldn’t. I’d love to, but he’d never let me.” The nurse looked exasperated. “You’re not even his own child! He has five of his own. Let them help out. You’ve done your share.”

  There was no way of telling Miss Lewis how Gus really was. The rages. The oaths. The blows. “I’m sorry, Miss Lewis. It’s wonderful of you, but I—couldn’t.”

  “You’re afraid of him,” said Miss Lewis simply.

  “I guess so. You don’t know how awful he can be.”

  “You’d be away from home. He couldn’t get at you.”

  “He’d take it out on the rest of them. I’d—worry so that it wouldn’t be worth it.”

  “But your mother picked him out. It’s up to her to cope with him. All you have to do is tell him you’re going to be a nurse, and if he raises Cain, face him down! Stand up to him!”

  Hopeless as urging jelly to turn into brick! Ella had not dared mention St. Luke’s even to her mother, who might precipitate calamity by broaching the subject to her husband. There had been nothing to do, after commencement, but fall into the hurried back-breaking routine of the unhired help in an overpopulated household. It was the price she was willing to pay for peace, the toll exacted by Gus’s violence. Even now, driving the rattletrap car through the early dark, she was anxious about how things might be going at home. Guiltily, because she had loitered, she pressed harder on the accelerator.

  She saw the obstacle in the road just in time. Her brakes cried out, the wheels sent up sprays of gravel, the motor coughed and stalled. She peered over the steering wheel at the object her headlights had picked up. A bicycle, lying in the middle of the road! Her eyes searched the road margins for a sprawled child, but she saw no one. Gingerly she stepped out in the road, raised the bicycle, looked for bloodstains. So intent was she that when a hand touched her arm she screamed and heard the high, wailing echo calling back from the woods.

  “That’s enough of that, sweetheart!” the man said. He clapped a rough hand over her mouth and talked close to her ear. “You’re going to drive me across the state line to Wentworth. Shut up and get in the car. I haven’t any time to waste.”

  Holding her by the arms, he thrust her into the driver’s seat and swore when he looked at the gas gauge. “Damn it, there isn’t enough in here to go sixty miles!”

  “The gauge doesn’t work,” she said stupidly.

  “Well, let’s get going. If we have to stop anywhere, I’m your uncle Jack and don’t forget it.” He pressed her arm, numbingly. “Get it?”

  “Yes.”

  She started the engine and, once they were under way, he seemed to relax a little. “I bet I came twenty miles on that stinking contraption. Feels good to sit down. You live around here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not gabby, are you? Well, that’s all right with me.” He took a heavy monkey wrench out from under his sweater. “See this? I’m going to take a little nap, and if you try any funny business—”

  She did not hear all of what he said. She was conscious of a difficulty in breathing and the heavy thudding of her heart, but otherwise her mind was blank. She drove automatically, sitting as far from him as she could. Not until she heard a snore did she dare to look at him. There he sat, horrible even in sleep, slack mouth open, the wrench tightly in his hand. A nightmare that had escaped from dreams into reality. Terrifying. Impossible. Yet there he was.

  For half an hour she drove by mere reflex action, and then she discovered a truth: fear, when it is extreme, does not last. Her mind threw off the inertia of shock and gave her a glimmer of hope. She was coming to the main highway on which she must turn to get to Wentworth, and there was a stop light or two there, a group of stores, some houses. There, surely, she could attract someone’s attention—by making faces or signaling or dropping something out of the window. Or she might drive the car into something and take her chances in the wreck.

  But the man awoke, sharply. “What’re we coming to?”

  “The main road into Wentworth. I’ll turn left at that light.”

  “No. Go straight through.”

  “That’ll take us to—”

  “We’ll find a back road into Wentworth.”

  The car bumped up to the smooth pavement, passed through the green halo of light, bumped down again to the gravel surface on the other side. “Good,” he said with satisfaction. “Just do what I tell you and you’ll be okay. I’m not a bad guy when you get to know me.” He patted her knee approvingly.

  “Why don’t you drive?” she said desperately.

  He pushed over closer to her and she felt his breath on her cheek. “Because I have to be sure you stay with me, sweetie. Can’t have you running to the cops. And it ain’t as easy for a driver to leave a car as it is for a passenger. See?”

  “I won’t go to the cops. Pl
ease. If you let me out right here, I’ll let you take the car and I won’t say a word. Honestly I—”

  He buried his face in her neck and laughed. “’Course you won’t. You’re not going to get the chance. That’s why.”

  “But after I drop you off at Wentworth, what’s to stop me from going to the police then? You’ll have to believe me sometime. You’ll have to take my word for it. I won’t tell the police, if only you’ll—”

  He paid no attention. He was pawing at her, babbling foolishly, and suddenly she grasped the significance of what he had half admitted. He could not risk turning her loose, no matter how she begged or promised. After she had served his various purposes he would kill her. Kidnapping, crossing a state line, criminal assault maybe, what did he have to lose? Her death was a necessity to him. Poor stupid little fool to take so long to realize that!

  Since her death was inevitable and it no longer mattered what she did, she drove an elbow forcefully into his ribs. “Sit up and give me room! I can’t drive like this.”

  He gave her space, leering. “You’re right. Mustn’t mix business with pleasure. Later we’ll pull over somewhere and get friendly. What d’you say?”

  She didn’t answer. She was surveying her life with detachment, as if it were already over. To be dead in a ditch at twenty before she had even begun to live! Her revulsion was so great that she cranked down a window swiftly, to keep from being ill.

  The man saw the headlights behind them before she did. “Somebody’s following us,” he said. “Turn down here and keep going.” He sat tensely for five minutes, watching the back window. “Yep. They’ve turned after us, and they’re coming fast. Hell!” He crouched down, gnawing excitedly at a fingernail. “Just over the next rise, turn off the lights and drive off the road into a field. Hurry!”

  As they dropped down the next hill and she snapped off the lights obediently, he reached over and gave the wheel a mighty wrench. The car skidded, turned, leaped a culvert, and shuddered along over the rough ground where corn had been. Behind some tall shocks, he cut the motor and took the keys. In the stillness she heard the other car pass by, following the road.