The Night of the Hunter

by Davis Grubb

  And this was the house of Rachel Cooper—a strong tree with branches for many birds. And so the coming of two more did not make much of a difference. They were children and they were hungry and they needed love and a bath and a spanking and sometimes Rachel would think when she looked at them, any of them: ’Deed to God, sometimes I feel like I’m playin’ a big joke on the Lord. Why, when He comes looking for old folks He won’t even see me—He’ll see them kids and maybe He’ll just pass on by and say: Why, shoot! That there’s a mother! I can’t take her!

  At night when they were in bed she would come down and stand in the kitchen for a spell and think: It’s my last harvest. My gathering of summer’s best and last sowing.

  To John she was a perfect and agonizing enigma: an unfathomable mixture of female authority and tenderest motherliness. He loathed her those first few days and spoke not one single word of answer, or request, or denial to her in all that time. Sullenly, stubbornly, tragically the boy submitted to her disquieting scrub brush, her fierce, unflagging ministrations to his long-untended hair, her spankings when it came his turn to receive them. When she gathered the children about her once a week, on the grave, sweet Sunday dusks with the harvest moon hung full-blown as a chilled, fresh melon on the hills above the river; arrayed them on little square carpet stools about her in a semicircle and read them a story from the Scripture, John remembered only the voice of Salvation that he had left screaming and frothing among the cattails on the river shore upon that dreadful night of their exodus.

  John, you hain’t heard a word I said.

  He did not lower his eyes from the lamp, did not move his hands from his knees. He might have been carved from pine, for all his movement. And then she knew it would be wise to let him be and not try to speak to him too much or to make him answer, knowing in her wisdom that the dark, frightened bird that crouched shivering and hurt in the deep forest of his mind would one day poke its bright eye through the leaves and presently (if she paid no special notice) it might hop out onto a limb and then they would all hear it singing brightly and boldly some afternoon and only then would they turn and pretend to be surprised and welcome it to their picnic cloth.

  Pearl, in that autumn, was so hungry for love that she would have turned and taken suck from an old ewe. And soon she had edged little Mary over just a mite to share in the old woman’s most favorite and tender partiality. Pearl adored Rachel and it was a devotion scarcely less than that she felt toward the girl Ruby. Ruby took complete charge the night the strange new children first slept under Rachel’s roof. John rebelled when she attempted to undress him for bed and Rachel intervened, but it was Ruby who held Pearl in her arms until she was asleep and could be laid trusting and smiling, thumb tucked between her pouting, sweet lips, beneath the cool, fresh sheets of the old spool bed in Rachel’s attic room. John lay awake beside his sister that night in a perfect agony of misgivings. He had not felt such rejection of his fortunes even in the darkest days when Preacher had put in his first appearance at Cresap’s Landing. It was not that he believed old Rachel might be in league with the blue men who had dragged off his father or even with the insane evangelist. This was curiously worse: it was as if in some unutterable and beguiling way Rachel schemed against the very identity of him. John had grown so accustomed to the climate of flight and danger and to the clear definition of Life’s mortal enemies that somehow Rachel’s goodness seemed more darkly perilous than any of the others. And yet in the time to come, as the days stretched into weeks and the weeks wound like country lanes among the shaking, burning leaves of Indian summer and the end of harvest was upon the land, it seemed to John that what he had felt that morning on the sandbar when old Rachel had come upon them there, that sense of coming home, might be true. He found that his chafed spirit rankled less and less beneath the stern, wholesome regimen of Rachel’s household.

  One night they were all at the black stove making seafoam candy: old Rachel and the girls prattling and carrying on over the buttered tins where the candy pieces were to be spread to cool. He sat apart from them, alone on the back stoop in the crisp air, under the moon in the black walnut tree beyond the washhouse. He had almost thought for a moment that he would like to go indoors and stand close to them, not to say anything because he could not speak yet, but just to stand, to be one of them, perhaps to touch the old woman with his hand, to let her know that the broken bird in the dark tree stirred its wings and tried them and already thought of the morning when it would venture upon those outer limbs and try its voice upon the stillness.

  On the night when Rachel read to them from the Bible about Moses he had been moved even more.

  Now, old Pharoah—he was the King of Egyptland! she cried, spreading her hard old hands across the tissue-thin pages of the Scripture. And he had a daughter and once upon a time she was walkin’ along the river and she seen something bumpin’ and scrapin’ along down on a bar under the willows, back in the cattails where the devil’s darnin’ needles was flashin’ in the mornin’ sun. And do you know what it was, children?

  No! gasped Ruby and Clary and Little Mary and, hearing them, Pearl cried out, too.

  Well now, it was a skiff washed up on the bar, whispered the old woman, her black eyes twinkling in the light of the kitchen lamp. And who do you reckon was in it?

  Pearl and John! cried poor, big Ruby.

  Not this time! cried Rachel. It was just one youngin—a little boy babe. And do you know who he was, children?

  No! cried Ruby and Clary and Little Mary and Pearl in a single voice.

  It was Moses!—a king of men, Moses, children, that was to grow up to lead his people out of the wilderness—to save them all from death and pestilence and plague.

  John heard it and came to them that night, drawn irresistibly by this tale that was so completely his own, and sat boldly in the circle, beside Ruby’s carpet stool, and listened some more, and the old woman wisely paid him no mind.

  The river brought the time of gold into the valley. Up in the woods the hickory nuts rained their dry patter throughout the still afternoons and there was smoke in the air and the ghosts of Cornstalk and his young martyred Princes stalked the land again and the hunters’ guns boomed and racketed in the hollows and soon the frost would come to blacken the yellow pawpaws. John had come home. The bird was freed and had flown into the sun to return each dusk to its nest. All the love of that house had been too much for him: it was in the butter, in the smell of the clean clothes that Rachel patched and sewed each night where they had torn them, in the odor of fresh bread on fall afternoons and in the nasal, hearty crackle of her impatient voice when she hailed them in for supper. And yet despite this capitulation John kept his eyes on the river road, and guarded the doll in his sister’s arms with unremitting vigilance; harking ever for the clop of that strange horse on the windy, midnight highway, for the creak upon the threshold, the whisper of the hunter’s steel. Not through any logic, but through a grim and pragmatic cynicism of instinct, John knew within his heart, within his flesh, that the idyll would be broken in the end: that upon one day before the snow fell again he would hear that sweet and fateful voice drifting clear and dreadful through the affrighted autumn dusk.

  One night, sensing that he might want to talk, Rachel sent the other children off to bed but kept John with her in the kitchen. She bent her head, squinting through her poor, taped-up, crazed spectacles at the darning of their tattered stockings under the golden circle of lamplight.

  Git ye an apple from the cellar, boy. And git me one, too.

  He obeyed, pounding down into the cellar, happy that she had kept him up after the others to make this a special time for him alone, to set him upon a chore whose fruits they would share. He clambered up the side of the great barrel and stretched his fingers deep inside among the chilly, clustered heaps of last year’s McIntoshes. And when he had found two without rot or blemish he scampered back to the kitchen, washed them at the pump, and gave one to Rachel. Now she set her darning-gourd
abruptly aside, bit crisply into the fruit, and glared at him with that tart, twinkling grimness that he had come to recognize as all the world’s safety.

  John, where’s your folks? she said suddenly.

  He lifted his eyes to her and said the word plainly, knowing its awful truth.

  Dead.

  Dead, she nodded with finality and let that matter be. And where you from?

  Upriver, he said. A ways.

  Well, I know that, John! I didn’t figger you’d rowed that John boat up from Parkersburg! Have you any kin?

  He shrugged.

  Kin, she repeated. No aunts, no uncles, no grandfolks?

  I don’t know, he said.

  Far up in the dark, above the house, above the world, the vast locust voices began their insensate, rackety skirl. And suddenly, and with a tenderness that nigh broke the old woman’s heart, John reached out his hand and laid his fingers on her old knuckles.

  Tell me that story agin.

  Story, honey? Why, what story?

  About them kings, he said. That the queen found down on the sandbar in the skiff that time.

  Kings! she scolded. Why, honey, there was only one.

  Oh, no, he said. I mind you said there was two.

  Well, shoot! Maybe there was! Yes, come to think of it—there was two, John.

  And she fetched the old Bible and read him the tale again, in a soft, gruff voice because she did not dare let him see how she felt just then, and changed the story around so that there were really two in the bulrushes, in the basket, in that lost and ancient time.

  Git to bed now! she cried at last, rising with angry, moist eyes and smacked his bottom smartly before her as he fled up the kitchen steps. Git to bed now and no nonsense. Gracious, it’s nigh eight o’clock and we’ve all got to be up tomorrow bright and early to fetch them eggs and butter to town.

  He lay in bed that night, hearing a strange steamboat blow softly down somewhere under the lower stars, and he thought for the first time: Well, maybe he won’t come at all now and maybe it wasn’t none of it real and maybe there wasn’t even any Mom and Dad or none of it and I am a lost king and Pearl is a lost king, too.

  —

  The trip to New Economy with the week’s butter and eggs was the great event toward which each of the seven other days moved. Upon this day Rachel dressed each of them in his best and together they went to the river landing where the old ferryboat made its dozen daily trips to the Ohio side. At this ferry landing there stood an ancient locust tree upon which, hung on a leather thong nailed into the bark, was a battered brass bugle. More times than not, the ferry captain dozed with a Western magazine over his face up in the cabin of the rickety little gasoline boat and it was the custom of travelers on the other side to wake him with the bugle to come and fetch them across. Rachel always carried a bit of the fresh, clean muslin she used for straining jelly so that she could wipe off the brass mouthpiece of the bugle that was not uncommonly crusted and bitter with the tobacco juice of its previous user.

  Dirtiest critters under God’s blue sky!—Men! she would scold and then lift the horn to her mouth to blow a lusty, impatient trump across the glassy, silent stream.

  In New Economy they had a good restaurant meal at the Empire Eats and when the day’s trading was done and if their produce had brought a good price, Rachel would take them to Ev Roberts’s pharmacy and treat them all to an enormous, communal sack of licorice drops and sometimes ice-cream sodas. Then it was back to the ferry again with empty baskets and high spirits and roaring appetites for supper. Folks turned on the streets to stare after Rachel Cooper and her brood. Every woman with children of her own envied the proper, obedient way the children followed the old woman’s polka-dot skirts. Men, respectful of Rachel’s hard, shrewd bargaining sense at the cattle auctions, bowed to her, tipped their hats, spoke words of greeting. When they passed Ev Roberts’s bench out in front of the drugstore on their way to the street again the late-afternoon loafers and whittlers had suddenly gathered.

  Hi, Miz Cooper.

  Howdy, Gene.

  Got two more peeps in yore brood, I see.

  Yes, and ornerier than the rest! she cried. Don’t kids just beat the Dutch now! Just look at them two little ones—Pearl and Mary. I’ll swear I scrubbed them two till they was raw ’fore I come over here this mornin’.

  Where’d ye git them new ones, Miz Cooper?

  Driftwood! she cried. Just plain driftwood warshed up on a bar!

  And then she could have cut her tongue out for saying that: for letting those loose-jawed scalawags know anything about those two. Nine chances out of ten that boy John had fibbed to her about having no folks and next thing she knew some WPA family would come rattling and banging up the yard in a busted-down fruit truck and claim their two lost biddies and light into Rachel for kidnaping them in the first place. Rachel bit her tongue angrily and hurried the children toward the ferry. Sure as sin, some father would show his face in town and those gossips would tell. And sure as sin he would come a-hunting his kids.

  As a matter of fact, it was not three days later that the stranger with the funny hands bought Ruby an ice-cream soda and a movie magazine in Ev Roberts’s pharmacy and told her what pretty eyes she had.

  —

  That summer Rachel had arranged for Ruby to learn sewing from Granny Blankensop—an aged, widowed seamstress who lived with her daughter across the river at New Economy. Each Thursday evening Rachel tied up a fifty-cent piece in the girl’s handkerchief and gave her two dozen eggs’ tuition in a yellow basket. Then she took her to the ferry landing and saw her safely on board the little boat which was to be met on the Ohio side by Granny Blankensop’s middle-aged and unmarried daughter Nevada. At nine Rachel would come back to the landing to meet the girl. It seemed to her that nothing in this procedure could permit the disastrous encounter between Ruby and any of the ornery farm boys and evening loafers who lounged on the bench in front of Ev Roberts’s drugstore.

  Yet, the first night Nevada Blankensop was to meet Ruby at the New Economy landing she was, in fact, overcome in her bedroom after two tumblers of her mother’s dandelion wine. And so Ruby had stood in bewilderment on the alien bricks and pondered what she was supposed to do next, what the purpose and meaning of her mission there might be. It was something Rachel wanted her to do. It was something she was supposed to learn that would make her a better girl. Through the branches of the chestnut trees along Water Street she saw the bright lights of New Economy. She heard the drifting, random sounds of men’s easy voices and the music of a radio and the noise of an occasional flivver. Now as she moved into the glitter of Pike Street things began happening. The night above her was filled with golden, winding wires of light and stars that winked off and on like enormous, sweet fireflies. The men on the evening bench saw her then: the whittlers and the tale tellers and the watch traders and the killers of time. And Ruby had found the world.

  —

  Rachel never knew. The eggs and the basket were often forgotten in that sweet, breathless scuffle down on the road berm under the pawpaw leaves and when Ruby got off at the West Virginia landing she would be empty-handed and Rachel would think: Well now, if Granny Blankensop don’t have her nerve—keeping my very best egg basket.

  Ruby lived for those Thursdays. She had found a wonderful thing that she could do well: something that never went wrong like gathering eggs did, like washing jars did, because there was nothing to drop, to break, to spill, to forget. And on the dozen occasions that Nevada Blankensop had actually been there to meet her and take her up to the house, fusty and thick with the smell of old women’s sleep, Ruby had squirmed and twitched her buttocks on the split-bottom chair the whole time of the sewing lesson: heeding not a smidgen of it; learning not so much as a single, twinkling stitch. One night she had lain in her bed in a perfect trance of yearning and thought desperately: I just can’t wait till Thursday! Because that’s five sleeps away! I’ll steal the money from Rachel’s sugar bowl and go ther
e tonight—to the river—

  But she had been afraid to do that and waited anyway and that Thursday night Nevada had the vapors and was not there to meet her and she had fairly run to that place in the street in front of the drugstore where the eyes of the evening loafers awaited her.

  That’s her right yonder! whispered Macijah Blake to the stranger, nudging him and pointing to the girl moving down the street. That’s Ruby and I reckon she’d be able to tell you what you want to know about them two new ones Rachel took in here a while back!

  The stranger had appeared in New Economy that afternoon and hitched his horse to the iron courthouse fence and wandered away while the mare munched and tore at the untended grass. At dusk he had sought out the evening loafers and told them the story that he had repeated in a hundred dusty crossroad gatherings until he could say it now by rote: how he was a preacher of the Gospel looking for his no-account wife who had run off with a drummer and how his two blessed children had gotten lost in the scuffle. He told them how he had gone a-hunting and a-wandering through the bottomlands all that summer and how he had tracked down a dozen lost lambs and none of them his. A little boy and a girl with a doll? Yes, thought Macijah Blake, that was them. But she would know for sure—that bad girl Ruby—and it was Thursday and chances were she’d come over to town tonight. The others moved away from him with that disgust he seemed to arouse everywhere now. All but Macijah Blake and he stayed to point Ruby out as she came to stand before the assemblage of them: waiting in the dust of Pike Street with her big shoes close together and her fingers locked around the basket handle.