The Moon by Night

by Madeleine L'engle

  I didn’t really think refreshing was what I wanted to be, but I didn’t say anything. I thought of a very plain black sheath Mother sometimes wears with a string of pearls, and wondered how I’d look in it. I’m almost as tall as she is. For once I was glad I wasn’t a golden girl like Suzy.

  “You’ve got an interesting face, Vicky,” Zachary said as we walked back towards our tent. “Not pretty-pretty, but there’s something more. And a darned good figure. I’d say something other than darned only I might shock little unhatched you.”

  “I’m not so unhatched as all that.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll bet you that nothing’s happened to you all your life long. Your meals have always been put in front of you and if you skin your little knee you can run crying to Mommie and Poppie and they’ll kiss it and make everything all right.”

  Well, maybe I didn’t have very much experience so far. But I was on my way to getting it. “Has so much happened to you?” I asked.

  “I am as old as Methuselah, Victorinia. I am old beyond my time. Someday I shall tell you all. Don’t want to shock you on first acquaintance.”

  We got back to the campsite and Mother and Daddy and John were sitting around the table drinking coffee. Zachary handed me over to them with a bow, making me feel about two years old. “Good as my word, sir,” he said to Daddy. “Here’s your daughter, safe, sound, and unsullied. See you tomorrow, Vicky-O. Good night, all.” He waved, and bounded across the path and into their elegant tent.

  “What’d you want to take a walk with that creep for?” John asked.

  “I like him,” I said, sitting down.

  Mother looked at me. “I made some cocoa for you, Vicky.” She poured me a cup, but didn’t say anything else.

  John went on. “For heaven’s sake don’t go getting interested in the jerk. It was from hunger as far as he was concerned. Nobody else here.”

  Mother said, “I hardly think you need worry about Vicky’s getting interested in him, since she’ll probably never see him again. And as to its being from hunger, John, Vicky’s not Zachary’s sister, and he sees her with perhaps fresher eyes.”

  John heaved a persecuted sigh. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “I know perfectly well what you think of my looks, John,” I said stiffly, “but in case you haven’t bothered to notice, I’ve changed a lot in the past year.”

  “Hold it,” John said. “Let’s have no quibbling, sibling. You’re a cute kid, and the trouble is I was just feeling protective about you.” He got up, yawned, and stretched. “Before I get into any more trouble around here I’d better hit the hay.”

  “Let Vicky go first,” Mother said. “Suzy’s waiting for her to go up to the lavatory.”

  Even with our flashlights it was dark on the path when Suzy and I went up to wash, and Suzy was sleepy, and cross because I’d gone off with Zachary and kept her waiting for so long. The lav itself was pretty well lit, not like the other camps where there hadn’t been any lights at all, and we stood side by side brushing our teeth.

  “For heaven’s sake, Vicky,” Suzy growled, “what were you doing all the time with that spazz. Making out?”

  “We were talking,” I said, stiffly.

  “I bet,” Suzy said, and spat. She was using chlorophyl toothpaste, so she spat green.

  “When you’re old enough to know what you’re talking about you’ll have more right to shoot your mouth off,” I said.

  Suzy spat greener and bigger.

  I finished brushing my teeth, washed my face, and stared in the mirror. I contemplated putting my hair up, but I’d just washed and set it for the wedding, and it keeps its set pretty well between washings, so I was afraid I’d get too many comments.

  “Quit staring at yourself and come along,” Suzy said.

  “I’m not ready yet.”

  “Then I’m going without you.”

  “Okay, go ahead.” I didn’t really think she’d go into that dark without me, but she swished on out in a huff, and left me there. I looked at myself in the mirror for a while longer, longer than I really felt like it, because I didn’t want Suzy to think I was running after her. Then I left the bright wash-room and went out into the night. The path was tree-hooded and dark, and the trees still dripped when the wind blew them. The tent seemed much further off than it had when I’d walked up the path with Suzy, and all my flashlight did was make the shadows move, and they were moving enough anyhow in the wind.

  Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, sort of beyond my left shoulder, I saw something dark moving towards me.

  Six

  At first I thought it was one of the hoods, but then I realized that it was an animal, and I wasn’t sure which was worse. I stood still in a panic, then made myself swing around and turn my flashlight in the direction of whatever it was. Whatever it was hadn’t waited for me, but was disappearing into the darkness of the woods. I pelted the rest of the way down the leafy path to the tent.

  “Vicky, what on earth’s the matter?” Mother asked as I plunged in and went sprawling onto John’s sleeping bag.

  “I saw a bear!”

  “Nonsense,” Daddy said.

  “But I did!”

  “It might have been a woodchuck or a raccoon.” Daddy spoke in his most reasonable voice. “Not a bear.”

  “Woodchucks and raccoons don’t stand on two legs, and they aren’t as big as people. I thought it was one of those JDs at first, but it wasn’t, it was an animal.”

  Rob sat up in his sleeping bag excitedly. “I want to see the bear! Where was it, Vicky?”

  “Near the lavatories.”

  “It was not a bear,” Daddy repeated. “Let’s read our chapter and get to sleep, kids. Tomorrow we cross Tennessee.”

  Mother read to us, and then we said prayers. I kept my voice very low. I could imagine Zachary laughing.

  Suzy and Rob went right to sleep as usual, but I was wide awake. I lay rolled up in my sleeping bag and thought about Zachary and the strange way he’d talked. He wasn’t a bit like any of the boys I knew in Thornhill. In the first place he was older than the kids in my grade, the ones I knew really well from the time they were in short pants, and he wasn’t in the least like any of John’s friends, who never have anything to do with me anyhow, except to insult me in a friendly sort of way, or dance with me at school dances. I didn’t think Zachary’d get on very well with the kids in Thornhill, but I was beginning to realize that Thornhill isn’t the whole world. It used to be, for me.

  Mother and Daddy had the lantern on between them, and were reading, Mother a paperback book, Daddy a medical magazine. I rolled over and sighed heavily. Mother looked at me over the book. “Still awake, Vicky?”

  “Um hm. What’re you reading?”

  “Anna Karenina. I haven’t read it since I was about your age.”

  “Would I like it?” I peered down over the tail gate.

  “I remember enjoying it very much, but I obviously didn’t get a lot of it. I think you might wait a couple of years.”

  Suzy gave a kind of mutter, and Mother said, “We’d better not talk any more or we’ll wake Suzy and Rob. Good-night, honey.”

  Mother and Daddy turned out their light before I went to sleep, but right after that I drifted off, still thinking about Zachary, and if I was going to see him in the morning, maybe, and then I was deep dark asleep.

  CRASH!

  I was so sound asleep that I was still half in the middle of some dream, and I thought it was an atom bomb, I guess because of Zachary’s stinky old song. Then I realized that Daddy and John were out of the tent with the lantern and Mother was standing in the door. I heard Zachary’s voice, kind of cross.

  Daddy and John came back.

  “What was it?” I squeaked, sure the hoods had managed to sneak back in the park, locked gates or no.

  Mother said, “Shh. Suzy and Rob are still asleep.”

  “It had nothing to do with those boys.” Daddy said f
irmly in a low voice. “It was only the ice box. Evidently a coon or something knocked it off the bench onto the ground. I looked all around, but I couldn’t see anything. So I put the ice box up on the table, right in the center. It ought to be okay now.” We had the box of food in the front seat of the car, but had left the cooking things, and the ice box, which shuts tight, out by the table, so they’d be more convenient in the morning. “Go to sleep, Vicky.”

  I looked at my watch, and it was around midnight. I snuggled down in my sleeping bag and went to sleep.

  CRASH!

  I opened my eyes and struggled to wake up. John was crawling out of his sleeping bag, and Daddy was just going out of the tent with the lantern. This time I was pretty sure it was the ice box again, so I wasn’t so scared. I heard Zachary’s father sounding sort of disagreeable, and Zachary saying, “For cripes sakes, Pop.” I looked at my watch and it was almost two. “I bet it’s the bear,” I said to Mother, “the bear I saw when I went to brush my teeth.”

  Daddy stuck his head through the tent door. “It’s the ice box again. All the way down from the table and onto the ground. It must be a coon.”

  “It’s a pretty heavy ice box,” Mother said. “Vicky thinks it’s a bear.”

  Daddy pooh-poohed that, put the ice box in the front of the car, and we all went to sleep again.

  I slept so soundly that I didn’t hear anybody getting up in the morning, and Mother let me sleep until breakfast was ready. When I emerged Daddy came to me, grinning. “Look at this, Vicky.” He showed me a large paw mark on the tent, more paw marks on the table and bench and on the ice box, and a big dent in the ice box. “We measured the paw prints,” he said, “just for future reference, and they’re exactly the size of Suzy’s hand. I hate to admit it but I think you were right. It may have been a bear after all.”

  I looked over at Zachary’s fancy tent, but there wasn’t a sound, and when we sat down to breakfast Mother told us to be quiet because the Greys were still asleep. We were packing the car, still trying to be quiet, when the ranger came by in his green truck and stopped.

  “Sorry about those kids last night,” the ranger said. He looked where the Coke bottle had made the dent in the fender. “That’s not so good. You want to take action?”

  “It would delay us too much,” Daddy said. “But I hope it won’t happen again to someone else.”

  “Ah’ll see that it doesn’t,” the ranger promised. “Ah’ve got something to go on, now.” He had a nice kind of drawl, not snarly and nasty like the kid who asked for the Coke bottle back.

  Daddy asked, “What kind of an animal might have been trying to get in our ice box last night?”

  “A b’ar,” the ranger answered without hesitation. “A black b’ar. They come around the campgrounds looking for food. Won’t bother you if you leave ’em alone and don’t try to feed ’em. Wall, hope yawl had a good night.” He waved at us and drove off.

  Seven

  Nobody emerged from the Greys’ tent, no matter how often I looked towards it, and I had to quit when John made a snide remark. We got going about eight-thirty and if it hadn’t been for this funny feeling that I had about Zachary I’d have gone along with everybody else in being glad to get out, what with wind and weather and hoods and bears.

  John and Mother were right about Tennessee. It’s really a beautiful state, and everybody we talked to at filling stations and markets and places was lovely and drawly and friendly. Of course John had to go through Oak Ridge, which was fascinating but scary. I mean all that stuff about radiation and cancer and all. It’s facts and we have to face it and it isn’t any worse than the Black Plague and the Spanish Inquisition but that doesn’t make me have to like it.

  Well, that was Oak Ridge, and that isn’t Tennessee any more than the JDs were. What was Tennessee if I look back on it with my mind instead of my feelings is roses, laurel, and rhododendron all in bloom, and birds flying across the road. Red earth and wind-ey roads and lots of mules, which the farmers at home don’t have. And people wanting to help us and saying Tinnissee instead of Tennessee. And stopping at a funny little store up in the hills to get gas and cash a traveler’s check, and the little old lady who ran the store coming out in a gingham dress and an old-fashioned sun bonnet and a corncob pipe in her mouth and knowing all about credit cards but never having heard of a traveler’s check!

  Somewhere along in the early part of the afternoon a shiny black station wagon with a tent trailer whizzed past us on a curve, honking loudly. “That crazy kook,” John said. “I’m glad he’s not driving us. Just as well that’s the last we’ll see of him.”

  Montgomery Bell State Park all the way across Tennessee was one of the nicest state campgrounds we hit, with hot showers and laundry tubs, so we all got bathed and Mother and I washed out some of our drip dry clothes and hung them up on our laundry rope which John and Daddy strung for us between two trees. There was a ball park right by the camp, so as soon as John got his jobs done he was off and before long he was in the middle of a baseball game, with Suzy and Rob sitting on a fence with a group of other younger kids, watching. Meanwhile Mother and I started getting dinner ready and Daddy struggled with the fire. There must have been a heavy shower early in the afternoon, because all the firewood was sopping wet, and about all it did was smoke. So Mother said it was a good time to initiate Uncle Douglas’s stove, the fancy one he got us from Abercrombie and Fitch. The thing wouldn’t work. Big deal. So dinner was cooked exclusively over magazines Mother and Daddy had brought along, medical magazines, the Saturday Review (Daddy loves the Double Crostic puzzles in those and pulled out all the pages with the puzzles he hadn’t done before putting the magazines in the fire), Harper’s, science fiction magazines, Life, the New Yorker, Scientific American—oh, it was a real conglomeration.

  “More paper, more paper,” Daddy kept calling to Mother.

  “But I’ve given you all the ones I’ve read.”

  “I have to have more,” he said, “even if we get Reader’s inDigestion,” Daddy said. “Since it cooks your dinner you can digest it along with your food.”

  Mother groaned at this display of wit, and handed him some more pages.

  We were through dinner; John, Suzy, and Rob had gone back to the baseball field, when there was the sound of a car being driven at high speed, and a black station wagon came roaring into the campgrounds, stopping with a squeal of brakes at our campsite. I’d quit thinking all cars being driven too fast belonged to hoods. That was one effect Zachary had.

  He got out in his gorgeous black leather jacket and said, “Hi, Austins.” His mother and father weren’t with him, and the tent trailer wasn’t hitched to the station wagon.

  “My mother insisted on staying at a motel tonight,” he said. “We’ve just finished a zuggy shrimp dinner. I’ll probably upchuck it before morning. May I take Vicky in to town for a movie, sir? There’s a good show on.”

  I could tell Daddy didn’t think much of Zachary the way he said, “Sorry, Zach. We’ve got a six hundred mile drive ahead tomorrow. We’re going to push on to stay with relatives in Oklahoma.”

  “Where do you go from there?” Zachary asked.

  “I really don’t know,” Daddy said coldly. “We plan to stay in Oklahoma quite a while.”

  I got the message even if Zachary didn’t. It was the first I’d heard of going all the way to Tulsa the next day, and what Daddy meant was that Zachary wouldn’t be able to find us at the next camping place and that was just as well and it would also be just as well if we never saw him again. Usually Mother and Daddy have their arms out and the doors open to all our friends. There’s almost always someone extra at our house for dinner, and, on week-ends, spending the night. But the welcome mat wasn’t out for Zachary.

  I looked at Mother and Daddy and kind of scowled. I didn’t think Zachary was all that undesirable. John’s brought home some pretty gooney characters and nobody’s blown any gaskets.

  They didn’t ask Zachary to stay, but he obv
iously wasn’t about to go. He leaned against the shiny black of his station wagon and talked Tennessee politics, about which he seemed to know a lot. After a while Mother and Daddy excused themselves and went to sit on a fallen tree that edged the brook behind our campsite.

  Zachary grinned. “Finally smoked ’em out. You intrigue me, Vicky. Don’t wonder that gang last night tried to pick you up.”

  This flattered me, even if it wasn’t true. “They didn’t,” I said. “They were just a bunch of kooks looking for kicks.”

  “You think you’re not a kick?” He kind of leered at me. Out of the corner of my eye I looked at Mother and Daddy sitting on the fallen tree. I didn’t know whether I wanted them to be nearer or further away.

  “When are you going to be in Laguna Beach?” he asked.

  “I don’t know exactly. Somewhere near the end of June.”

  “Who’re you staying with there?”

  “An uncle and aunt.”

  “What’s their name, for crying out loud? How’m I going to look you up? Laguna’s not too long a haul from L.A.”

  “That’s where you live?”

  “Yes. Now what’s your uncle’s name?”

  “Douglas Austin.” If my parents would have reservations about Zachary’s looking me up, so did I. But somehow it seemed safer to have him look me up when we were in a house in a town in the middle of civilization than in the wilderness. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure whether I wanted him whizzing into any more campgrounds.

  “Who’s keeping you all that time in Oklahoma?”

  “Another uncle and aunt. They used to live in California, but now Uncle Nat has a church in Tulsa.”

  “Oh my aching back, a church! What’s he doing with a church?”

  “He’s a minister,” I said stiffly.

  “Ick. Have fun.”

  “We will,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of cousins there and Uncle Nat and Aunt Sue are marvelous and we’re going to have a ball.”

  “I bet.”

  I was mad. I liked Zachary and he was different from anybody I’d ever known and I didn’t want to scare him off by seeming pious or something, because after all I think I’ve made it quite clear that I’m not, but I wasn’t going to have him thinking people like Grandfather or Uncle Nat were squares just because they were ministers. What’s wrong with being a minister? It’s not like having leprosy in the family. I looked Zachary fiercely in the eye and put all the disdain I could manage into my voice. “You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”