The warm weather might not last, and there might be more snow, they said, but the odors in the air, the birds returning, the cows going crazy, running with their tails in the air, the dogs dancing in the school yard, the horses rolling in the fields, all said spring was near, spring was coming, coming at last, and like a frozen river thawing, Charles felt the cold bands of winter snap and his heart leap forth. He wanted to be strong, to show off for the girls, to do dangerous and idiotic feats so they might watch and see he was bravest, strongest, most handsome of all. But of course, the other boys felt the same way, so his own behavior appeared perfectly natural to Miss Wrigley who stood at the tall windows during lunch hour watching the boys swarming up those dangerous old cottonwood trees to see who was brave enough to get into the dead fork at the top, who was enough of a fool to leap from the third branch and grab the lower branch, swing out and drop. And the girls would stand along the edge of the building or sit in the new grass around the south side of the old tool shed and pretend not to look, giggling in the way girls do when they are being performed for by boys in the spring.
Two more months, she was thinking as she watched the primitive rites going on in the school yard. Two more months of living with those dreary people in their dreary round of labor and silence, of trying so hard to make a mark on these children, to give them something more to think about in their lives than bringing crops in and whether a cow was going to freshen or not. Miss Wrigley was still young enough to be idealistic, hardly into her mid twenties yet, but her two years in this country school had taught her that in the pursuit of ideals one might very well lose one’s own life. She had determined to return to the university, to get past this isolation, the wearing away of her soul against the many uncaring faces that had to be taught the same things again and again. But at that thought she felt ashamed. There were rewards, children like Sally and Douglas, and of course Charles.
What a puzzling person Charles was, she thought, watching him now in his distinctive red shirt. He waved at the other children from the top of the cottonwood, standing on one foot in that dead fork that might break. Well, she thought, they must do that. But he has grown up in less than one school year, grown almost into a man from a boy not much bigger than Douglas to a man as tall as Waldo. And how old was he, really? A mystery, but surely destined to be a great success in the world. If he didn’t kill himself, she thought, watching him swing down like Tarzan from the cottonwood. Now he was running alter Kick Jones who waved a jacket around his head. They had so much energy, these boys, like young horses. She stiffened as she saw Charles tackle Kick Jones and a fight begin in earnest. They were hitting each other in the face now. She raised the window and screamed, but it did no good. As she was about to turn away and run into the yard to stop them, she saw the Jones boy suddenly break away, still holding the other boy’s jacket. Now Carl Bent had tackled Charles and was holding him down. Miss Wrigley ran for the door as the screams from outside began to take on a serious tone. She arrived to find Carl Bent on the ground doubled up like a snake that has been stepped on, Charles running to the far corner of the yard where Kick Jones was in the act of throwing something into the flooded creek.
“Charles’s gone crazy,” Mary Mae Martin said, her eyes wide with fear. “He hit Carl so hard, and he said he’d kill Kick for taking his jacket.”
The other girls were moving toward the schoolhouse, the noon hour being about over and the boys having got too rough again. Miss Wrigley stopped a moment to see if Carl was all right, but he only groaned and would not speak except to motion her away. She turned to scream at Charles who seemed indeed to have gone crazy, for he had leaped the barbed wire fence and was sliding down the creek bank in the mud and high water of the spring rains. She ran to the corner of the yard as Kick Jones came limping past with blood running out of his mouth. She looked at him with concern, but he only shook his head.
“Charles!” Miss Wrigley screamed at the tall boy who was waist deep in the flooded creek. “What is it? Charles?” But he would pay no attention, only groped around harder to find what the Jones boy had thrown. He would not answer any of her questions and ignored her command to come in, that the noon hour was over. She finally turned away, more hurt than angry that he would ignore her so for anything, a jackknife or some piece of foolish wealth, even a love token from a girl. She felt a childish sense of rejection and became angry at herself for that. She marched back into the schoolhouse, ignored all questions about Charles, sent Kick and Carl home to be repaired, and began the afternoon lessons with a firm and unfaltering voice.
At a quarter to four, Miss Wrigley decided it was enough and dismissed the children. Charles had never returned, and she assumed he had gone home, since he was probably a mess from being in the creek. She walked down the back stairs to the basement landing to make sure the back door was locked and glanced out past the school yard at the brimming creek. As she turned away, she caught a movement, a head appeared in the coils of muddy water. Good Heavens, Charles! She wrenched at the back door, tried to find her keys to unlock it, fumbled with the right key that would not go into the lock, finally got the door open and dropped the whole ring of keys as she rushed out across the yard screaming.
“Charles! Charles, get out or there. You’ll die. Oh, Charles.” She had a time getting through the old sagging barbed wire, catching her skirt in several places. And the muddy field was over her shoe tops. Charles’s head appeared again downstream from where he had been before. He stood up in the chest deep water, leaning against the swift muddy current and looked at Miss Wrigley as if he had just heard his death sentence. She was frightened by the lost look on his face as much as by the fact that he might have been in that freezing water for more than three hours, unless he had gone home and come back. She stopped, ankle deep in the mud of the bank and held her hand out.
“Come out now, Charles,” she said softly, urging him by stretching farther over the creek bank and waving her hand at him.
He looked at her, his face streaked with mud, his hair muddy and stuck to his skull. His eyes were dull, and his whole body shivered in spasms which he ignored. He ducked under again in a whirl of water. She waited, slipping down the bank a bit more, digging in the heels of her ruined shoes. Five dollars, she thought irrelevantly, gone in the mud for this crazy boy. Char1es’s face reappeared, sputtering in the same place he had been.
“Charles, if you don’t come out of the water now, I’m coming in to get you. I’ve aheady ruined my best pair of shoes, and this wool skirt is the last good one I’ve got, but I’m going to come right in there after you if you don’t come out.”
To her intense amazement, Charles stood in the chest deep water and began to weep, his face crumpling up like a baby’s while the tears rolled out and mixed with the creek mud, and his body shuddered in great spasms. Miss Wrigley muttered something, stepped out of her shoes, leaving them standing fixed in the heavy mud as it she had been plucked out of them and carried off to heaven, and walked unsteadily down into the icy water. It was unbelievably cold as it rushed around her legs, then up to her waist, and then she stepped on a slanting stone and fell forward so that she went in over her head and came up gasping and spitting. She walked forward resolutely until she had the boy’s arm in both her hands. She pulled him with all her strength, feeling the heavy drag of the creek water urging them both downstream. Charles came along, docile enough now, weeping and shuddering, his skin ice cold to her touch. She got him out, through the fence and into the schoolhouse where she began poking up the fire in the back stove that had almost gone out. When it was going again, she threw her cloth coat around Charles’s shoulders and told him to take off his clothes. She dried his muddy hair with her scarf and went back to the girls’ cloak room to find something she could change into. There was nothing but her own raincoat that she had left there a week ago when it had rained in the morning and turned beautiful in the afternoon. She peeled away her wet clothes and put the raincoat on, holding it tight around her
shivering body. When she came back, Charles was hunched down beside the stove, the coat pulled around him, his wet clothes scattered on the schoolroom floor.
Miss Wrigley put her arms mound the boy’s shoulders. His body shuddered in regular waves now, and when he looked at her, she saw his skin was blue.
“Oh, Charles,” she said, hugging him and rubbing his back vigorously. “What was so important? What could he have thrown in the creek that you would risk getting pneumonia for?”
“My amulet,” he said, but his eyes looked dull, as if he hardly realized she was there, as if he might be simply repeating something he had been saying to himself for hours.
She continued rubbing him, feeling shivery herself. “Were you in that creek the whole time?”
But he would not answer except to repeat the same phrase. She wondered how she was going to get him home, and what she was going to do herself, wearing only a raincoat and her hair all draggled and wet. It was not far to the widow Stumway’s house, just across the road and a couple of hundred yards down the highway. She was just thinking about going back to the creek bank for her shoes when she heard the front door slam shut. She half turned, her arm still around Charles’s shoulders. Paul Holton stood in the hall door looking at her strangely, his little round mouth hanging open. She felt the direction of his gaze and realized he was looking at her bare legs where the raincoat had pulled away when she kneeled down. She pulled the coat down over her leg and said with as much authority as she could, “Paul, Charles has been in the cold creek for just hours, and he’s going to be very sick unless we can get him home and into a warm bed right away. Now you run down the road to the Peaussiers and tell them I’m in trouble and must have help. See if there’s someone there that can drive the car so we can get this boy home fast.” She looked hard at Paul who simply stood there as if he had not heard what she said.
“Paul!” she screamed viciously. “Will you do that?”
“Yes, ma’am. Go to Peaussiers and get a car. Yes ma’am.” He turned and bumped into the door jamb, as he went out running.
***
He was in his bed, but it kept changing to the snow storm. It was so cold, and then he was burning, burning in a forest that was on fire, the trees all like huge candles burning all the way down, and he had to slip between them. And then he was holding the amulet, but it was big, bigger than he could carry, and it kept wanting to fall on him, it was so big, and he had to keep pushing against it to keep it from falling on him. The dream went on so long that he forgot there was any other world, that he was a person living in a world that did not change momentarily from cold to hot. There were only the dreams, and now it was getting hotter all the time, and it never got cold, just hotter and harder to breathe so that it seemed the air was like smoke or like soup that he had to try hard to breathe in and breathe out, and then he was under water and was breathing the water, and at first he was frightened to death that he would drown, but then he realized he was breathing the water, and it was not hurting him.
“I can’t say, Mrs. Stumway,” the short, bald man in the tweed coat said. “It’s not like the movies where the doctor comes out and says everything’s all right. The fever’s not going any higher, I don’t believe, but I can’t promise he’ll pull out of it right away.” He shook his head, putting his stethoscope back in the little bag. “There’s not much more to do now. Not really a case for the hospital, since his condition appears stable and his breathing has cleared some.”
Mrs. Stumway stood in the door of Charles’s bedroom, pale and narrow in her old brown dress, looking down at the quiet face of the orphan boy. “He’s really not my kin, Doctor Mervin,” she said, her hands together in front of her. “But he’s such a good boy, and my daughter says he saved her life when she wrecked her car at Christmas. I hate to see the poor thing sick. He’s so active. Such a good, strong lad.” She followed the doctor downstairs to the door.
“I’m not saying he’s out of the woods,” the doctor said, pulling his coat around his shoulders, “but he’s young and he’s getting good care. If his breathing gets to sounding stopped up and rattly again, you call me, no matter what time of the day or night. All right?”
Something was in the water with him. He tried to see it, but it was always behind him, like his shadow when the light was in his eyes, he couldn’t ever get a good look at it. He could hear what it was saying, and he wondered how anybody could talk under water.
“It’s your body, Charles,” the voice was saying softly. “You’re in charge of it, and I must let you get well. I can’t do that for you, Charles. You do make some foolish mistakes sometimes.”
Charles felt anger, but somehow the water, which was warm like a hot bath, made the anger less strong. He couldn’t really be mad, so he just listened and felt the water pull at him and lull him until he stopped dreaming altogether and went really to sleep where there were no dreams at all.
Miss Wrigley had visited him, he saw when he opened his eyes, and there must have been a doctor there, because there was a doctor smell in the room. She had left his jackknife and the old husking gloves he used when he played softball. And the jonquils in the tall vase were probably her idea. He took a deep breath, but his chest still hurt considerably. It felt as though something had hit his chest many small blows, for it ached all over like a big bruise, but it was easier to breathe, and his eyes felt less burning hot and sandy the way they had. It was dark except for the lamp out in the hall that threw a long dim bar of light across his floor. He tried to sit up and his head throbbed so that he dropped back in pain. Well, he was not dead, anyway. And then he thought about what he had lost.
It was nearly two weeks later when Charles wobbled out the door into the sunlight of late April. Leaves were speckling the woods like a flock of butterflies, and the birds were singing, dipping between the branches. Flowers were poking up everywhere around the house, and the squirrels that had been so hungry they tried to eat the roof off of the house during the bad snowstorm were racing up and down the trees, chattering as if they had never almost died in the cold, as if the world was always going to be warm and wonderful now and winter was gone forever. He walked to school with Douglas who had come for him, trying to be happy and pleasant, although he felt in his heart the stone-heavy weight of his loss, the new insecurity that he knew he must endure now. Douglas seemed more than usually quiet.
It was not the same, Charles felt, sitting in the third row from the windows, the sixth grade row with Runt Borsold, Mary Mae Martin, Paul Holton, and Brenda Gustafson. The lessons were all dull, and it hardly seemed worth the effort to read the books anymore when just by moving his eyes slightly to the left he could watch Flossie Portola trying to flirt with him, or just by leaning back and whispering over his shoulder could ask Brenda to scratch his shoulder, which she would softly giggle and do with one sharp fingernail so it made his hair prickle. And he couldn’t get his mind on the homework that Miss Wrigley gave, coming to school more often than not without ever looking at it after a night of running wild in the fields. It wasn’t that he was tired. That sort of thing did not tire him. It was just that the books seemed irrelevant. He did not meet Miss Wrigley’s eyes anymore, did not speak up in class much, and seemed more interested in the outside of the school than the inside now. Miss Wrigley looked a bit sad and stern at him occasionally, but she did not get angry or curt with him. She did not ask him to stay after school anymore, either, Charles noticed. with some relief.
The last PTA meeting and party of the year was held on a warm night in May. Charles hardly entered the schoolhouse, but stayed outside with the other boys, smoking cigarettes and swapping dirty stories. They came in to be recognized once and stood around awkwardly while Miss Wrigley announced the attendance awards and grade awards for the year. And Charles had to come to the front of the room once to receive a special award, a walnut plaque with a little brass plate on it with his name and the date and his grade level achieved engraved on it. He suffered with a red face while
Miss Wrigley stood very formally and handed him the plaque while the kids and the farmers and their wives all clapped. Then she held out her hand for him to shake, and as he took her hand he looked up and saw the disappointment in her eyes, and he held her hand a second too long and blushed. Then he sped out into the dark again and had to go through the snide comments and jokes of the other boys. He had learned to take it now, feeling they were only doing what they needed to do, confronted with Charles as the teacher’s favorite, as he admitted now that he had been. But they didn’t pursue it. There was something else going on.
“C’mon out to the old tool shed,” Runt said in a hoarse whisper. “Carl’s got an eight-page-bible.”
Charles had heard of these wonders, but had never seen one. Inside the tool shed that held the mower and hay rake that were used on the school yard in summer, a crowd of boys was humped in one corner, a flashlight gleaming intermittently as they shifted around, watching something on the dirt floor.
“Geezus!”
“Wow, look at that!”
“Quit shovin’.”
“He ain’t shovin’,” another voice said. “He’s creamin’,” and there was a low snicker from the group as if it were a single organism responding.
Charles worked his way forward and looked over shoulders at what the flashlight was pointing to on the floor. He saw a small opened book with black and white drawings on it, and for a moment he could not make out what the drawings were of, but then someone turned a page and a clearer set came into view. Buck Rogers and Wilma Deering, naked except for their helmets, were engaged in a fantastic orgy, using some sort of ray to enlarge their organs, until on the last page there was a huge phallus spouting enormous amounts of sperm while the woman flew off into a corner. Charles found himself panting as someone turned back to the first page and began it again.
“God, Carl, where’d you get it?”
The Orphan Page 22
