Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  “What’s happened to him?” exclaimed Daniel.

  “You’ll see.”

  Emerging a few seconds later, none the worse for his swim, the bird flew back to his tree, a silvery minnow writhing in his beak. When I turned to share my joy with Daniel, I expected to see his wily smile, but he was sobbing.

  I watched him without saying a word, his hands covering his eyes, since I was sure he would not want me to call attention to his display of emotion. When I finally dared to question him, he glared at me viciously. I decided to go on a brief bird-watching expedition in the woods. When I returned, he made me swear to keep a secret, then told me that Senhora Beatriz was his grandmother. “Her daughter gave me up as a baby. She left me on the wheel. The nuns gave me to my adoptive mother and father.”

  Left on the wheel was the Portuguese expression for placing an unwanted infant on a turntable set inside the window of a charitable institution maintained for just this purpose. The turntable was partitioned by a wooden board to keep the identity of the mother a secret. Babies left there were cared for by nuns and, if possible, given to new parents.

  “Why did she give you up?” I asked.

  Daniel wiped his nose with his hand, picked up a branch from the ground, and began making fierce cuts in it with a short-bladed knife. “Don’t know. She’s dead now – the fevers took her a year after she gave me to the nuns. She was just nineteen. She must have been too poor to care for me.” He looked off into the distance. “I only found out about her because one day Senhora Beatriz was delivering laundry to a neighbor of ours and saw me in the street. She got a big fright and went all pale. Like she’d seen a ghost. Bobo de merda, sem cabeçeira, vá-te-embora, vá agora.”

  This was another of the rhymes I would come to associate with Daniel. It meant, Fool without wit, boy of shit, leave today and go away.

  “See, I looked just like her dead daughter – but I only found that out later.”

  He fashioned two tiny holes in his wood with the point of his blade, then scored some curving lines. “I secretly followed Senhora Beatriz to her house and began to go there every day at the same time. She’d always look sad, then close her shutters.”

  I twisted my head to see his work better, but he held it away from me and said he’d clout me if I peeked again.

  “John, you can be damned sure I’ve got a head filled with shit, because the next thing I did was tell my mother about Senhora Beatriz. She never stays at home now – Ma, I mean. I haven’t even seen her in a year. The last time I did, the old donkey grabbed me hard” – the lad’s eyes shone with rage – “and slapped me right across my face. She told me to beg forgiveness for being born. Everything got broke in her life when she took me in. That’s when I found out I was adopted.”

  Holding his knife like a pen, he made a long circular incision across his design.

  “Then, one day, Senhora Beatriz came to our house – maybe two years ago. I invited her inside, but she wouldn’t come in. She started crying right in the doorway. I went to her, but she told me to stay back. She said she needed a lad to collect soiled linens and things. She’d pay me.”

  “What did you say?”

  “What do you think I said? I’d never have been able to buy my carving tools without her money. That’s how I get all my things, John. So, about six months ago, I was at her house and she sat me down and gave me some biscuits. She showed me a tiny painting with a woman’s face. The whole thing wasn’t any bigger than my palm. And the woman’s face looked like mine. She said that that was why she got a fright the first time she saw me, because I looked so much like her.”

  “The woman in the painting was your mother?”

  He nodded. “Her name was Teresa. Senhora Beatriz told me she’d given up a baby she’d had with a man who’d run off. They weren’t married. Senhora Beatriz sure was angry at him for leaving her. She said he was a clothing merchant from Lisbon and that he’d ruined her daughter with his silk and promises. Not that she said the baby they’d had was me, of course. She thinks I haven’t figured it out. I haven’t told anyone but you, so you’ve got to keep quiet.”

  “Why don’t you tell Senhora Beatriz you know? She’s your grandmother.”

  “If she wanted me to know,” he replied angrily, “she’d say so. She has to tell me. I’m not going to say anything otherwise. And you’re not either! You hear me?”

  “I’ll not say a thing to anyone,” I agreed, but I didn’t understand his reasoning. Now I know he showed a sensitivity for her feelings far beyond his years, and an exemplary capacity for self-denial.

  Daniel held up his finished carving. It was a face with questioning eyes, an open, awestruck mouth, and wild hair. It looked like a spooked cat.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” I asked.

  “It’s his Scottish lordship himself – it’s you.”

  “Me!” I held out my hand for it, but he stood up, reared back, and threw it into the lake.

  I jumped up. “Why’d you do that? I wanted to keep it.”

  He gave me a defiant look. “’Cause I’m evil. Fool without wit, boy of shit, leave today and go away!”

  “You ought to have at least let me get a good look. That wasn’t fair!”

  Daniel’s face crumpled as though I’d slapped him. When I reached out for him, he jerked away and said, “Don’t touch me, I’m filthy.”

  *

  After he’d stopped crying, I swam in the cold tarn while Daniel waited on shore. He asked me questions about the bird market we’d seen earlier, which was pitched every Tuesday and Saturday in New Square.

  “Listen,” he said, “we’ll go there on Tuesday. Late afternoon. I want to follow the seller with the most birds as he leaves for home. Also, I want you to get some paints – and brushes.”

  “Daniel, what are you planning? My parents have warned me – ”

  “Christ, John, I haven’t worked it all out yet. Have a little patience.”

  What he wouldn’t let me say was that my parents had forbidden me from visiting the bird market. This was because once, when I was four, I’d fainted dead away on seeing a goldfinch in a wire prison no bigger than a man’s fist. Now that I was older, they surely feared that I’d get my revenge and do something rash, for which I’d end up caged myself.

  Quite right, they were, as it turned out. Though I suppose I might even today blame it all on Daniel.

  III

  On the Sunday after Senhora Beatriz was beaten, Father told me a Scottish tale counseling caution. In this story, a witch transformed Papa into a pimply toad and chained him to a standard in her granite tower. To my delight, Porritch – the dog he’d had as a lad – rescued him by sneaking up on the hag, catching her asleep, and clamping his jaws around her neck. I say delight because I had always wished for a dog, though my mother had obliged me to wait until I was a trifle older and more “responsible,” as she put it.

  “When a witch is killed,” Papa explained to me on this occasion, “all the evil spells she’s ever uttered are undone in an instant.”

  I recall he made quite an impression on me that day by explaining that the gold chain on his pocket watch had been the same one the witch had used to tie him to her standard. “It’s fixed now, son, but the clasp was broken when I found it. You see, when the evil nighthag was killed, I was transformed from a toad to a lad in an instant. My growth shattered the clasp.”

  He let me hold the watch and added, “I shall give it to you on the day we celebrate your twenty-first birthday. Do you know why I told you this particular tale, son?” When I shook my head, he said, “It has to do with what happened to Senhora Beatriz and certain other related dangers in the city at the moment. Son, you’re a wee thing still and, though you are brave and swift of foot, already a defiant kelpie, you cannot do everything yourself.” Kelpie meant monster of the lochs in Scottish, but Papa used it as a term of endearment. “We all need to be rescued now and again – from all sorts of snares. So you are to race home to me if you ev
er see anything like that again – any woman, man, or child being hurt. Do you see my point, lad?”

  “I understand.”

  At the time, Papa’s worry, and his vague reference to certain other related dangers, seemed to have nothing to do with the preacher I’d listened to in New Square. But as I write these memories it is now only too obvious that my parents would have heard a number of terrifying accounts of his hateful activities by then.

  *

  To get the paints and brushes that Daniel had asked for, I went early on Monday morning to visit Luna and Graça Oliveira, kindhearted neighbors whom we referred to as the Olive Tree Sisters. They were then halfway into their sixth decade. If asked, however, I would have sworn that they must have been over seventy, since their gray hair and puckered faces indicated to my youthful eyes a withering decrepitude.

  Luna and Graça were renowned throughout the city for the lifelike beauty of the wax fruit they molded. Their likenesses were so precise, in fact, it was rumored that our mad-as-a-hatter Queen Maria, while on a visit to Porto before my birth, had taken an ill-advised bite of one of their sunset-colored peaches. As I have it on good authority that the Queen’s brown teeth were as precarious in her mouth as tortoiseshell buttons on a ragseller’s waistcoat, this must have meant a shattering end to several.

  Standing outside the Olive Tree Sisters’ home, I tapped the lion’s-head knocker against their door. I had not considered the ungodly time – no more than half an hour past sunrise. And even worse, I’d disobeyed my parents by sneaking out, as I was forbidden from leaving our home while they were both asleep. But I was optimistic that I could complete my mission without their finding out – an indication of just how far afield Daniel’s friendship had already led me.

  Luna peered down from an upstairs window, her head crowned by a scarlet nightcap with a woolen ball tassel. Considering me a figment of the early-morning mist, her gray-green eyes blinked. “John? Is that you, lad?”

  I confirmed it was and she shouted, “Codfish cakes! What are you doing here at this hour? What’s wrong?”

  I started to explain, but my excitement left me tongue-tied.

  “I’m coming down, John. Don’t move or I’ll flatten you!” she said, pointing a stern finger at me.

  I was too much of an imp to heed her request and after only a few seconds knocked again, far harder. Placing my ear to the door, I heard her say, “That wee son of a bitch knows nothing of the pains in this old body.”

  I wasn’t offended; Luna was renowned for speaking like a stevedore. She opened the door, frowning. “You are a most impatient little devil!” she declared.

  “I’m sorry, Senhora Luna, but … but I need your help.”

  Luna’s wiry gray hair was clipped short and she was wearing several slender gold necklaces and earrings of filigree six-pointed stars, which made her look, I thought, beautiful.

  “John,” she said in a grave whisper, “is something wrong – is your mama or papa ill?” She was convinced that only tragedy could have brought me here so early.

  “I need paints,” I replied.

  She turned and looked behind her, as though I might have been addressing someone else.

  “You woke me at this hour for paints? Are you mad, child?” she shrieked.

  “I promised Daniel I’d get paints.”

  “Who in God’s name is Daniel?”

  Before I had time to answer, she breathed in stiffly and muttered, “Oh, never mind, lad.” Grabbing my arm, she dragged me into their sitting room like a hooked fish. Though tiny, she was powerful, with the great knobby hands of a peasant. I had once seen her crush a walnut between her palms – afterward, she told me that all artists need strong fingers in order to strangle their doubts.

  She waddled to the base of the stairs, her feet splayed like a duck. With no warning, she gave a deafening screech for her sister. “Graçinha! Move those bones, Sister. Someone left another surprise on our doorstep.”

  “You’re cleaning it this time, Little Sister,” Graça called down.

  “Too late – it’s in the house. We’ve a sorry spectacle here right on the rug.” She grinned at her prank.

  “What in God’s sweet name are you talking about, Little Sister?”

  After a moment, Graça appeared at the top of their stairs, her bony feet wedged into clogs. She was the taller of the two by nearly two inches, though she usually described herself as “a full hand closer to God” to irritate Luna. She smiled more easily than her younger sister, and now, having noticed me, she offered a pixie grin, saying, “A handsome little surprise it is too!”

  Once downstairs, Graça bent down and kissed my cheeks. Both sisters reeked of garlic. Luna once told me she slept with a clove around her neck to fend off mosquitoes, flies, and meddling priests.

  Upon their insistence, I sat in the red velvet armchair that I’d adored since I was tiny. They dropped down in front of me on a chaise with embroidered cushions. They had the prettiest furniture on our street.

  “Speak, child,” Luna commanded, “or I shall be forced to get out our instruments of torture.”

  So it was that I explained about Daniel and a secret plan he had conceived, which had something to do with the bird market.

  Graça turned to her sister and smiled wistfully. “Children,” she sighed, as though I and all my fellow fledglings were a perpetual mystery. I am not of the opinion that Luna ever regretted her unmarried and childless state, but Graça may have. As to why they never took husbands, I cannot say.

  The sisters looked at each other, exchanging shrugs, sighs, and coded phrases. In the end, they agreed to my request and disappeared into the nether regions of their house, where they had their workrooms. Alone and anxious, I lifted up a brass warming pan and began conferring knighthoods upon their furniture. While making my rounds I discovered a crystalline green and blue tile, four inches square, bearing the figure of a triton. I’d never seen anything so lovely before.

  At that moment the Olive Tree Sisters hurried back into the room, carrying ceramic jars containing red, blue, yellow, and white paint. After learning that I didn’t know how to mix colors, Luna remarked disdainfully, “A filthy damnable disgrace that your tutor teaches you nothing of art. I shall be talking to your mother about getting you some proper lessons.”

  Graça explained that with the three primary colors and white, I could make all the others. While I listened, Luna fetched me brushes and a papier-mâché tray painted with tulips for carrying it all home.

  “And I’ll dip you up to your nose in wax if you make a mess,” she warned me.

  On my way out the door, I asked where they had bought the tile of the triton. Graça told me it had been made by their friend, Senhor Gilberto the potter.

  Graça looked at Luna, who twisted her lips into a frown. How this expression was interpreted as permission, I do not know, but Graça patted my head and said, “It’s yours, then.”

  “Mine?”

  She kissed me on the brow and placed the tile gingerly onto my tray. “Always surround yourself with beautiful things, John, and all will be well.”

  *

  I balanced my tray in one hand, eased open the front door to our house, and tiptoed inside. Mother was standing by the mirror, brushing her chestnut-brown tresses in a luxurious curtain over her face, as she did every morning. She was wearing her blue day dress, stitched tight just under the bust and falling straight to the floor, hiding her slim waist. Her feet were bare. For a single moment, I believed I still had a chance to slip by her. If I exercised caution, I could retrace my steps and vanish past her upstairs. But on parting her hair in front, she caught a startled glimpse of me and my courage failed.

  “Good morning, John,” she said. This was the en garde before our battle.

  “I was just outside for a moment, confirming we shall have sun.”

  She eyed my tray suspiciously.

  “I’ve also been with the Olive Tree Sisters,” I rushed to confess. “They invited me
for tea and let me borrow some things.”

  “Luna and Graça had you for tea at seven o’clock in the morning?” she asked skeptically. “John, you must either think me insane or unconcerned for your welfare. And you are testing my patience yet again. Now, would you mind telling me what it is you are carrying?”

  “Paints. Daniel and I shall be painting some things.”

  “What things?”

  “Some masks he’s made,” I lied.

  “Indeed.” She came to me and snatched up one of the jars. Peering inside, she sniffed its contents. Satisfied that I was telling the truth, she said, “Now, listen to me: You are not to eat any of this. I’m quite sure it’s poisonous.”

  I gave her a furious look, because imbibing such a paste would never have crossed my mind.

  “Promise me,” she said, wagging her finger.

  “Mother, do you think I am a complete and utter idiot?”

  To which she replied, without batting an eyelash, “No, of course not, dear, far from it. We all know only too well how intelligent you are. But I must say that you imitate many things brilliantly, and if you can bear a small criticism, you even do an excellent imitation of an idiot at times.”

  *

  That afternoon, mother and I bid farewell to my father at our door, as he was journeying upriver for one of his two-week sojourns to survey lands for the Douro Wine Company. Trying to cheer me up, he said, “Soon, son, we shall have our own vineyard upriver and I shall not need to part from you.”

  Leaning down to whisper in my ear, he added that he had spoken again to Mama about getting a dog and that she was softening. Furthermore, his absence would no doubt play on her emotions and render her butter to our wishes. I embraced him very hard. I would have liked to press my little self fully inside him.

  Mama and I waved good-bye as he strode down the street, her hand trembling around mine. She brushed away her tears and whispered something to herself that surprised and chilled me: “This life is killing me.”