by Davis Grubb
Even in that faint show of moonlight, even with the mists wisping and curling against the land, they could see the livid, twisted, raging oval of his face: the mouth gaping and sick with hatred. Now he wallowed rapidly toward them through the shallows, the bright, open blade winking in his fist, and then he staggered and slipped and fell, floundering in the water for a moment and then rising again, splashed after them. John bore back on the oar in the lock and the blade skimmed the water ineffectually and he thought: Why can’t I do it when I know how to do it! Please, let me do it! Please! And he bore back again and the oar blade bit hard into the stream and the boat swung erratically like a leaf.
Wait! Wait! wait! Damn you to hell!
And now some errant current in the vast, dark river caught them upon its warm wing and the boat began moving, blessedly moving, spinning at first like a mad October leaf and then heading into the channel while still they could hear Preacher: every sound drifting clean and sharp across the flat water: he was back on shore now where he could follow better, clawing his way down the brush filth through sumac and pokeberry, cursing and shouting amid that wiry jungle of the river shore, but now they were moving beyond him, they were free.
John? gasped Pearl.
He dragged his eyes to her, not answering, collapsing face down upon the crook of his arm upon the stern: spent and exhausted even in the face of this near miraculous exodus.
We forgot to take Daddy, she said.
Yes. Yes, Pearl, he murmured, too tired to explain, and then suddenly feeling his flesh seized with a shivering like the ague or some dreaded river fever because of what he had just managed and because he would never quite believe again in all his life that he had been able to do it at all. Preacher stood now, thigh-deep in the shallows under the willows a dozen yards above the row of shantyboats, and opening his mouth began a steady, rhythmical, animal scream of outrage and loss. And the shantyboat people ceased their sleeping, their love-making, their singing of old sweet tunes and harkened: hearing something as old and dark as the things on the river’s bed, old as evil itself, a pulsing, ragged bawling that came down the water to them in hideous rhythm. It might have been the ghost of old Mason himself or Macijah Harpe or the renegade Girty for all the hellishness in it. And those river folk fell silent, waiting for it to stop, waiting for the flowing river night to wash it into the darkness again and leave the hour to the sounds a night should have: the scritch of green frogs, the sudden leaping of a fish, the squeal of a buck hare up in the orchard before the ravening weasel’s leap. Even when the skiff had floated far away down the dark and silent river the children could hear the faint, distant drift of that hoarse and terrible chant.
John? Pearl whispered.
But he was beyond answering.
John?
But he was asleep. And so it was to the doll that she spoke. And since the game she and John and Daddy had been playing was finished she began another one. And in the silence of the great brooding river night she whispered to the doll Jenny a little story about a pretty fly she had seen one day in the green, sweet leaves of the grape arbor. He had a wife, this pretty fly, and one day she flew away and he was very sad. And then one night his two pretty fly children flew away, too, into the sky—into the moon. But it was a story without an end because presently she was sleeping, too.
—
Walt! Oh, Walt! Look here what the mailman brought this morning!
He took it from her hand: the cheap, colored postal card with the inevitable courthouse and the courthouse yard with the brass cannon and the two nameless and immemorial town loafers lounging against the old soldiers’ monument.
Now see, Walt! I told you all your frettin’ was for naught!
Walt turned the card over and commenced reading aloud:
Dear Walt and Icey: I bet you been worried and give us up for lost. Took the kids down here with me for a visit to my sister Elsie’s farm. Thot it would do us all a world of good after so much trubble and heartache. A little change of senery—
Ah, the poor, poor soul!
—a little change of senery will do us good for a month or so. At least the kids will git a plenty of good home cooking and some meat on their bonns and ther is a fine revival going on down here and they ask me to preach next Wensday. God be with you till we meet again from yr. devoted Harry Powell.
Now ain’t you relieved, Walt?
Well, sure I am. But don’t forget—you was worried, too, Mother. Him takin’ off with the kids like he done that night and never a word of good-by.
But that would be like him, she said. Feelin’ he’d already been burden enough in his time of need.
Well, I reckon! Walt lied, half remembering his old suspicions of Preacher. I just got to worryin’ for fear some of them gypsies might have busted in the house one night and done off with all three of them.
Shucks, Walt, them gypsies has been gone a week.
Yes, but not before one of them knifed a farmer down on Ben’s Run the other forenoon and stole his best field horse.
I read that in the Echo. Was he bad hurt?
He’ll live. But they never caught the gypsies nor the horse neither. I tell you, Mother, a body ain’t safe in his own parlor these nights.
Icey snuffled and scurried off to the kitchen, glowing with happiness and relief.
Sometimes when I think of the courage of that great soul, she cried, above her pot of fudge, it makes me ashamed of myself that I ever complained, Walt!
He came to the kitchen and stood beside her.
It wouldn’t surprise me none, she went on, if he was to come back next month and put the house and lot up for sale. And it might be the best thing. So many, many memories there!
Walt went out in front to the ice-cream bins and, leaning his bare elbows on the frosty lids, scowled at the card. Something itched and worried behind his eyes, far back in his mind, and yet he said nothing, thought nothing. Icey came out of the kitchen then, her eyes sparkling.
Walt Spoon, I think I know why Mister Powell took them kids and left the other night.
He looked at her, saying nothing.
Walt, I bet Willa’s run aground somewhere and sent for him to fish her out again.
Yes. Well, maybe—
It would be like him, she said, to go and lift her up and forgive.
Yes, I reckon it would—
The ninety and nine, Walt! Mind the old hymn. Where the one sheep run off and the ninety and nine was left and the shepherd never rested till he’d found that wanderin’ one.
Walt grunted and lighted his pipe and, squinting one eye, stared into the fair morning beneath the trees of Peacock Alley.
The ninety and nine, crooned Icey softly, thinking of the wonderful thing that Preacher was doing, and stuck the pretty postcard in the frame of the big mirror over the shelf behind the counter, above the gleaming jars of licorice and gumdrops and frosty mints.
That man of God, she said softly and stared at the bright penny postcard alongside the faded carnival photo of the sheepish, laughing girl that had once been Willa Harper.
—
The people saw him that August in a dozen little towns along the river: the quiet, brooding man on the horse. He would ride in town early in the morning and they could tell by his clothes and the stubble of beard that he had spent the night in some farmer’s hayloft and fed his horse on some farmer’s corn. They paid him no particular never mind because it was a depression year—a time of wanderers on the land. He would tell them he was an evangelist and hitch his horse to a fence post and fetch a dusty Scripture from the pocket of his ragged coat and then preach a hell-raising half-hour sermon in the shadow of a country store or under the trees of a courthouse square and no sheriff ever bothered him because it was a depression year and everybody was a little bit scared of God just then. Sometimes he would get a few coins in his old hat or maybe a sandwich from a board-front restaurant with no other sign over it but Good Eats—No Credit or maybe a storekeeper would give him a loaf
of last week’s bread and a jar of old preserves. He preached often about children: about how an ungrateful child is an abomination before the eyes of God and about how the world was fast going to damnation because of impudent and disobedient youngsters flying in the face of Age.
Preacher, how many kids you got?
He turned and glared at the man, shading his squinting eyes under the hand that was grown so dark with sunburn and wind that the blue letters of Love were nearly gone.
I had two, brother. But the Lord seen fit to take them away.
Well, meanin’ no smartness, Preacher, but if you had the five I’ve got to put up with and feed six or eight times a day you’d know how true them words you just preached really was.
Thank you, brother!
And on top of that, cried the other one, spurting a brown stream of amber into the dust among the sleeping dogs in the shadow of an old Chevrolet, my ol’ woman wanted to take in them two wild savages Gailey Flowers chased out of his tomato garden last week!
The which? Say that again, brother. Two, you say?
Two little kids. Orphans, I reckon. Old Gailey Flowers has that piece of land down at the forks in the road below Hannibal Station and he catched them kids stealin’ tomatoes there the other mornin’ about sunup.
When was that? When, brother? When did you say?
Is them kids yourn, Preacher?
When? When was they seen last?
He had hold of the man’s arm now and the fingers of his dark left hand pressed into the farmer’s tough wrist.
It was a Wednesday morning! called an old man from the crowd. My woman seen ’em, too. They come up to the house a-beggin’ for bread and bacon. Shucks, we hain’t had bacon on our table since ’31.
There was something now that they all sensed about Preacher that seemed hungry and unclean. His lips quivered, his eyes were too bright, his fingers too pleading as he went around to each of them, laying hands upon their arms, begging for more details about the children. It was a year of depression. It was no strange sight in the land in that lean and fallow time: children running the woodlands and the fields without parents, without food, without love. Families were shattered and broken asunder in that black decade and the children were driven to fend for themselves like the whelps of random litters: in the lanes of the back counties, roaming the big highways, sleeping in barn lofts or in old abandoned car bodies on town junk heaps; stealing food where they could or accepting it from the hands of some kind farm woman who could see within their ravaged and disenchanted faces a vision of herself or of her own kind or of some dark portent of what yet might come to pass upon herself or to her own. But these men, who had seen and understood this loving-kindness and mercy in the faces and voices of their good wives, saw none of this in the face of Preacher; saw instead the dry-toothed cunning of the hound on the hunt. They moved away from him. The dusty congregation dispersed and went back to whittling, to waiting at the post office doorway for the posting of the WPA jobs or the passing out of relief commodities or perhaps merely homeward to loaf in sullen and broiling discontent and stare at their empty, impotent hands.
And so the dusty stranger moved on from town to town: sniffing, nosing under scrap heaps of corner gossip for a word, for a clue; eavesdropping on feedstore porches, idling with a ready ear by crossroad post offices and short-line depots or in the lobbies of the country hotels where the drummers drink and tell ornery stories and listen for the midnight train to go wailing off into the velvet, star-sweet night.
He worked a week here and a week there, picking peaches or working in the late corn harvest: earning a meal or a night’s lodging or a few pennies, moving on through the river counties, his nose and eyes ever to windward, moving with an implacable and unceasing revenge after the ones who had cheated him of that which the Lord had said was his own.
Sometime, he knew that he would come suddenly upon a farmhouse, lazy and golden in the dusk under the pin oaks in the lambent light of Indian summer. And there—perhaps playing in the dust beside a cistern or squatting on the freshly scrubbed stone porch of that solid bottom-lands farmhouse he would see them at last: a little girl with an old doll and a little boy with no toy at all, their haunted faces like moonflowers in the dusk.
—
To have seen the children in that troubled time one might have supposed them to be fallen angels, or dusty woodland elves suddenly banished from the Court of the Gods of Moonlight and of faery meadows. They blew along like brown leaves on the wind. All the long hot day after their escape they had drifted upon the swift river channel and then the river night dropped abruptly upon them and there were no lights but the stars and the shanty-boat lamps along the shore and the drifting dust of fireflies against the black, looming hills above the narrows. They fell asleep, hungry and discouraged and frightened, and the old river night had seemed to set about them the sentries of her own history: fiddling keelboatmen and the blue-eyed old captains of the Louisville trade.
In the morning John awakened with a sprig of willow leaves tickling his face. He opened his eyes and saw that Ben Harper’s skiff, those ten feet of ark that had borne them safely above the black flood of Preacher’s malevolence, had providently run aground on a sand bar near the mouth of a creek. The sun stood high in the brush pines on the hill above them and there was a fine, cracking wind from the river. They were ravenously hungry. John shrewdly dragged the boat onto the bar as far as he could and gathering broken branches from the drift against the banks covered the boat so that they could safely leave it and forage for their breakfast among the bottom farms. They were an unkempt and raggle-taggle pair those two—foul with the smell of fish tails from the skiffs bilge and smirched with tar from Uncle Birdie’s generous calking of the old boat’s seams. John spied an orchard far up beyond a bluff above the river road and told Pearl to wait while he went to fetch them a shirtful of fruit for their morning meal. So Pearl squatted beneath the nodding tops of the snowy Queen Anne’s lace that covered the meadow like an old woman’s Sunday tablecloth and chatted and sang to the doll while John was gone. Presently he appeared, running toward her again and there were cries behind him among the little peach trees and he beckoned her to follow him and they fled again down the pasture to the shore. The farmer did not pursue them there and they sat on a large, flat rock, disconsolate and hungrier than ever, chewing on blades of sour grass, and glumly surveyed the gray expanse of morning river.
John, when are we going home?
Just wait, now, Pearl!
But if we went home, John, she reasoned stubbornly, Daddy would fix us our breakfast. And Mom is terribly worried, John.
But he knew better than that. Scraps and tatters of old Uncle Birdie’s sodden mumblings had stayed with him since that terrible moment in the wharfboat when all of heaven’s unreasoning judgment seemed to rise against them. John knew that his mother was gone. She was as blurred now in his hopes—even in his memory—as the misty, half-forgotten figure of the hanging man on the red bricks of the wall. Preacher had done away with her in some dreadful and final way. Preacher and the blue men had finished her. It was a world that hunted the children now.
He caught a hellgrammite in a muddy, stagnant pond up on the bar and Pearl screamed at the dreadful, crawly, squirming thing as he speared it on a hook he had found in a rusty snuffbox in the skiff. He weighted a short length of line with a pebble and dropped it in the shallows, hoping that there might be in that bare foot of depth a hungry catfish. But it seemed useless after a bit and he retired to his stone again to stare bitterly at Pearl and think that somehow she was to blame for all of it. It was not easy: keeping always before him the realization of what it was he was fighting to protect. For it was more than his life and hers; it was that solemn child’s oath that he had taken that day in the tall grass by the feet of his doomed and bleeding father. He ran to Pearl and snatched the doll from her clinging hands and looked to see if the safety pin still held closed the gap in the soft cloth body and, poking a finger thro
ugh, felt the crisp bills of the dead man’s plunder. Yes, it was really there: it was not a dark dream. Yes, he had sworn to save it and he felt his throat tighten, remembering suddenly how important and dreadful and irrevocable it is to swear to a thing.
By noon hunger had emboldened them to seek a farmhouse kitchen for a meal. The fat wife stopped her churning in the cool of the casaba vines along the stone porch and stared at them there on the stone stoop worn curved with time. She wiped her itching nose on a freckled forearm.
Hungry are ye? Well, where’s your folks?
We ain’t got none, said John truthfully, and hearing the words in his own ears gave a sudden, dreadful substantiation to the fact.
Well, sit down there and don’t come trackin’ up my porch with your muddy feet. I’ll see if there’s any potato soup left. Gracious, such times when youngins run the roads!
She waddled off to the kitchen, quarreling with life, and returned presently with big thick bowls of hot potato soup and three thick slices of homemade bread spread over with cinnamon-sweet apple butter. They finished in a breath and came and stood with wide, grave eyes, holding up the empty bowls, waiting for her to notice them again. She grumbled and took their bowls away and filled them again only this time there were no bread and apple butter. When they were finished John sensed that it would be wise to leave. The woman stood kneading her butter in a wooden bowl, squeezing out the sour buttermilk with a flat paddle with which she scored the sweet, golden pat when she was done.
Git ye filled up?
Yes’m.
Well, what do ye say? If ye was born ye must have had a ma and she should have learnt ye to say thanks for things.
Thank you, ma’am.
Thank you, said Pearl, making a feeble little try at the curtsy Willa had taught her at Christmas time two years before.
Go away! the fat woman’s eyes seemed to say. Go away because you remind me of something dreadful in the land just now: some pattern that is breaking up: something going that is as basic and old as the wheeling of the winter stars. Go away! Don’t remind me that it’s Hard Times and there’s children on the roads of the land!
