The Night of the Hunter

by Davis Grubb

  A winter dusk.

  Ruby?

  Yes’m.

  Run down to the little store across from the jail and fetch back a pound of butter. I clean forgot when we shopped today and Lovey’s ’bout got supper ready. Run along now. Here’s fifty cents.

  Can I go? the children all cry out and Rachel shushes them because she has told them not to shout because she realizes what a burden their being there really is on her sister Lovey who has bad enough nerves as it is. The children scamper away to the sewing room to play with the bright steel parts of the sewing machine that the old sister has given them as toys during their stay. Ruby pulls on the old coat, far too small for her, and the ugly toboggan that barely covers her shaggy hair. She moves into the crystal silence of the winter dusk, down the pavement, the coin clutched in her palm, the wind drifting sharp as a razor. The winter trees are naked and stretch like the fingers of poverty into the gray sky.

  The blue men, Ruby thinks. John said it was them that has got him up there in that big stone house yonder. I reckon they won’t let him out or else he would have come to see us again and maybe he would have told me again about my purty eyes. I love him. She don’t understand that he is different from them others: the ones I done the bad thing with. She thinks he is just like them and she don’t know that the reason he likes me is because I am so purty, and I’ll bet if he was to get the blue men to let him out of the stone house he would walk right up to me right now and tell me so and ask me to marry him. He would love me I’ll bet. Because I love him. And nobody really loves me—Miz Cooper and them kids. I love them, I reckon, but, shoot! I am so big and tall I don’t fit things any more and I always have to lean over. When I am with her she treats me like them and they are babies and shoot! I can’t be a baby and I can’t be a grownup so what does that make me? I used to wonder who I really am and when I done the bad thing with them boys I just done it so they would like me—so they would love me. When you are too big for everybody nothing fits. This coat used to be Clary’s and Clary is littler than I ever was so whenever I bend over I have to hold my shoulders up so’s it won’t rip. Rooms, too. Rooms don’t fit. People don’t fit, neither. Except him. Well, he don’t make fun of me and laugh at me like them boys used to do and he don’t want to do the dirty thing. That’s the stone house yonder. That’s where the blue men got him.

  She lifted her eyes to the hard, yellow windows of the county jail and looked at the little bars and then she saw the tiny, black shape of shoulders and a head and thought: That’s him now. If I wave my arms maybe he will see me and come out and we can get married.

  She stood on the thin ice of the pavement and waved her hand and tried to smile the pretty smile like the beautiful girls in the movie magazines because maybe if he saw how beautiful she was again he would get the blue men to let him come out.

  He is different, she thought, with a delicate smile on her poor mouth, and something stirred softly in the crackling cold of the night, a faint noise of thrashing like a restless beast moving in its hay in the stable darkness and she heeded it for a moment and then resumed her revery, thinking: A body just can’t go around with people that don’t fit. When I first come to live with Miz Cooper I was ten years old just like Clary and I had all my clothes in a cardboard carton tied up with a piece of clothesline just like Clary and I just sat there on top of it in Miz Cooper’s hall, looking at them two other kids she had then before their folks come and took them away and I thought: Why, shoot! This ain’t no better and it ain’t no worse! I never fit. But when I seen him that night in front of the drugstore and he taken me in there and bought me that sody and that book I knowed he was different. Why, Miz Cooper she just taken on something awful about him buying me that there movie book. She was so mad she shot him with her gun and directly the blue men come and taken him away and put him yonder in the big stone house.

  She turned her head, cocking it to the wind, as the stir and murmur grew like a vast, faint thunder in the town and her face screwed up cannily, heeding it, straining to fathom its meaning and wondering: Them’s people shouting somewheres. All them people away off somewheres. This sure is the strangest place—the strangest town.

  And then she shut her eyes and saw his face like it had looked at her in Ev Roberts’s drugstore that night, all cruel and beautiful and angry, and she knew more than ever how unlike the others he was: them simpering, slobbering boys on the evening bench, them ones that used to take her down in the pawpaw thickets along the river road and do that bad thing to her. And now, opening her eyes again and turning her head she saw the bright flames and thought: Why, them’s just like beautiful red flowers—like them poinsettias Miz Cooper had one Christmas—only that is fire on the end of those sticks the people are waving: that crowd that is marching up the street from the Wellman’s Opera House.

  They were walking slowly toward the courthouse yard before the jail and it seemed, curiously, as if their faces were not moving as slowly as their bodies were, as if, indeed, the faces were being propelled swiftly before them the leaping light of the red flambeaux. And now they were almost abreast of her in the middle of Tomlinson Avenue and she could see their faces more clearly and with a particular vividness the face of the big man in the lead, the man who waved the rope in his hands and shouted. Because it was the husband of the woman who had risen screaming and praying in the back of Wellman’s Opera House at the trial just as she was screaming and praying at her husband’s side now. And with a sudden sweet rush of knowing the girl understood why they were coming.

  Sure! Sure! she thought. They’re a-comin’ to save him. They’re going to make the blue men let him out of the big stone house.

  And now she turned her eyes to the yellow windows of the county jail again and saw that each square of yellow was swarming with black silhouettes of men now. She turned toward the trees in the yard at the shout from the courthouse steps, beneath the icy branches of the giant sycamores that embraced its ugly sandstone porch, and saw the blue men gathering there with the guns in their hands and still the saviors with their torches did not stop.

  Yes! she breathed. Save him now! Let him free!

  And she began to run, to catch up with them, wishing she had a torch, too, and then one of them turned and saw her and gave her a shove toward the pavement and told her to go home and said it wasn’t any job for children and she stood there a moment watching with her dream eyes as the seething mob circled and moved in cautiously toward the porch under the trees where the blue men were knotted and she thought: I’ll run back and get my things all ready: my other gingham dress and my shawl and my Mickey Mouse wrist watch that don’t run and the straw hat with the flowers and I’ll have them all packed up in that cardboard carton with the piece of clothesline around it and I’ll tell Miz Cooper he is coming to marry me and she won’t mind because she knows it as well as I do: I don’t fit. I don’t belong.

  So she began to run back to Lovey’s house while behind her the breaking, hoarse voice of Walt Spoon rose above the gathering chorus of the mob.

  Because he tricked us! Because he tricked us! Because he is Satan hiding behind the cross!

  And the mob roared its affirmation and moved up the steps and Ruby ran into the house and old Rachel met her by the umbrella stand saying: Why, where’s the butter? Forevermore, Ruby, where you been?

  EPILOGUE

  THEY ABIDE

  I say that we are wound

  With mercy round and round

  As if with air!…

  —GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  And Christmas came to blanket the black memories for a while: Christmas with a swirling two-day snowfall with flakes as big as summer cabbage moths. And now they were all home again, inside the warm, familiar house: old Rachel and her flock. She had been glad to come home, as much for being under her own roof again as for fleeing the scene of Preacher’s last, terrible night on earth. And staying in her sister’s house, even for a spell, had chafed her dreadfully.

  She thought: L
ovey is my sister and a good soul but she is old and I am old and when you are old and the house you live in is old you understand one another, that house and you, and nobody else’s house is the same. Lovey’s butter ain’t fresh and sweet like I always want it: little things. Lovey has a way of running her finger around the inside of the cream pitcher and licking it off when she’s redding off the supper dishes and I just can’t abide that. Little things! Gracious, I’m getting old and queer!

  She had bought a Christmas present for each of the children and for the season she baked a fruitcake and killed two fine fat Plymouth Rocks and opened Mason jars of the special holiday things she kept on the dusty cellar shelves: watermelon preserves and candied apples and peaches and strawberry jam. These were days when John had begun to smile again and had ceased to sit apart when Ruby and Clary and Rachel fetched down a greasy old deck of cards and played Hearts together on the kitchen table.

  Christmas made Rachel angry. It made her think again of what the world does to children. If one listened well upon any night in history one might hear the running of their feet: the little children for whom there was no welcome door. Old Rachel banged pots and baking pans in her kitchen those bustling days before the Yule season, muttering to herself and scowling out her windows, angry at how it was with some child somewhere in the world that very winter day. On the afternoon before Christmas Day she had gone down through the snow of the path to the road, wearing nothing but her old gray wool man’s sweater and her toboggan. When she saw that there was no mail in the RFD box she grumbled again to herself and stormed inwardly at the sweet old Christmas song that had kept finding its way to her lips all that day. There had been a card from Lovey the day before, but now she knew there would be neither card nor package from her son Ralph and his wife this year and she thought: Good! I’m glad they didn’t send me nothing. Whenever they do it’s never nothing I want nor need but something to show me how fancy and smart they’ve come up in the world. Though they might have sent a little box for them kids—yes, they might have done that.

  And she labored back up the frozen ruts through the knee-deep snow, an old woman like a strong tree with branches for many birds, and bit her tongue with disgust at herself for being hurt, for caring that Ralph had sent nothing this year. Then the door to the kitchen opened under her hand and the warm, spice-fragrant steam of the indoors drifted against her face and she heard Ruby and Pearl whispering and giggling somewhere in the house as they wrapped the potholders they had crocheted her for Christmas gifts. Rachel shook herself angrily, more piqued than ever with herself, thinking: I ought to be ashamed. ’Deed, now! Caring about a fool thing like that! Why, these is my kids! A brand-new harvest! A brand-new brood! Ain’t it always true that the last sowing comes up sweetest under the old autumn moon? Why, shoot! Them kids is all that matters.

  She poured herself a sputtering-hot cup of black coffee and, squatting on the chair by the window, cradled the cup in her big, rootlike fingers and sipped it, listening to the winter wind that shrilled one moment against the window cracks and then fell silent again. Rachel watched the dusk of that Christmas eve gather over the stretching miles of white bottomland while amidst it the dark stream of the river flowed like the blood of the earth itself: old, dark Time coursing to the oceans and never stopping whatever the calendar or clock might say.

  Rachel reflected about children. One would think the world might be ashamed to name such a day for one of them and then go on the same old way: children running the lanes, lost sheep crying in the wind while the shepherd drank and feasted in the tavern with never an ear to heed their small lament. Lord save little children! Because with every child ever born of woman’s womb there is a time of running through a shadowed place, an alley with no doors, and a hunter whose footsteps ring brightly along the bricks behind him. With every child—rich or poor—however favored, however warm and safe the nursery, there is this time of echoing and vast aloneness, when there is no one to come nor to hear, and dry leaves scurrying past along a street become the rustle of Dread and the ticking of the old house is the cocking of the hunter’s gun. For even when the older ones love and care and are troubled for the small ones there is little they can do as they look into the grave and stricken eyes that are windows to this affrighted nursery province beyond all succor, all comforting. To Rachel the most dreadful and moving thing of all was the humbling grace with which these small ones accept their lot. Lord save little children! They would weep at a broken toy but stand with the courage of a burning saint before the murder of a mother and the fact that, perhaps, there had never been a father at all. The death of a kitten would send them screaming to the handiest female lap and yet when the time came that they were no longer welcome in a house they would gather their things together in old paper cartons tied with a length of clothesline and wander forth to seek another street, another house, another door. Lord save little children!

  They abide. The wind blows and the rain is cold. Yet, they abide.

  And in the shadow of a branch beneath the moon a child sees a tiger and the old ones say: There is no tiger! Go to sleep! And when they sleep it is a tiger’s sleep and a tiger’s night and a tiger’s breathing at the midnight pane. Lord save little children! For each of them has his Preacher to hound him down the dark river of fear and tonguelessness and never-a-door. Each one is mute and alone because there is no word for a child’s fear and no ear to heed it if there were a word and no one to understand it if it heard. Lord save little children! They abide and they endure.

  After supper that Christmas eve the children gathered round Rachel at the kitchen table and she told them the Christmas legend and they listened gravely because it was their own story, and while Rachel peered through her cracked old spectacles at the small Scripture words each of them stole solemnly in his turn and peered between cupped fingers through the moonlight of that crystalline winter’s night toward the stable as if they had hoped to see there a lantern and paper cartons tied with lengths of clothesline where the Wanderers had laid down their burden at long last upon the threshold of a welcoming fold. Thinking then that they might not have understood the old words Rachel closed the book and gazed round their faces in the circle of the lamplight.

  Now, did ye understand that story, children?

  They nodded gravely and then Little Mary said: Can we give you your presents now?

  Shoot! she said, rising and scurrying off to the stove for more coffee. You don’t mean to say you got me a present? Shoot, now!

  Oh, yes! they cried, and she chuckled and scolded herself for caring so much for them because one of these fine mornings the kinsmen would come to claim them or some fool county woman with a brief case and a head full of college words. And she stood waiting while they clamored away into the house after the messy little packages they had wrapped for her and when they returned they stood gravely holding them out for her to take. There were handmade potholders from each of the girls and though Rachel had helped them make them every step of the way she pretended now to be enormously surprised and pleased as a queen would be with kerchiefs of mandarin silk. Yet John had no gift half so fine as these bright, ragged potholders. His gift was a large McIntosh apple which he had taken from the barrel in the cellar and wrapped himself and prayed that she would not guess that it was not something for which he had paid a great sum of money in a rare and exotic market place. This, to be sure, was what Rachel pretended to believe and John smiled at her cry of surprise and then it was her turn and she gave them the packages which she had kept hidden in the top of the china closet behind the old Haviland china service she had not used in forty years. There were new calico dresses for the girls and sticks of peppermint candy for all and for John there was the dollar watch that he had wanted since that time long ago when he had seen one through the dust of Miz Cunningham’s dreadful little ragbag window. The girls ran screaming now to the upstairs rooms to try their dresses on and Rachel, submitting at last to the spirit of the season, sat down smiling at th
e kitchen table. John had gone off to the corner behind the stairs and stood listening to the watch in the pocket of his shirt, the stitch of its proud and magic heart beating against his own, its numerals that shone in the dark of his pocket burning with a sweet, soft ecstasy against his breast. And he thought: If I keep it here in my shirt pocket for a while it will be all right because it is so big and so much that it makes me scared when I hold it and look at it. Because things go away in the world, they fall sometimes and they break, they are there one minute and then gone. And Rachel knew what was in his mind just then so she grunted and her eyes twinkled in his direction.

  I declare, John! That watch sure is a fine, loud ticker!

  He cast her a swift, burning look and then could not hold back the wide, proud smile though still he could not find a word to say that would be just right.

  My! It sure will be nice, she cried, to have someone around the house who can give me the right time of day! That old Seth Thomas in the hall just ain’t what it was once upon a time.

  And then he waited until she stopped looking, until she seemed busy again with her mending of the child’s stocking from the rat’s nest of her sewing basket and walked softly to her, standing very quiet, hoping she would not notice him, because if he might be allowed to stand there unseen for an instant then there would just be the two of them, and then he might find the words to speak his heart. And Rachel paid him no mind, frowning and pursing her lips, and then bit off the yarn and held up the stocking on the gourd to see if there was any hole left and that was when John reached out his hand and touched her shoulder.

  That there watch, he said, is the nicest watch I ever had.

  Well, good! Good, John! she said. I’m mighty glad to hear that! A feller can’t just go around with rundown, busted watches in his pocket! Especially when folks is countin’ on him for the right time of day!