The man who had discovered the child pushed a battered felt hat back from his face, and rubbed his hand slowly across a square, unshaven jaw. Then his eyes sought something fifty feet further along the highway which he had earlier noticed and dismissed as of no interest. Now he pointed to it, automatically using a thumb on which he had traveled thousands of miles, and said slowly, “See that old mail-box over there a ways? Probably a shack back a piece from the road.”
4 THE MINER AND HIS WIFE
1
THE first rays of the rising sun struck across a lost world of slag that could have been a surrealist’s conception of prehistoric times; a barren, repellent landscape of unheroic peaks and valleys filled with purple shadows; a tarnished earth’s surface as unyielding as volcanic lava, too raw, too sterile to produce growth of any kind, stranger and bleaker than the fabled mountains of the moon, shaped in haphazard ridges melting one into another without drama or individuality; a treeless, grassless, man-made desolation, naked in a crude, inhuman beauty uniquely its own.
In a gully still unwarmed by the flaming orange of a sunrise slashed with thin black streamers of cloud, the shack crouched against the inhospitable slag like the last relic of a forgotten, and unsuccessful, civilization. A low wind, overlooked by the night in its passing, whined around its box-like contours and tore with idle malice at its tattered tarpaper sides. A twist of newsprint, blown against a ramshackle outhouse, pawed at a half-open door, and fell back, again inanimate. In a crevice in the slag devoted to refuse, a can clattered as a rat lifted its head from its scavanging to gaze with cruel ferocity at the bundle lying on the single, shallow doorstep of the shack.
As daylight strengthened, the formless shadows in the gully became absorbed by the dark grey slag. The air, heavy with minute dust particles, took on a copper-coloured hue, and the sun, its brilliance muted as though by the smoke of many forest fires, revealed itself as a burnished copper disc.
Inside the shack, the miner’s wife turned over in bed, opened eyes still bleary with sleep, and looked at a battered alarm-clock on a bureau of necessity so close to the bed she could have reached out and touched it. It was a purely automatic gesture, for the clock was never right, was, in fact, rarely wound. With a prodigious yawn, she swung her feet out on to the worn board floor and heaved her great bulk upright, her hair a soiled red banner cascading to her waist. From a row of nails, on which hung an assortment of clothing, she took a faded pink wrapper, and, still yawning, struggled into it.
“Butch!” Her voice was hoarse but not unpleasant.
No reply was forthcoming from the mountainous hump on the farther side of the brass bedstead.
“Butch! You hear me, you big ape? It’s time you got movin’.”
Like an amiable hippopotamus rising from a wallow it had no desire to leave, Butch sat up and blinked at a new day from under shaggy black eyebrows. “You say somethin’, Mag?”
“You hear’d me.”
“You got breakfast ready a’ready?”
By the light of a single, long-unwashed window, Mag scrutinized herself in the clouded mirror of the bureau while she took ineffectual swipes at her vivid hair with a brush whose bristles were worn down almost to the wood. Her voice as tranquil as her fat, good-humoured face, she said, “Don’t you go a‘wastin’ time askin’ no stoopid questions. Get up.”
“Who’s askin’ stoopid questions?”
Bunching her hair in a careless knot at the back of her head, and skewering it with a few large hairpins, Mag did not bother to reply. She dabbed pink powder on the end of her nose, more from habit than from any remnant of once warranted vanity. Then, prepared to face a renewal of the few daily tasks her life demanded of her, she pushed aside a limp green curtain in the partition that divided the bedroom from the main room of the shack.
Ashes still warm from the previous evening made the lighting of a fire in the coal stove a relatively simple business. Moving heavily, but with a certain slow efficiency, she filled a kettle from one of the two pails of tepid water standing on the back of the huge stove. A few dirty dishes were collected from amongst an accumulation of odds and ends on a long trestle table and put into a primitive sink. Clean dishes were taken from open shelves above the sink and set on the table in a space which she cleared with a sweep of a large freckled arm. Knives and forks were sought for, and found, in a cardboard box in the top drawer of a golden-oak dresser that was her chief pride and joy. Aluminum salt and pepper shakers were set down between a greasy pack of playing cards and an unfinished piece of brown knitting whose purpose defied conjecture, and she was ready to prepare bacon and eggs. These were kept in a refrigerator that was much too frigid during the winter months, and totally useless in the summer, consisting, as it did, of nothing more than a hole in the floor reached by a trap-door.
She was already on her knees, for her a difficult process in itself, when she paused, the trap held partly open, and listened for a repetition of a sound so alien in those surroundings she thought her hearing must have been playing tricks with her. Protesting floor boards and an unhappy grunt told her that her lawful wedded husband was dutifully wrestling with the uncomplicated garments in which he was soon due to set out for the mine. The crackling of the fire, and the hiss of a kettle about to come to the boil, assured her that his breakfast would be ready as soon as he was ready for it. These were the familiar sounds she heard every morning of her life, and, unless the weather were bad, almost the only sounds, for the unproductive slag gave birth to no stir or rustle, no change or movement, simply an immense silence as profound as that which must have preceded the creation. Occasionally, high against the sky, the cry of a bird could be heard, a lonely repudiation of the brutally arid land over which it passed. But that was all.
“It musta been a bird,” Mag told herself. “It couldn’t have been nothin’ else.”
And then she heard it again, and knew that it was no bird.
Puffing with the effort involved, she got to her feet, and, walking with unaccustomed speed, crossed to the door and jerked it open. For a moment, bereft of the power of speech, she simply stared at the child who, having struggled free from her blankets, sat upright on the doorstep looking up at her with miserable, blue-eyed bewilderment.
Taking in the smudged evidence of many tears, and the ugly lump on the small head, Mag felt her heart turn over.
“For the luvva Mike,” she breathed softly, “it were a stork.” And without further hesitation, she stooped, picked the child up in warm, competent arms, and carried her into the shack.
“Butch! Come out here quick. Somebody’s been and dumped their kid on us in the night.”
There was a wordless rumble of shocked disbelief from behind the green curtain, followed immediately by Butch himself, his head thrusting forward from his great shoulders, his small eyes blinking rapidly as his limited intelligence attempted to accept the unacceptable.
The child was heavy, but Mag continued to hold her, rocking her gently, murmuring quiet reassurances in a wordless language no child could fail to understand.
“Well, I’ll be——” Butch began, and, unable to finish the sentence, was forced to find it complete as it was. Shaking his bullet head from side to side, he gaped at his large spouse as if she had at that moment outdone all past performances in the way of miraculous conceptions.
Feeling the child’s tense body begin to relax, seeing fear replaced in wide eyes by an instinctive, touching trust, Mag put her down, settling her against lumpy pink cushions on a sagging red couch. “There now, you feel better, don’t you, kid?” Over her ample shoulder, she addressed Butch. “Get her a cuppa milk.”
“Are you sure”——
“That she’ll drink milk? Don’t be so damn dumb. All kids like milk. Here, baby, what’s your name? Tell Mag, What’s your name?”
“Are you sure it’s a girl?” Butch roared in a deep, bull-like voice that was curiously unterrifying for all its volume. “Them blue eyes and yellow curls don’t mean not
hin’. Why, when I was a kid, I had——”
The big woman regarded him with a withering contempt that reduced him to silence. “Do I look like I was born yestidday, you big baboon? Now, get a hustle on with that milk.”
Butch was, and always had been, more than satisfied with Mag. She suited him. But there were times when he felt dimly that she did not accord him quite the deferential respect he deserved as man of the house. This was one of those times, but he nevertheless did what he had been asked because he could not think of anything else to do.
Mag, leaning close to the child, narrowed long-sighted eyes to look at the embroidery on the front of the simple white nightgown. “I believe you got your name right on you, haven’t you, kid? Now, hold still, and let Mag take a look.” Frowning, she concentrated on a pattern of letters which she actually had no trouble in deciphering, but which made no sense to her, could not be formed into syllables she could pronounce. “P—S—Y— No, t’ain’t possible. Mebbe it’s the kid’s initials or somethin’.”
Butch, by this time standing beside her with a slopping cup of milk in his large, hairy hand, said, “Mebbe it’s some furrin’ name.”
“Could be,” Mag replied doubtfully. “For the luvva Mike, what would the kid be wantin’ with a saucer!” Leaving him to decide for himself what he would do with the saucer, she took the cup from him and carefully held it to the child’s mouth.
Psyche took a tentative sip, said “Milk!” in a pleased tone of voice, and, putting her own small hands on either side of the cracked white cup, proceeded to dispatch its contents as fast as she could.
Standing back, her hands on her hips, Mag said, with a pride she was quite unaware of, “Why, the kid can talk some. She’s real bright, ain’t she?”
“How old you reckon she is?” Butch asked.
“More’n two, and less’n two and a half.”
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. Ain’t I helped my old woman to raise eleven kids?”
“What you aimin’ to do with her?”
Psyche, having finished the milk, climbed down off the couch, and, walking with a not quite certain balance, carried the cup over to the table which was level with the top of her head. With enormous care, she reached up and set the cup down. This done, she turned to look up at Mag with a radiant smile. “All done. Go home now?”
The pages from the calendar on Sharon’s rosewood desk fluttered into the wastebasket, days falling into eternity as irresistibly as the bronze leaves drifting down from the oak trees in the garden. Fourteen —fifteen—sixteen—the gulf which could no longer be measured in hours was now sixteen days wide.
On the morning of the sixteenth day Sharon sat in the office of a police inspector whose long, tired face reflected a defeat he would not admit in so many words.
Looking over his head at a large wall calendar as cruel as her own, she avoided his eyes and the message in them which she could not—would not—accept. As long as she lived, it was a message she would refuse to accept from anyone, ever.
The policeman, seeing the unconscious firming of her delicate mouth, and the desperate determination in blue eyes beneath level dark eyebrows, read her thoughts as clearly as if she had said them aloud. He knew her quite well now; knew that her apparent fragility masked strength; knew that there was warmth behind the cool reserve with which she usually faced the world; knew that she possessed not only imagination and a quick perception, but a mind as clear and keen as any he had ever encountered. And, knowing all these things, he was afraid she might—because of rather than in spite of her unusual gifts—perhaps destroy herself in the unending pursuit of a hope which he already saw as hopeless.
In the sixteen days following the kidnapping, the kidnapper had been twice identified with reasonable certainty, the second time more than half-way across the continent; but there the trail had ended. That he had parted company somewhere along the way both with the child and the car he had been driving, was accepted by the police as fact rather than conjecture. But in what order, or where, or under what circumstances he had done this, it had been impossible to discover. All they knew was that, somewhere across a staggeringly wide course, the child, with a fawn’s protective colouring and lack of scent, had disappeared without leaving a trace behind her; had, despite the scope and efficiency of the machinery set in motion to find her, vanished into thin air. She might be still alive—or she might be dead.
For the first time, the policeman found himself thinking of her as an individual, and estimating her chances of survival, not simply in terms of days and years, but as a person whose heredity and environment might well be diametrically opposed in their twin influences on her.
He became aware that the young woman opposite him had risen to her feet, and that the long silence that had fallen between them marked the termination of an interview as painfully fruitless as the many that had preceded it.
Getting up quickly, he shook hands with a formality he found both foolish and oppressive. If she had thanked him for anything at all, he felt he could not have borne it.
“We will continue to do everything in our power,” he told her quietly.
“You have done everything—already, haven’t you?”
She is telling me that we have given up, he thought bitterly, and really she is right. “We will continue to do everything in our power,” he repeated.
Her shoulders very straight in a black coat whose sombreness she had deliberately defied with a frivolous red hat, Sharon walked to the door.
“Good-bye,” she said, and then added, with soft violence, “I will never give up—never!”
During her first ten days at the shack Psyche often bumped a hurt on her head which took that long to heal, but to Butch and Mag’s awe and amazement she never once cried on these occasions. She rarely wept at all. When she did, her tears were like a summer storm, coming in a brief, fierce deluge, without warning or apparent cause. The second time this happened, Mag, casting around for something with which she could be diverted, gave her a multi-coloured feather duster that she had ordered from a mailorder catalogue and never used. The feather duster failed in its immediate purpose, but Psyche was rarely to be found without it after that. She caressed its soft brilliance, talked to it by the hour, dragged it behind her both inside and outside the shack, and never went to bed without it. At night, when Mag tucked her up on the ancient couch in a corner of the tiny, cluttered store-room that paralleled the bedroom, its motley harlequin head would be on the pillow beside her fair one. And when the oil lamps were lit, and the miner and his wife were settled in the main room, if they listened they could hear the gentle murmur of an unintelligible, one-sided conversation that never seemed to reach a conclusion, that would cease only when Psyche fell asleep, and would be resumed in the morning as soon as she woke.
“It’s kind of like a doll for her, ain’t it?” Butch said.
“More like a person, almost,” Mag answered slowly. “It’s like as if it were someone she’s known before.”
“She’s a good kid.”
“Yeah, she’s a good kid.”
“It don’t seem right that a kid like that should be in one of them orphan places.”
Mag sighed. “There ain’t no other place for a kid whose folks don’t want it.”
During the daytime Psyche kept very busy exploring the shack, a pastime that seemed of consuming interest to her. It was almost as if she were looking for something. Returning again and again to the places through which she had just methodically searched, she seemed unable to convince herself that the next time it would not, miraculously, be there. When the game became simply a game, and nothing more, it would be difficult to say, but as time went on her repeated examinations of the limited premises became more leisurely than they had been, and she would pause to rattle things that would rattle, and to attempt to rattle things that would not. Having found her way under the sagging couch, she would stay in hiding there and make small noises until Mag good-naturedly cha
sed her out with a broom not often used for any other purpose. Given a spoon to lick, or a dry crust on which to sharpen her few small white teeth, she would linger on the doorstep in the sunlight talking to Feather Duster.
“She ain’t much trouble,” Butch said.
“She ain’t no trouble at all,” Mag told him firmly. “Kids an’ dogs an’ cats, they’re all much the same when you come right down to it. You gotta feed ‘em an’ give ‘em a place to lay down, that’s all.”
They had had a dog once, and a number of cats which had gone on to their reward in a variety of ways, all of them abrupt. But they liked small creatures, and, though they were not consciously aware of any lack in their lives, were lonely when they were without one. Unfettered by the doubts and fears that would have been theirs if they had been more gently reared, they tackled the crisis that fate had seen fit to send them with direct simplicity. Equally simply, they drifted into a decision that was never declared in so many words.
During a hot Indian summer. Psyche grew brown beneath a brassy, cloudless sky, and, allowed to trip and fall and pick herself up again unaided, learned how to walk steadily on bare feet whose soft soles gradually assumed the consistency of shoe leather. In a face the colour of an over-ripe peach, her eyes were startlingly blue, and her short curls were bleached by the sun to palest gold. She grew thinner, the baby fat melting away from straight, strong bones, but otherwise she appeared to thrive on a diet consisting chiefly of pies, fried meats, and canned goods. Small hands, never entirely clean, became useful instruments adept at buttoning the weird costume that Mag had fabricated for her out of a vast pair of pink cotton bloomers.
Psyche Page 7
