(6)
In the middle of January, Charles received a small cardboard package with a letter enclosed:
My Dearest Young Hero,
I’m sure I saw you carrying this stone amulet on the night I was so very foolish and endangered both our lives. The repairmen who worked on my poor car found it and kindly returned it. If it is not yours, then we have perhaps discovered an ancient archeological site of pre-Colombian relics, and I should make a career of running my car into ditches in hopes of finding more. A friend of mine here in Chicago says it is certainly a rare piece, and he offered me an interesting sum of money for it, so if you would like to sell it sometime in exchange for a year of college, let me know.
You will be gratified, dearest Charles, to know that I have thought carefully over our last words together at the train station, and I have turned over a new leaf. I have not once visited the Caledonian Isle since leaving your side, and it is my intention to become a complete Blue Nose. Thanks to you, Charles, I have not only had my life saved, I have had it renovated. I do remember you with much affection, and please remember that my invitation to visit or stay with me in Chicago or wherever I might find myself living is heartfelt and genuine. Keep well and stay as high minded and courageous as I remember you.
Love,
Claire Lanphier
Charles felt that last admonition keenly, for he had been increasingly aware of the burgeoning of some power within him that obsessed his waking moments and took over his dreams with an endless movie of rape and seduction. In school he was for the first time having trouble concentrating on studies, his mind seeming no more than a skittering steam bubble on a burning hot surface. In attempting to memorize the exports of Great Britain’s colonies, he would find his eyes fixed on the pleasing lines of Betty Bailey’s calf, or the fascinating mystery of Flossie Portola’s bosom, or even the swing of Miss Wrigley’s skirt as she walked briskly up the aisle between the desks. His face would burn hotly, and he would curse what he felt was the Beast power inside him that turned his mind and his dreams into a bawdy house of lust. But it was still January, colder that year than many old residents could remember, and there was at least the distraction of cold outdoor sports and long tramps through the snow rabbit hunting with the Bent boys.
After he received the amulet from Mrs. Lanphier, he seemed miraculously cured. There were still times of daydreaming in the overheated schoolroom as he would catch sight of Brenda Gustafson’s secret smile when she looked at him, or as he touched Betty Bailey’s hand when taking a paper from her and saw her flirtatious look at him, but possession of the stone interposed a barrier between Charles and the unbearable fires of lust he had begun to suffer. In dreams he still found himself doing the most hideously wonderful things, having sexual adventures that would have worn out a Casanova, but these were dreams. Reality had now, at least, taken on a sane appearance again, and he could once again concentrate on school work so that Miss Wrigley smiled more often now and encouraged him again after what she called his “slump” at the beginning of the semester. There was no longer the urge to get up and go out in the middle of the night so that power inside him could romp in the snow and kill things in people’s barns. Charles did not often think of what he might remember from those nights right after Christmas. It was another sort of dream, and if some of the boys at school mentioned wolves coming down from the north and terrible depredations on local livestock, Charles resolutely shut away any sort of memories he might have of those nocturnal massacres, resisting the impulse to say, “That’s a lie, Harry. It wasn’t four sheep. It was only two.”
In February came the big snow. At the end of the first week in February, with a foot of snow lying old and hard on the ground, it began to come down heavily one afternoon. Charles and the other children sat in the schoolroom gazing as if hypnotized out the tall windows at the thickness of the snowfall. They could not see the cottonwood trees in the middle of the school yard, and then the fox-and-geese track nearer to the building could not be seen, and then it was as if the whole world had sunk beneath a whirling sea of snow, and there was nothing beyond the windows but the crash and tumult of flakes. Charles imagined he could feel the building foundering in the ocean of snow as his balance became disoriented by the sight of all the windows of the schoolroom filled with the same endless looming and whirling whiteness. Gradually the classes stopped. The students stood at their desks or walked as if in sleep to the blank white windows. Miss Wrigley laid down her big history book and stood, one hand on her hip, the other touching her cheek, looking at the windows where nothing could be seen but snow.
They went home early that day, farmers and their wives meeting some of the children on the road to help them home in the blinding storm. No vehicles moved on the highway, so that it became merely a flatter stretch in the arctic whiteness, a guide to the filled in lanes and driveways that led to the invisible houses looming suddenly out of the white darkness as people fought with heads down through snow that was at first pleasantly exciting, then a tiresome nuisance, and finally became a menacing and impersonal danger that even the children began to feel uneasy about. Once inside again, the farm families would stand by the windows as the afternoon darkened and look blindly out into the storm as the children at school had, mesmerized by the sudden emergence of nature’s possibilities for destruction and bland horror.
No one in the local community died that night, though many gained a new respect for what was called in Charles’s geography book “the temperate zone.” In nearby places where the great storm covered the earth and filled the atmosphere for more than eight hours, there were deaths among all warm blooded creatures who found themselves lost in it. Cows and sheep died standing helplessly mired in snow deeper than they could walk in, people in cars and buses would start out for help and get lost in the white darkness, go in circles, and finally stop to rest, to be found days later mere humps in the level sea of snow. Two sisters in Wisconsin started home from an afternoon party, became separated in the early darkness and both died less than two hundred feet from their own back door, coming toward their house from different directions. A middle-aged man left his wife in their car with the engine running and the heater on while he went for help. He floundered off into a deep, snow filled ditch, wore himself out, stopped to rest and froze to death. His wife died before he did, of carbon monoxide poisoning while the car engine idled on until it ran out of gas, and then it got very cold so that they could not tell, three days later when the car was found, if she had frozen or died of gas poisoning. Out of a bus load of children who were returning from a skating trip to a local lake, the driver and four children died trying to reach help alter the bus missed the road at a turn and ran off into snow so deep it came up over the bus windows. The rest of the children remained with an eighteen-year-old counselor who built fires out of the bus seats and saved everyone by huddling them like chickens that night for warmth until they were found next afternoon by a contingent of skiers. And worse than the snow itself was the insidious cold that came shortly after, dropping temperatures as much as thirty-five degrees in three hours. Trains moved more slowly, following the rail plows, cities began to run short on supplies of milk and eggs, the road plows began to break down after thirty-six hours of steady use, and three days after the big storm, another arctic mass of air moved in from the Northwest, dumping another foot of snow on top of the already devastated Midwest.
After the first big snow on Friday, there was a day’s shoveling to do, a few wandering stock to be found, brought home and fed, supplies of food to be checked over, and wood and coal to be piled for the coming weeks. And by Sunday afternoon it was play time for the farm boys who found the snow too deep to hunt in and too heavy on the lanes for sleds, so they resorted to digging caves in drifts that were in some places fifteen feet high. Charles, Douglas, and his brothers built a labyrinth of tunnels in the long drift that ran like a delta from the corner of the highway bridge near the Bent farm across the creek bed and far along the drainage ditch. In a solidified wave of blinding white the drift covered over the wing of the bridge, filled completely the twelve-foot-deep creek bed and lifted to a graceful curl beyond the corner of a long low implement shed. Charles had been the first to see the possibilities and had begun a small tunnel along the hard blue ice of the creek where the edge of the drift stopped at the bridge. Soon they had tunnels going in half a dozen locations, a large room big enough for Douglas to stand up in and were installing elaborations like shelves and ventilation shafts.
Charles sat, panting, his hands numb from digging, his white breath clouding the whiteness of the tunnel. The light filtered in at the top of the big room, a frosted whiteness like a heavy cover of cirrus clouds on a bright day, and further down the sides the whiteness shaded to blue gray, and back in the tunnels it was a darker gray, but near any source of light the tunnel walls and ceiling were a sheer sugar white, whiter than salt, whiter than clouds, Charles thought, with a dark line near the floor that showed the stratum of the old snow.
A scream from outside frightened him, a scream of rage. It sounded like Rudy. Then there was a whoomp sound like a huge fist plunging into a giant pillow. Some snow sifted down his neck. He looked up at the lightest part, the ceiling of the big room, as the whoomp came again. More snow fell, and he crawled out along the tunnel that ended at the creek bed. It was brighter outside the tunnel, so that he blinked while listening to the cries and curses from the Bent boys. They were up on the highway bridge. He looked up in time to see a bundled form come sailing off the bridge rail and smack down into the snow caves, causing the tunnel Charles had just come out of to cave in with a cloud of bursting snow. Charles cried out. They were jumping down off the bridge wrecking everything. He climbed into the drift trying to get at the boy who was trying just as hard to get out and away. It was Paul Holton, covered with snow and laughing.
“Hey, sucker, you’re busting up our tunnels,” Charles cried, trying to get at the floundering boy.
Another form came leaping off the rail to smack into the area of the big room, and it went down like the crystal palace with a cloud of snow shooting out of the tunnels. Charles was crying out with anger now, and he almost had Paul.
“Now cut it out, Paul,” Charles said, grabbing at the boy and getting his cap. But Paul got away up onto the highway, and Charles turned to see Kick Jones emerging from the drift. “Hey, we been working a long time,” Charles began, but then he saw another figure on the bridge rail, the tall figure of Carl Bent, dark against the sky. With a whoop he leaped and landed spread eagled on the area Charles had just left. It collapsed.
Charles was silent, climbing up to the highway where Douglas was standing watching the other boys leap off the bridge rail to demolish the tunnels and rooms they had spent the whole morning building. Charles felt angry, but he was thinking about jumping too when he saw Doug had tears in his eyes and stood awkwardly watching as Rudy climbed up on the rail. When Douglas shouted out from beside him, he flinched in surprise.
“Fat ass Rudy! Fat ass Rudy!” Douglas said, his tears overflowing.
Rudy turned from his height on the bridge and snarled at his brother, “Shut your mouth, you cripple.” And he turned to leap off the rail.
Douglas took three quick steps, his still leg slicing two wide arcs on his right side, and as Rudy left the rail, Douglas grabbed one pants leg tripping him up. Rudy squealed and fell face down into the drift. Douglas leaned over the rail watching as Rudy crawled backward out of the hole he had dived into. The older boy’s face was packed with snow in eyes, nose, mouth so that he looked as it he was wearing a plaster cast on his head.
Rudy cleaned his face as he climbed back to the bridge, murder in his eyes. Charles moved next to Douglas, hoping the brothers Wouldn’t fight if it meant involving him.
But Rudy never stopped to talk or consider. He climbed up the drifted bank, got to the road and came straight for Douglas. Charles instinctively stepped aside, but then grabbed at Rudy’s coat as he began pounding on his brother with both fists, snorting and panting curses. Douglas tried to fend off the blows, covering his head with his arms, and before Charles could figure what to do, Rudy had swung a fist under Doug’s arm hitting him squarely in the nose. Douglas screamed and turned away.
Charles pulled Rudy away, pushed him hard a couple of times until Rudy got the idea he would have to fight Charles if he kept on.
“It ain’t your fight, big hero,” said Rudy panting. “He ain’t your brother.”
“Leave him alone,” Charles said.
“You ain’t nobody,” Rudy said, his face red. “You’re only an orphan, and you ain’t really nobody.” He stepped back and a cool smile came on his face. “You ain’t really smart. You’re just gettin’ in Miss Wrigley’s pants.”
Charles did not for a moment know what he meant, having some vague image of a pair of pants hanging on a hook while he went through the pockets, but in the next instant he heard Kick Jones and Carl Bent laughing as they leaned against the bridge rail, and his face flamed red.
“Everybody knows he’s teacher’s pet,” Kick said.
“He stays after school and gets some free feelies,” Carl said, grinning.
Charles stood astounded as their meaning broke over him. At first he could not believe what they meant, and then he could not believe that they had so quickly turned against him. Like most people, Charles had the inborn notion that everyone loved him, at least those who had nothing against him. Now he was finding out that all of these boys harbored a secret grudge because he had advanced in school so quickly. It was too much to take in all at once, and he stood there with his mouth open stupidly while they taunted and laughed. Behind him, Douglas snuffled while his nose dripped bright red drops into the snow.
“He’s a big lover all right,” Paul Holton said, sauntering back from the spot he had run to when Charles was alter him. “Flossie says he’s hot stuff. She says he tried to do it to her.”
“That’s a lie,” Charles said, feeling guilty for his daydreams. “And if you’re stupid, it’s not Miss Wrigley’s fault.” He felt confused facing the four boys who leaned in a row against the bridge rail and grinned at him. There seemed nothing to say to them that would make an impression. They stood relaxed, a jury that had made up its mind. Charles felt convicted. There was nothing he could do, short of attacking all four of them and getting the tar beaten out of him.
“Charles is going to be a great man,” Douglas said suddenly, sounding as if he had a bad cold because his nose was still full of blood. “He’s smarter than all of you stupid farmers put together.”
The four boys along the rail laughed and pointed at Charles and Doug. Charles knew it was hopeless and turned to pull Doug away, but the younger boy was enraged. His face was smeared with blood as if he had been painted with a brush, and a large red drop welled from each nostril. He looked like a war casualty, Charles thought.
“You’re just jealous about him because he’s going to pass you all up this year, and it took you all this time to get in the grade you’re in, and Paul can’t even do his multiplication tables past six, and Carl can’t read big words, and ...”
Charles had him by the neck of the coat, dragging him away. He would get them both bloodied, and he might feel like getting beat up, but Charles knew how it felt and was not eager to feel it again.
“That don’t matter,” Rudy said, grinning. “You’ll always be a cripple.” And when Douglas wrenched away from Charles, Rudy added, “And I seen you jerkin’ off last night in the outhouse.”
Then Douglas went insane with rage, tearing part of his coat collar off as he pulled away from Charles’s grasp and tried to get at his brother. Rudy easily stepped in and hit Douglas twice more, once in the face, once on the top of the head, until Carl told him to stop.
Douglas was staggering, his eyes glazed. “Tattle tale, tattle tale, hanging on the bull’s tail; when the bull takes a pee, you’ll have a cup of tea,” he screamed in a high baby voice, chanting it over and over until Charles took him by the arm and began walking him to the house. The boys at the bridge rail were still laughing and making obscene signs when Charles got Douglas to the Bent house and put him in the care of his mother. Inside the warm house he heard the screaming of the youngest Bent, another boy, born early in December, and he listened to it with sudden clarity. It was a child, and it would grow up to be a boy, then a young man, go to school, get a job, get married, have children, maybe become famous. He could do that, the baby. And as Charles mumbled something to the angry Mrs. Bent and backed out of the house to start the walk home, he kept thinking about the baby’s cry, how it was born, how it would live. He walked back up the lane ignoring the boys still standing on the bridge. It wasn’t really important, what they said. But what mattered could not be changed. He might beat them up one at a time, maybe even Rudy and Paul at the same time, but it wouldn’t make him be any different. He felt the cold, buzzing stone in his pocket, the leather thong he had put through the hole and pinned into his jacket so he would not lose it. If he did not have this, what would happen?
Was he, Charles Cahill, the only creature of his kind in the world? Or was it like Doug when he jerked off in the darkness thinking his was the only guilt in the world? Was everybody like him? But they didn’t ever show it. Maybe the whole world is like me, Charles thought with a sudden burst of illumination. But the next moment he knew it wasn’t true. The notorious gangsters in Chicago like Machine Gun Jack McGurn who had just got killed battling police, they were murderers, but most people weren’t. Animals were animals, people were people. But what was he? As he approached the dark stand of woods and the hidden house of the widow Stumway, Charles felt again the uncertainty, the empty feeling of fear in his guts that he always felt thinking back about what had happened at Thanksgiving. For a time then, he had simply not existed. He had no memory, no feeling of being when the Beast had shifted into someone else by mistake. He recalled the thing that stood in the dim bathroom of the Boldhuis house, looking at its giant bulk of power and terror, and feeling that it was part of him. But then he knew that wasn’t right, because of the strange shift that the Beast remembered but he did not. And he knew he had it all turned around. It was not part of him, even if it did save him from death and try to keep him from getting hurt. It was only trying to survive. He was part of it, and he would exist only as long as that power needed him for its own ends, whatever they were. Unless he could always have the stone, what Mrs. Lanphier called his “amulet.” If he always had that with him or in the house he was in, couldn’t he be like other people?
He stood on the widow Stumway’s back walk that he had shoveled off yesterday and watched blankly as snow started to drift down again. Looking into the dark trees back of the house as the snow began to fall harder, he could see the image of that powerful creature he remembered from the mirror. It was fearful, horrible, teeth like knives, small mean ears set close to the back of the long muzzled head, the heavy rounded shoulders that could lift a ton of automobile. He thought of Beauty and the Beast, the light-hating figure of Grendel, the wicked ones, the unhappy ones. Was he waiting for a hero to come along and rub him out?
***
Charles grew wary of his conduct, always giving some excuse when Miss Wrigley wanted him to stay after school to do extra work or to talk further about the lessons, talks that Charles had loved before and missed so that he gritted his teeth thinking about them. He hated the thought of giving in to the suspicions and gibes of the other boys, but what if all the kids thought things like that? His manner grew noticeably cool toward the girls, noticeably more reserved and deferential toward the older boys. Miss Wrigley recognized the signs and thought he was having growing pains, seeking entrance into the secrets of manhood. She felt a warmth at her own understanding.
By the end of March, it seemed winter had been forever. Snow had become a way of life, as it is to Eskimos, and then almost overnight in the first week of April, it was gone. Rain began in the night, rain and a warm southwest wind that carried with it odors of growing things and warm wet earth that the farmers and their families had not smelled for an eon of cold. Charles woke in the night to hear the rain like low voices on the roof. He slipped out of bed, surprised at how warm it suddenly was, so warm he could not see his breath. He lifted the window and opened the little wooden vent on the storm window. The breeze that came through that little slot melted something, like the icy crystals that had prevented the little boy from seeing truly in the Snow Queen story. Something around Charles’s heart fell loose, and he prickled all over with a new excitement. Spring!
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?”
“Oh, I bought it off a high school guy for half a buck.”
The tool shed got hotter and mustier by the minute, and the heap of boys writhed and cursed and said obscenities as the pages were turned. Charles felt tense as a slingshot pulled tight, looking at the crude pictures and knowing it was all ridiculous, but wanting to see them more, wanting to feel this tension more, wanting it to be greater and greater, until someone knocked the light down and Carl grabbed his book and the whole group burst out of the tool shed whooping and hollering and chasing each other around the dark yard.
When they had worn themselves out, they went to sit on the dark outside stairs, listening to the gabble of adults inside as the refreshments were served. Charles said he was going to get something to eat, and some of the boys went with him while some stayed in the dark, grumbling they didn’t want any old cardboard pie and Koolaid. Inside the school again, the light was blinding for a moment, and then Charles found the refreshment table, took a plate full and looked around for a chair. Flossie waved at him and patted a desk beside her own. He went over and slouched down in the desk grinning at her.
“I always thought you were going to be different, Charles,” Flossie said, licking pie crumbs off her lips. “But there you are, out in the dark with the rest of the dumb boys.”
“I got tired of being a gentleman,” Charles said. He took a great gobble of the cherry pie.
“I’ll bet you haven’t,” she said archly “You’re just being careful so the other boys won’t kid you so much.” She put her hand on his arm. “What made you stay in that creek until you caught pneumonia?”
“Lookin’ for something.”
“Looking for what? Honestly, Charles, I never heard of such a crazy thing.”
“Something of mine.”
“Well, you must have really wanted it to just about die for it. Honestly, Fern and I were so worried. Did you know we came to visit when you were so sick, but Mrs. Stumway wouldn’t let us come up?”
“No. Thanks, Flossie.” Charles looked up, straight into her eyes so that she laughed. “You’re a really good friend.” He finished his pie, noticed her hand was still on his arm and felt a warmth rising in him again. “Hey, why don’t we walk home, to your house, I mean? It’s a nice night.”
When they were out of sight of the school and had left behind the two younger boys Charles had had to threaten with a beating, they reached out and held hands until they were almost to the railroad tracks. Charles recognized the area. Over there, across the tracks and under that tree, was where he had pushed over Alfred’s car, or rather, the Beast had pushed it over. He felt disoriented for a moment and stopped. Flossie misunderstood as they stood there in the dark moonless night with the bright stars in a clear black sky, and she turned to him, taking his other hand, and she kissed him on the mouth with soft lips, just touching his lower lip with her tongue. In an instant, Charles felt as though he were on fire, all memories and thoughts lost from his mind. He closed his arms around Flossie’s slender body, cupping her head with his left hand, and they kissed long and earnestly until they were both breathless.
“Wow, Charles,” Flossie said. “You haven’t changed. Or maybe you’ve got better.” She rubbed his back, arching her body up to his so that his pulses pounded in a dozen separate places in his body. “Yes,” she said, moving her abdomen against him, “lots better.”
They broke apart and walked to the grass under the tree where the car had been turned over back in October, and in spite of the grass being wet, they lay down together.
I am rising to be with Charles now with such pleasant sensations available to us both. The blood carries us both to an ascending tenseness that I recognize now. Charles knows I am here, but he feels I will not interfere, as it is for our mutual pleasure. I help him exert some will as the young woman seems not to object to our going on, to doing more things with her body as she wriggles and caresses Charles’s head and neck. The sensations are becoming exquisite, almost unbearable for us both now as the caresses become more intimate and the young people begin to tear at each others’ clothing. A great need is building up, and I must exert all my will not to shift and break this moment. I must be content to go with the boy here, for it will not be possible for me with the woman. She would be terrified, and the sensations would not continue. I hold to the body of Charles while I feel his mind slipping back as I push forward and apply more force to make the woman go on with this act.
Now we are near, the boy’s body quivering with excitement as he searches for the way to do this thing we have never done. I am loosing my hold so as to feel it all more fully. But what is happening? The woman is crying out and trying to get away. I regain my hold and she stops, lies quiet for a moment but is no longer trying to make it pleasurable. Again we approach the consummation of this act, and I must let go again as the flood of pleasure bears me away from the scene, but again she is struggling.
“No, Charles, no! Please, Charles, not all the way. Oh please, Charles, I don’t know why I let you go this far.” She was crying uncontrollably now, trying to get out of the boy’s grip that was like steel on her body. But then he stopped. “Oh please, please,” she cried, her eyes filled with tears, but still holding to Charles’s body with her arms.
Charles came to himself, found himself so near the goal of his lustful fantasies that for a second or so he believed he was in a dream again, and then he saw Flossie’s terrified eyes, knew where his hands were and what he was about to do, and he drew back, wrenching himself off the girl’s body with a painful cry. He lay rigid on the ground, his groin in pain with the agony of unsatisfied lust.
I am coming back into Charles’s sensations again, and I cannot understand why the boy and girl have stopped. It is a terrible frustration that we feel, a bad sensation that I can savor but do not particularly enjoy. They are not going to continue. I feel rage beginning, but it is not a time for me to appear, and I must ride my own disappointment for the moment. This should not happen. It is not a good feeling.
“Flossie,” Charles said, his teeth gritted. “I’m sorry, I don’t know. I got too excited. I’m sorry.”
The slender girl, only a shadow in the dark, pulled her skirt down and lay down beside Charles, putting her arm over him, saying next to his ear, “It’s all right, all right. I know, Charles. I want to, but we can’t, but oh, Charles, I really want to.” And she began to cry harder now while Charles lay on his back looking up at the star filled sky and felt the blood calming gradually to a bearable level again. He was thinking that he could not allow this to happen again, that these situations must be avoided, since the power would sometime force the act to a conclusion, and he would be guilty of violating some poor girl who could not resist him. He felt tears in his eyes at the utter frustration of it, the inability to control his own life, the constant lust he felt, and the terrible and immediate sickness that made his stomach churn and ache and his leg muscles knot and release.
When they could walk steadily, they went on across the field in a short cut so as not to meet anyone else. At the Portolas’ gate, Charles and Flossie held each other in a long kiss, but just as the sensations began to build up again, the girl broke away and ran for the house. Charles heard her cry back to him a good night, and she was gone. He ran for awhile, cutting back through fields, avoiding the roads and lanes, hating the Beast, the monster that he felt so close to him now that he could almost feel the hot, predatory breath in his ear, seeming so real and present beside him that when it spoke in his mind he jumped.
“Charles, I believe that what you call the monster and the hero are the same thing.”
“They’re not,” Charles said aloud into the spring darkness. “You’re strong and clever, like a bear or a weasel, but you don’t care about being good and honorable because you aren’t human.”
“We are the same creature, Charles. We stand in the same space, breathe the same air, eat the same food.”
The boy stopped, his smooth face wrinkled into a frown of disgust. “I don’t eat raw meat,” he said. “I don’t make dogs howl at night and people run away scared of my shadow, and I’m not a monster that will go around taking advantage of a poor girl just because she’s all hot and bothered.”
“I take what I need. It is right to do this.”
“You’d do it to anybody. You wanted to do it to Mrs. Lanphier that night in the blizzard.” He stopped, ashamed of the memory.
“These females wanted to do the sexual act with you - and with me,” it said from inside him, although the voice seemed at his ear, almost a breath he could feel, warmer than the warm night air. He began walking again, hearing the real rush of night breeze in his ears.
“You don’t know what it is to be human,” Charles said at last. “You could never be courageous or heroic or be really in love because you’re not human.”
“I recognize that you are trying to insult me, Charles,” the voice said softly. “But I do not wish to be human any more than you want to be me - but it is necessary. We are together, and we share the same emotions. You are making us uncomfortable for no reason.”
“It’s my own reason,” Charles said. He could see the light in the schoolhouse far across the fields seeming to blink on and off as distant trees came between him and the light. “It’s a human reason,” he said, almost saying “heroic” for “human,” knowing that he felt larger and more manly when he pulled away from what he wanted, denied himself that ultimate pleasure that the Beast was talking about.
“But you can’t just maker me disappear, Charles,” the Beast said, softly, insistently. “We are together, one creature.”
Charles had walked into the open now, seeing the schoolhouse lights like a beacon across the clear, dark fields. He felt the uprush of hopelessness that always came over him like a chill when he realized that. The Beast was right. There was only one creature. He would never stand beside that huge, fearsome thing, look at it except in a mirror as he had that one time, run from it in fear or leave it behind. It was himself. No, he corrected, feeling a weakness in his arms and legs, he was part of It. As he went forward across the plowed furrows he saw the schoolhouse lights go out, the outline of the six tall windows disappearing into the background of night as if they had never been. She had closed up, then, and would be walking out now, up the cinder lane to her little room at the Peaussier farm.
He almost swerved off to the right to walk through the stand of trees and get home when he realized he had left the plaque. Miss Wrigley would be terribly disappointed if he didn’t think enough of it to even take it home. He broke into a trot and made for the school, running harder now, thinking that if he caught her just going out the gate he could apologize and get the plaque. But he could not make good time across the freshly plowed fields, and he glimpsed a walking figure heading out the school gate and down the cinder road toward the farm a quarter of a mile farther on. He slowed to a walk, panting and keeping up a good pace, but not sure why he was still going on. She would be home in a few minutes, and it would be too late, and he certainly didn’t want to be jumping out of the dark and scaring her. But he walked on, some obscure reason making itself in his mind, or perhaps he was not thinking at all, but did not want to go home.
Strangely, as he followed the dimly seen form of Miss Wrigley, she in the center of the cinder road, he behind her and on the field side of the fence, he felt no particular motive. Rather, he felt it was play. He was a detective, and she was a suspect he had to shadow, because ... But that was silly, he thought, picking his way carefully so as to keep one of the roadside trees between him and the woman in case she turned around. I don’t want to scare her, he thought. She was almost to the Peaussier farm lane, and Charles could hear some animal in or near the barn grunting in a painful way. It was a long, heaving grunt with a little squeak at the end. He stopped, puzzled at what it could be, and then remembered Runt talking about Mrs. Peaussier’s little Jersey being, as he called it “hot for the bull,” but that they would not breed the Jersey to their Holstein bull, so the bull was wearing himself out with the smell of hot cow in his nose day and night. Charles had a moment of deep and inarticulate sympathy for the old bull out there grunting in the dark.
When he looked again, Miss Wrigley had disappeared into the Peaussier farmhouse. Charles felt itchy, his stomach felt separated into four tight parts, and his groin felt as though it had been kneaded in a cement mixer. For a minute he stopped, turned about and almost started across the field for home. But he did not take the first step. Instead he turned again and continued on, crossing the last fence that took him into the Peaussier’s garden plot and brought the two dogs out silently to see who he was. He got down on his knees and talked to them so they recognized him and wagged their tails. He had been at the farm many times, walking home with Miss Wrigley and talking right up to the back door, sometimes standing in the cold until both their feet were numb, talking about faraway cities and mathematics and poetry.
She had never invited him in, of course, for she was a maiden school teacher, and he was a growing young man, and the Peaussiers were silent but watchful. She boarded with them, living in their upstairs room over the back porch as her predecessor had done before her. The Peaussiers were a stoical bunch who worked the soil like peasants, kept their family at home as long as they could, and had all the virtues of thrift and economy their ancestors had practiced in the Old Country. Charles had seen Mr. Peaussier and his youngest son, who was out of high school and living at home, but he had never exchanged a word with them. He had on occasion seen Miss Wrigley bundled into their old touring car, going into town on a Saturday morning. She with her lively smile and waving hand, packed among the straight and silent Peaussiers like a living woman among a load of hickory fence posts.
The dogs knew him. He walked through the garden plot in the dark, hoping he wouldn’t step into some newly dug pit or on some boards with nails in them. It was that dark. He watched the outline of the buildings that surrounded the backyard and saw the sudden soft illumination when a lamp was lighted in an upstairs back window. Miss Wrigley was in her bedroom. Charles moved through the barnyard as if he had a purpose, slid past the crib and the milk house as if he knew what he was doing, but he was not actually thinking at all. He moved as if in a movie of himself that he could not remember, as if it was all planned out beforehand and needed no thought. Now he could see the window, the swept back lace curtains and the shade pulled almost to the sill. He watched the illuminated shade and was rewarded by a shadow that moved across it.
There was a trellis at one end of the porch, but it was made of little half inch strips that would not have held a monkey. The porch pillar at the other end, he thought, slipping off his shoes, and the drainpipe, if it didn’t come loose, would make one big step to the roof of the porch. He pulled his socks off, stepped up on the porch and onto the railing, going very carefully in case some of the wood might be rotten. But no part of the Peaussier place was allowed to be rotten. All was strong, newly painted, firmly nailed, as was the iron strap that held the down spout. The roof was gritty, but not too slanting, and now the narrow slot of light at the bottom of the shade was just ahead of him. He crawled on his stomach up to the window sill and peered through that slot. At first he didn’t see her, and his heart gave a great jump. What if he had made a noise and old man Peaussier was coming out with his shotgun? But just as he was about to back down away from the window, she came back from somewhere, perhaps the toilet, since the Peaussiers had an indoor bathroom. She was dressed in the dark, shiny dress she had worn at the PTA meeting. He watched as she put some things away in a desk and then stood at a closet unbuttoning the dress down the front.
Charles was so absorbed in watching this entirely new aspect of Miss Wrigley’s life that he was almost unaware that his body was beginning to react in two distinct ways: fear and lust. His heart thumped against the porch roof so hard that someone standing under him might have heard it, and sweat ran down into his ears even though the night was turning cool, and his hands on the gritty roofing quivered as if in palsy. Miss Wrigley had hung the dress in the closet and taken a long white nightgown out and laid it across the bed. Then she disappeared again for a moment, came back with a book, threw it on the bed, moved the lamp to the night stand, and finished undressing. Charles had never seen an adult naked woman except in certain ragged, smuggled pictures Carl had loaned to Douglas. He was suddenly galvanized with emotions pulling him in two directions. He could not tear his eyes away from the woman as she bent to remove her underwear, and as she straightened up, tossing the underthings into a hamper, he felt an intense shame wash over him. He looked at her body, the naked, helpless wonian’s body, the round breasts and belly and the black vee of pubic hair and the rounded hips, and then he looked at the calm face as she rubbed the red mark on her belly where something had been too tight, scratched the outsides of her thighs where there were more red marks, and as naturally as if she were always in a nude state, reached for the nightgown and slipped it over her head so that it slithered down like a white cotton curtain falling on the night’s performance. And the calm face was Miss Wrigley’s face, a loved face that had nurtured him in learning, that had cared about him as much as any person on earth had cared for him, a loved person whom he had just betrayed in a hideous way by sneaking to her window to watch her undress. The shaking was all over his body now, and he could not imagine moving, trying to get down off the wretched height to which he had climbed for such a purpose. His guts ached, and he hated the throbbing in his groin and the painful erection that had come back again. He moved one foot to try to turn away and, still looking at the woman’s face through the lace curtain, saw her flinch, her eyes widen as she looked toward the window. She had heard him. He dared not move.
His breathing labored in his chest so that he felt strangled as he tried to control it, and now he could feel that hated presence again, the powerful urge coming over him as it rose inside him, and he whispered inside his mind, “NO! NO!” But it came on, flooding him with tension and a presence, as it had with Flossie. Now if he were found here. No. Anything, but don’t make a noise now. He clung to the sandpaper-feeling roof as if it were tilting him over an abyss while the idiotically happy Beast rose in him, coursing in his blood, and he feeling its awful joy in his agony of shame and frustration, actually to feel it luxuriating in his flooded nervous system as he shook with fear and lust and shame, and all he could do, his eyes still boring through the curtain as he was afraid to make any movement at all, was to hold himself still as that thing inside him crawled about its loathsome business of savoring his painful state. Miss Wrigley had gotten into bed and was reading her book, glancing in the general direction of the window once and then again. Finally, she put the book down and blew out the lamp. At the moment she turned her head to blow out the flame, Charles lowered his head, feeling dizzy and almost demented with agony and shame. His defenses were low, so concentrated was his attention on not disturbing one single particle of that roof. And his mind was saying, what if old man Peaussier is down there, watching me, waiting, has been watching me all the time, so that his body shivers and quakes as he tries to move.
I rise in the boy, feel his disturbed state and am growing angry at this constant irritation and frustration he seems determined to put himself and me through. I must do something. I rise and shift.
With one spring I leave the roof silently and hit the ground next to the two dogs. They would cry out, but I have no time for them, so I grip each one with a claw and hold their throats until they are almost dead. Now they will not bother me for a time. I feel the surroundings with my full senses, the yard becomes bright as a lighted field. I sense two cats getting ready to fight over near the crib, the rabbits on the other side of the garden plot in the weeds sitting like warm stones in their darkness, the barn full of life radiating its vibrations, its joy, into the darkness where I feel my full power again. An odor catches me as I drop the dogs. Tantalizing, musky, exciting, almost as if there were something waiting especially for me in that barn. Yes, the Jersey. It is her odor. My excitement is high as I stalk the odor, letting it guide me precisely, feeling as it wavers to one side of my path or the other, like a beacon. I move silently across the barnyard, the cats scatter like snowflakes from my path. Beyond the barn I hear the poor bull in his agony. That will not be my fate again. I have entered the broad door. To the right, the box stall. I hear her stirring now and smell the sweet alfalfa odor of the cow like a setting for a jewel, the jewel of mating scent that fills me with desire now and blocks out all but the most peripheral of warning senses. I look into the stall, grasping the form with my spatial sense, closing on the odor, I snap the latch on the door, swing it wide, press my face into the scent that is so delectable, pressing my face to the cow, feeling all the liquids in my body turning hot and heavy, pressing along her side, her smooth flank, whispering to her, “I could be your bull, my dear. I could be your lover, but you must stand me as I am, sweetheart, for I have suffered. How I have suffered.”
The cow, the lovely ginger and velvet black Jersey flicks her ears like signals, stamps her feet, begins to bawl a little. I mount her and begin.
I try to remember not to hurt her with my claws, but it is so hard, as the movements make themselves astoundingly without my volition, and I float upward on an ascending rise of beating blood to which I keep time. There is music, I hear and feel music as in that dark hallway, piano, drums now, there were no drums, but yes, drums, ascending. I hear outside my reddened universe of pleasure the cow moaning and crying now, but nothing can stop me now as the blood inside me begins to explode, explode, and goes farther and explodes more, and I am crying out with much pleasure, raking the cow with my claws and crying out. And I feel all my life and energy and blood lust and power sporting out, shooting in a great trajectory into pitch blackness, and I fall forward across the cow’s back, my hind feet wedged in the sides of the stall, still engaged with this animal, my mind completely gone as the dark almost closes around me.
Lights go on suddenly, brilliant, blinding lights. I cry out, but there are people coming from outside. I am confused and weak, must not try. I use my last concentration and shift.
There is a medley of screams, some of them coming from the young man, Charles, who has found himself compromised by the perfidy of that power which he now knows he must serve or be destroyed. Some of them come from the gathering of usually silent Peaussiers who have rushed to their barn to safeguard their most valuable cow from what sounded like an attack by the bull that must impossibly have broken in to get her. And the most piercing of all comes from Miss Jessie Wrigley, twenty-four-year-old local teacher who had been roused earlier by some noise and was the one who woke the family. Miss Wrigley witnesses a sight that may to the end of her life remain stamped in her memory, if she does not resolutely deny its reality in a moment or two, or if she does not faint, which she is not in the habit of doing. She sees in the sudden illumination of the electric barn lights which have only this month been installed, her favorite and star pupil, Charles Cahill, obviously in a painful state of post-coital remorse, lying over the back of the Peaussier’s favorite milker and valuable cream cow, Sherry, who seems less the worse for wear than her student who appears to have died in the act.
The details of Mr. Peaussier, a man not to be nonplussed by any natural or unnatural act of man or beast short of doom’s blast, withdrawing Charles from his love object are not lost on the stunned onlookers, so that there is no doubt in the minds of any present what has been happening. The young man stands as if he were a puppet whose strings had been cut, sagging and obscene until Mr. Peaussier steps forward and says his first and last words to the boy.
“Get yourself decent.”
And with suddenly maddened eyes, Charles Cahill leaps at the aging farmer, knocks him to the floor of the barn and speeds out into the darkness where he vanishes in every sense of the word. Twenty feet from the bright lighted rectangle of the open barn door where three standing people and one recumbent one watch, along with a rather scratched-up Jersey cow, something else appears and disappears, something very large and very fast, so that the watchers can only individually assume they have seen a trick of the light, an optical illusion that none of them will ever mention to anyone. The incident itself has been quite enough.
***
If this hill has a name, I have not heard it. Hills are so rare in this country they are not even named, called perhaps just “The Hill,” but it is a good vantage point from which to survey the little river valley. Now in the first cool silence of dawn when even the birds have not thrown off the dimness of night, I exult in my newly discovered sensations and wonder at Charles and his human foolishness. All this night he has been only a burning rage inside of me, like a sour stomach, I think, grinning. I sit on my haunches at the edge of the steep side of the hill, the east side, looking down at the brown pathway of the Iroquois River half a mile away. If I turned back the other way I could see most of the county where my last nine months have been spent. How much I have learned here, I think, yawning suddenly, surprised by fatigue. The river is not yet struck by the rising sun that is just up and tangled in the trees and farms along the horizon. The river is as brown as a road, an unpaved road leading northeast.
“Charles,” I call again, having called him many times in the night, receiving for answer only the slow burning of his absent rage.
“This is no way for a hero to act.”
Silence.
“We can leave here, go to the woman, Claire Lanphier, in Chicago. She loves you, Charles, would be your mother, help you. You might go on to high school, the university.” I cannot continue against his resolute absence.
“If I had not shifted,” I say, “they might have killed us both.”
“Charles? It’s not that bad. People forget.”
But there is no answer and my fatigue reduces my patience with the boy. I have always liked Charles, even with his ridiculous ideals, as if he were a Midwestern Sir Galahad. I turn back and look over the low, level farmlands to the west, the Peaussier farm laid out like a checkerboard of new grain and corn, a line of tiny cows being drawn out to pasture along the almost invisible string of their path. Nearby, along the little black cinder road, the oblong schoolhouse sits in its yard with the two cottonwood trees and the outhouses like tiny toadstools, the copse of solid foliage in which Mrs. Stumway hides from the world, the double siloed and immaculate farm beside the highway bridge where Douglas Bent is perhaps strapping on his brace to begin another day, the far off town with its low haze of smoke.
One last try. “So Beast wins the Beauty?”
I listen, but even the hot fuming of his rage has disappeared now.
“Well, Charles, my dear hero, farewell. Who knows, perhaps this monster will yet become a prince.”
And I set off down the hillside for the river, heading north-east.
The End of
The First Book of the Beast