The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb

Author:Davis Grubb
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-07-07T04:00:00+00:00

BOOK FOUR

A STRONG TREE WITH MANY BIRDS

“Oh, the gold! The precious, precious gold! The green miser’ll horde ye soon! Hish! Hish! God goes ’mong the worlds blackberrying!”

—MELVILLE, Moby-Dick

She was old and yet she was ageless—in the manner of such staunch country widows. Gaunt, plain-spoken, and hard of arm, she could stand up to three of the toughest, shrewdest cattle dealers in Pleasants County and get every penny she thought her hog was worth. Or if pork was off that year she would butcher and can her own sausage and smoke her own hams and have enough left over to present the preacher’s family with a nice meal of spareribs. In the summer she sent the children into the woodlands and brush filth with buckets for berries, and it was her old, wise hands that taught their young fingers how to pick them and schooled their eyes in the ways of berry-finding. She had a cow and she churned her own butter and sold it at New Economy wrapped in cool, damp swaths of immaculate muslin. She had chickens and their eggs went to market, too, in a bright yellow basket spread across with a napkin. From the fat of her butchered hog she made soap, standing in a drenching March rain beside her brawling iron kettle in the back yard till the task was done. Fifteen miles downriver at Parkersburg a waitress had short-changed her and that was a quarter of a century before and she had never gone to that town again.

Widowed a full forty years before, she had raised a son and seen him off into the world but she had soon grown lonely in the haunted stillness of the old home and so there had never been a time in the quarter of a century since that her house had not sheltered a child. And children were easy to come by in the river lands. Many a dark-haired farm girl lost her wits to an August moon and the mouth of a cunning lover and found herself, after he had gone away to work in Pittsburgh or Detroit, with the fruit of their ecstasy squalling and unwelcome in her poor mother’s kitchen. Once the child was weaned and toddling it was to Rachel Cooper’s door that he was carried, like as not, and there was never the bad word uttered for what he was: poor little wood’s colt. On Sundays his mother might come for a visit and a walk with him in the fields and at sundown he would be returned to Rachel’s bed and board, unprotesting. She fed her children till they were rosy and full, scrubbed them till they were red and squalling, spanked them when there was cause, and taught them the Lord’s tales on Sabbath mornings. That very summer she had packed her ugly cardboard suitcase and gone to Chillicothe to visit her own boy Ralph, who was forty-three now and doing well in real estate and married with a nice wife and four grown girls of his own.

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