On such a night, now that it was September, the autumn winds would be curving through the taut red grass, releasing all the gone voices, and I wondered if he was singing among them, the old man in whose bed I lay falling asleep.
Then I thought Dolly at last had come to kiss me goodnight, for I woke up sensing her near me in the room; but it was almost morning, beginning light was like a flowering foliage at the windows, and roosters ranted in distant yards. “Shhh, Collin,” Dolly whispered, bending over me. She was wearing a woolen winter suit and a hat with a traveling veil that misted her face. “I only wanted you to know where we are going.”
“To the tree-house?” I said, and thought I was talking in my sleep.
Dolly nodded. “Just for now. Until we know better what our plans will be.” She could see that I was frightened, and put her hand on my forehead.
“You and Catherine: but not me?” and I was jerking with a chill. “You can’t leave without me.”
The town clock was tolling; she seemed to be waiting for it to finish before making up her mind. It struck five, and by the time the note had died away I had climbed out of bed and rushed into my clothes. There was nothing for Dolly to say except: “Don’t forget your comb.”
Catherine met us in the yard; she was crooked over with the weight of a brimming oilcloth satchel; her eyes were swollen, she had been crying, and Dolly, oddly calm and certain of what she was doing, said it doesn’t matter, Catherine—we can send for your goldfish once we find a place. Verena’s closed quiet windows loomed above us; we moved cautiously past them and silently out the gate.
A fox terrier barked at us; but there was no one on the street, and no one saw us pass through the town except a sleepless prisoner gazing from the jail. We reached the field of Indian grass at the same moment as the sun. Dolly’s veil flared in the morning breeze, and a pair of pheasants, nesting in our path, swept before us, their metal wings swiping the cockscomb-scarlet grass. The China tree was a September bowl of green and greenish gold: Gonna fall, gonna bust our heads, Catherine said, as all around us the leaves shook down their dew.
II
IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR Riley Henderson, I doubt anyone would have known, or at least known so soon, that we were in the tree.
Catherine had loaded her oilcloth satchel with the leftovers from Sunday dinner, and we were enjoying a breakfast of cake and chicken when gunfire slapped through the woods. We sat there with cake going dry in our mouths. Below, a sleek bird dog cantered into view, followed by Riley Henderson; he was shouldering a shotgun and around his neck there hung a garland of bleeding squirrels whose tails were tied together. Dolly lowered her veil, as though to camouflage herself among the leaves.
He paused not far away, and his wary, tanned young face tightened; propping his gun into position he took a roaming aim, as if waiting for a target to present itself. The suspense was too much for Catherine, who shouted: “Riley Henderson, don’t you dare shoot us!”
His gun wavered, and he spun around, the squirrels swinging like a loose necklace. Then he saw us in the tree, and after a moment said, “Hello there, Catherine Creek; hello, Miss Talbo. What are you folks doing up there? Wildcat chase you?”
“Just sitting,” said Dolly promptly, as though she were afraid for either Catherine or I to answer. “That’s a fine mess of squirrels you’ve got.”
“Take a couple,” he said, detaching two. “We had some for supper last night and they were real tender. Wait a minute, I’ll bring them up to you.”
“You don’t have to do that; just leave them on the ground.” But he said ants would get at them, and hauled himself into the tree. His blue shirt was spotted with squirrel blood, and flecks of blood glittered in his rough leather-colored hair; he smelled of gunpowder, and his homely well-made face was brown as cinnamon. “I’ll be damned, it’s a tree-house,” he said, pounding his foot as though to test the strength of the boards.
Catherine warned him that maybe it was a tree-house now, but it wouldn’t be for long if he didn’t stop that stamping. He said, “You build it, Collin?” and it was with a happy shock that I realized he’d called my name: I hadn’t thought Riley Henderson knew me from dust. But I knew him, all right.
No one in our town ever had themselves so much talked about as Riley Henderson. Older people spoke of him with sighing voices, and those nearer his own age, like myself, were glad to call him mean and hard: that was because he would only let us envy him, would not let us love him, be his friend.
Anyone could have told you the facts.
He was born in China, where his father, a missionary, had been killed in an uprising. His mother was from this town, and her name was Rose; though I never saw her myself, people say she was a beautiful woman until she started wearing glasses; she was rich too, having received a large inheritance from her grandfather. When she came back from China she brought Riley, then five, and two younger children, both girls; they lived with her unmarried brother, Justice of the Peace Horace Holton, a meaty spinsterish man with skin yellow as quince.
In the following years Rose Henderson grew strange in her ways: she threatened to sue Verena for selling her a dress that shrank in the wash; to punish Riley, she made him hop on one leg around the yard reciting the multiplication table; otherwise, she let him run wild, and when the Presbyterian minister spoke to her about it she told him she hated her children and wished they were dead.
And she must have meant it, for one Christmas morning she locked the bathroom door and tried to drown her two little girls in the tub: it was said that Riley broke the door down with a hatchet, which seems a tall order for a boy of nine or ten, whatever he was. Afterwards, Rose was sent off to a place on the Gulf Coast, an institution, and she may still be living there, at least I’ve never heard that she died.
Now Riley and his uncle Horace Holton couldn’t get on. One night he stole Horace’s Oldsmobile and drove out to the Dance-N-Dine with Mamie Curtiss: she was fast as lightning, and maybe five years older than Riley, who was not more than fifteen at the time. Well, Horace heard they were at the Dance-N-Dine and got the Sheriff to drive him out there: he said he was going to teach Riley a lesson and have him arrested.
But Riley said Sheriff, you’re after the wrong party. Right there in front of a crowd he accused his uncle of stealing money that belonged to Rose and that was meant for him and his sisters. He offered to fight it out on the spot; and when Horace held back, he just walked over and socked him in the eye. The Sheriff put Riley in jail. But Judge Cool, an old friend of Rose’s, began to investigate, and sure enough it turned out Horace had been draining Rose’s money into his own account.
So Horace simply packed his things and took the train to New Orleans where, a few months, later, we heard that, billed as the Minister of Romance, he had a job marrying couples on an excursion steamer that made moonlight cruises up the Mississippi. From then on, Riley was his own boss. With money borrowed against the inheritance he was coming into, he bought a red racy car and went skidding round the countryside with every floozy in town; the only nice girls you ever saw in that car were his sisters—he took them for a drive Sunday afternoons, a slow respectable circling of the square.
They were pretty girls, his sisters, but they didn’t have much fun, for he kept a strict watch, and boys were afraid to come near them. A reliable colored woman did their housework, otherwise they lived alone.
One of his sisters, Elizabeth, was in my class at school, and she got the best grades, straight A’s. Riley himself had quit school; but he was not one of the pool-hall loafs, nor did he mix with them; he fished in the daytime, or went hunting; around the old Holton house he made many improvements, as he was a good carpenter; and a good mechanic, too: for instance, he built a special car horn, it wailed like a train-whistle, and in the evening you could hear it howling as he roared down the road on his way to a dance in another town.
How I longed for him to be my friend! and it seemed possible, he was just two years older.
But I could remember the only time he ever spoke to me. Spruce in a pair of white flannels, he was off to a dance at the clubhouse, and he came into Verena’s drugstore, where I sometimes helped
