Hunting Midnight

go.”

“But he knows me. He looked at me.”

Daniel sighed theatrically, replying that I must have been mistaken. It would be several years before I would see the connection between this hate monger and the beating of Senhora Beatriz.

*

In my youth I thought there could be no greater gift than being able to speak with animals. So as soon as we reached our lake, I stood and imitated the call of a kingfisher I spotted high up in an oak tree. When I ceased my calls, my avian friend contemplated the water thirty feet below. Then, without warning, he hurtled downward like a winged arrow, cutting into the water and disappearing.

“What’s happened to him?” exclaimed Daniel.

“You’ll see.”

Emerging a few seconds later, none the worse for his swim, the bird flew back to his tree, a silvery minnow writhing in his beak. When I turned to share my joy with Daniel, I expected to see his wily smile, but he was sobbing.

I watched him without saying a word, his hands covering his eyes, since I was sure he would not want me to call attention to his display of emotion. When I finally dared to question him, he glared at me viciously. I decided to go on a brief bird-watching expedition in the woods. When I returned, he made me swear to keep a secret, then told me that Senhora Beatriz was his grandmother. “Her daughter gave me up as a baby. She left me on the wheel. The nuns gave me to my adoptive mother and father.”

Left on the wheel was the Portuguese expression for placing an unwanted infant on a turntable set inside the window of a charitable institution maintained for just this purpose. The turntable was partitioned by a wooden board to keep the identity of the mother a secret. Babies left there were cared for by nuns and, if possible, given to new parents.

“Why did she give you up?” I asked.

Daniel wiped his nose with his hand, picked up a branch from the ground, and began making fierce cuts in it with a short-bladed knife. “Don’t know. She’s dead now — the fevers took her a year after she gave me to the nuns. She was just nineteen. She must have been too poor to care for me.” He looked off into the distance. “I only found out about her because one day Senhora Beatriz was delivering laundry to a neighbor of ours and saw me in the street. She got a big fright and went all pale. Like she’d seen a ghost. Bobo de merda, sem cabeceira, va-te-embora, va agora.”

This was another of the rhymes I would come to associate with Daniel. It meant, Fool without wit, boy of shit, leave today and go away.

“See, I looked just like her dead daughter — but I only found that out later.”

He fashioned two tiny holes in his wood with the point of his blade, then scored some curving lines. “I secretly followed Senhora Beatriz to her house and began to go there every day at the same time. She’d always look sad, then close her shutters.”

I twisted my head to see his work better, but he held it away from me and said he’d clout me if I peeked again.

“John, you can be damned sure I’ve got a head filled with shit, because the next thing I did was tell my mother about Senhora Beatriz. She never stays at home now — Ma, I mean. I haven’t even seen her in a year. The last time I did, the old donkey grabbed me hard” — the lad’s eyes shone with rage — “and slapped me right across my face. She told me to beg forgiveness for being born. Everything got broke in her life when she took me in. That’s when I found out I was adopted.”

Holding his knife like a pen, he made a long circular incision across his design.

“Then, one day, Senhora Beatriz came to our house — maybe two years ago. I invited her inside, but she wouldn’t come in. She started crying right in the doorway. I went to her, but she told me to stay back. She said she needed a lad to collect soiled linens and things. She’d pay me.”

“What did you say?”

“What do you think I said? I’d never have been able to buy my carving tools without her money. That’s how I get all my things, John. So, about six months ago, I was at her house and she sat me down and gave me some biscuits. She showed me a tiny painting with a woman’s face. The whole thing wasn’t any bigger than my palm. And the woman’s face looked like mine. She said that that was why she got a fright the first time she saw me, because I looked so much like her.”

“The woman in the painting was your mother?”

He nodded. “Her name was Teresa. Senhora Beatriz told me she’d given up a baby she’d had with a man who’d run off. They weren’t married. Senhora Beatriz sure was angry at him for leaving her. She said he was a clothing merchant from Lisbon and that he’d ruined her daughter with his silk and promises. Not that she said the baby they’d had was me, of course. She thinks I haven’t figured it out. I haven’t told anyone but you, so you’ve got to keep quiet.”

“Why don’t you tell Senhora Beatriz you know? She’s your grandmother.”

“If she wanted me to know,” he replied angrily, “she’d say so. She has to tell me. I’m not going to say anything otherwise. And you’re not either! You hear me?”

“I’ll not say a thing to anyone,” I agreed, but I didn’t understand his reasoning. Now I know he showed a sensitivity for her feelings far beyond his years, and an exemplary capacity for self-denial.

Daniel held up his finished carving. It was a face with questioning eyes, an open, awestruck mouth, and wild hair. It looked like a spooked cat.

“What’s that supposed to be?” I asked.

“It’s his Scottish lordship himself — it’s you.”

“Me!” I held out my hand for it, but he stood up, reared back, and threw it into the lake.

I jumped up. “Why’d you do that? I wanted to keep it.”

He gave me a defiant look. “’Cause I’m evil. Fool without wit, boy of shit,leave today and go away!”

“You ought to have at least let me get a good look. That wasn’t fair!”

Daniel’s face crumpled as though I’d slapped him. When I reached out for him, he jerked away and said, “Don’t touch me, I’m filthy.”

*

After he’d stopped crying, I swam in the cold tarn while Daniel waited on shore. He asked me questions about the bird market we’d seen earlier, which was pitched every Tuesday and Saturday in New Square.

“Listen,” he said, “we’ll go there on Tuesday. Late afternoon. I want to follow the seller with the most birds as he leaves for home. Also, I want you to get some paints — and brushes.”

“Daniel, what are you planning? My parents have warned me — ”

“Christ, John, I haven’t worked it all out yet. Have a little patience.”

What he wouldn’t let me say was that my parents had forbidden me from visiting the bird market. This was because once, when I was four, I’d fainted dead away on seeing a goldfinch in a wire prison no bigger than a man’s fist. Now that I was older, they surely feared that I’d get my revenge and do something rash, for which I’d end up caged myself.

Quite right, they were, as it turned out. Though I suppose I might even today blame it all on Daniel.

III

On the Sunday after Senhora Beatriz was beaten, Father told me a Scottish tale counseling caution. In this story, a witch transformed Papa into a pimply toad and chained him to a standard in her granite tower. To my delight, Porritch — the dog he’d had as a lad — rescued him by sneaking up on the hag, catching her asleep, and clamping his jaws around her neck. I say delight because I had always wished for a dog, though my mother had obliged me to wait until I was a trifle older and more “responsible,” as she put it.

“When a witch is killed,” Papa explained to me on this occasion, “all the evil spells she’s ever uttered are undone in an instant.”