The Night of the Hunter Read Online Free Page B

Sometimes there were twelve and sometimes it was only six and then again they would all blend together into one and her face would rise up in the wavering chiaroscuro of his dreams like the Whore of Sodom and not until his hand stole under his blanket and wound round the bone hasp of the faithful knife did the face blanch and dissolve into a spasm of horror and flee back into the darkness again. He was bad at remembering facts, dates, places, names. And yet fragments would return with shocking verisimilitude: the broken chards of forgotten times, lost names, dead faces; these would return and he would know for that instant what he had felt toward the time, the name, the place, and how God had spoken clear to him and told him what he had to do. The knife beneath the wool, the Sword of Jehovah beneath his wrathful fingers. God sent people to him. God told him what to do. And it was always a widow that God brought to him. A widow with a little wad of money in the dining-room sugar bowl and perhaps a little more in the county bank. The Lord provided. Sometimes it was only a few hundred dollars but he would thank the Lord just the same when it was all over and done with and everything was smoothed over and there was not so much as a single scarlet droplet on the leaves in the pleasant woods where it had ended and the Sword of God was wiped clean again—ready again.
    Through the leafy, tranquil decade of the twenties he had wandered among the river hamlets and the mill towns of Ohio and Kentucky and Indiana doing God’s work quietly; without fuss or ostentation. Perhaps it was his very indifference to being caught—his inability to imagine that anyone would even want to interfere—that kept them from ever nailing him for anything but the car theft in Parkersburg that had sent him to the state penitentiary. Sometimes he found his widows in the lonely-hearts columns of the pulp love story magazines. Always widows. Chuckling, pleasant, stupid widows who would want to sit alone with him on a dusty, bulging davenport in a parlor not yet aired free of the sickly-sweet flower smell of the dead man’s funeral. Fat, simpering, hot widows who flirted and fluttered their eyelashes and fumbled for his hand with plump fingers still sticky from the drugstore chocolates; soft corpse hands that made him retch and hold himself in while he turned to the powdered face and smiled and spoke of the provident God that had brought them both together. And afterward there was the little roll of money; money to go forth and preach God’s word among a world of harlots and fools.
    Wandering the land he preached. He would take a room at the cheap depot hotel where the drummers sat out the long summer twilights and watched for the evening train and after a bit he would spread the word that he was in town and get himself invited to preach at a meetinghouse and presently he would announce a big open-air revival by the river for the last week in August. It never brought him much money. But it helped him spread God’s glory. God took care of the money. God brought him widows.
    His name was Harry Powell but everyone called him Preacher and sometimes that was the only word he would scrawl in the smudged hotel registers. Spring always found him back in Louisville because that was the town of his birth and because with the burgeoning of the ripe season upon the river he liked to feel his whole spirit come alive with holy rage and hatred of the spewing masses of harlots and whoremasters he saw in the crowded April night streets in that swarming river Sodom. He would pay his money and go into a burlesque show and sit in the front row watching it all and rub the knife in his pocket with sweating fingers; seething in a quiet convulsion of outrage and nausea at all that ocean of undulating womanhood beyond the lights; his nose growing full of it: the choking miasma of girl smell and cheap perfume and stogie smoke and man smell and the breath of ten-cent mountain corn