The Night of the Moonbow Read online

  Table of Contents

  DEDICATION & EPIGRAPH

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MAPS

  PART ONE: The New Boy

  PART TWO: The Forest Primeval

  PART THREE: Dreams in the Midsummer Dark

  PART FOUR: The Night of the Moonbow

  EPILOGUE

  Also by the same author, and available from Coronet:

  ALL THAT GLITTERS CROWNED HEADS HARVEST HOME LADY

  About the Author

  After a notable career as an actor on the stage, in television and in films, climaxed by his award-winning performance in The Cardinal, Thomas Tryon retired from acting to concentrate on writing. His first novel, THE OTHER, published in 1971, became a huge bestseller (and a film), and is now taught in high schools and colleges across the USA. Four other books followed, all bestsellers as well: HARVEST HOME, LADY, CROWNED HEADS and ALL THAT GLITTERS. He has also written a novel for children, OPAL AND CUPID.

  Thomas Tryon lives in Beverly Hills.

  The Night of the Moonbow

  Thomas Tryon

  CORONET BOOKS Hodder and Stoughton

  DEDICATION & EPIGRAPH

  For Scott Tryon 1957- 1982

  It has always seemed to me that the two loveliest words in the English language are “summer afternoon.”

  HENRY JAMES, in a letter to Edith Wharton

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Columbia-Pictures Publications: Excerpt from “That Old Feeling” by Lou Brown and Sammy Sain. Copyright 1937 (renewed 1965) by Leo Feist Incorporated. All rights assigned to S B K Catalogue Partnership. All rights controlled and administered by S B K Feist Catalogue. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.: Excerpts from “The Music Goes ’Round and Around” by Ed Farley, Michael Riley, and Red Hodgson. Copyright 1935 Chappell & Co. (renewed). Excerpts from “Poor Butterfly” by Raymond Hubbell and John Golden. Copyright 1916 by Warner Bros. Inc. (renewed). Excerpts from “You Go to My Head” by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie. Copyright 1938 by Warner Bros. Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  MAPS

  PART ONE: The New Boy

  Prologue

  Who, having heard it firsthand from the lips of Pa Star buck, could ever forget the famous tale of the moonbow ? Who could account for its fatal charm, or explain of what singular enchantment the story was concocted? An aura it had, certainly; a unique kind of sorcery - but of what was it made? What caused it to happen? Why did it cast such a spell over everyone, this magical moonbow that no one at Moonbow Lake had ever seen?

  In truth, until that fateful night when the last council fire was held in the pine grove, no one in that northeastern corner of Connecticut could recall ever having seen the spectacle, a silver rainbow of the night arched across the shimmering waters of the lake, a span of friendliness and Christian fellowship, as Pa described it, pointing up the moral of the Moonbow Tale.

  Why, then, did the campers keep telling one another that one day, someday, the moonbow would appear? Perhaps they wished for it to be real because it gave them something to hope for; the moonbow was dreams come true, the impossible made possible, the infinite finite, a boy’s reward for being a boy. This summer it would come, they said, or this - or next, surely; wouldn’t it?

  And when, in that final camp season of 1938, it did come, how was it possible that there, at Camp Friend-Indeed, where the summer sang among the trees, where no Moonbow boy had ever raised his hand against another, hatred,- rank and profound, should have shown its face? Someone with a bucket of paint and a brush should have daubed an X on the door of Cabin 7, the cabin called

  Jeremiah, for it was there that the red-speckled death had first appeared, to pass among the boys, spreading contagion, until one by one it claimed them all, poor luckless boys of lucky Cabin 7.

  What had it been? Some momentary moonbow madness? A bad dream? So Pa Starbuck often thought in those dolorous after-years when, having been relieved of his long tenure as founder-director of the camp, he had come to eke out what time the Almighty had allotted to him in a squalid, sun-parched suburb of Miami, where whichever neon moons that rose above the withered palm trees behind his stucco bungalow were merely the bitter reminders of his sorrows.

  Perhaps it was only a dream, thought the Reverend wistfully, bathed in the silver glow of his Philco television screen, the kind of dream that is born of moonbow magic, gossamer and gone. He sighed again and told himself the Lord knew he had tried - He did, didn't He? - he had, hadn’t he?

  The afternoon the new boy arrived, a scorcher for that early in July, the Red Sox were playing the Braves. Tiger Abernathy, captain and star catcher for the Sox, shouldered his Louisville Slugger and stepped on to the plate, tapped his bat, waited as the pitcher wound up and let fly, then took a mighty swing at the ball. Dusty Rhoades, the Braves’ first baseman, missed it altogether, and Oggie Ogden, the outfielder, leaning sideways with outstretched glove, also came up empty-handed, and there went the ball smack through the back window of Ma Starbuck’s office. A shattering of glass was briefly heard, then the victory cheer as Tiger beat it to home plate for his third run that afternoon.

  Hap Holliday, the camp athletic director, marched up and congratulated the boy. “But did you have to break Ma’s window?” His laugh was bluff and hearty as he clapped Tiger on the back.

  Slewing the bill of his cap from back to front and shading his eyes, Tiger grinned up at the coach. “I guess I didn’t have to, but it sure helped, didn’t it?”

  Hap nodded. “Now maybe we’ll get some action around here.” His beefy red face covered with sweat, he wiped his brow as he scanned the baseball diamond, which lay close between the dining hall and the old farmhouse whose rear quarters served as the camp office. For years the coach had been lobbying to have the ball field moved farther away from both buildings, but nothing had come of the idea. A few more broken windows and maybe Rolfe Hartsig, the camp’s benefactor, would see that the new field should be the next object of his largesse.

  As players and spectators a-like abandoned the field for the hike down to the lower camp, Tiger blew out his cheeks emphatically and rubbed his scalp under his cap. “Well, I guess if we want our ball back I better go get it from Ma. Dump, I’ll see you back in Jeremiah,” he called to his cabin-mate Dump Dillworth, busy storing their team’s equipment in the shed.

  “Let me talk to Ma,” Hap suggested. “I can get around her if she’s going to be mad.”

  “I can get around Ma good as anyone.” Tiger knew his onions when it came to Ma Starbuck. He started off, then stopped. “Can I have my knife back?” The hunting knife was one of Tiger’s most treasured possessions; he had won it two years before in the competition for best all-round athlete; Rolfe Hartsig had provided the prize, a Bowie knife purchased at Abercrombie & Fitch in New York.

  Hap handed over the knife in its leather sheath, then collected his golf bag and favorite driver and headed off to whack some balls on the lower playing field, while Tiger dutifully trotted toward the farmhouse, a ramshackle structure whose sides seemed to slant toward each other as much for comfort as for support. Approaching it, he circled a clump of lilac shrubs, then mounted the red sandstone block that served as the office stoop, on both sides of which grew ragged clusters of sunflowers.

  He opened the screen door to find Ma with broom and dustpan, sweeping up the broken glass. Jezebel, Ma’s prized Persian, reclined the length of the windowsill, where a fatigued sanseveria held up its mottled blades in the arid soil of a majolica planter. Under a monochrome of The Angelas, hanging askew on the wall, Harpo, a limp-haired canine of dubious pedigre
e, opened an eye to glance at Tiger when his name was spoken, then, eagerly banging his tail on the floor, scrambled noisily to his feet, made his way to the boy, and began licking his bare legs.

  “Hey, Harp, hey, boy, good fellah,” Tiger said, burying his face in the dog’s neck.

  “Oh, honey, don’t kiss Heinz-y, he hasn’t been washed this week. He gets so dirty, too.” Though the dog was called “Harpo,” Ma sometimes referred to him as “Heinz-y” because, she said, he was fifty-seven varieties. “And then some,” she always added.

  “This your ball, Tiger Abernathy?” she demanded, hands on hips and trying to look fierce. “I don’t think you know your own strength, Mr Charles Atlas.”

  ‘I’m really sorry, Ma. Here, let me do that.” He took the broom from her.

  Grateful for his assistance, Ma lowered her considerable bulk into the swivel chair behind the large rolltop desk that was her pride and joy. The ancient chair, its high back upholstered in cracked leather and studded round with brass nail-heads kept eternally polished by the friction of her plump thighs against them, protested loudly as she took possession. She leaned her face, plain and hard-worked but serene as a full moon, on a worn hand, and peered through the thick lenses of her glasses at Tiger as he swept up. What was a windowpane? she asked herself - it wasn’t the broken glass that worried her, not with 120 campers pulling the tricks that 120 campers could pull; what worried her were the broken arms and legs and cracked heads.

  “You sure play a swell ball game, Tiger,” she said admiringly.

  He looked up at her, eyebrows raised in silent question. Ma had to restrain her amusement. “Sure, me and Jezzy ben watchin’ you most of the afternoon. Say, what d’you suppose that smoke is over yonder?” she wondered, swiveling to peer past the window shade.

  “Maybe it’s Injun smoke,” Tiger said with a straight face, down on his hands and knees now, meticulously pinching up the last bits of glass the broom had overlooked.

  . “Tiger Abernathy, you’re a caution! Why, you couldn’t find a Injun within a hundred miles of Moonbow Lake. Looks like it’s cornin’ from the old Steelyard place. I just hope nobody’s lightin’ fires over there.”

  She watched as Tiger, the smallest boy in the intermediate unit, but a winner for all that, clambered onto a chair to have a closer look. It wasn’t likely anybody’d be stupid enough to build a fire at the Haunted House in broad daylight, but, then, you never knew what those crazy Rinkydinks might get up to. Though the existence of the Rinkydink Club, a motley collection of the camp’s older boys, was kept hidden from Pa Starbuck, Ma was not fooled; she knew they held secret meetings down in the cellar of the house, where they smoked Lucky Strikes and talked about “doing it,” in defiance of camp rules, not to mention the ghost that roamed the premises and was reputed, from time to time, to have been “seen.” If Tiger gauged matters correctly, however, the smoke was coming not from the Haunted House but from Indian Woods, where a work detail of “fire-builders” was policing the Seneca campfire area for that evening’s initiation rites. Tonight, being the end of the first two-week camp period, .would see the first all-camper council fire and torchlight parade, when the newest members of the Seneca Lodge would be initiated. Yesterday, at a special meeting, seven inductees had been chosen for the honor.

  Reassured, Ma returned to the papers she had been perusing before Tiger’s line drive interrupted her, while Tiger finished his task. Presently, he shook the dustpan into the tin wastebasket beside her chair, then asked for his money envelope.

  “Coop’s not open, honey. You can’t have your money envelope less’n store’s open, you know that.’

  “I want it so I can pay for the glass.”

  “So’s he can pay for the glass,” Ma repeated to no one in particular. “Tiger Abernathy, there’s not another boy in camp would come in here of his own accord and offer to pay for a smashed windowpane. You aim to break that record as well?”

  He waited while she riffled with plump fingers through the alphabetized money envelopes standing in the Thom

  McAn shoebox she used for filing purposes. Her eyes, always troublesome, were bothered by the afternoon sun streaming through the back window, and she reached for her green celluloid eyeshade, the sort that gamblers and railway baggage-masters favor. Ma had her own homey style. With her broad, maternal bosom, made for comforting boys, her graying hair that hardly knew which way to grow, her round, puffy cheeks, untouched by the artifice of makeup, her firm little chin, and the slip straps that always showed through the tops of her dresses, she was every camper’s “Ma.”

  Still waiting as she searched, Tiger added helpfully, “I’m the first one, Ma. Ab, remember?”

  “Shucks, and don’t I know it. Abernathy, Brewster — here you are.”

  Tiger winced at the name; nobody, except at his peril, ever called Tiger “Brewster,” not even the teachers in school. The last guy who tried had had the wind butted out of him by Tiger’s granite-hard head and been sent sprawling.

  Ma flicked the envelope out of the box and handed it over. With tanned, grubby fingers, Tiger pinched the clasp, lifted the flap, blew, and peered inside.

  “How much do you figure the damage’ll be, Ma?” he asked.

  “Well, lessee, glass ought to be ’bout a quarter, don’t you think?”

  “How about the putty and the glazier’s points?”

  “Hell’s bells, what do I know about putty or them other doodads? You slap a quarter there on the desk and we’ll call it square.”

  Her chair swiveled with a screech as she turned to face her desk again. The cubbyholes of the old rolltop were stuffed with an array of envelopes and papers, and more of the same littered the oaken surface, along with ledgers, open and shut,- and a cast-iron spindle piercing a sheaf of pink laundry slips. A blocked-out campers’ chart, showing the allocation of bunks in the cabins of the various units, stood out amid the jumble. Ma’s desk was, so to speak, the central switchboard and nerve center of Friend-Indeed; from it were disbursed all payments, all orders and announcements, practically all the comings and goings of the entire camp.

  “Before you go, Tige, I need a word with you.”

  Glancing past the pale, balding spot on the top of her head, Tiger saw she was staring intently at the chart.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  Ma shook her head. “There’s this new boy coming tomorrow, is all” - she rummaged through the papers on her desk - “the one replacing Stanley Wagner, you know.”

  Tiger knew. This summer Howie Bochman, one of their regular cabin-mates, had been lost to the Jeremians as a result of having contracted a case of infantile paralysis, a blow that had been compounded by Howie’s replacement, the unfortunate Stanley Wagner. Unfortunate because Stanley’s presence in Cabin 7 had not worked out. He had been, in a word, a spud, and the entire camp still smarted from the embarrassing and shameful episode that had ended his brief stay at Friend-Indeed.

  “Not good camper fodder,” had been the judgment of Reece Hartsig, Jeremiah’s counselor, and no one had disagreed. A bedwetter (at fourteen!), a crybaby, and incurably homesick, Stanley had proved the wimpiest camper anyone could recall ever having come to the lake. Demerits had rained like hailstones upon Cabin 7 for Stanley’s sundry errors and malfeasances, and the camel’s back had been broken when, after a visit by a select group of campers to the Castle, a crystal paperweight had been discovered missing, in consequence of which Ma’s friend, Dagmar Kronborg, had declared her home and its “trophy room” off limits for the remainder of the season.

  The paperweight had eventually turned up hidden at the bottom of Stanley’s suitcase, and after an official meeting of the Sachems’ Council, the camp’s governing board, the culprit had been “sent to Scarsdale,” which meant nobody in camp was allowed to talk to him for three whole days; then, having survived this trial, the next day Stanley had simply gone up in smoke, his parents spiriting him away with neither farewells nor apologies, and leaving behind only t
he yellow-stained length of canvas in his bunk. Now that bunk would get a new canvas, and a new boy in it, and all the Jeremians were looking forward to his coming.

  Ma found what she was looking for, an already opened letter. Tiger, who knew better than to read over a person’s shoulder, waited until she looked up; her face was suddenly dyed emerald as a sunbeam pierced her eyeshade.

  “Name’s Leo,” she said. She adjusted her spectacles -“Leo - Joakum? I guess that’s how you’d say it.” “Where’s he from?” Tiger asked.

  “Saggetts Notch.” She gave him a glance. “Fact is, he comes from Pitt.”

  “The Institute?” Tiger was surprised. “An orphan?”

  Ma nodded. “Dr Dunbar and the Joshua Society folks arranged it.”

  Tiger mulled over this unexpected news; he didn’t know any orphans that he could recall. Ma held up the three pages of script and explained. The letter had been written by one Elsie Meekum, an assistant to Edwin Poe, supervisor of the Institute, and that gentleman’s liaison with Dr Dunbar, the president of the Friends of Joshua.

  “It’s a sad case,” Ma said, her face expressing sympathy for the plight of this Leo Joakum. “We must be sure he has a good time. Try to see he fits in, so he doesn’t end up like—” Though she left her sentence unfinished, Tiger knew she was thinking of Stanley.

  He put the question uppermost in his mind. “Does he play baseball?”

  Ma was vague on this point. “I don’t really know. I should think so, though - most boys play baseball, don’t they? He plays on the violin, anyways - the lady says he’s a real - real what?” She consulted Miss Meekum’s lines. “Yes - ‘prodigy,’ she writes. Mercy, we could be getting our own Bobby Breen.” She laid down the page with the others. “I expect he’ll find it a bit strange at first, so I’m counting on you to show him the ropes, you and Bomber, in particular. Maybe you can hang him some netting so he don’t get eaten by mosquitoes.” She fixed him with her eyes, large and round as a raccoon’s behind the magnifying lenses. “I’m depending on you to be good pals to him. See that the other boys treat him right. They’ll follow along if you lead ’em.”