PART ONE
Chapter One
High clouds drove across the dark toward abiding calm. Ben Cory watched them rolling under west wind down a winter sky, until his father's voice drew him back into the pool of firelight and candleshine. The moment's alarm of loneliness lingered, another occasion when the self disturbed by the not-self desires the assurance of boundaries. Where does the self end and the universe begin? Ben knew the inquiry to be a corridor where many doors open on darkness but not all.
Most of the days of that February had been whitely brilliant, the nights heavy with malignant doubts of wartime. Outside Deerfield's palisade, where one did not go alone, Ben at fourteen could never forget the enemy, the Others. Indians and French—or say danger itself, a thing of the mind harsh as an arrow in the flesh. In the cave of darkness that was the garret at bedtime, with Reuben's breath tickling his shoulder, the thought of the Others often entered behind Ben Cory's eyes. If sleep refused him his parents' talk might be recalled, and that sense of the Others, the quiet-footed, would become a commentary like secret laughter. They could laugh, those bronze people of the wilderness; they could laugh and cry, as wolves do.
On this evening of the twenty-ninth of February, 1704, snow was drifted mightily against Deerfield's palisade, crusted and frozen over. All winter the village had shivered to warnings: the French might try it. Governor Dudley sent reinforcements as generously as other commitments of a scared Massachusetts would allow; then the waiting, and the snow.
Ben's father had recently received a letter from Great-uncle John Kenny of Roxbury. As he discussed it that evening with Ben's mother, the boys could listen. From an Englishman who escaped Port Royal and reached Boston, Mr. Kenny had learned the French were friendlier than ever with the Abenaki tribes of Acadia. Joseph Cory read aloud: "I am moved to wonder whether we may ever know a time when the good works of men shall be no longer set at naught by embroilments of faction and credo, or by maneuvering of states and principalities. It is a sorry thing that a man should refrain from speaking his mind, overborne by the righteous who forget it was said: Be not righteous overmuch: Ecclesiastes vii; 16. I hate no man for that he believeth in other fashion than I do, be he Anabaptist, Quaker, Papist, I care nothing. He hath his light, so let me live by mine own."
Ben's mother was sewing, in her favorite small chair by the fireplace, the day's work never quite ended, candlelight mild on her dark face and her fingers that hurried because she was troubled. "Truly, Joseph, he displayeth much pride."
"Is it wrong, Adna, a man should be proud? Brave too—nay, reckless, seeing the letter might have fallen in the wrong hands."
"But—to make himself, as it were, judge of all things...."
Ben glanced at the enigma of his younger brother's face, wondering which view Reuben would share.
Hesitantly Adna Cory said: "You've spoke, times, of inviting Mr. Kenny here. I'd be pleased of course. In the spring, perhaps, before such time as you'll be too busied with the plowing and all?"
Joseph Cory sighed. Ben's parents often left much unsaid, the silences a communication not always excluding himself and Reuben. Neither now mentioned the smallness of the house, the cramping difficulties of living on a raw frontier. Even by frontier standards the house was meager—two rooms downstairs and the lean-to where old Jesse Plum dwelt in frowsty security; upstairs the garret and that was all. Ben knew his mother's family was or had been wealthy; so was Grandmother Cory in Springfield. But Joseph Cory was proud, with a sharp-cornered aversion to owing anyone anything.
The land spread generously fruitful here at the edge of wilderness; good times ought to bloom in this village if ever an end came to the alarms and imperatives of war. Under that stress it suffered the bleakness of a place often forgotten, where a handful of garrison soldiers tried to hold themselves ready for disaster, nourishing scant patience for Deerfield and not loved there. They cleaned their dark tools and cursed the weather, the Indians, the French, the pay or lack of it, above all their own foolishness in joining the militia.
Ben's mother and father were surely wondering in silence how the house could provide for such a guest as John Kenny, Grandmother Cory's elder brother, a fabulous merchant-importer, owner of ships and warehouses of the fat Boston trade. To Ben, Uncle John was a figure of learning, wealth and magnificence moving seven or eight feet tall in a haze of legend, mythical as Dudley or the Mathers or Queen Anne. Ben had heard his father call Uncle John slight and frail—a stiff breeze would blow him away; Ben's mind noted the information, his heart not accepting it at all. Joseph Cory said at last: "Well, Adna, he's sixty-seven. I suppose he seldom leaves Roxbury, especially now when all's uncertain. I hear the Boston road is fair as far as Hadley, but they mean for good riders, young men. Up from Hadley 'tis what you remember, love, muddy as dammit even when the spring's past. And he's not in the best health—says so here, further on."
Ben noticed Reuben's face drooping in resignation. Ru would know, as Ben did, that even if Uncle John were invited he probably could not come. The untamed roads were lonely; an old man on horseback could die swiftly from an arrow or bullet out of the brush.... Ben supposed he ought to take up a candle and persuade Reuben to bed. At fourteen Ben was expected to assume many of a man's responsibilities, not least of them the jumpy task of riding herd on his brother, who would be twelve in May.
Ben stood tall for his age, his slimness toughened by farm and other work to wiry flexibility. He could split wood nearly as well as his father, mend shoes better than Jesse Plum, manage the big kettles for his mother's candlemaking. But he could search his face in a mirror for signs of maturity and find maddeningly few. It remained a mild, large-eyed boy's face, high at the forehead, the jaw square but rounded at the chin. Father's craggy nose had character; Father was said to resemble Great-grandfather Stephen Cory, the sailor.
Legend placed Stephen Cory aboard Lord Howard's flagship when the Armada came against England in 1588. It just might have been true, for he was past middle life when he gave up the wild universe of the sea and begat Ben's grandfather Matthew Cory, and he was in his salt-encrusted seventies when he died in 1643 in the little new town of Boston. Whether the myth was true or false, Stephen Cory lived gaudily in Ben's fancy, strutting the quarterdeck, thrusting a beaky face like Joseph Cory's to the leaping spray and the enormous winds.
But Ben Cory in these prosaic modern times had grown resigned to a nose that stayed straight and small like his mother's, and his mouth was wide and full like hers—not a mouth for sternness, said the mirror. If Ben glared commandingly at the glass, somebody inside him hooted with merriment. His voice had changed but could still crack; the down on his face did not yet need shaving, being light in color.
"I never heard," said Joseph Cory, "that the Abenaki had any better stomach for winter campaigns than any other damned Inj'ans."
Adna Cory bit off a thread. "Septembers, Octobers, after they have their own corn harvested, then they come." Adna Pownal Cory would have been thinking of many past times when summer was fading but no dead leaves lay fallen to rustle warnings of approach. "A September, was it not, when they attacked the Beldings? Poor Sam! Thou wast six that year, Benjamin, and all warrior with no mind to be hustled out of the way—remember?"
"Yes, Mother, I do." A September Sabbath. The Beldings had gone to bring their corn from the outer fields before the service, when Indians ambushed the wagon, raging briefly into the village and away.
The Corys were not members of the church. Joseph Cory had been brought up in the congregation at Springfield, but when he came to Deerfield with his bride in 1688 he had declined either to join or to explain his failure to do so. Adna Cory was a member of the Anglican communion, which had been permitted to exist in Massachusetts for several years. On many Sundays and Lecture Days, in defense against public opinion, the family went to the meeting-house, the boys rigidly enduring the rhymed Psalms and the tedium of Mr. John Williams, who tended to preach in a sort of febrile blank verse.
They had stayed at home on the morning the Beldings were ruined. Ben remembered the explosion of Sabbath quiet into screams and shots, Father snatching the flintlock from its deerhorn rack and Mother gone very white, hurrying himself and four-year-old Reuben up to the garret. Ben was no warrior then—Adna Cory's fantasy developed that later, maybe from Ben's insistence on crowding in front of Reuben because he hoped to see what was going on.
For the Beldings help came too late—the mother and three children killed, the father and two other children taken captive to Canada, another child wounded and left for dead. Later Ben watched a soldier carrying in nine-year-old Sam Belding, who had revived and hidden in the swamp. The thin legs dangled; Sam's head rolled against the soldier's jacket, a bloody mess. Sam lived. Ben at six had understood it adequately: we, and the Others. The village could be furious but not astonished. Sam Belding's head became a commonplace, like any pitiable thing seen long enough for the seeing mind to grow its own scar.
"Now I think of it," Joseph Cory said, "there may have been Abenaki with the French who raided Schenectady fourteen years ago." He left the table to sit near the fire, long-limbed and rangy, tired from a day at the woodpile and at mending harness. He adjusted a log on the flames and yawned, smiling at his cavernous noise, rubbing his palms up over his forehead; a clean and sober man, still young. Ben grew bemused with a fancy that his father's face had become translucent to some other fire behind the hawk-nosed profile, untidy sandy hair, pointed chin, friendly thin mouth, speculative gray eyes. "Those poor fools at Schenectady! That you don't remember, Ben. The meeting voted our palisade as soon as word came from Schenectady—early March, you but a few weeks old. I was an angry man that year as well as proud." His glance at his wife invited sharing of other memories; Adna Cory lifted a dark eyebrow and blushed a little, not quite smiling. "We all labored beyond ourselves to build that stockade, Ben, chopping frozen ground. Had cause—they were caught asleep at Schenectady, those Dutchmen. Men at Albany warned 'em of danger, but they were carrying on some factional quarrel with the people at Albany, and to show how lightly they held any word from that source they put up snowman sentinels. Marry come up!—and went to bed, so the Inj'ans and French walked in through the open gates. Snowmen! They that were butchered in bed were the fortunate. I'll never understand my fellow men. Babes and women cut open and burned alive...."
The Abenaki, Ben knew, had not changed. Climbing out there with Reuben the other day, he had seen the snow, high and hard-crusted against the stockade walls. Beyond the window clouds would be still rushing in their silence. Ben heard his mother saying in distress: "So long ago, Joseph! Let it be."
"Oh, Adna, I do rattle on.... I hear Captain Wells is not content about our palisade. It will stand, so we have men behind it, not snowmen. And I hear the common talk that Dudley should have done better by us. I think he did what he could. What's one minikin village in all the Massachusetts?—but you can't ask the village to see it so, it a'n't human. Dudley's politics and religion cause them to damn him for all else. Should caterpillars ravage the corn again it will be Dudley's fault, same as the poor man keepeth the butter from coming in the chum and is to blame if Goody What's-'er-name hath a flux."
"I pray our Father we never need the stockade." Adna Cory's voice held a drawling note of fatigue or drowsiness, not responding to her husband's labored mirth. She studied Ben; the one long glance, he knew, would tell her whether he needed buttons sewn on or holes mended, whether his face and hands wanted washing, whether his supper had been sufficient, whether he was likely to remember about hearing and prompting Reuben in prayers at bedtime. The glance gave Ben a passing mark and moved on to embrace Reuben. "Mm—sitting there like Mumchance that was hanged for saying nothing! Sleep got thee, Ru? Eyes drawing sand?"
Reuben smiled angelically and stretched, his thin face reflecting her own—small nose, high forehead, pointed ears. He bore an even more emphatic resemblance to Ben, his eyes a darker gray. The ocean must be gray like that, Ben supposed, the gray Atlantic that his father had once glimpsed and never forgotten—speaking of it sometimes like a man who has promised himself to revisit a mystery if the demands of daily existence ever allow it.
Ben knew that a vulnerable quality in Reuben troubled their father. It was easy to wound Reuben. Ben had done it more than once, without intent and with regret in the same moment. No doubt Joseph Cory prayed the boy would grow stronger armor with increase of manhood.
Reuben Cory watched his tall brother lift a candle in its pewter sconce and trim a blob of wax with his thumbnail. Ben's hand, firm below the flame and golden, brought Reuben the amazement of a miracle, a thing never seen before. A familiar knife-scar on the forefinger—even that was new, though Reuben recalled quite well how Ben had got it ignobly a year ago by losing his patience when Jesse Plum was showing him how to whittle a maple stick. A text from the prescribed Scriptural reading sounded in Reuben's mind, as happened so often when he was startled, delighted or disturbed: I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. But it seemed to the boy that something here was false. The thought might be dutiful and correct, yet was he actually praising the Lord for having made Ben beautiful? Why, hardly. Rather he knew, as with Puritan skill and insistence he searched his heart, that he was more of a mind to praise Ben for being himself—which was heresy, and of course absurd. Uncle John's letter must be to blame.
The marvel of Ben's hand moved out of the concentrated light. Reuben rose, aware that Ben wished him to come along without a fuss. The letter, lying open as his father had left it on the table, pulled at him. His mother would not be pleased to have him study it. In spite of that, in spite of his own uneasiness, his eyes probed swiftly at it, and hungrily. Mr. Kenny had used a brownish ink; light slanting from a new angle as Ben moved the candle transfigured the writing to iridescent gold: It is a sorrie thing that a Man should refrayne from speaking his Minde.... He hath his Light, so let mee live by mine owne. Reuben's eyes snatched a few lines further on, words his father had not read aloud: Nor no man, by threat of Damnation nor Promiss of Paradise, shall ever betray me into the Folly of hating my Naybor, whether in the name of Princes who are but Men or in the name of a God I knowe not.
Reuben turned away clumsily, shocked and confused. It was clear why his father had read no more aloud. His mother might have offered no comment at all; but.... Ben was regarding him kindly, perhaps puzzled, across the hot flower of the candle. "Come on, Ru——" and Ben's voice cracked woefully, baritone to treble and back to a rumble.
Looking then at none of them, Reuben could feel certain lines of force: their mother's tender amusement at the cracking of Ben's voice, and Ben's helpless annoyance at that amusement, and from the other seat by the fireplace a quiet contemplation neither amused nor much concerned with judgment. And here at the center of the lines of force, here within himself, a wonder much like a pain just below the ribs, that anyone so admired and respected as Uncle John could be such a tremendous heretic. A God I know not?—that shook the ground. And Reuben was certain that, for the present at least, he could not speak to his father about that fretful thing under the ribs.
Nor even to Ben.
Ben noticed that Reuben was making less snickering circumstance than usual of diving under the covers in the chill of the garret. Both had wriggled into dark security before Ben remembered that Ru had not said prayers at all—for him almost unprecedented—nor had Ben himself done so. Uneasily Ben decided to let it go this once. Reuben had lapsed into heavy stillness and would certainly resent a jab in the back. As for himself, he could pray silently in bed: Father and Mother both said so.
So far as Ben knew, Reuben was sleeping as well as ever these nights, starting dutifully on his own side buried to the nose, but later twitching in sleep, flinging himself about—frequently plagued, Ben knew, by terrifying dreams. Often, when he was well down in sleep, his arm would arrive on Ben's chest with a hard impatient flop; then, usually, quiet. Ben could not remove the arm without waking him, which might bring on an hour's talking-spell. Ben enjoyed those, but on these February nights Ben wanted to sleep, and an unfamiliar difficulty in it was annoying him like a sore tooth.
Was he a coward, that he should die a little whenever some obscure night noise resembled distant shouts or gunfire? What was bravery anyway, and why could you never be certain you possessed it?
Had he stumbled into sin without knowing it? He could uncover no kernel of serious iniquity. All winter he had been rigidly good, because (Father said, Mother said) his brother looked up to him and needed the example of virtue. Yet they ought to know—Mother surely did—that Reuben was the nearer to grace.
No angel of course. Ru's normally loving temper could be submerged in sullen withdrawal or red-faced wrath. The brothers had quarreled a few times; only a few, since for Ben the experience was too shattering, turning the natural world upside down in loss and destruction. Nowadays Ben thought he knew how to read the danger signs and head off an explosion.
It could not be sin that held him wakeful. More likely fear—listening for the town watch to become a voice instead of a crunch of boots. Ben had fallen into the habit of noting that squeak of leather on snow, then straying into some waking dream in which a stern Ben Cory with a thinner mouth played a heroic part or died interestingly.
He could enter other waking dreams, the only region where a warm personification of desire is unfailingly obliging, never giggles secretly with other girls, never snuffles from a cold in the head or talks back. More than a year ago Ben had suffered a three months' obsession with a tangible human being named Judith. He saw it now as a childish aberration of the far past—the girl's father was the tithingman; one must draw the line somewhere. He had seen Judith hardly at all this winter, being no longer obliged to attend the little Deerfield school; when he did glimpse her he was heart-free. But no flesh-and-blood creature had superseded her, and often in the waking dreams his lively collaborator looked like Judith, as she said and did those shameless things which were saved (he hoped) from sinfulness by the covering assumption: We'd be married, of course, before we did anything like that, or that. Ben had spoken to the tangible Judith perhaps a dozen times during his obsession, as the occasions of school made it flat-out necessary; to Judith of the dreams he spoke at length, wittily, memorably, relishing her praise, her sharing of all his views, as she whispered under his ear in the dark and Ben could imagine he knew the sliding of a silken thigh and searching fingers.
Dreams of sleep followed no such intelligent direction. Ben experienced few of them, for usually his sleep was profound. The wench who did once recently delight him in one of these bore no resemblance to Judith or anyone. Ben had managed to glimpse little more of her than a pert earlobe and tumbling hair. The agony of climax had not even ended when he woke with wet loins and the exasperation of not quite remembering. Better and worse than waking dreams; worse because waking demolished them as full sunshine kills a rainbow, and better because they left him in something like temporary peace as no waking fantasy ever did.
Aware of the near warmth of Reuben, of Father and Mother sleeping downstairs, and beyond the snow-burdened roof the hard great glitter of February night, Ben could also discover aloneness, a cool splendor of thought wide-ranging, since a mind free of daytime bounds need recognize few others, sometimes none at all.
Did Heaven and Hell fill everything beyond the earth? Well, how could they? Something else must include them, if only emptiness.
At the ancient game of contemplating time, Ben found no great alarm in staring down either direction of forever, while the brain refused to conceive an end or a beginning, but too much of this wearied him like an effort to grasp air in the hand. He could not follow those speculations without coming to something like a blank wall. Possibly God put it there; possibly if God put the wall there men should stay away from it.
On such cold nights, while Ben wrestled not too urgently with eternity, the house might achieve a transitory perfection of silence. Then a contracting beam would set off a snap like gunshot. It could be real gunshot; after thin worry of listening Ben would know it was not. He might hear his father downstairs sigh and turn over in the four-poster that would not quite accommodate his long legs. Down in the fireplace an ember might pop in the banked-up ash—like a knocking, like floorboards disturbed by an otherwise noiseless footfall. Out in the shadows a village dog might bark, and Ranger in the shed boom back at him. Sometimes the gray cat Bonny, who liked to come smokefooting in and curl on the boys' bed, would take to snoring lightly. If it was a night when Jesse Plum's narrow ruddy nose was troubling him, Jesse in his lean-to might imitate anything from a waterfall to a hog-killing. Or Ben would hear the hollow baritone of an owl, the lamenting of a wolf, the nearly human scream of a mountain cat. But true silence also might arrive, and it would seem to Ben that if he could himself be silent as the dark, permitting no least sound of breath, there might come to him another moment of revelation such as he had once known—he could not quite recall the time—when he had dropped on his back in the grass, and looking up, had discovered the brilliant life of new birch leaves between him and the immortal blue of spring.
Reuben was wakeful too, but sought to conceal it by lying motionless even after his back began to itch, since the desire for talk was at present not in him. For a while he was both hurt and relieved that Ben had not reminded him to pray. But terror was latent in this; his mind winced away from it and sought the consolation of a decision: as soon as Ben should fall asleep—and Ben usually snored a little—he would get up and stand by the window and atone for the omission by offering up a better prayer than usual, one in fact that he preferred Ben not to hear, since he particularly intended to ask God's blessing on Ben himself. Once the decision was reached the comfort of it was genuine, allowing his body to relax as fear dissolved away. Unaware of the surreptitious approach of sleep, he found himself recalling things far away, wherever it is that yesterdays go, and at the same time wondered why his mind should so becloud itself with forgetting. He wanted—after a time quite eagerly wanted to recreate a certain day, the day when Jesse Plum and the Indian Meco brought in a lion. As he invited it the recollection brightened, yet remained under a nimbus of the not-remembered.
Reuben knew Jesse Plum's history in a general way. The old man had arrived from England as an indentured servant some time in the early 1670's, a long-jawed hulk with certain fixed ideas, one of which was that nobody loved him any more than you could put in your eye and see never the worse. After his first term of servitude he had drifted to Springfield and cemented himself to Grandfather Matthew Cory's family with the suctorial power of the meek. Reuben knew that in the same year when his father and mother were married and came to Deerfield, Grandfather Cory died, and after his death Grandmother Rachel Cory had no place for a godless sot; her son at Deerfield casually inherited Jesse, and Jesse did nobly, working for his keep and a trifle over, aware that Goodman Joseph Cory could seldom be stern toward anyone but himself.
Jesse's thin nose, wedged between gently wandering milky blue eyes, possessed an intuition for alcohol, as a good bloodhound's nose will hold him firm on the trail. Jesse never rebelled nor complained. His mention of the Pain in his Back was simply a special kind of breathing with words, his muscle the sort of unlovely boot-leather that can always beat out one more day's wear. He tended to be somewhere else at plowing-time, and Reuben had seen him approach overt emotion in the presence of a woodpile, but he never failed at harvest—Jesse was doing his best and said so himself. A neighbor, Benoni Stebbins, observing Jesse's slowly receding back, once declared in Reuben's hearing that some men are born tired—the charitable heart can only hope they'll find time for enough rest before Judgment.
Jesse talked most colorfully when resting; Jesse was a man of memories. In youth he had known the Great Plague of 1665 and the fire that laid London flat the following year; of these he almost never spoke, but he loved to croak on by the hour with less sorrowful recollections of the motherland.
The Indian Meco must have met inquiries about his true name with a bubble and purr of Algonkian syllables inconvenient for English tongues. Reuben had almost forgotten him until tonight, and calculated in the dark: that was four years ago, the day they brought in a lion. Reuben could then find Meco's image—scrawnily tall, gnarled, bald, the softer wrinkles of his eroded face fallen in from a bulging forehead and stupendous hooked nose. Meco wore a cast-off English bodice as a favorite breechclout. A Pocumtuck, he was believed to have claimed in his bruised English. If that was true he had reason for a desolate old age: the Mohawks almost annihilated that nation in 1664, and the remnant was further cut down in King Philip's War of 1675-'76 against the English. Not too small a war—Joseph Cory remembered it as a background thunder of his own childhood. The Indians burned Springfield; at Deerfield an innocent small stream earned the name of Bloody Brook and bore it still. The war ended when Sachem Metacomet of the Wampanoags, called King Philip, was betrayed by one of his own people and shot, and most of the survivors of his tribe were sold by the irritated Saints of Massachusetts into West Indian slavery.
Meco lived and foraged God knew where—somewhere in the highlands beyond the Pocumtuck River. At least Reuben had always seen him appear from that direction, an undecipherable message out of the region of sundown and west wind.
The Day of the Lion—midsummer of four years past, so Ben had been ten and Reuben a little past eight: the year the century turned. Jesse Plum vanished before sunrise; by afternoon the household grew convinced he had wandered off with Meco. The two satisfied each other in conversation, an affair of huge parturient silences, a drink, a further scanning of horizons—all this a genuine mental mining rewarded in the end by the substantial nugget of a grunt.
When the family sat at supper one of the Hoyt boys danced in, expanded with joy, announcing: "They killed a catamount!" The youth was swooping on when Joseph Cory asked: "Boy—who did? When, pray, and how, may a man arise to inquire?"
"Well, they killed a catamount," said the younger Hermes, and fled, not wishing to miss any more of the triumph which was entering the north gate of the stockade, collecting startled admirers. A progress of two, Jesse Plum and Meco, bearing on a pole between them the corpse of a mountain cat. They were both drunk as David's sow. Respectfully they dumped the tawny ruin in the dooryard.
"In the hills," Jesse Plum declaimed. "Yah!" He waved (Goodman Cory's) gun approximately east, toward the Pocumtuck Range. "Now he'll slay no more cattle." He set the gun down with care. "Why, he might've attackted the boys, then I couldn't never 've forgave myself, no never." Jesse lifted knotty hands defying all powers that could threaten the Cory children, and Meco began a stately shuffle, perhaps the tentative offer of a victory dance, but found himself in the wrong mood. Smiling at everyone, Jesse explained: "'S the Lord's guidance."
Father asked: "There's been cattle killed?"
Jesse was immediately hurt and sulky. "Not never again by this beast—heart-shot he be." He nodded where he thought Meco was probably standing. "Good man—whoreson good man there."
Reuben could remember seeing and hearing all that through a doorway partially filled by his mother's grace; he could remember squeezing in beside her, her arm dropping on his shoulder, her finger twisting in his hair, which he still wore quite long in those days. He could remember her bubbling with suppressed laughter. Ben was already outside, standing slim beside Father, contemplating Jesse's performance with adult gravity.
The carcass lay at some distance, and a damp east wind was blowing toward the river, but even from the first that lion had not looked right. Bloated and not bloody; flies were settling. "Oh!" Mother said—"thankful heart! It hath a—a little stink."
Meco was not as drunk as Jesse. He spread dark fingers in resignation. "Big stink," he amended, and strode off into rainy twilight, leaving Jesse to salvage what he might of glory.
So far as Reuben recalled, Meco never came back. After he had gone—but now at twelve Reuben could not bring the rest easily to mind.
Father had not found it so amusing. Jesse must have been obliged to bury the carrion and spend sober hours longing for invisibility. In following days, no doubt, whenever Jesse joined a gathering, say at the ordinary or leaning on a fence or discussing a bottle behind a shed, someone would make a soft faraway mention of catamounts, and Jesse would be surrounded by that shattering New England laughter which is performed without moving a muscle of the face or emitting any sound of any kind.
Then, within the obscurity of this last night of February, Reuben did remember more. Shame had stirred within him for Jesse Plum, who had always owned the status of a friend, old but accessible and a spinner of tales. Jesse knew everything, Reuben had once supposed—wild secret things, winds and weather signs, the enigma of women's flesh and one's own, charms against disaster, skin-prickling histories of what witches might do to cause it, and endless gaudy tales of England in the days of King Charles. If you could believe Jesse Plum—Reuben had, once—his youth before the Plague would have terrified Marlborough and made a stallion blush. Jesse could tell of monsters too—basilisk, mandrake, unicorn, sea serpent. Jesse liked to hint murkily that once during the miserable Atlantic passage to the colonies he had glimpsed a Something rising from the bowels of the deep, and never quite got around to saying what it was. He could explain the simpler stories written by furred feet in the snow, by iron bear-claws high on a tree trunk. From a blur and a spot of blood he could make you see a mouse becoming a midnight dinner for an owl, and then set your spine wriggling with a hint that maybe it was not exactly an owl but like one. For a long time—long anyway to Reuben Cory—the brothers had settled many private arguments by: "We can ask Jesse."
Drunk or no, it had not been right that a tall grown man, an old man, should act the clown. It had not felt right to watch Jesse with the dead lion when his sweating grayish face turned lost and vague and crumpled in a stupid chuckle of apology.
And then as Meco stalked away, Ben had looked around, not smiling but startled, awed—clearly aware, as Reuben was, of an astonished sharing. The Day of the Lion was perhaps the first day when Reuben understood that Ben was a person too. Before that, an image worshipped, slightly feared, not consciously loved. Afterward, a separate self, a brightly visible human being with gray eyes. On that rainy evening four years ago, Reuben now remembered, he had soon looked away from Ben's warm stare, not quite able to bear it, and had resolved in secret: I'll never quarrel with him again. The resolution had been broken of course, once or twice....
Ben Cory dwelt in a natural multiplicity of worlds. He could be active in the world of Deerfield's daily occasions: the reasonable labors on his father's farm grant; the school remembered from last year, where Ru's offhand brilliance at the piddling studies was now making him disliked, and Ben no longer there to prevent the occasional bloody nose or comfort him after a pedagogic birching; the not-friendly church; the clumsy kindness of some boys and girls of the village, and the mindless, furtively obscene cruelty of others; nearer to him sometimes than any of these, the quiet land itself in the flowing of the seasons, the smells of summer morning and of the milky breath of cattle, the open fields and marshes, the frame of low hills and the all-surrounding presence of maple and beech and oak and pine, the wilderness.
Ben knew the unique world his mother's presence created, where without much discomfort he was on his good behavior. With another sort of good behavior he could enjoy the world of being-with-Father, one often lit with unexpected mirth and kindness.
He possessed a sense of the outer world: an important Massachusetts, a half-mythical Canada inhabited hatefully by the Others, a New York not very real, an England thought of as Home—in a perfunctory way because of the ocean that made England, for a Deerfield boy, only slightly nearer than the moon. From his father Ben gained some clear perception of the war, the giants France and England raging over old hates and new advantages under two sick and stubborn sovereigns, Queen Anne of England and the doddering Sun King Louis XIV of France—yet the ocean itself was more actual to Ben than England or the war, for Ben's own father had seen it once on a boyhood visit to Dorchester. He said, if your ear lay close on the pillow at night, the murmuring you heard then was not unlike the moaning of breakers on sand, and why shouldn't a boy (said Joseph Cory) send himself to sleep by listening? The sound was eternal, Joseph Cory said—somewhere, always, ocean was breaking on the sand.
North of Deerfield the greater wilderness was a world inviting no one, a forest too old for imagining: green rounded hills secret in distance, swamps, valleys obscure, streams of unknown sources. That belonged to the bear and mountain lion, to the deer with midnight eyes and the comic grandeur of moose; to the rabbit—bouncing bread and butter of the wilderness—and the fox and weasel who followed him; to the down-footed lynx and quiet-sliding rattlesnake. Hunters, trappers and fur-traders knew something of that land, and had for nearly a hundred years.
The Abenaki knew everything about it—green depths of spring and balsam-pungent air, ardent stillness of forest summer afternoon, autumn explosions of gold and scarlet, and all the ways for men on an errand of killing to travel through it in silence when the ground was white and the evergreens bowed down and the northern lights a wavering of madness between them and the February moon.
Ben was welcome in yet another world as no one else was: a world that existed only when Reuben willed it.
Ru's talking-spells began when he was about six and able to find hidden hens' nests in the shed, to the sharp-faced ladies' continuing indignation. At that time the Corys still maintained the yellow-necked rooster brought as a youth from Springfield (senile and resembling Louis XIV in other ways but named Sir Pudden) who believed himself master of the shed and hated Jesse Plum's boots. He and Ranger and Bonny knew all about the nests. Ranger avoided them from a rigid sense of honor, with only a pensive lift of the white eyebrows in his black face. Sir Pudden stood about in glamorous attitudes—second nature if you have twelve wives, all of them cloth-heads. Bonny entered the shed in those days on a moral tiptoe, never certain whether the armed truce with Sir Pudden was still in force. Sir Pudden, to Reuben's extreme sorrow, regretfully became soup in the year 1699. Even sorrow was grist for Ru's talk-mill.
Bemused by the chickens' personalities, Reuben elaborated names for all of them—Martha, Patience, Hoobah, Binega, many others. Every new batch of fluff-balls drove him to a dither of vicarious maternity. At night he kept Ben awake with flowing tales in which these names acquired quasi-human characters who could range up and down in a special world with horizons of Reuben's choosing.
In the conventionally documented world nobody ever chopped William Stoughton into small red gobbets. That vinegar-blooded Saint, deputy governor during the witchcraft frenzy of 1692 and again later, died in 1701, but not in the small red gobbets Duchess Hoobah made of him in one of Reuben's narratives. The conventionally documented Stoughton would not have been interested to learn how an obscure Joseph Cory, remembering 1692, had loathed him out loud in the presence of wide-eared children. It didn't matter. The past of one, or two, or two thousand years, the fluid present, the future that can exist only in myth, all came to focus in Reuben's here-and-now, in the theme and variations of a small clean mouth chirping in the dark.
Ben seldom suppressed the talk. He liked to offer details of adult wisdom, or new words that Reuben would roll with relish on the tongue. The stories gained in sophistication, especially during the last three or four years, when the boy had developed a taste for listening to Jesse Plum. Princesses appeared; decapitations were limited to villains, wizards and Frenchmen. Allegory too: the tales no longer rambled but were innervated by unifying purpose, and Ben knew rather plainly that he was receiving gifts from a mind altogether separate and unlike his own. Ru also acquired some tact, and awareness of the times when Ben preferred to sleep.
If he itched with questions, though, and found Ben reluctant to answer, Ru might take advantage of his smaller size, punch and prod, try to smother Ben with the covers or nag after the forbidden tickle-spot at the edge of the ribs. He could hurt if he gripped a handful of hair, but he generally managed to stop short of open war. Ben imagined, sometimes with uneasiness, that his brother could study his mind, feel with his nerves, control him as a small man controls a big horse with wit alone. After such assaults, secondary eruptions would demonstrate that the little wretch was still awake—pinches, pokes, muffled war whoops, prohibited words: original sin taking its own time to simmer down.
Nowadays Ru's stories would be delivered sotto voce, lest Father shout up telling the boys to go to sleep. The hushed story-teller's voice illuminated the inner world, making of the night a sheltering room. Ben would be more aware of his brother than if darkness had not hidden him—the warmth, the harmless small-boy smell of him, above all the voice and its comic or startling or grandiose inventions....
Ben sighed in the exasperation of insomnia, and slid out of bed to stand barefoot in the cold, saying a proper prayer in an undertone. His mother preferred to kneel, but admitted it was wise to conform to surrounding custom lest one forget in a public place. Puritans did not kneel, regarding it as a mark of popery. Faintly relieved, Ben walked to the garret window to glance into the winter night, wondering if a dark moving thing he saw was that it ought to be. Yes—the watch, on his rounds. Ben could make out the black stem line of a jutting flintlock. The shadowy important man marched along the northern limit of the stockade, passing out of sight to Ben's left behind the meeting-house.
"Ben, what ails thee?—can't sleep?"
"Restless." Ben stumbled back into bed shivering, squirming down away from the cold. "Go back to sleep—sorry I disturbed thee." It must be after midnight, Ben thought, and all well. But as he tried to settle himself, inviting sleep with a better conscience, the snow outside the palisade, pressed high against the logs, nagged at him like the thought of a broken lock on a back door.
Chapter Two
Ben surged up on a stiff arm, listening. The uproar had been in the shed, he thought. Maybe Ranger had broken his rope and run out. Now Ben could hear only the bumping sickly turbulence of his own heart. In a dream he had been flying; the dream had betrayed him into this agony of listening where no sound was, and fear grew over him like frost on a stone image.
"Arm!"
That noise was part of the dream. In the dream, faceless beings had been shouting, not willing that Ben should fly.
Then he knew the cry was the summons of the watch in a world of no dreaming—a few rods away, near the north end of the palisade. It flared, a jet of terror in darkness, and died.
The covers dropped. Cold slapped and squeezed Ben, but he could not move until some sound released him from this frozen waiting.
It came, a yelling that soared upward like fire swallowing dry pine, throbbing yells made by only one kind of creature alive.
A different voice pierced the clamor, snarling in search of authority: "À droit, vous! Là-bas! Enfoncez les portes!" And a wild drawled afterthought: "Prisonniers!" The voice was smothered by the yells and a whinnying of some other man's laughter.
Footsteps pounded on snow. Steel assaulted wood. Then—Reuben still sleeping—the flintlocks began to talk, the near ones a dry thundering, the farther ones like slamming doors.
Ben could move. He reeled up, shocked into panic, thrashing against sullen-clinging bedclothes. "Ru!" Ben punched and shook him. "God damn it, wake up!" Reuben made an empty noise. "Raid! It's the French!" Reuben leaped under his hand, comprehending. "Here!—your britches. Your shoes—no, bugger it, these're mine, where'd you put yours?" Ben slammed his forehead on the foot of the bed, searching; his nightshirt tripped him and he flung it off. A floor-splinter lanced fire into his knee. He heard two thuds, one below the window, the other in the same instant on the opposite wall. "Ru!"
"Leave off shouting, Ben."
"That bullet——"
"What bullet?"
"Never mind. Will you tell me where your shoes are?"
Reuben could not answer. Joseph Cory's voice fumed at the foot of the stairs: "Come down! Coats—don't forget your coats!"
Ben shouted: "We're coming!" He pursued the shoes under the fallen bed-cover. He found his own breeches and shirt, then his hunting-knife where it always rested on the table by the bed.
Orange glory beyond the window marvelously bloomed, flooding Reuben's angelic face and thin naked body moving toward the square of light. "Why," said Reuben—"why, the cods're burning us!"
"God's mercy, get away from that window!"
He had to pull Reuben from it; force the shoes on his feet and find armholes for him. Father was calling again. Ben hustled his brother to the head of the stairs. "Stay here. I'll get the coats."
The room shimmered. Red-black ghosts in a swirling jig hid the coats, defying Ben to come get them and fall on his face. He got them; then he too was drawn against his will to the window.
The fire danced on his left, the heart of it out of sight—west and south, beyond the training field, the Hawks house perhaps. North, near the meeting-house, a confusion of shapes under gunfire was twisting toward some climax. Five fire-tinted men broke away, soundless to Ben, moving with apparent slowness. One leaped forward in mid-stride to drop in the white; his arms sought each other above his head, scooping the snow as if he would embrace it, or climb like a hurt bug up the side of a world for him overturned.
The others disregarded him, plunging toward the Cory house. Reuben was trying to speak. "I'm here, Ru. We must go down—could be trapped." Reuben mumbled something. "What?"
"Ben, I must——"
"God damn it, don't be looking for the pot, use the floor, if they burn us who's to care?" Ben called again to his father, but his voice was swallowed by a bang. Not his father's gun—Jesse Plum's musket, a piece of trash the old man had picked up at third or fourth hand, likely to shoot anywhere but forward. "Come on, Ru!"
"I'm sorry."
"Your coat. Here—I'll button it for you."
"Ben, I didn't pray tonight, nor I didn't forget neither."
"What? Oh, put on your coat!"
"I didn't pray."
Ben forced the boy's arms into the coat and lifted him, amazed at his own strength, at the sureness of his feet on invisible stair-treads. "Ru, you deceive yourself."
"Mr. Williams saith that without prayer——"
"Ru, be still!"
Jesse's wretched gun slammed again, a different sound, a spattering clang, followed by the stridency of Jesse cursing and weeping.
Ben's mouth brushed Reuben's cheek; he tried to say something reassuring. How could even a child suppose the disaster was on his account? What of all those in Deerfield who did pray? He supposed Reuben would presently recover his wits, and set him down, but held him still in the hollow of his arm.
No true dark prevailed here in the entry facing south. The front room's west window admitted the glare of the burning, showing the empty four-poster. Ben's father was a specter in a nightshirt, cursing himself for not having locked the shutters. "Where's Mother?"
"In the hall." That was the name for the rear room, kitchen-parlor-workroom, heart of the little house. "Go to her, Reuben." Ben let him go. The brass face of the clock blurred in its tall oaken cabinet; Ben could not make it out. His time-sense said it was near dawn.
Outside the front door voices set up a gobbling not in French. Joseph Cory yelled: "I hear you, God damn you!" And to Ben, quietly: "See to Jesse, I think his gun blowed. Find out if you will."
If you will—he had never spoken so to Ben before. Ben groped through the doorway between the rooms; Reuben was shivering there alone. Ben found his mother and Jesse Plum in the hall, Jesse swinging his gaunt arms, one bare, the other trailing a wisp of nightshirt. The old man was fending her off. "Don't impede me, Goody Cory! 'Tis a nothing—leave me fetch my axe!" He lurched clear of her helpless hands, and Ben glimpsed his right side where the nightshirt had been blasted away—cooked meat. A piece of the gun-barrel stuck from a crack in the wall. Jesse seemed unaware of pain.
"Let him be, Mother. Come away from the windows!" She heard, understood, came to him. Jesse plunged into the woodshed and returned with his axe dangling.
"A nothing!" Jesse hooted. The little blue eyes burned above a mad smile. "I'll hold this side, Goody Cory. They won't pass, not by me. I'll see their guts cheese and the dogs eating it." He raved on. Ben hurried back to his father.
"Look!"
Only a blot with eyes, at the west window. In wide fluid motion like the final leap of a cat, Joseph Cory swung his gun and fired. The thing toppled away. Below the ridiculous starred hole in the glass a choking body began a gradual dying.
"You got him."
"I got him," said Joseph Cory, and turned on his son a sickened face Ben had never known. "What of Jesse?" The choking continued. Goodman Cory's voice climbed, beating down that noise: "Speak up, boy!"
"His gun did blow, he's hurt but not down. He fetched his axe. I think he knows what he's doing."
Goodman Cory reloaded the gun. "Ben, I'm weak." The choking became a bubbling squeal. Goodman Cory stumbled toward the window.
Ben's mother was kneeling in the doorway between the rooms, Reuben clutched in her arms, her cheek against his head. She was praying. The light of the fires showed Ben her moving lips, her dark eyes that now and then sought for him, too. Goodman Cory had halted short of the window, crucified by uncertainty, the flintlock a stiff burden. "Ben," he said—"Ben, hear me...."
The crash of an axe against the oaken door blotted out at last the clamor of a man strangling in his own blood. But Ben could still hear his mother praying.
"A stone axe, not steel," said Joseph Cory, and nodded to Ben as one man to another. "No good against our oak."
"Will you shoot through the door?"
"... and forgive us our trespasses ..."
"Nay—only waste a bullet. Ben, thou art a man—if I'm lost, take care of thy mother and Reuben. Be ready. Readiness—I mean alway—later—all thy life—readiness, wherein I've failed."
"You've not failed."
"No time for kindness." He shook Ben's arm. "Ben—if God liveth he is far away."
"... for thine is the kingdom ..."
"Ben, hear me," said Goodman Cory. "I say God is far away, no whit concerned with man."
"Deliver us," said Adna Cory—"deliver us from evil...."
"I wanted learning, Ben. Find more than I did."
The good oak was barely quivering under the petulant fury of the stone axe. "But Father, you know so much——"
"I? Learning—oh, a key to so many doors! Why, I never found but a few, sniffing at the threshold, a fool, a bumpkin. And Reuben must find learning too." He pulled Ben close, crouching, whispering: "Ben, hear me. I fear for Reuben. I pray you, keep him from being too much wounded. I can't understand him, Ben. Thou art mine own, I know thee—while he—nay, I haven't words...."
"But Father, you will——"
The pounding ceased. Sudden footsteps thumped rhythmically on snow. Something different smashed against the oak with the gross dullness of the invincible. Goodman Cory pushed his son into the front room. "The devils have found a log. Why, Ben, I shall live if I may."
It was an honest door, three-ply, studded with nails; the log ram thundered five times before that barrier yielded. Then Ben's eyes winced at high-crested devil-shadows surging in the orange glare.
Goodman Cory wasted no shot on the two who rushed the entrance. The muzzle of his gun found their heads, snake-swift, aimed like the course of a bullet. They collapsed in a mess of legs and arms. With thumping violence a hatchet skidded across the floor.
Ben saw his father clamber over the stunned enemy and past the wreckage of oaken boards. He heard his father shout in a voice so searching that all the roaring confusion, magnified with the door down and a sudden cold wind in the gap crying, was momentarily a silence: "Did you come here to murder children?"
A French officer ten yards away in the corrupted snow gracefully lifted his flintlock and shot Goodman Cory through the heart.
He said: "Mother, you must not shield me." But in her prayers she did not hear him.
The room before him spread out as a mass of darkness holding two oblong mouths of Hell, yet from moment to moment as his mother prayed, Reuben was aware, coldly aware that those two hell-gates were simply windows of the house where he lived: the west window displaying an absurd, pretty hole—who'd have thought a bullet could go through without shattering all the glass?—the south window a fainter gleaming, for its shutters were partly closed and the glare of the fires came upon it indirectly—beautiful in fact, rather like first light of a red-sky morning; rather like——
Wind struck him, rushing through the ravished door, and Reuben thought: Now! "Mother, let me go! Let me——" but her cheek was heavy and hot against his head; her arms would not understand; he could not hurt her by struggling to free himself.
Someone, maybe Father, shouted a dim word or two outside and was answered by a blast of gunfire. In the room behind them Jesse Plum raved. Mother, let me speak to you—Reuben understood he had not said it aloud.
"Deliver us from evil—deliver us from evil...."
It was coming.
Reuben had known it, waited for it, now watched with no astonishment as the thing on all fours lurched obscenely from the entry into the front room and fumbled about, snorting, searching for the axe.
Reuben caught his mother's wrists and pushed her arms away—no help for it. Amazed at their clinging strength, he was more amazed that he had the power to overcome it, and without harming her. He was free and not free.
He could drive himself a few steps forward, but it seemed that the air between him and the thing on all fours had thickened to monstrous glue. His lungs must toil to fill themselves. He located the thing again as it crouched and began to rise. With all his force, with a sense of huge achievement, he spat on the face of it.
Reuben felt it at first simply as a brutal and foul indignity when the thing, rising to a vast height, laid a hand flat across his face and lifted him so, with nothing but iron thumb and finger gouging under his cheekbones, and flung him sprawling. He struck the bed, and during some long sluggish course of time, two or three seconds perhaps, he secured a bedpost and hauled himself upright, finding that the firelight from the west window was now behind him, and everything was changed. He must get back across the room.
The thing towered to the ceiling between him and his mother, who still knelt in the doorway and still prayed. He must get back across the room. She would not look up. It might be she did not see, did not know the stone axe was swinging down. He must go back across the room.
Reuben felt the scream wrenched out of his throat: he himself had nothing to do with it. He was certain then that he was running back across the room. This room or some other, in this world or some other.
Ben moved into the light, stumbling over the ravished door, falling, gathering himself in one motion to go on, to kneel beside the unresponding mouth, knowing that his father was dead. His mind retained an ice-fire shrewdness, a corner-of-the-eye intelligence understanding the smoking houses, the running, the shrieking, the fur-capped Frenchman who was reloading, and shouting too in foreign-sounding English: "Surrender!"—was that what the fool was yammering? To Ben he appeared a stupid and trivial man with babyish pop eyes—couldn't the fellow understand that Goodman Cory was dead?
Ben was on his feet, his father's gun dull and heavy—loaded, too, he realized. The French officer fired, clumsily this time, and a hornet-thing of no importance muttered past Ben's ear.
In the house, someone screamed.
Ben turned his back on the Frenchman dreamily. "Acquire learning?" Delayed knowledge of the scream penetrated him like blown flame. A man in the entry was struggling to rise. Automatically, with no conscious anger, Ben clubbed the gun against the black head, catching the Indian smell of acorn grease and paint. Should he now shoot through the deerskin jacket?—no, because he must be already dead. Ben had heard and felt the splintering of bone. And anyway this man was only one, and there had been two.
The fires continued in his eyes and shifted to blackness. Here in the front room he couldn't see. He knew his mother or maybe Reuben had screamed. He understood the blackness was in his head, a vertigo, and he called: "I'm coming to you, Mother!" The blackness dissolved, giving back the room. He must look there, where she was lying, and the spilled blood, and the boy kneeling beside her saying quite softly over and over: "Mother—Mother...."
Out in the hall a muffled hammering went on and on. Ben explained aloud carefully: "I will go and find out."
Jesse Plum's nightshirt still flapped on him in strips. He was bringing down his axe repeatedly, though the Indian's head lay nearly separate from the trunk. Ben stood quiet, compelled to watch until the head broke from a band of skin and rolled on the drenched hearthstones, the forehead displaying the gash of Jesse's first blow.
Jesse squinted at Ben, a puzzled and exhausted old man. His hairy legs shivered, kneecaps dancing. "I was too late—plague and fire! Oh, the fair things I looked for in this land! Gold—the Fountain—yah, the Fountain, the things they'll tell a man! Benjamin, it be'n't right, it be'n't right...." Reuben was still speaking, too; the empty silver monotone reached Jesse's consciousness and he pulled himself to erectness. "Goodm'n Cory?"
"They've shot him, Jesse."
"Dead?"
Ben did not speak. Jesse lurched to the east window. "This side's clear. Fetch your brother, Ben. I'll get you out, I will so. Hatfield—Cap'n Wells' fort anyway. Hurry—fetch him, Ben!"
Reuben writhed away from Ben's touch. "Jesse, help me with him!"
Jesse caught him up. Reuben fought in dumb fury, but Jesse held him fast ignoring that, and rushed through the woodshed, opening the door at the far end with a thrust of a horny foot. "Stay close, Ben!" They were stumbling across snow trampled by the flight of others, in the shadow of their own house that stood between them and the fires; then out of that shadow toward a beginning of winter dawn. Men and women were running about here, unrecognizable in wounds and terror and nakedness, people Ben had known all his life, swept into the panic of a crushed anthill. The east wall of the stockade rose cruelly high. There Jesse set Reuben down. The boy swung about mechanically, walking back toward the fires. Ben grabbed and slapped him; he only stared.
Jesse snatched off the wreck of his nightshirt and twisted it into a cord, running it through the belt of Reuben's breeches. "Go first, Ben—I'll h'ist you."
Ben swarmed up somehow. Jesse yelled: "Drop! You must catch him." Then Jesse was up too, clutching the palisade with his knees, hauling on the makeshift rope before Reuben's groping hand could discard it. Jesse gained a grip on Reuben's armpit, and Ben flung himself down. "Ready, Jesse!" But instead of letting Ben catch his brother, the old man leaped with him, turning in mid-air so that he fell under Reuben, who sprawled free and ripped loose the cord.
Ben grabbed the boy's arm. Jesse reeled up on his knees. "Get to Hatfield! I'm undone. The filthy papists've done me in."
Reuben had at least delivered himself from his witless trance. He tugged to free his arm and wailed: "Let me go!"
"Get up, Jesse! You can't sit there so."
Jesse shook his head, a stubborn child. "I stink. There's men fail at everything—you don't understand." He whimpered, trying to cover his crotch. "I be naked, can't you see? You go on. I'm done."
"Let me go, Ben! Let me go back! Let me go, damn you!"
Ben's eyes were watering from the cold and from a billow of smoke the wind flung down on them. "God damn it, Jesse, you think we'd abandon you? Get up!"
"Plague and fire...."
"Get up!"
"Oh, I—I will, Ben. It's the old liquor rising up in me. Ben, I couldn't help that, it was on me to drink. Leave me gather my wits. O Lord Jesus, is it coming day already? I will get up, Ben, don't fret." And he did, jerky in motion like an ill-made doll, willing to follow....
Some confusion of battle still fumed by Captain Wells' fortified house beyond the southeast corner of the palisade. Ben heard gunfire, the heart-cracking sound of a woman wailing unseen. Leading, gripping Reuben's wrist, Ben avoided that fort, plunging into the woods and white-packed underbrush to circle it and come out well to the south on the Hatfield road—unmistakable, familiar, over there on his right under enormous morning sky. Others in flight had marked the road with the signature of bloody drops, clear against white now that the sun was surely rising.
Reuben pulled back continually. Ben's right knee throbbed, he couldn't think why. He knew Jesse was following. Impossible to run in this white muck. He could push on, the sun at his left hand, and not look back. He was aware not of time but only of breathing, of driving forward in pain against the sodden snow and retaining his hold of Reuben's wrist; yet time was moving too, as it would forever, and the sun advancing.
He realized that for some while now he had heard no gunfire. They had surely not come so far on the Hatfield road as not to hear it, for the morning was still. It must have ended. The wind had dropped, the air becoming sluggish, almost warm. Drowsy....
Reuben struggled abreast of him and beat feebly at his shoulder. "Ben, you must let me go back. Mother——"
"Ru, thou knowest she is dead."
"You never loved her or you could not say it."
Ben faced about, feeling the sun of March, seeing on the backward trail nothing familiar, only a rising faraway smoke. That must have been Deerfield. Nearby, the quiet world of snow was lightly patterned with tracks of forest life; no wind at all now to disturb the shadowy trees and undergrowth. Ben knew his brother was nearly sane, already ashamed of the words just spoken. Jesse had halted, swaying and mumbling in his cold nakedness, looking back. "I loved her, Reuben. Now save thy breath for walking."
More time unmeasurable passed in the dreary plodding. Small shadows down the trail became large, large shadows became men—angry men from Hatfield, some of them soldiers. A blunt-faced sergeant of militia shouted to Ben: "They still there, boy?"
"Yes," Ben wheezed—"I think so."
The sergeant paused, seeing Jesse's side. "You're bad hurt."
Someone tossed a jacket over Jesse. The sergeant offered a leather flask and Jesse grabbed his arm, muttering uneasily: "Water?"
"Water of Jamaica."
"God magnify you!" Jesse drank. "Don't know you—'d pray for you was I a'ready in Hell."
The sergeant jerked his head at the north. "How many?"
"Jesus, I don't know. Killed one Inj'an with my axe." Jesse said that in startled thoughtfulness as if just remembering. "My own gun got me—peddler sold it me for a musket, bloody grape-shot it is now, might've killed me deader'n a son of a bitch." The sergeant ran on to the head of the column. "A'n't left you much," Jesse apologized, and discovered the flask still in his hand. "Why, he's gone and left me it, in the name of God."
"Come on, Jesse—he meant to. Come on!"
"I will, Ben. But do you boys walk on ahead—it be'n't right a thing so ugly as me should walk naked in the sun, the Lord never intended it."
Some others of the column called to them, words sounding kind, passing over Ben like a slightly warming breeze.
A vague time later—the column was gone and Ben was trying to ignore a stitch in the side—Jesse's voice rose and fell in a fitful rambling; the old man sang a little, too. "If I knowed that man's name I could pray for him. The race is not alway to him that can the swiftest run—call that a Psa'm, they do, no music in 'em, Church of England myself, if so be it makes any difference when a man's a sinner and lost and bound to Hell. I know what I'll do, I'll say to the Lord Jesus, that man who gave me a drink on the Hatfield road the first day of March, that's what I'll say, mark it, Ben, and pity but the dear Lord'd understand, you would think—Benjamin? Won't he? I'll say, that man who gave me a drink on the first bloody day of March, right about there on the Hatfield road, do you see, and will that do fair enough, Benjamin?"
"Of course, Jesse."
"You're a sweet soul, Benjamin, to gi' me that out of the good learning you got. I call that an act of kindness to an old fart that's wallowed in ignorance and sin all his days, I won't forget it, I could kiss your foot. I used to could sing, Benjamin. At Mother Gilly's house they'd use to ask me to sing, every smock there would ask me—her house was in Stepney, not far from the Mile End Road. 'Brave Benbow lost his legs'—that's a song I picked up from a chapman come by your father's house, Benjamin, I think it was last year. 'Brave Benbow'—oh, bugger me blind if I a'n't forgot it, anyway there was better songs in the days of King Charles that won't come again, needn't to think they will, boy. That's all past, that is...."
Ben's hand had relaxed. Reuben broke free and plunged blindly ahead to drop face down in the snow, not rising.
Here the road curved near the frozen expanse of the Connecticut. Distant in the south smoke threaded into the clouds, the smoke of decent fires—Hatfield village, warmth and safety. Ben raised Reuben's limply protesting body, brushing white smears from his face and collar. Jesse stood by, trying to drink from an empty flask. "Ru, brother——"
"I can't go on, nor I will not."
"You must."
"I cursed you."
"What? That?—you know that was nothing."
"I'm rotten with sin. I let it happen. I did nothing. And yesterday she chided me for using an ugly word, and I went out into the shed and I—and——"
"That's nothing."
"You say that. I befouled myself. I didn't pray last night. So I'm to die in sin and be damned forever."
"No. No...."
Jesse mumbled: "God-damn flask's empty." Ben's eyes were compelled to follow the motion of a brown thing soaring up from Jesse's long arm, flying, descending to the river ice and skidding off to lie still, a dot of darkness. "Don't know m' own bloody strength," said Jesse Plum, and chuckled in apology.
"Reuben, thou art no more in sin than any child of Adam."
"I let it happen. He came out of the dark. I let it happen."
"Reuben, get up on your feet!" As Reuben answered that angry shout with nothing but a sick stare, Ben searched in desperation for anything at all that might reach the boy's mind, and could find nothing, thwarted by the barrier that rises or seems to rise between one self and another, and so cried out unthinkingly: "For my sake then! Because I need thee and love thee."
Reuben Cory clung to the power of a fantasy. The snow before him, through which his feet could now drive with amazing patience and force, was not really level but a stairway. Level it was—flat level, drearily flat and white and cold—but his mind by quiet assertion made of it a stairway: because a level may indicate infinity, but a stairway, any stairway, must come to an end. Let it be a thousand miles or a thousand years away, a stairway must come to an end, for the mind refused to imagine one that went up forever, to no goal. Therefore each step was a rising, something gained toward the summit where Ben stood waiting to tell him he had done well.
By fantasy the universe might stand divided, into a region endurable and an outer region. To the outer region one must return, soon, and Reuben knew it.
From within the region of illusion that he knew to be illusion, Reuben grew aware, and more comfortably, that old Jesse Plum was still rambling on, and singing.
"Brave Benbow lost his legs, by chain-shot, by chain-shot...."
Reuben no longer resented the croaking sound as a hateful intrusion. The old man meant no harm, and was drunk. Ben had refused to abandon him, and Ben always knew best.
"Says Kirby unto Wade: 'We will run, we will run.'
Says Kirby unto Wade: 'We will run.
For I value no disgrace, nor the losing of my place,
But the enemy I won't face, nor his gun, nor his gun....'"
Peacefully, almost unobserved, the boundary between the two regions dissolved. The snow was flat. For a few moments Reuben's mind was completely engaged in an effort to understand how they had got away from the house. The axe—came—down.... Then what? Out of this blank two remote voices spoke with needle sharpness: "Goodm'n Cory?" "They've shot him, Jesse." Maybe after that he had fainted. But now, to the deepest privacy of his mind, Reuben could state: That home was not; that he would be twelve in May; that his mother and father were dead; that he was walking on flat snow into the outskirts of the village of Hatfield with his brother and an old servant who was drunk and naked.
Hatfield buzzed. For a short way—questions from distracted citizens spattered from all sides—Reuben knew that Jesse was shambling between him and Ben, an arm on each, wobbling and protective; then under the guidance of a pink fat man they passed into the thick warmth of the ordinary's common room. In this hot haze and clatter of voices, Reuben's senses clouded, not in retreat but bodily exhaustion. A birdy, ancient woman hovered about them with noises of concern. Beside her face, Ben's appeared, and Reuben searched the strangeness of it in a fluctuating dark and brightness. They must be sitting near a fireplace, he reasoned, and Ben's arm was preventing him from toppling over. Ben was speaking, too. "What?"
"I said, rest thee a while, Ru."
The fat man had wrapped Jesse Plum in a huge brown horse-blanket; now someone brought the old man a pewter tankard. At the rim of it gleamed Jesse's little blue eyes, unfocused like those of a baby at the breast. At length Reuben heard someone drawl in unbelieving admiration: "Godso-o-o!" Jesse's grimy fingers fluttered; a frowzy-haired boy in a grubby apron giggled and snatched the tankard before it could hit the floor. Jesse collapsed into himself, a wired skeleton from which rose the bubble and rasp of a sudden snore.
The fat man was talking in lardy tones. "Hoy! Killed an Inj'an, he did say. He don't look it." Jowls shaking and puffy fingers gentle, he twitched away the blanket to examine Jesse's burnt side. "Bad. Gun blowed, he said. We'd ought to have goose-grease." The ragged boy was peeking at it. The fat man lifted him away by a greasy spreading ear. "Mind thy God-damned manners, pup—a'n't we all brothers in Christ? Go fetch cobwebs. Good as grease, they'll mend a burn."
Jesse Plum was carried away, his slumber undisturbed, and Ben was talking with the old woman.
Reuben supposed he ought to listen, say something himself. Their speech came to him disconnected and obscure. "Grandmother in Springfield—Madam Rachel Cory ... great-uncle—Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury."
"... sleigh gone a'ready to Hadley with others from Deerfield—be there more on the way?"
"I think there was no one near us."
"... to your grandmother—certainly...."
Most unmanly, Reuben thought, to let his head sink, to leave Ben the whole burden of caring for him, but with that head an unmanageable lump of exhaustion there was no help for it. He found it strange that Ben's voice should be rumbling directly under his ear and yet sound far away. "Ma'am, if my brother might rest in a room where it's quiet?"
Reuben tried to protest as he was lifted. He could walk. The protest fell short of words. An alien hand touched him, someone else offering to take him. Ben's voice was oddly impatient: "Nay, I'll carry him...."
Reuben sensed the passage of a creaking stairway. Ben let him down, on a cot, and as he stretched out his vision cleared, showing him a narrow room, and Jesse Plum on a pallet nearby, snug in his horse-blanket, brown gnarled feet innocently protruding, Adam's apple bobbing with his snores. The old woman was hovering. "Nay then, boys, you bide here long as you're a-mind. Jerusha'll get a cart, or you might wait on the sleigh's returning if you wish. Eh, Lord, we saw the fires on the sky before dawn, I'd only just come down to see after breakfast. Anyone'd know you for brothers—eh, Lord, yes! What's your name?"
"Reuben and Benjamin Cory—I'm Benjamin."
"Eh, Lord, yes! I'm Goody Hawks, and you can trust my Jerusha—he'll get you to Springfield one way or t'other. Some tea, ha?"
Reuben thought: I must speak, if only for thanks. But Ben, sitting by him, a hand spread without pressure on Reuben's chest, was saying everything, taking care of everything. "You're most kind, ma'am."
"Eh, Lord, nothing—shame if we couldn't help the Lord's own on such a day...."
Reuben saw his brother wince and lean down, pulling up the leg of his breeches to bare his knee. Though it made the room swirl dangerously, Reuben braced up on his elbow to look at the long splinter embedded below Ben's kneecap.
"Law me!" Goody Hawks knelt by Ben, clucking and muttering. She secured the end of the splinter in horny nails, drew it free with skillful quickness and held it up. "You walked from Deerfield with that and all? Marry, it's two inches long if I'm a day old. You must have a poultice of sawdust or the like. I'll fetch it when I bring the tea. That'll draw out any that's left—like draws like, you know—eh, Lord, what a thing, I'd've dropped flat with it in twenty paces."
Reuben thought: I will speak, and his hand reached out, and he heard his own voice as a hoarse and stupid little noise: "Give it here."
Goody Hawks dropped the stained thing in Reuben's hand, apparently not puzzled that he should want it, though Ben was, and studied him with some mixture of amusement and concern. Reuben pushed the splinter into his shirt pocket, and then, in some dread that Ben might ask questions unanswerable, he lay back and shut his eyes.
He heard them whispering together a little while, the sound partly smothered by the snoring of Jesse Plum. "... was there when our mother was killed ... outside the house, but he was forced to see...."
Reuben thought: A stairway. I am lying still—nevertheless a stairway.
As Goody Hawks tiptoed from the room, he felt again on his chest the undemanding weightless warmth.
"Ben, what are we to do?"
"Nothing for now, except you should rest.... I suppose Grandmother will have room for us. If not there's Uncle John at Roxbury."
"Last night I saw a part of his letter that Father didn't read aloud. Uncle John must be a great infidel."
"What did he write?"
"'Nor no man, by threat of damnation nor promise of paradise, shall ever betray me into the folly of hating my neighbor, whether in the name of princes who are but men or in the name of a God I know not....' How could anyone write such a thing, unless he...."
"Marry, I don't know. I think—oh, let it be, Ru. He's a good man, we know that.... I suppose he only meant that the general opinion is not his own, that his own religion is in some manner different."
"Yes, maybe.... Ben, is it true 'tis a hundred miles to Boston and Roxbury?"
"More than a hundred, I believe."
"Will the French be coming down this way, you think?"
"They'd be here now, Ru, if that was their mind. Though I did hear Captain Wells saying a few days ago that if the French found the wit and the forces to drive down the river and hold it, they could cut the Massachusetts in half. But, he said, he thought they hadn't the men, nor the wit to think of it. There'll be no Inj'ans here."
"What'll we do—I mean in Springfield, or Roxbury?"
"Oh, I must be apprenticed to some trade or other. But thou shalt—continue studies. That was Father's wish—'deed it was the very last thing he spoke of before they broke down the door. And 'tis my wish too, remember that. Thou must acquire learning, he said."
"And why should I have that, and thou not have it?"
"I shall too. But being older, I can be apprenticed now, to earn my keep anyway, and I'll find means to study at the same time. I dare say that'll be Grandmother's wish, or Uncle John's."
"What about going to sea?"
"D'you know, I believe that's why I keep thinking of Uncle John and Roxbury. He's a shipowner. If thou couldst stay with him until a little older, and study, why, I might well be able to sign on shipboard for a while, so to earn my way."
"Ben, thou wilt never see thyself."
"Why? What does that mean?... Who ever can see himself?"
"Maybe no one. But thou especially—thou art ever thinking what may be done for others, the while I've thought only of mine own—mine own——"
"Heavens, Ru! I'm selfish enough."
"Not as I've been. Nay, let me say it—it's on me to say it, Ben: I mean to do better, to make thee not ashamed of me. I'm afeared, but I tell thee, I will try to be brave."
Chapter Three
Ben Cory lifted and dropped the brass knocker of an oak door, nail-studded, with hinges of dull-gleaming iron. "She may open to us herself, Ru. Remember to take off your cap."
Ben recalled that the sole of Reuben's left shoe was cracked; he had noticed it when he found the shoes after that nightmare search—actually the morning of this same first day of windy March. Ben's own shoes were still sound; the wet melting snow would be working up miserably through that crack in Reuben's. He squeezed the boy's shoulder. At least they were together. Undoubtedly Grandmother Cory would provide decent shoes.
The alien town oppressed him; Reuben too would be feeling the loneliness of a place where no one knew them. Other windows they had passed were alive with the mild glory of candles; Ben had noted this as they climbed the hill road from the frozen river, to the house with two chimneys that Jesse Plum had pointed out. Madam Cory's windows stood blankly gray in the graying evening.
Ben missed Jesse here. The old man, who had snored all afternoon in the oxcart that drowsily brought them down from Hatfield, had gone into a flutter of anxious apology at the prospect of approaching Madam Cory's house. "It a'n't fitten, Benjamin," he said. "Your grandmother was never no-way partial to me. I'll come later, ha? You don't take it unkind? That's her house, third back from the hill road, with the two chimbleys." Meanwhile his sad little blue eyes had fixed on a tavern signboard down the riverside street, a yellow rooster against startling blue. "She was never no-way partial—" still fluttering, apologizing, promising to come later, Jesse set off for the sign of the rooster at a feeble run....
The door at last squeaked open. The one observing them was only a servant in a drab russet jacket, bulging with heavy muscle. His baldness was fringed with gray at the temples, the thick skin of his face channeled like a withering pumpkin, his voice the hushed croak of a good soul enjoying a funeral. "You are Madam Cory's grandsons?"
"Yes. Word arrived about us?"
The big man nodded. "A militia rider from Hatfield. Madam Cory is at evening prayers. Come this way." He led them through a chilly entry into a parlor crowded with polished lifeless shapes. Ben selected a black throne; Reuben kept hold of his hand, speechless. "I am Jonas Lloyd—sir. Me and m' good wife, we does for Madam Cory. I trust you'll be some comfort in her affliction.... That is the Mister's chair—Mr. Matthew Cory's, your grandfather's. I fear Madam Cory doth prefer it be not used."
Ben scrambled out of it to stand in disgust by the cold fireplace. Jonas Lloyd's canine brown eyes assessed their ragged clothes; he nodded in sad approval of Ben's action, and faded away with the silence of well-trained muscle. Reuben muttered: "Dare we sit elsewhere?"
"Try it anyway."
"You was here once, Ben. Is the house as you remember it?"
"I can't remember it—I was a pisstail baby."
"I suppose we oughtn't use such words here?"
"You're right. I must remember."
They explored the room, timidly. A pot clattered in the unknown kitchen. A dog barked outdoors and was chided by some woman's elderly peevish voice. In the dying light, they could not make much of a painting on the wall—someone lean, stern, undoubtedly dead, with the high-bridged Cory nose; probably Grandfather Matthew, of whom Ben's father had seldom spoken. Jonas Lloyd had made no move to light the candles or the firewood standing ready on the hearth. Ben ventured onto another chair; no ghost pitched him out of it. Reuben sank on the floor and rested his cheek against Ben's knee, then jerked away, feeling the poultice that Goody Hawks had bound on the splinter-wound. "Did I——"
"Nay, it don't hurt," said Ben, and pulled him back, and tried to smooth his tangled hair, but only a vigorous combing would do that.
"Ben, how ever did we get over the palisade?"
"Jesse—he pulled you up and jumped with you."
"Why can't I remember it?"
"Oh, you was—I don't know. Hush—that's over...." Ben could find no light at all beyond the windows. Enough light filtered in from the hallway where a rushlight burned to show him Reuben's face gone vague and absent. As time crawled on, Ben wondered how anyone could spend an hour at evening prayers. Adna Pownal Cory would have called it excess of zeal.
His memory of his grandmother ought not to be so dim, he thought. When he was four, his mother had been expecting another child—a girl who lived only a week, as it happened—and Madam Cory offered to take him for a month or so; Adna Cory would not let two-year-old Reuben out of her care, for he was sickly, but she let Ben go. Madam Cory was then forty-nine, to Ben timelessly ancient. Ben could recall little except a struggle to say a Psalm right for her. Gray skirt, stiff white bodice, plain cap—and Ben could not get in all those new words of the Psalm. Grandmother's hand was dry and cool. "Dost thou not wish to be saved, Benjamin?..."
After Grandfather Cory died in 1688, Grandmother's younger sister and brother-in-law moved in with her—Patience and Recovered Herrin. The Herrins were blessed with six surviving children, whom they must have distributed somehow around the house. Ben could dredge up no infantile memory of them but a blur of faces sharing nothing, voices tediously speaking not for him. He knew that Patience had died in '97, and Recovered had gathered up his brood, married again and moved away.
Ben recovered no memory of the Pownals breezing in at Springfield to look at him, though they must have done so. Ben's aunt Mercy Pownal visited Deerfield in 1701, wearing a red silk hood, reckless short-sleeved bodice and scarlet cheyney jacket that shocked Mr. Williams and others to the bone, especially in view of a rumor that the woman could read Greek and Latin, had been to London (or Philadelphia?—some foreign place anyway) and, worst of all, was twenty-nine and yet unmarried. Ben remembered his mother trying to speak a formal welcome and crying instead. Then the two clung to each other in the doorway, the tall woman leaning her cheek against Mother's head, saying: "Nay, it's good, Adna, good—I wish I was in thy little shoes." Moments later Ben's mother was showing her over the small house, still sniffling, also chuckling like a skylark.
At another time came the marvel of Uncle Zebina Pownal, in black curls, who plumped down on all fours claiming to be a moose so the boys could ride him—a tame moose, he said, but amoosing; possibly Reuben's first pun, for the boy nearly strangled getting it down. Uncle Zebina sang, music of England; he had gone there, and heard the new inventions of Henry Purcell, who died young. Father was obliged to warn Uncle Zebina that the Deerfield neighbors would think ill of such music. "We must not interfere with their sadness, to be sure," said Uncle Zebina, and for the remainder of his visit he made the music a sweet conspiracy, humming softly and shielding his big red mouth with a comic hand.
But those were Deerfield memories and clouded with a strangeness. In 1702, the year of King William's death and Queen Anne's accession, when war broke out again, the bearded patriarch Enos Pownal, Mother's grandfather, had pulled up stakes in wrath at Springfield sold his fine house to some lowborn Dutchman from Albany, and sailed for the West Indies with most of the tribe. Enos died at sea, but the tribe went on, Mercy and Zebina and a flock of others, to settle at Kingston. Ben's mother occasionally received letters from them that left her brilliant-eyed. Even at fourteen Ben had never heard the whole story of that very Pownal-like upheaval; it carried overtones of religion and politics, and suppressed echoes of the word "smuggling."
No use—the woman now at evening prayers would take on no reality for Ben, as the Benjamin Cory four years old was an infinity removed. Yet he found it astonishingly easy to bring up recollection from the age of six of Reuben's four-year-old self, a wild passionate atom submerged in serious illness every few months, a being who must somehow be shielded, not hurt....
He thought of the journey just ended, the brown oxen slopping on dreamily through the mush of a thaw that had come on a benign breeze out of the south, the pearls falling from bare oak and dark-clothed pine to make gray periods in the white. He saw again Jesse Plum snoring, shaken about but no part of him awake except one hand that clung with a life of its own to the rail of the cart; he felt again Reuben huddled against him, speaking hardly a word in all the hours of the journey. The driver walking with the team had been a deaf-mute servant of the Hatfield ordinary, beyond communication in a hushed universe of his own. Across the river from Springfield the oxen had refused to venture on the ice. At Ben's prodding Jesse Plum had waked, his mind still shrinking within the rags of sleep, and the mute had swung the cart about for home.
Somewhere in that passage, Ben recalled, he had glimpsed a flash of life—a wintering jay, clean as a fragment of sky, lighting on a branch to scold the human thing. The cart crawled on; gazing back, Ben had been able to see the bird rise into the wider blue, in airy departure not wholly lost.
The bulk of Jonas Lloyd abruptly shut off the light. The man was rumbling with the studied cheerfulness of a hangman: "You may come now." He led them up a drafty staircase and indicated an open doorway at the rear of the upper hall and padded back into the gloom below.
A canopied four-poster filled the center of Madam Cory's bedroom, a neat pleasant room with western windows that would overlook the river by daylight. The quiet woman sat by one of these, pallid hands folded in her gray-skirted lap. Her eyes were, like Reuben's, ocean-gray, but unacquainted with laughter. A table beside her held a leather-bound Bible and one candle in a pewter sconce.
"Well, come to me then! Are you afeared of an old woman?"
Ben was dazed to discover—so vast had been the infantile image—that his grandmother was not large at all. She sat no higher in the little chair than Reuben would have done. "We are not—not too presentable, Grandmother."
"That's no matter. You must be Benjamin—awkward still, I see. And Reuben, whom I never saw—yes, yes, anyone would know you for brothers. You take after your mother's side somewhat, in appearance." Rachel Cory sighed gustily. "Thankful heart, Benjamin—don't cry! We all die, don't we? Pity but men would give more thought to what cometh after. I said don't cry. Your father's death, Benjamin, is a grievous thing, and you will remember that I have lost a son. Am I weeping? Am I, my dear?"
"No, Grandmother."
"Benjamin, let us understand one another from the beginning. I remember you as a child, willful and headstrong. If you and Reuben are to bide here until you can maintain yourselves, as of course you shall, you must walk in the one right way. Your father erred, who might have been one of the Saints; concerning your poor mother, I will not speak. Your father strayed. Benjamin, Reuben, in the Book of Psalms it is written: The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
Reuben heard and did not hear his grandmother: the sound of words in her deep, positive voice reached him, but not the meaning—it was not as though she had spoken in a foreign language, but as though his own comprehension were momentarily numb. He saw Ben look away from her in stunned blankness, and then no more reflection was possible, for a wild hoarse singing had broken loose in the night outside.
Rachel Cory winced and leaned to her window; it was too dark, Reuben guessed, for anything to be recognized. "Well," she said with the precision of disgust, "there is one heedless enough. You might as well understand, Springfield is no Canaan."
"Brave Benbow lost his legs, by chain-shot, by chain-shot,
Brave Benbow lost his legs—"
"The constable is slack again. It has been weeks since we suffered open sodden drunkenness in the streets. I do regret it should have happened on the evening of your arrival. Take a lesson from it if you have the wit. Benjamin, one thing you and Reuben must understand: in all the time the Lord hath permitted me to dwell here——"
"Yaphoo! If I a'n't a futtering he-goat of Hell there a'n't no name for me. Behold, I'm the brazen serpent of the wilderness—yaphoo! Look on me, you pocky smock-tumblers, you pot-walloping get of Belial, on my bosom I got the bleeding bloody cross, only it slipped some, there's some men fail at everything, can't even carry a cross right side up and be God-damned to you, s's I!" In panic fear of laughing, Reuben coughed, and tried to look out the window so that his back would be turned to his grandmother. "You harken unto me, you jolly whoremasters, you cuckoldy cods and Roundheads too, harken how I pickled my wounds in the juice of the vine! Why, bugger 'em all, s's I, and you too—a'n't I meek and lowly? Yaphoo! A'n't I crushed to the dust nor can't sink no further down, a piss-poor toad under the heel of the Almighty? Look down! Don't I stay alive because Hell won't have me? You broke my heart, Lord, you fried my brains, now scourge me with a bull's pizzle, I won't say nothing. Yaphoo!" The voice was moving away. Reuben prayed that Ben would not speak. "Ah, Lord, look down!" Yes, it was fainter, muffled, as if walls intervened; Jesse must have turned a corner of the street. "Out of the deeps, O Lord—yaphoo!..."
Precariously, Reuben said: "I think he's gone, Grandmother."
She nodded grimly, letting out her breath in a shaken sigh. "I trust so. Some idle scum of the river-front.... In all the time the Lord hath permitted me to dwell here, I have tried to maintain my house as, let us say, a small imperfect Zion, if that be not vanity. I will tolerate no ungodliness, Benjamin, Reuben—no foul speech, no unconsidered acts. You'll never find me unkind or failing in understanding, but the walking is strict. You will be at meeting without fail on Sabbath and Lecture Days. These are wicked times. The faith is everywhere assailed, every day bringeth new inventions. See to it that I find you on the side of the Saints. Well, you must be weary and hungry. Jonas will see to your supper and show you to your room."
They were dismissed.
No more music came from Jesse Plum.
Jonas was waiting, and led the boys to the kitchen where his rawboned wife Anna had kept a supper warm. Anna Lloyd sniffed more than she spoke, through a ribbon of nose overhanging the shrunken area where most of her teeth had been lost. Neatly dressed and clean, perhaps she would never seem so, kitchen smoke and years of drudgery having found permanent lodgment in her wrinkles. She was incurious about Deerfield and the boys; her few questions were aimed at some region not well defined because of a cast in her eye.
Here in his own domain Jonas laid aside solemnity, straddling a chair, carelessly pawing Anna's scrawny bottom now and then, a caress such as he might have granted to a useful dog.
Reuben pushed the lukewarm stew around on his trencher for politeness' sake. He noticed that Ben was actually eating the stuff and emptying his mug of thin beer. Then Jonas recovered his mantle of stately gloom and guided them back upstairs to a room of their own. It was at the rear of the house overlooking a yard; except for Grandmother Cory's, probably the best room in the house. Jonas lit a candle and padded away.
The room contained another four-poster with a dark blue canopy. The small-paned windows shone brilliantly clean, the furniture stood just so, defying any sinfulness of disorder. A framed sampler on the wall aimed its message so that anyone retiring or rising must be advised: I will also vex the hearts of many people, when I shall bring thy destruction among the nations, into the countries which thou hast not known. Ezekiel xxxii; 9.
Staring at this, Reuben thought: There was never such a thing in my mother's house. "Ben," he said, and turned to his brother in sudden need—"Ben, I'm only now understanding."
"Understanding, Ru?"
"We're alone. There's nothing. Only you and me."
It came to Ben belatedly, lying still under the dark canopy, the candle out, that once again neither he nor Reuben had prayed. For his own part he had not even thought of it, being too concerned with finding some word of comfort for Reuben in that moment of desolate comprehension. Now, since there was some possibility that the boy had fallen asleep, he dared not move.
He thought of Jesse Plum—surely a drinking companion must have steered the old man away to sleep it off in some tolerant kennel.
"The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
She might have been there in the room.
Ben faced up to the words for the first time, retreated incredulously, was compelled to return, wondering if Reuben could have understood them as he did now. In effect his grandmother had said it was right and fitting that their father (her son) should die.
Ben thought: Fanatic.... His father had used that term now and then, but indecisively, defining it but giving Ben the impression that a fanatic was a person you weren't likely to meet. The word was clarified for Joseph Cory's son now that it owned a face.
Laboriously Ben instructed himself: in the morning he would tell his grandmother that he and Reuben intended to go on to Roxbury.
At least that was decision, not frivolously reached; now perhaps he could rest. Reuben stirred and mumbled, but quieted at a pressure of Ben's arm. Ben watched the canopy, a blackness against softer dark. Moonlight must have arrived outside, faint, without consolation. In random air the canopy swayed like the bough of a sublimely silent tree possessed by midnight. Ben watched it, remembering.
Reuben was five, the first time he nearly died. Mr. Williams, a frontier minister of many duties, had felt obliged to offer what medical aid he could. He called the illness a calenture, came to the house to pray, provided some remedies that Ru promptly vomited. One of these was crushed sow bugs, recommended by the great Cotton Mather. Adna Cory stayed by the bedside, seeming unable to hear anything said to her by anyone but Reuben. Ben could remember firelight mixed with a gleam of candles, flooding through the half-open door of the back room where Reuben cried and drowsed and burned. Ru's breath had been loud and rapid on the night Ben recalled most clearly—it must have been the night before the fever broke and they began to think the child would live.
Ben's father was sleeping as usual in the front room; he needed to be up early and out for the corn-planting that will not wait even on the shadow of death. He had snuffed his candle but sat up still dressed, bony hands dangling, and said: "Thou shouldst go to bed, Ben—'tis late."
Lost, missing his mother in her deafness, Ben did not want to go to bed. The garret would be black, with the certainty of the lion under the bed of which Ben must not speak because it was not real. Voices in the other room dragged him toward other perils, cliffs not quite seen—the flowing tenor of Mr. Williams, now and then a word from his mother. Drawn elsewhere was his body, awkwardly, into the curve of his father's arm. "Thou shouldst be told, thy brother may die." But Father himself had told him, that morning; it was strange he could forget.
Ben remembered asking why God let people be ill, and then something, blurred now, about the drowning of Bonny's kittens. Lowering his face to his father's shirt, Ben had discovered a heartbeat heavy and interesting, overriding his father's words, leaving only fragments for later memory: "I wouldn't have thee question Mr. Williams concerning such a thing ... over-sure he knoweth all truth ... do themselves suffer from the sin of pride, as if knowledge of holy things resembled the goods of a man of business...." But Father had said something more, important, and it would not now come to mind.
"A promise to thyself is binding, unless a better wisdom——"
No, that was later, when Ben was ten years old and had been told to search his heart for any call to a particular life-work....
In the other room: "The broth was from a turkey Plum shot for us, Mr. Williams. He couldn't swallow the meat, I made a broth in the room of it. I know he got strength of it."
And Mr. Williams, melodious: "Goody Cory, I have prayed that this affliction might bring you and your good husband to a better understanding of the Christian's necessities. Oh, how advantageous gracious supplications are! God accounts forgetting his mercies a forgetting himself—no time more fit for praise than a time of trial. Why, can't you see this visitation must be God's means of bringing you and Goodman Cory and——"
"There was hominy in it!" An ecclesiastical sigh followed that wail, and the rapid, harsher sighs of Reuben fighting to live.
But what else had his father said? Was it before they went outdoors?—in Ben's memory they were already in the yard, the house door closed. "No rain tomorrow." A breeze was blowing off the river. Joseph Cory had shown his son the inviolate shining of Polaris. "That star tells sailors where the north is, Ben. It never changes."
"Why, don't they alway know that?"
"Compasses sometimes fail. Nothing distracts Polaris."
Later he carried Ben up to bed and sat by him in the dark a while, speaking of a book of voyages by one Hakluyt, promising he would try to secure a copy and they would read it together. And he wrote of it afterward to Uncle John, who sent it as a gift with Ben's name in his own hand. Now it would be smoke.
In the Springfield house, boards squeaked upstairs—probably an attic bedroom for Jonas Lloyd and his sad wife. A rooster somewhere woke with the abrupt foolishness of his kind and crowed four times. Jesse Plum would say that was a sign somebody would give you money in four days, or maybe four changes of the moon.
"Thou didst have a sister, Ben, and thou too small to understand, who lived but a few days. If Ru dies, so I keep thee I'll bear it somehow. North, right of the meeting-house, up a little—that is Polaris."
He said that.
In devotions at Deerfield, Ben's father had often read from the Book of Job, as his mother owned a fondness for the Epistle of James.
Where is the way where light dwelleth?
The voice exclaimed: "Behold the judgment true and righteous on those conceived in sin and born in iniquity!" Then for Reuben the dark was pierced with little fires that grew, and in growing illuminated many writhing faces in the pit, and blackened arms that could not quite reach the rim of it. This was the pit where blood boiled in the veins and burst them, yet one never died, never.
Out of the midnight arch above him a monstrous sorrowing thing with a stubble of gray beard swooped down. Flame twisted from its side, still it could catch hold of the bubble of glass where Reuben sought to hide himself, catch hold and thrust at it repeatedly with a forked black phallus, while Reuben could not scream to frighten it away. He could not, because now began—he had foreseen it—the one torment he always dreaded most of all: suffocation, a gasping for clean air where none was, lungs locked and heaving, yielding at last because they must and drawing in the sulfur fumes—yet one never died. All were agreed on the definition of eternity....
Meanwhile, on the other side of the palisade of burning logs, Ben and Great-uncle John Kenny of Roxbury were strolling quietly, talking quietly, watching Reuben with calm. Ben, however, was not faceless like Uncle John, not too remote or impersonal. Ben grinned as he jerked his thumb toward a more distant place, where a little old man with a white beard sat on his hams cutting figures out of paper with a rusty pair of scissors, impaling some of them, tearing some of them, burning some of them with solemn care like an old chapman cooking meat in the open on a forked twig. To whom Reuben advanced through muddy snow and said as he had been instructed: "Forgive us our transparencies." Some one of the words must have been wrong, for the little man rose up gibbering from a toothless gap and came for him viciously, the scissors raised like a hatchet. Reuben was able to scream at last and fling himself away——
Into the warmth where Ben—Oh, this is waking!—where Ben was saying: "Hush thee, Ru, hush! Don't be so afeared! I'm here, I'm with thee."
As Reuben slept on, peacefully after his nightmare, morning imperceptibly arrived, a pallor in an unfamiliar window long dark; much more time must pass, Ben knew, before true dawn. This was that neutral hush before one is compelled to accept a finished thing and say: All that was yesterday. Now and then in the sluggishly advancing, sluggishly dying night, Ben had listened to a drip of melting from the roof. The patient monotone had ceased, Ben never knowing the moment. He crept out naked from under the covers, finding the room not too distressingly cold, and knelt at one of the windows, wishing he might gain a glimpse of the hill road that ran east, toward Roxbury.
Shadow-country of black and gray was brightening to the prosaic. An inky monster on Ben's right became a woodshed and a higher structure that must be a stable. A trotting-horse weather-vane grew clear, the horse's head pointing away—so the wind had shifted to blow from the west, and that had probably brought an end to the thaw. Ben fumbled on his clothes and returned to the window. During this brief absence had begun the day's miracle, a promise of fire on the underside of cloud.
The snow and mud in the yard below him showed a tangle of blurry tracks enlarged by yesterday's melting. At the rear of the yard rose the untidy grandeur of an elm. A lake of churned mud by the stable resembled a mammoth cluster of grapes, separate blobs of fruit supplied by outlying hoofprints. Near the base of the elm a murky area suggested a man sprawling with his head on his arm.
Maybe this very day, Ben thought, he and Reuben could be climbing that hill road, discovering the far side of it. If he behaved politely his grandmother was bound to let them go....
That shadow under the elm did create a dreadfully potent illusion of humanity—almost-real legs in abandoned collapse.
Ben gasped and clawed open the bedroom door.
Anna Lloyd was pottering downstairs with a candle. At Ben's noise she jumped, shielding the flame. "Oh, it's you. What's up?"
"Someone in the yard—" Ben shoved past her. She followed trembling, covering the candle so that it gave little help.
He reached the back door of the kitchen. The key jammed; Anna Lloyd shuffled up behind him wheezing: "Now what's all this, boy?"
The key gave way. Ben ignored her, running out across slush that had frozen crisp and hard.
Jesse's face was recognizable. In the twist of his bluish open mouth one could imagine an apologetic smile. Ben clutched his arm; the whole body moved with it, stiff as a dead branch.
Behind Ben Anna Lloyd wailed thinly. She was gripping her candle though it had blown out; morning light gave Ben her ugly peering face, more peevish than sad. "Land of mercy! Oh, law, the Mist'ess'll be terrible put out! Why, 'tis old Plum."
"Yes, he came with us from Deerfield. He must have been trying to reach the stable, find some way to get in where it was warm without troubling my grandmother. Fell and couldn't rise with the liquor in him—oh, when the singing stopped I did think some friend——"
"Singing? Ooh!—he done all that commotion last night?" Ben did not answer; she seemed useless, not open to communication, like a tiresome dog. "Must call the Mist'ess immediate. She'll be terrible put out—well, it a'n't my fault, no one can say...."
There was more in her mumbling about the wages of sin. Ben's stomach heaved. He lurched away from Anna Lloyd, back into the kitchen. He grabbed a chair and straddled it, fighting nausea, head on his arm. In this self-imposed darkness he heard the outer door bang, and Anna shuffled past him muttering. Only a few moments passed before the house was in a sputtering uproar—voices, hurrying feet, Jonas braying something or other. So long as he could keep his face hidden, his body quiet, he might not vomit. Soon enough his shoulder was tapped. "Benjamin!"
"Yes, Grandmother."
"I suppose you can stand up when spoken to?"
He managed it. "I was feeling sick. Grandmother, I ought to have gone out last night—to find out——"
"You knew, last night, you knew it was that fellow Plum making that foul commotion, knew and would not tell me. Benjamin, I marvel at you, I do marvel."
"But I thought——"
"You thought!" She was dressed for the day; haggard, the mark of a pillow fading on her cheek. "Well, well—you thought what?"
"When he stopped, I thought some friend must have taken him away, so you needn't to trouble about him."
She said with intense patience: "Benjamin, I am not troubled about him. I knew him long before you were born, and why my husband saw fit to tolerate him I shall never know—excess of charity perhaps."
"He saved our lives."
"Indeed?"
"He got us over the palisade when the village was burning."
"Indeed? Any oaf can have a good impulse now and then. Someone else would have lent a hand if not he. You're not beholden."
"There was no one else. Jesse was ever friendly to Ru and me. I never knew him unkind, Grandmother."
"What? What? No unkindness to himself and others to live with the conversation of a hog, to spend all the years God gave him in utter blasphemy?" Her voice climbed. "Blasphemy, swinish drunkenness, sin and corruption, knowing the truth—why, he was instructed; your grandfather and I saw to that—knowing it and rejecting it, knowing his steps went down to Hell and heedless continually. No unkindness?"
"He was not like that, Grandmother."
"You contradict me?... Benjamin, go in the parlor. I'll come to you presently." She pointed at the door and Ben shambled through it, more in flight than obedience.
The place was clammily cold, and dark. Ben remembered to avoid Grandfather Matthew's throne. He stood by the fireplace spreading his hands where no warmth was. Pain gnawed at his knee; he wondered if he ought to have kept on Goody Hawks' poultice. Almost at once Grandmother Cory was confronting him in the gloom. "Jonas!" When the big man tiptoed in she said: "Open the shutters." Thin light brought no comfort. "Light the fire—boy appears to be cold. Nay, first go wake that child upstairs if he's slept through all this—I wonder he could."
"Oh, he could!" Ben snatched clumsily for something harmless to ease the tension. "Wide awake one minute and then——"
"Benjamin, do please to be quiet. Jonas, bring Reuben down. He is to stay with Anna; he is not to come in here." Ben saw Jonas' witch-wife join him in the hallway and they went upstairs together. "Ah, Benjamin!—about your miserable clothes, I had hoped to employ part of this day in buying suitable garments for you and your brother, but now I suppose the time must be spent otherwise—and Lecture Day at that, when I must be at meeting after the noon hour. And you and Reuben ought to go too, but of course I cannot take you to the meeting-house looking like beggar boys and very likely lousy."
"We are not! Grandmother, I——"
"You won't find me failing in understanding, Benjamin, but pray understand this once and for all: your failure last night to tell me about that fellow Plum was a lie—a lie of silence.... Oh, when word came yesterday I did pray that you and your brother might be brands from the burning. I do pray for it yet. I made plans for you, I searched my heart, I sought guidance, I even trusted I had found it. D'you think me cold, unnatural? D'you imagine I don't love you, my grandson?" She brushed with dry impatience at sudden tears. Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Ben tried to catch a glimpse of Reuben, but the bulk of the Lloyds hid him as they passed the doorway. "Benjamin, what am I to do with you? What do you yourself think would be right for me to do with you, a liar, a wilderness child who hath something like the conversation of a savage?"
"Grandmother, about Jesse——"
"Plum again! And thus I'm answered! Why, the constable will see after all that."
"Constable?"
"Town authorities, boy. Burial. Is that what you meant?"
"A pauper's burial."
"Thankful heart, boy, I can't understand you. You wish the creature buried among the Saints?"
"No, I...." Ben searched his mind hopelessly. During the night many polite convincing speeches had been prepared—scattered, one and all. He blurted the one thought his mind could hold: "Reuben and I must go to Uncle John Kenny at Roxbury."
"What!" She was whitely horrified. "You don't know what you say."
"Why, Grandmother, he was a friend to my father. They wrote to one another. Once Uncle John sent me a book."
"He did?" She sat down slowly, little white hands stiff as ivory on the arms of the chair. "That may serve to explain much.... Benjamin, I require you to listen to me if only this once. I have reason to believe that my poor brother John is an atheist. I will trust you did not know this; now you do. He is an old man—as I'm old—and hardened, corrupt with false learning, evil conversation, a blasphemer, often fuddled with drink, a—a fornicator. He hath kept a mistress, at Roxbury, quite openly, under the name of housekeeper—for all I know the whore is there yet. Being wealthy, with friends in high places, none dares deal with him—that's the pass our colony hath arrived at. We builded a Zion; it becometh an abomination, a pen of swine, a nest of adulterers, blasphemers, sodomites, worshippers of the golden calf—vipers.... And now you wish me to allow you and that poor child your brother to go into that—that filthiness. Benjamin, I will hear nothing more about going to my brother at Roxbury. I will not send you to an even worse darkness than you dwelt in at Deerfield."
"We dwelt in no darkness there!"
"Benjamin, be careful!"
The avalanche had him, all fences of caution swept aside. "You have no right to speak so of my father! We will go to Roxbury!"
"Benjamin, stop!"
"And you'll bury Jesse like a dead dog—your Christian charity! Judgments—my father—you lie, lie!"
"Jonas!"
"Wasn't he your son? I believe nothing."
"Jonas! Jonas!"
"I won't bear it!" But now Jonas was behind him and twisting his right arm up between the shoulders.
"Jonas, lock him in his room. Here!" She fumbled a bunch of keys from her belt, with difficulty, for doubtless she could not see plainly. "Here, take it, Jonas! The boy is possessed!" Eyes flaring to the whites, she lifted the cluster of keys and struck Ben twice across the mouth.
As Jonas frogmarched him to the stairs, Ben tried to see down the hallway into the kitchen. Anna Lloyd was restraining Reuben, though at the moment the boy was not trying to break free but stood leaning away from her in a frozen motion, his white face empty.
Jonas hurled Ben into the bedroom. Ben pulled himself upright by a leg of the four-poster in time to hear the door slam and the key chatter in the lock. He spat blood from his lips, and heard the floor creak under Jonas' swift departure; heard silence fall on the room like the booming of another, larger door. Even then a part of his mind could fret at what seemed the strangest thing of all: when she struck him with the keys, his grandmother had looked exalted, almost happy—satisfied....
Hours crawled.
Now and then Ben Cory tried to retreat from images of the recent past and terrors of the immediate present within the shelter of a lethargy, a temporary refusal to think of anything at all. This was no good, since no power could shut away the thought of Reuben alone with these people, his own twelve-year-old temper explosive and perilous. Sooner or later Ru was bound to lose control and fetch down the wrath as Ben himself had done. Now when it was too late, Ben saw his outbreak as a betrayal of Reuben, a betrayal of trust. Once or twice he pressed his forehead on the window glass and tried to pray—seeing then that if only Reuben were with him it would be quite possible to jump from this window with fair safety into the snow.
A square of thin sunshine moved across the floor. It had neared the window when high clouds obscured the sun of March; the square yielded, grayed, vanished, like Ben's own trust in ancient certainties. Footsteps sounded often, not for him. Voices flowed on somewhere; Ben heard the homely commotion of household activity—doors closing, the hiss of sweeping, a shovel scraping ash from a hearthstone, clatter of kitchen gear.
Continually his ears strained for Reuben's treble or a light tread that would be his. But plainly Reuben was forbidden to come to him. Someone would, some time soon, he supposed. Someone in authority would be obliged to deal with the wild beast, the blasphemer.
He sprawled on the bed, raising his right knee to soften the nagging of the splinter-wound. Anxious to avoid the refuge of sleep, he fell into it anyway, having had little or none last night, and woke to what was surely the pallor of late afternoon. The house was quite silent; maybe everyone had gone to the Lecture Day sermon. In spite of himself he slept again, and roused, feeling ill and disoriented, in total dark.
From the window small lights could be found twinkling over on the left where the hill road must be. Ben groped for the stub candle on the mantel, and fought a dreary battle with his tinderbox, winning at last the consolation of a pale candle-flame. His knee felt hot, and throbbed. He let down his breeches but could find nothing very wrong. The splinter-wound was slightly raised; he saw or imagined faint steaks of red up his thigh. His clothing must have chafed the wound while he slept. As he moved sluggishly about the room the throbbing ceased and he could forget it. The lightheadedness—that would be hunger. Anger was no longer hot but heavy, lead in the stomach.
He thought what had roused him had been a murmur of talk somewhere. He no longer heard it. Nothing happened; no one came. The flame of the candle worked downward. One of the lights near the hill road winked out, a friend gone away.... Cry out? Rattle the door, bang on the walls? Pride as well as caution forbade. They could not keep this up forever. Ben Cory of Deerfield could wait them out....
From slumped dejection on the bed, Ben saw the door opening so gradually and softly that he feared his eyes were playing a trick. Even as Reuben slipped in and closed the door with the same caution, Ben was slow to believe it. Reuben had not even troubled to lay a finger over his lips, certain that Ben would smother any sound of greeting.
Reuben's shirt bulged. He lifted from it a rolled-up length of harness leather five or six feet long, and crossed at once to the window. As Ben joined him he spoke sparingly, in an undertone that would not carry so far as a whisper: "Must be now—we'll have no other chance. I have some food. Bit of new snow, maybe enough to hide our tracks."
They worked together in silence and complete understanding, easing the window open, fastening the end of the strap to a shutter-hook. Though far short of the ground, it lessened the drop to reasonable safety. Ben let himself down first, dropping easily on the old snow. Large soft flakes of the new were dreamily floating. He stood in silence with waiting arms.
"Ah, what happened to the day?"
"Ben, hush! We mustn't be heard talking in the street...."
"Right, here, Ru. Up the hill and east...."
"That might be the last house, you think?"
"Hope so."
"The day was a bad dream, Ben. Take this—you ha'n't eaten all day. Got another half-loaf under my shirt, and a chunk I cut from a ham I found in the shed, all I could carry.... Think this'll cover our tracks?"
"Not unless it thickens some."
"Pray it does."
"Nay, it better hold off a while or we'll lose these sled-tracks and direction with 'em...."
"I cursed old Anna when she was holding me. She—I mean Grandmother—made me wash my mouth with vinegar, then I must sit not moving all morning. Then they all went to meeting but Jonas, who locked me in a closet so he could mind his chores. Damn them all, I say God-damn them!"
"Hush, Ru! Grandmother only thought——"
"I say she doesn't think. I say she hath no heart at all, and your mouth'll be scarred all your days like Sam Belding's head."
"It will not—and don't speak so loud. Could be houses back of those trees, it's too dark to be sure."
"I will be quiet, Ben, but I say I cannot forgive her nor I will not, and I'll sooner die in the snow than ever go back in that house."
"We can't go back, that's sure. But Ru, to her we were—don't you understand?—sinful. And I was, too—I ought never to have spoken to her so. I lost my head somehow."
"But Mother, or Father, or anyone with a heart, would have forgiven anything you said at such a time. I cursed you, when I was out of my wits. You forgave at once, when I reminded you you could scarce remember it."
"What you said was nothing. What I said to Grandmother was—well, too much somehow. There's a strangeness—let's not think of it. We need all our wits to find the way here.... Can you make out the sled-marks? My eyes don't feel just right."
"Yes, I can see them. Ben, art thou fevered? Thy hand is too hot."
"I don't think so. I was hungry, and the food you brought will hold me up."
"They let me eat heavy at supper, and I did so, knowing we might have a chance—Ben, are you having trouble walking?"
"No, no, I slipped, that was all. It's from fretting all day in that room and doing nothing. My head's clearing already."
"You were to have a flogging in the morning. It would have been today, but the minister was ill. He preached for Lecture Day, but then went home with a sore throat. Grandmother and old Anna were talking of it when they came back, Anna saying the flogging should be in the public square, but Grandmother said it would be at the house, and first the minister should instruct you and pray. I say let them pray for their own salvation."
"Ru——"
"I'll be quiet. But I make no peace with them, never."
"The snow's stopped?"
"It's less here under the trees."
"Trees? We're under—oh yes, I see."
"Ben—thou didst not know it?"
"I was keeping my eyes on the ground, to find those sled-marks."
"Oh ... I was thinking and planning all evening. They put me in an attic room, next the Lloyds, I was forced to wait till they went a-futtering and then a-snoring.... Ben, if it's a hundred miles to Roxbury—we can do ten miles, maybe fifteen, in a day. You've got your knife, and I stole one from the kitchen—better than nothing. We can find something. The food will last a few days anyway."
"We'll get to Roxbury."
"Wish to rest a while?"
"I think I'd best not, Ru, unless—art thou tired?"
"I'll never tire. And then the Spice Islands?"
Chapter Four
In windless calm under the pines, Reuben's dark-dilated eyes could still find the furrows where sled-runners had passed, and the half-moons of dainty hoof prints. Nothing stirred within the vague archway continually opening before him. Gradually, tree and rock and snow came to possess sharper lines, stronger shadows; somewhere, a birth of new light—"Ben," he said, "it's the moon."
"Where, Ru? I can't find it."
"Somewhere ahead...."
Since they came under the shelter of the trees—and that was a long time ago—Reuben had felt no longer the cold kiss of snowflakes. It had been nothing but a flurry, now ended. At a curve in the road he discovered, through a break in the treetops, a grayness brightening. He halted; Ben blundered into him, arms slipping clumsily around him as if in need of support. Dull rags of cloud dropped away from the naked radiance. "I told you, Ben. There she rides." Ben was smiling. "Ben—all's well?... I did right? We could not have stayed, and thou to be flogged, maybe put in the stocks."
"The stocks, was it?"
"Yes, old Anna was yattering about that too when they came home from the sermon, and Grandmother never said her nay."
"Of course thou'st done right.... They'll search. That snow wasn't enough to hide anything."
"No.... We've walked more than an hour—must have done five miles."
"We can walk another five." Though standing quietly, Ben was breathing too fast, his eyes too steadily fixed on the new light in the sky.
In the woods Ben always had been leader. And there it was Ben's natural way to send his glance flickering everywhere. Reuben recalled the voice of Jesse Plum: "No Inj'an'll ever surprise you, Ben. Swoonds, you could look at a squirrel while the little bugger jumps from one branch to the next, and tell me its age and gender, and if she be female whether she got little 'uns." Jesse had not croaked that in flattery. Wilderness had been near and vital to Jesse; he never made a mock of it, and was capable of scolding either boy for walking noisily in dead leaves.
"Ben, do you feel——"
"All's well. Let's go on."
Reuben walked on ahead, trying to set an easier pace. Surely, surely there was no reason why Ben should fall ill....
In time the forest opened to a park-like region where perhaps in past seasons the Indians had followed their custom of burning over the land, killing new growth and brush, allowing established trees to expand their side branches in isolation. Through more than a mile of this they walked. Ben did not speak.
The sled-tracks passed abruptly over the edge of a slope. Reuben could make out no treetops directly ahead, though a thick cluster of them stood to his left; the part of the slope where the road ran down would be open ground. A ghost of alien sound disturbed him.
He held out his hand, but Ben either failed to see it or was unwilling that his brother should go ahead alone; he still followed closely—more quietly though, more careful of his steps—when Reuben reached the beginning of the slope.
The thing could not be more than thirty feet away, a living blot of long shadow on the trampled white.
The slope ran steeply down. At the bottom, a flat expanse to the right must be the northern end of a pond or lake, frozen, snow-covered. The sled-tracks, plain in moon-shadow, skirted that level surface and disappeared in thicker woods beyond. On Reuben's left, all the way down the slope and connecting with the farther woods, hemlocks loomed densely black, branches bowing to the ground.
The thing gazed up across the wild turkey between its paws, and Reuben understood the sound—crunch of monstrous teeth on frail bone. Ben drew his knife and pushed in front muttering: "He won't attack, Ru. They're timid—Jesse alway said...."
The panther had flattened in alarm and readiness, all motionless but for a quiver at the tip of the tail. Round ears spread back on a skull smooth and cruel as the head of a snake, and moonlight greenly sparked from eyes arrogant with the majesty of loneliness. Once or twice the angry head dipped as if meaning to snatch up the meat and save it from the human threat; the motions were abortive, the beast preferring to freeze, and watch, and wait.
Reuben yielded no time to the weakening pain of anticipation. He scooped a handful of damp snow into a ball, swung on his heel in the fine free motion that Ben himself had taught him, and let fly.
The snowball hit the great face on the nose, spattering wonderfully. Unbelieving, Reuben watched a grayish blur shoot away to the black shelter of the hemlocks, belly to earth.
A violent tremor of reaction took hold of Reuben; he heard Ben gasp. "Ru—Ru—oh, man, how he scooned off!" Ben sat down laughing helplessly in the snow.
"Ay," said Reuben, shaken and panting and full of pride. "I allow, Mr. Cory, he might travel some little time, Mr. Cory." The tremor was overcome by the swift joyous action of running down the slope to bring back the remains of the turkey. "See, Ben—he's left us both legs and some of the back and breast."
"Poor puss! My own little brother, a man who'd steal from a——"
"Snow down your backside!" said Reuben, and jumped for him.
Ben caught him fairly and pulled him off his feet, but in the mimic struggle Ben stiffened suddenly and groaned: "Ru—help me up!" Before Reuben could do so, Ben was on his feet without help, denying his own words: "It's nothing, Ru—I got a little dizzy, nothing more."
"Ben, if you——"
"We can't go back.... Hoy, here's a thought! All that turkey blood on the snow—couldn't we make it seem——"
"Law you!" Reuben yelped and war-danced. Ben could not be ill, he thought, so long as he was able to produce such a dazzling conception. "Ben, a marvelous bloody swindle—why, damme, they'll mumble it in chimney comers till the Devil's blind, and his eyes a'n't sore yet. Think of it!—those poor lost boys!"
"Small red gobbets."
"What?"
"Hast thou forgotten? Thine own tales——"
"Oh, that. Nay then, behold how bravely they did stand before the beast—alas, all for nothing, though Benjamin Cory with his good right arm did—did make varsall sure to pick up the turkey feathers."
Eagerly Ben joined him in that undertaking. Reuben found and scuffed out the line of tracks where the gobbler had walked out from under the trees into calamity. As they viewed the shambles critically in devoted silence, it seemed to Reuben that there ought to be more blood. Beside the patch of snow where the stain was largest, Reuben dropped on his back with outflung arms to leave a tragic imprint. Ben grunted approval, but then spoke with a discouragement that was unlike him: "It'll never deceive a woodsman."
"Oh, Ben, they'll be townfolks that find it. Superstitious too. If our own trail ends here, what can they think? We must go under the trees, where—where he went."
"Oh, him!" Ben recovered, laughing again not quite naturally. "He's na' but a spent fart, Ru. He'll travel as you said, and then I picture him climbing a tree to grieve all day tomorrow about what my little brother did to him. 'Snowballs!' he'll say. 'Me, to be whopped by a snowball—why, bugger me blind, and all the time it was that Reuben Cory no bigger'n a boar's tit!'"
"You're no Goliar neither, in fact I could whup you handy with my arse tied under my chin. Now drag me, Ben, from here to the trees, along that line where he ran. That'll make a fine confusion and wipe out your own tracks. Then we'll follow his marks under the trees and smear our own till they can't tell which from nohow."
"That's the thing. What a catamount was he! Know what he did? Laid us out like a pair of sticks, he did, your ankle crossed on mine, took both feet in his mouth, poor wretch, and for his sins went a-blundering through the woods with a boy dangling on each side."
"I tell you, Ben, the superstitious will believe madder things than that. La, some of the tales Jesse used to tell!"
"Miaaow!" Ben doubled over, laughing far too much. "Why, of course—by the time the tale is carried back to Springfield he won't be a catamount at all. He'll be taller'n a house, the Old Nick himself with a passel of demons. It'll be a—a——" he stopped, watching Reuben blankly, all laughter spent.
Reuben said: "It will be a judgment of the Lord." Ben stared, and nodded, and looked away, searching the northern sky above the hemlocks.
Following his gaze, Reuben lost himself a while in the wonder of open night, seeing Cassiopeia released from a last fringe of departing cloud, and the Great Bear slanting toward the North Star. Reuben darkly felt the absence of some familiar thing, something his own mind ought to supply and would not. The night was serene, without complication beautiful, answering nothing.
Ben Cory followed his brother in slowly deepening weariness. The time must be not far from dawn. The moon rode high and lonely, dimmed by new cloud battalions from the west. Ben groped at the thought of sleep; but Reuben, who was wise about everything tonight, might tell him it was not yet time. Ben suffered a passing resentment, that the boy could walk on ahead so untiringly, so unconcerned.
In this more open part of the woods they were not attempting to disguise their tracks. Reuben said it was no longer worth it, and Reuben knew best. Ben tried to step in his brother's prints, nowhere else. This seemed a clever thing to do—when he could remember to do it, and forget the pain in his knee, and ignore certain soft dark waves that now and then approached him from nowhere and flowed away independently of any shadow on the moon.
Back there under the crowded hemlocks, a very long time ago, it had not appeared necessary after all to search for the panther's prints and follow them. All the way down that slope, and far beyond it where the land rose again and the hemlocks continued, many patches of snowless ground allowed them to progress without leaving marks. For an hour, or two or three hours perhaps, they had worked their way along these areas. Glimpses of the moon held them to a general easterly direction. In several places—Ben recalled this with solemn pride in Reuben's wisdom—Reuben had spread his jacket across a patch of snow too wide to jump, so that they might step on it and leave a vague blur nothing like a footprint, rather like the impress of some animal's body lying down. At the least, their efforts would provide a most confusing trail unless the searchers brought dogs; they reassured each other of this from time to time. Advance by this method had been tormentingly slow, yet after a while Reuben, who knew everything, announced that they must have covered another mile.
The road and the sled-tracks were things forgotten. The eastward direction was still a certainty: the moon had said so, until it climbed too high to be a fair guide. The trees had thinned out, the snow lay continuous on the ground; Reuben who knew everything said they might as well walk naturally again, since there was no help for it anyway, and to blur the tracks here would be a waste of effort. Ben had a confused sense of walking on higher ground where a light wind was blowing.
Once, back in the darker woods, he had heard the wail of a mountain cat, so thin and far away that hills and hollows must have intervened. Their friend, maybe, lamenting at snowballs. Reuben had laughed at it. Later Ben caught another sound, a remote tenor howling, lonely at first but answered by another and another. Reuben who knew everything had not laughed at that. Ben thought or imagined that he heard it still.
No wolves had come.
Or if they have come, he thought, I can't see them. They slip along fogfooted behind the larger trees—that tree or that one—maybe. If they are truly come, my brother Reuben will know and tell me. In time for me to draw my knife. Wolves do understand cold steel, they say....
"Ru——"
The boy turned quickly and came back to him. Ben saw his face fade and brighten; the eyes, improbably large, watched him from a mighty depth. Now that, Ben thought, that is certainly an effect of the new cloud-wrack passing over the moon. How warm it is! he thought—nay, damn the thing, how cold! Nothing's truly warm since Mother died, therefore I was deluded.... "Ru, what's the time?"
"Can't be far from dawn."
"How do you know?"
"I can feel it.... Some kind of shack over there—see it? A hunter's lean-to, that's what it is."
"Looks more like a beast."
"Can't you see the poles? Come on—it's not far."
"Ru, listen!"
"Yes, I hear them. They're a long way off. Come!"
"Wait, Ru!" The waves of darkness, each time they advanced on him, were climbing higher, toward his eyes. "Listen to me, Reuben, and not to the wolves." Perhaps the next one would go over his head, and he could be quiet. "Listen to me—in my father's house are many mansions."
"Ben, save thy breath. Lean on me. It's not far."
Nothing came in search of them that night. For another hour Reuben heard the wolves, unable to guess in what region of the secret night they were crying. The shrill desolation of the noise wavered from every quarter of the dark, ceasing at times; then the mind could propose that it had never sounded, until it started up afresh, as pain will.
A flood of intense and soundless fire grew along the lower edge of a mass of winter clouds that had gathered and thickened in the latter part of the night. At some time before the kindling of that sullen splendid flame the howling of the wolves was ended.
Ben had fallen into sleep. When they reached the lean-to he appeared to have shaken off some of his confusion. He spoke reasonably; he stretched out on the heap of leaves and long-dead balsam boughs, insisting that Reuben lie down and rest also. Doing so mainly to humor him, Reuben heard his brother mutter something about Roxbury and then grunt in the plaintive way he always did when sleep had taken him.
When the clouds caught fire Ben still slept, his cheeks raging hot and his hands restless.
The lean-to had been shrewdly made, by some hunter looking to his own welfare. Heavy poles slanted against the base of a perpendicular bank some seven feet high, with others laid across them horizontally; on these brush was piled; snow had gathered, making a dense roof. The back was closed with tougher brush. Near the open end the hunter had thoughtfully heaped dead sticks so that the next comer need not immediately search for firewood. The shelter stood near a curve of the bank, the open end facing east and secure from any wind but the most violent. The space under the roof, barely enough to allow a large man some elbow room, was almost warm, and became unmistakably so after the boys had lain there a few minutes. But Ben shivered continually in his fevered sleep.
Reuben wrapped his coat around Ben's legs. He dreaded lighting a fire: it seemed to him still that to be discovered by searchers from Springfield was a sharper peril than any other. They would do nothing for Ben's sickness, he thought—flog him and let him die. Reuben collected evergreen branches small enough to hack off with the kitchen knife, and piled them at Ben's sides and over him, to hold in the body warmth. This occupied him for half an hour. The sky flamed. It was the third day of March.
He found he could study the position with some practicality; he could weigh the odds for survival, and say: we have a pound or so of smoked ham, half a loaf, part of a raw turkey; we are at least ten miles from Springfield, and anyway I cannot leave him to search for help. Having done this once or twice, he found it unprofitable to toil through the summary again, yet the emptiness of the morning hour demanded action of the mind, if only to hold away a madness of panic.
He saw Springfield consumed like Deerfield by flame from heaven, then saw himself in the bleak honesty of morning as a foolish child for creating such an image: Springfield wasn't to blame. If he dared leave Ben and go back there, he might dodge the powers represented by Grandmother Cory and find help. But he could not leave Ben to retrace a journey of ten miles. Wolves hunted sometimes by daylight; wolves and Indians. They could find Ben sick and sleeping.
Ben shook in a chill; his tossing pushed away some of the cover. Reuben restored it and lay close against him to give what warmth he could until the shivering passed. Panting, with some faint shine of sweat on his forehead, Ben said: "Right of the meeting-house—yes, I see it."
Reuben tried then, long and earnestly, to pray in the manner of his childhood, repeating familiar words aloud, since Ben was too far lost in sleep and sickness to be disturbed. During the act of supplication, some memory nagged. Something demoralizing, to be refused, but at last it sharpened into focus in spite of him. His mother had prayed: "Deliver us from evil ..." her clear voice completing the words, twice, three times perhaps in that reddened doorway until she received the answer, the blow, itself a completion which God had allowed. To Reuben the sound of his own voice became alien, then contemptible, a disgusting whine. A human being ought never to sound like that. Why should God listen to such a squeak?
In the abrupt silence the words of that question swelled to vast importance. They were not right. The question was not the right one.
Change it. Shorten it.
Why should God listen?...
The question was still not the right one.
Reuben crawled out into cold sunless light. He searched the east. The sun was present, a hazed white blur just visible in the overcast. New snowflakes were already drifting, far apart, without a wind.
Why God?...
That was not merely the sun but something of the mind, old, vaguely evil, dying, dissolving not quite as a dream dissolves but with the illogic and inconsequence of a dream.
Reuben said aloud: "Why?..."
The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
The snow would thicken, covering all things. It increased as he watched, the white ball fading, blotted out at last in the gray and white morning. The cold was not severe. No wind was blowing.
Reuben said: "I do not believe it."
He crept back into the shelter to hold his brother in his arms.
Late in the morning Ben woke in a remission of the fever, knowing Reuben was not far away. To the complex interesting lines above him—evidently a roof—he said experimentally: "I must have been sick."
"Lie quiet!" The power of Reuben's hand on his chest startled him, the sodden ache of his own muscles dismayed him. "We can't go on today, Ben. It's snowing heavy. I mean to light a fire—with all the snow they'll never see the smoke, if they come this way at all."
"They?—oh." Ben doubtfully remembered. It would not do for Reuben to guess how puzzled he was; craftily he asked: "How far you think we came from Hatfield?"
"Hatfield?"
"How stupid I am!" The unintended words drawled out of his mouth and floated away. "Meant Deerfield. My leg...." Reuben (who knew everything) helped him shove down his breeches, then allowed him to sit up and look at the splinter-wound, a yellowish scabby island in a puddle of pink. He wished to study it, but Reuben was already pulling up the musty repellent garment and urging him back on the pile of sweet-smelling leaves. "Suppose that's what made me sick?"
"Maybe."
"Suppose I ought to be bled?"
"I daren't, Ben. I don't know how a physician does it. I might cut wrong and not be able to stop the flow."
"I'll do well enough."
"Yes, but you must eat, or you'll weaken."
Ben considered this. He was hungry, yes, but wasn't some difficulty connected with the idea of eating? Meanwhile someone, apparently himself, was burdened with a bladder about to burst. "Must go outside."
"Watch out!" Reuben somewhere sounded frightened or angry. "You'll fetch down the roof if you try to stand."
That was sensible, Ben observed—of course he would, and then they'd have all the trouble of building it over. He located Reuben kneeling in a whiteness outside, ready to help him in spite of his stupidity, and crawled to him. Improbably, the boy transformed himself into a pillar under Ben's right arm, a curve of warm iron around Ben's middle—only Reuben who knew everything could have thought of that.
Out here in the blind white morning, Ben was distressed by inability to interpret what he saw. The swirling pallor might conceal a thousand significant shapes. He simply must not urinate on what might easily turn out to be Grandmother Cory's doorstep. He asked with care: "Here?"
"Anywhere. Hurry! You must get back under cover."
"That's right," said Ben humbly, suffering a panic dread that his bladder would never let go; it did, with relief like an end of pain. But still the gray and white was all a whirling bewilderment. He knew the sentinel monsters to be trees; nothing or everything might be stirring just beyond reach of his vision in these enormous distances. "Where is the way where light dwelleth?"
"What?"
"Which way is Roxbury?"
"That's east," said Reuben, and jerked his head. "Don't think about it now. Come back under cover. Damnation, Ben, help me a little! You know I can't lift you if you fall."
Ben walked with extreme care, and then crawled, back on the pile of leaves. Darkness approached and slid away. Reuben was shaking his shoulder, urging him to eat something. "What? What is it?"
"Some of the ham I stole—don't you remember?"
"Yes. But.... How much have we?"
"A plenty. See—all this. And the turkey too—I'll cook that when I have a fire going."
"Oh yes, the turkey.... Ru——"
"I ate all I wanted while you were sleeping."
He would lie of course, Ben thought. But with a face changeable as sunlight on a wind-rippled pond, Reuben had never been a good liar. Ben lifted a heavy arm to turn that face into the wan daylight. "You—did?"
"I swear to you, Ben, we have enough for several days, and I ate all I needed an hour ago."
Ben struggled over the mouthfuls. The meat lay heavy in him, threatening nausea; that passed. He accepted a final wave of darkness—not true darkness, simply a voluntary closing of the eyes. Certainly not unconsciousness, because he could feel Reuben wrapping some cloth around his legs. He wondered what it was, the curiosity not powerful enough to raise his ponderous eyelids. Later he heard Reuben speak—close to his ear maybe; surely not far away, or the words could not have reached him with that sweetness and clarity: "Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me."
The wolves came that night, not with howling but in silence.
Through the afternoon, under the long patient drive of snow, Reuben had gone out after more dead wood whenever Ben seemed quiet in his sleep. He had struggled with Ben's tinderbox to the edge of despair, and won a flame at last, the fire then leaping bravely and settling to steadiness under the endless slanting white, the smoke pushed away from the opening of the lean-to by a faint breeze out of the west. When he had gathered all the firewood he could find without going beyond reach of Ben's voice, Reuben used the stolen kitchen knife to hack off a green ash sapling and trim it to a six-foot spear. He was wearing Ben's knife now at his belt, but was unwilling to employ it in such labor—besides, the tedious task of trimming and whittling disposed of much time when there was nothing else to do and he knew it might be dangerous to think. All afternoon he heard only the crackle of his fire, the sustained mild hiss of the snow, and the small sounds of Ben's troubled slumber. His mind heard the wolves, knowing they would come.
The hunter-builder had chosen this location cleverly. Thick brambles and a looping confusion of wild grape covered the high bank above the lean-to; a beast could squirm through it, no doubt, but probably would not try, and surely would not jump down from it so long as someone tended a fire below. This fair security in the rear left only a half-circle of territory that needed watching. At the western end of that little arc, where the lean-to itself shut off his view if he sat by the opening, Reuben laid ready a stack of dead wood mixed with evergreen branches. It would be a moment's work to carry a brand to that pile, sending it up in a fine blaze to guard the blind spot. The wolves would not like that.
This was his last act of preparation before evening came on. He knew of evening as a gradual failing of the light, a growth of shadows in the continual drift of snowflakes, a shift from gray to black. At one time it had been afternoon; then afternoon resembling evening. Then night. Reuben became ears and eyes.
He could never hear their feet when they came, but all night he must listen for any change in Ben's breathing or any call from him, such a sound as might be smothered by fire noises or the small narcotic monotone of the snow. He sought to imitate Ben's way of looking everywhere, never allowing his gaze to become frozen in a stare. If something seemed to move out yonder, as happened many times deceivingly after darkness beyond the fire had grown complete, he must flick a glance at it, look away, return, and so assure himself that it was nothing, maybe a leap of fire-shadow, a harmless swaying of a branch of the giant spruce that stood twenty yards away.
He knew the truth of it, and with relief because it ended the sour agony of anticipation, when twin emeralds to the left of the spruce blinked on and off and shone again nearer. Two other pairs of jewels flashed into life, one to the right, the third directly below the tower of the tree. "I know you," he called. "I know you for what you are."
He stood up to look beyond the lean-to. A fourth pair of hunting lights had been approaching the blind spot, and halted at sight of him. Reuben drew forth a burning stick. He walked slowly, with care for the flame, and touched it to the dead wood and pine needles. The lights in the snow did not retire; they watched, curious and cold. In the sudden radiance they acquired a gray body, taut, startled at the new flame but not yet in retreat and visible to Reuben in sharp detail. A bitch wolf carrying young, her belly not much distended but seeming so because of the gauntness of her ribs and a wiry thinness of long flanks.
Only four; probably no others. They ranged in small groups like families, Jesse Plum used to say. The tales of large wolf packs, Jesse insisted, were travelers' fancies. A few of the young sometimes remained with the old ones until full-grown, then drifted away to start families of their own. "Be you ever confronted by 'em," said Jesse once, "they'll be few, boys, and no great peril unless they can get behind you in the dark. True, they can kill you and eat you, but they do doubt it, they understand cold steel and they be full of fear, the way all creatures fear man, and so do I." Well, in the complex story that grew from that opening, Jesse had been assailed by ten wolves who were not wolves; after he climbed seventy feet to the top of a beech, the great dog wolf leader had scrambled up after him, snapping at his heels but unable to reach them so long as Jesse remembered to make certain signs in the air. All that had been perfectly understood as a fireside fantasy, designed to send the children off to the black garret in a good mood. Here, Reuben told himself, he faced only four common wolves, angry with the long winter hunger but afraid of the fire. The gummy spruce branch in his hand still sputtered hotly. He flung it at the somber eyes. The bitch wolf casually dodged the brand. He saw the gray evil of her glide away to join the three others in deeper obscurity.
He sat on his heels near the opening of the lean-to, the green ash spear lying under his right hand, and listened for Ben's breathing. That sound reached him at last, seeming untroubled; then he could watch with greater assurance. If anything pushed through the brambles and dry brush at the top of the bank, he would hear it and be ready.
The eyes shifted, winked, vanished to reappear in silence. He found no more than four pairs at any time. If they became three or two, that might mean fresh danger. They remained, for a long time, four.
Reuben wondered when the snowfall had ceased. He remembered noticing that it was thinning when the eyes first appeared. Now it was over, the air clean and mild, a weak wind still sending the smoke away from the place where Ben lay sleeping. Reuben glanced upward in search of stars and found a few. Maybe—though not for hours yet, he thought—the moon would return, and shine on a smooth silver blank where yesterday his feet and Ben's had scrawled a trail.
He began to feel acquainted with those eyes. "You over on the left," he called—"you're Snotnose. You under the spruce, you're Trundletail, and your mother is Doxy Tumble." For a while he amused and warmed himself by hurling snowballs at them.
They slunk away, not far. The unconcern of their withdrawal conveyed the arrogance of contempt. They could wait.
Reuben's amusement died like the breaking of a weapon in his hand. He thought: What do they know? He stood as tall as he could, waving the green spear, and shouted at them: "I know you! Dirty dogs! Offal! I spit on you!" He fought back a desire to rush out in pursuit of them, with Ben's knife and the green spear.
That would be mad. They would understand his smallness, his singleness, and close in, tear him apart, move on to the shelter where Ben lay helpless and sleeping.... Reuben carried more wood to the other fire, then forced himself to squat once more patiently on his heels, and keep count of the pairs of eyes. Four. He could wait, too. How long?
Eternal hours. Like those that must have already passed since the wolves came. Or had they been there forever?
Why, of course they had. The breed was immortal. They had never been far from Deerfield. They owned the wilderness before ever Christians came to it. They howled in Rome, when Reuben Cory was not. Meeting the green ancient stare from the dark, Reuben felt his face stiffly smiling. He thought: It's true, true—there was a time when I was not. Something new began—something—the name of it I, Reuben Cory. Well, this I may have known, but until now I did never believe it.... He shivered, and although there was cool pleasure in it he drove away the consolation of philosophy because anything that dimmed alertness was dangerous. He could wait.
In a reasonable world, one slept for a part of each revolution of the beautiful sun. Reuben thought back in search of the last time he had slept—Springfield, before Jesse was found in the snow. Danger hid in this reflection also, the danger of self-pity. He put an end to it: I will not sleep.
It came to him that if one is hungry enough, any creature not downright poisonous is meat. Suppose, somehow——?
He could not go out against them, away from the fires. Either they would rush him all four together, or they would run away—good meat lost. But suppose, somehow, one of them might be tempted to come alone—say the old gray bitch who had already tried a sneak approach. How?
Wisdom lurked in her, a cold flame behind a long gray face. Reuben thought of her as their leader. He discovered that he hated her, in a swelling ecstasy not extended to her slinking companions. The thought of killing her, at first a random flicker like a further warning of madness, became a purpose, a source of power, a wildness deserving a better name than lunacy because of its very absurdity. For ten minutes or perhaps an hour Reuben hovered apart from his mind and watched the thought grow. A boy does not kill a grown wolf with a little stick.
And yet the point was sharp. The ash would bend like a bow but never break. His hand and eye were true, true as Ben's.
The fire beyond the lean-to was dying down. This had happened before—how many times? Marching over to refresh it, Reuben found he could not remember. No moon yet, therefore dawn must be remote in the future. He stood with his spear on the unimpeded ground between the two fires, considering, brooding.
The passion of hatred held something of love or at least a sultry need, a hunger not of the belly. He studied the pairs of eyes—four—wondering which pair might be hers. He fell to muttering, aiming at the gray bitch wolf every foulness of indecent words he could recall. Words only, unrelieving, lacking the thrust and achievement of a spear. New words startled him: "Such meat should help him...."
He had not the strength to do any harm with a thrown spear; he would only lose the weapon. Sometimes the very power of a stronger adversary can be made to work for you. If you know how. If you dare.
Reuben knew he was not mad. Within the passion was a coldness to match her own; shrewdness; wicked planning with all the treachery of a wolf and the bravery. No time now to think of courage or fear. Endless time to know the unbearable need for an act of love.
Reuben sank to his heels on this open ground, the lean-to at his back, fires not great to the left and the right of him, between him and the wolves only an expanse of flame-lit snow. He dropped the green ash spear in that white so that the sharp end was covered. His hand curling midway on the shaft owned a separate life, refusing to suffer from the harsh coldness. Gradually he allowed his head to droop, lift feebly and droop again, while his upturned eyes, perhaps not plain to the enemy, maintained alertness. Seeing all. Clever as Ben's.
The beasts were cruelly wise, Jesse Plum used to say. Out of thickets and moon-shadows they watched men's ways, as dogs did. Unlike dogs they watched only for signs of weakness, and this from no motives but hunger and savagery—except, said Jesse, those wolves which were not wolves.
He must be not reckless but wise and cold as they. He must be ready also to recognize the need for retreat. Supposing they all four came together, then he must jump to life quickly, scare them with noise and bustling and renewal of the fires. But supposing, when this interminable ordeal of crouching, waiting and feigning weakness came to an end, supposing it ever did—supposing his feet had not grown numb and frozen to betray him—supposing the old gray bitch should advance alone, while Ben lay sleeping and the Great Bear slanted toward the North Star——
She was coming.
He would not believe it for a while. Slowly he explained to himself that one of them must have crept out into the open a long time ago, as some trick of the firelight deceived him into calling it another shadow. Then he knew this was not so. She was coming to him. With all his heart he accepted it.
He lowered his head once more, and in that moment witnessed the brief belly-to-earth advance, the freezing down to watch him again across a much smaller distance. This could only be the one he hated, no other. She was coming to him. The others remained a shifting of eyes beyond the clear ground—afraid of him, mere offal, mere dogs as she was not—or else they were holding back because they knew her reasons and his own.
He knew that if he were to jump to his feet and dodge back behind the fire, she would not rush, not yet. No gambler, she would slide away and wait for the certainty, wait till dawn or beyond dawn or beyond the next dawn. He could not do it. It might be wiser, safer; might almost be a duty to Ben that he should retreat to comparative safety, now, while he had time. His body would not do it. His body would only wait like a bowstring, clutching the spear, controlling that deceitful droop of his head until the approaching moment when one of them—a half-starved alien beast or a boy who must remember the doorway of a reddened room where he clung sickly to a bedpost and did nothing—one of them would die quickly.
Was she only a wolf? Some wolves, Jesse said——
Was it possible—he was up on his feet in the surging act of madness—was it possible she could hate and love him in the same way?
He could not understand.
His mind must have flown away, missing the interval, the second of decision. But she was here. She was down. It was over.
She had screamed once, he thought, like a human thing; his ears held something of the strangled cry. More of the moment returned, her flaring mouth receiving the point in mid-air, her own driven weight spitting her upon it. It could not have happened.
It had happened, and she was down, and it was over, and he could remember his own backward staggering at the impact while all of him tightened down on that center of existence where his hands grasped the green ash spear. There followed some wave of elastic power in his legs, and all the force was then flowing the other way until it was over.
Simple butchery remained. He must follow with the spear her agonized writhing, hating no longer. No danger. Her failing paws threshed and tore at the shaft of the death she had swallowed. Her blood fumed out around it from a pierced lung.
It was all over.
"Thursday night we came away—remember? That was the night you fell sick, and was burning and tossing all day Friday. Saturday you was better, but once or twice you didn't know me. It was the Friday night when the wolves came."
"Are they still about? Nay, they can't be on so fair a morning. I feel washed clean, Ru. Weak, but—oh, I could do anything."
"Weaker than you know. It'll pass. I saw the wolves last on Saturday. They scented something, I think, and drifted away."
"It's all so still under the sun, and warm—what? I thought this was Saturday."
"This is Monday, Ben. Yesterday was the Sabbath. I hadn't thought of that till now, when you began asking me about the time. It was yesterday your fever broke for good. These three days have been a hundred years. I've had much time to think, when there was nothing else I could do—mind the fire, gather more wood, then either think or go mad, but I've not gone mad. I have not prayed, Ben, since before dawn on the Friday morning."
"I don't know what I should say about that. Father said, just before he died—did you hear?—said that God is far away."
"And Mother's last prayer was not answered. She prayed, 'Deliver us from evil.' And mine have never been answered."
"But we can't know that."
"I can't say that I know anything, anything at all, except that I'm here with you, and the air has turned warm, and the Bay Path road must be somewhere a mile or so over yonder, and tomorrow we shall try for Roxbury."
"And that thou hast killed a wolf.... Ru, if I didn't see that carcass under my nose——"
"I never lied to you. Oh—tales for your fancy now and then."
"I know that. What did you do with the hide?"
"Flung it out to the cannibals. The entrails too, and the head. They were delighted."
"Puh! What's this part I'm eating now and enjoying so?"
"Have you swallowed it, Mr. Cory?"
"I have, and you needn't try to make me puke."
"A puppy. She was carrying young—six. I had one whole, when you was still in the fever."
"Ow-ooh!"
"Oh, ay, your ears'll turn furry any day now. I say, Ben, when we're dirty-rich and famous, let's keep a few wolves on hand—you know, so to have roasted pups for guests of distinction."
"Now you sound like yourself."
"Do I?... Ben, I—something happened that night, Friday night."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know whether I can tell it.... When I dragged the carcass to the fire I was crying like a fool, I don't know why. Sat there crying with her bloody head on my knees, some-way I couldn't make it seem she was only a piece of meat. Later I could, later it didn't matter. And then—well...."
"What is it, Ru?"
"I found my britches were wet. Nay, not what you think, and not her blood neither, though that's dried all over 'em and I declare we both smell like the Devil's own. Remember you told me how some time soon, whenever it happened, I'd be spending the seed?"
"Oh—of course."
"Ben, I didn't know it when it happened. It must have been the moment when I was killing her. I didn't know it could happen that way."
"I didn't neither."
"Is something wrong with me?"
"No, no."
"You see, I already knew how it feels. I did confess to you about that—long ago, remember? That was the time when you told me, about the change, and the seed."
"Yes. Well, they say it's a sin to bring it on, but I think it must be venial, Ru, for Jesse said once that every man's vessels are alway in need of it. The dreams don't help. Nothing's wrong with you."
"But why didn't I know it when it happened?"
"Oh, the excitement—why, you must have been white-hot, to stand up to a wolf with nothing but a little stick. I didn't know it could happen that way, but I think it's not so strange."
"Jesse Plum.... Why did Father never speak of those things?"
"I don't know, Ru."
"Did he to you?"
"No, he never.... Look: I remember I spent once, merely from lifting a big rock. And—oh, tree-climbing, things like that. So you see—anyway there's nothing wrong with you, brother, nothing."
"Do you have those dreams much, Ben?"
"Not too often. You?"
"Oh, they...."
"You will. You'll be dreaming about girls, and——"
"I ... You'll be strong enough to go on tomorrow, Ben. One thing: we needn't fret now about anyone following from Springfield. That snow will have covered everything. I hope they found the turkey blood before it began a-falling. We can go slowly, rest as soon as we come to another fair shelter. This morning might be the start of another thaw, even an early spring—only look at the tears of that spruce, how they fall in the sun! We'll find more food some-way, now that you're well. There must be towns between here and Roxbury, where we could work for a few meals, a few nights' rest."
"Why, sure, we'll make it.... What happened to your jacket?"
"My—oh, the wolf."
"But the wolf did not reach you, brother."
"I dragged her."
"And so got your jacket torn and muddy on the inside? But I found it wrapped around my legs yesterday when I woke with a clear head, and you slipped it away, but I knew. Last night when it turned a little colder you put it around me again, thinking I was asleep, and I was silent, wishing to speak but too stupid."
"No need. You'd have done the same. Don't speak of it now."
"Very well. But——"
"Thou owest me nothing. I've been forced to think of these things—so many hours, Ben, when I—nay, but how could there be any owing or standing beholden between thee and me?"
"I think I owe thee everything."
"No! Pray understand, Ben. It's not a thing to be measured—why, it's not a thing at all, but—oh, like a region one travels through, an area of light."
"Love, a region?"
"What else? Can you own it or give it or take it? It came to me, Ben, that we only dwell in it, as in the sun, or this morning air."