Drearily it rained on the Monday when Jan Dyckman was buried.
More time lost to lessons: Gideon Hibbs nourished that thought so obviously that there was no occasion for him to utter it aloud. He was not attending the funeral, having been only distantly acquainted with the Dyckman family. Acidly, with a kind of humor occasionally encountered at the borders of philosophy, he remarked to John Kenny that he was the fourth son in a family of twelve; all his brothers and sisters had married and begotten young, of whom the expected percentage had died, and thus he found himself already in possession of a massive collection of pallbearer's gloves, for the which he could discover no practical application whatsoever (although familiar with the rumor that some persons of a weightier worth than himself had turned a fair penny in disposing of such); he would therefore, with Mr. Kenny's permission, remain at home and take advantage of the peace and quiet to do a trifle more on a work which had engaged him now for ten years, namely an employment of the sternest logic—(it could not be published in the colonies)—in a demonstration of the immortality of the soul. Mr. Kenny sighed and patted his dusty back.
The few who were present with Mr. Kenny and the boys bulked like a multitude in the spotless parlor of the Dyckman house. More unobtrusive than the Jenks' slave Clarissa, Constable Derry was there—so far as was known, the corpse had not bled in anyone's presence. There were Jan's two small girls red-nosed in doll-like silence, his stricken wife, a handful of dour strangers, Captain Jenks thoroughly sober and looking like the vast man he was instead of a ruin, Faith and Charity stiff and amazingly pale in black, Clarissa self-effacing, and Madam Prudence Jenks with a black enameled comb instead of a red one.
The Lutheran dominie did not exhort, nor shout, nor whine, but spoke all manner of pleasant things concerning the nature of the dead man, and then entered on the main stream of his discourse—this a poetic enumeration and description of the mercies of God, announced with mild certainty as though he had been directly instructed in the matter and had been astonished at the kindness of the Lord in assenting to some of his own small suggestions. Unhesitatingly he implied that if any soul could rest sure of heaven it was the soul of Jan Dyckman. A gentle spirit, this minister: incapable of learning how to be content with discontent, he had luckily never needed to learn it, since not every son of Adam is obliged to go to school.
At some time during this passage of consolation a kerchief tumbled from Faith's restless hand. Ben was able to find and return it to her, not prevented, not even much scared by the polar stare of Captain Jenks. He won a pressure of her fingers and a sudden blue-eyed look of such depth and sweetness that she might have been saying aloud: "I am with you." Reuben sat motionless, all gold and ivory.
The minister's tender music did not touch on the fact of murder, yet somehow conveyed that this was an aspect of the infinite wisdom of God which at the present time it was not polite to mention.
The mellow voice was larger but otherwise not changed, when in the cemetery under a slanting curtain of rain it recited the last words of commitment to the earth. Here Ben and Reuben stood together and glanced often at each other—communication, as any observer would have known, but under this quiet rain perhaps only one message passed, the simplest and the most essential: I am with you.
It rained all night.
In the morning at Roxbury pools of standing water translated the image of a warmer sky, for it was now well past the time of the return of the robins, and of the bluebirds whose color of morning is a music made visible. Once in such a pool at the base of a rock near Uncle John's private road—but that was another April, the April of last year—a distant self of Ben Cory had been revived, so that the older boy could momentarily breathe with the breath of that child and rejoice in the sunlight wantoning over the child's bare chest and legs and muddy feet. He had been five then or younger, master of a vessel on a sea of shining calm—a chip with an oak-leaf sail, a pond in a world no longer living: well, in the immediate world you must write down a Latin subjunctive a hundred times, whipping an intractable brain into retaining it, and by the way, what the devil did Ovid himself care about subjunctives when it was spring in Italy? Nothing, Ru would say—subjunctive's one small step in a stairway to a place up yonder where you might get a glimpse of Ovid; and Ru would take the book from him, and tumble across the bed in his thin-legged sprawl or sit on the floor with his almost beardless chin hooked on his knees, and listen while Ben groped and stumbled through the lesson—correcting Ben casually, guiding, sometimes ripping out lewd or startling comment to make the Latin stick in Ben's mind by association, and never once needing to open the blasted volume and make sure he was right....
By the same pool in the April of 1707, this present year of change, Reuben Cory had stared as through a window on the inverted blue of heaven; had knelt by the rock to find white violets, the first to come, miniature, early-waking, with a midget purple eye. Hurried bees had discovered them before him, since it is not enough for these restless innocent to store up summer in the honeycomb, but with the earliest warmth they must be out and seeking in hunger. He heard then the incessant whispering, the waters of the earth returning to the broader streams, to the sea, the sky, the earth again, the waters of spring.