It had been much like that not so many years ago, when the dreams were of Hell.
The moon was not shining, but the sky was a field of a million untroubled lights. As Reuben got up and stretched a cramp out of his arms—his body must have been locked like iron in the dream—he could make out something of his brother's face, enough to sense the tranquillity of Ben's healthy sleep, and envy it.
Ben's smooth forehead was turned away; his hand, firm and large, curled childishly under his rounded chin. Ben's eyelashes were long as a girl's, darker than his brows and curling upward at the tips, darker than the thickening down on his lip that he must now shave every other day. Reuben sat quiet, staring in the dark, until the dim pattern of his brother's face was set free from natural bounds, became incomprehensibly vast, all else a background, then dizzyingly small and far away, unreachable as an image in the bottom of a well.
What are you? What am I?
What is fear?
What is happiness?—well, that arrives unsought, if at all: to seek it, I know, is to stumble in a quicksand; to wait wearily hoping for it is simply one tedious way of dying.
What if nothing is real at all except the present moment?
Why, if so, then eternity is only a word. As I look on him now, I look on him forever. But there's deception here, for we do move and change: eternity is a word.
If the present alone is real, then do we ourselves create it from moment to moment? What is memory? I remember looking over hemlocks to the North Star, and Ben looked there too, and I have no way of knowing, ever, what he saw. I remember a day of summer——
Mid-July, for the hay was ripe then, and Reuben and his mother were returning from carrying a noon meal and a jug of beer to the outer fields. Other men beside Father were there, and Ben too, and some other older children and women to help with the raking, but Reuben at seven years old was no use with a rake. He had been allowed to carry the beer, sipping one mouthful and no more on the way. This was the homeward journey, and she in a smiling mood, tanned cheeks flushed, dark eyes full of mischief.