"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?