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 But no flesh-and-blood creature had superseded her, and often in the waking dreams his lively collaborator looked like Judith, as she said and did those shameless things which were saved (he hoped) from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.