_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."