Jesse was immediately hurt and sulky. "Not never again by this
beast--heart-shot he be." He nodded where he thought Meco was probably
standing. "Good man--whoreson good man there."
Reuben could remember seeing and hearing all that through a doorway
partially filled by his mother's grace; he could remember squeezing in
beside her, her arm dropping on his shoulder, her finger twisting in his
hair, which he still wore quite long in those days. He could remember
her bubbling with suppressed laughter. Ben was already outside, standing
slim beside Father, contemplating Jesse's performance with adult
gravity.
The carcass lay at some distance, and a damp east wind was blowing
toward the river, but even from the first that lion had not looked
right. Bloated and not bloody; flies were settling. "Oh!" Mother
said--"thankful heart! It hath a--a little stink."
Meco was not as drunk as Jesse. He spread dark fingers in resignation.
"Big stink," he amended, and strode off into rainy twilight, leaving
Jesse to salvage what he might of glory.
So far as Reuben recalled, Meco never came back. After he had gone--but
now at twelve Reuben could not bring the rest easily to mind.
Father had not found it so amusing. Jesse must have been obliged to bury
the carrion and spend sober hours longing for invisibility. In following
days, no doubt, whenever Jesse joined a gathering, say at the ordinary
or leaning on a fence or discussing a bottle behind a shed, someone
would make a soft faraway mention of catamounts, and Jesse would be
surrounded by that shattering New England laughter which is performed
without moving a muscle of the face or emitting any sound of any kind.
Then, within the obscurity of this last night of February, Reuben did
remember more. Shame had stirred within him for Jesse Plum, who had
always owned the status of a friend, old but accessible and a spinner of
tales. Jesse knew everything, Reuben had once supposed--wild secret
things, winds and weather signs, the enigma of women's flesh and one's
own, charms against disaster, skin-prickling histories of what witches
might do to cause it, and endless gaudy tales of England in the days of
King Charles. If you could believe Jesse Plum--Reuben had, once--his
youth before the Plague would have terrified Marlborough and made a
stallion blush. Jesse could tell of monsters too--basilisk, mandrake,
unicorn, sea serpent. Jesse liked to hint murkily that once during the
miserable Atlantic passage to the colonies he had glimpsed a Something
rising from the bowels of the deep, and never quite got around to saying
what it was. He could explain the simpler stories written by furred feet
in the snow, by iron bear-claws high on a tree trunk. From a blur and a
spot of blood he could make you see a mouse becoming a midnight dinner
for an owl, and then set your spine wriggling with a hint that maybe it
was not exactly an owl but like one. For a long time--long anyway to
Reuben Cory--the brothers had settled many private arguments by: "We can
ask Jesse."
Drunk or no, it had not been right that a tall grown man, an old man,
should act the clown. It had not felt right to watch Jesse with the dead
lion when his sweating grayish face turned lost and vague and crumpled
in a stupid chuckle of apology.
And then as Meco stalked away, Ben had looked around, not smiling but
startled, awed--clearly aware, as Reuben was, of an astonished sharing.
The Day of the Lion was perhaps the first day when Reuben understood
that Ben was a person too. Before that, an image worshipped, slightly
feared, not consciously loved. Afterward, a separate self, a brightly
visible human being with gray eyes. On that rainy evening four years
ago, Reuben now remembered, he had soon looked away from Ben's warm
stare, not quite able to bear it, and had resolved in secret: I'll never
quarrel with him again. The resolution had been broken of course, once
or twice....
* * * * *
Ben Cory dwelt in a natural multiplicity of worlds. He could be active
in the world of Deerfield's daily occasions: the reasonable labors on
his father's farm grant; the school remembered from last year, where
Ru's offhand brilliance at the piddling studies was now making him
disliked, and Ben no longer there to prevent the occasional bloody nose
or comfort him after a pedagogic birching; the not-friendly church; the
clumsy kindness of some boys and girls of the village, and the mindless,
furtively obscene cruelty of others; nearer to him sometimes than any of
these, the quiet land itself in the flowing of the seasons, the smells
of summer morning and of the milky breath of cattle, the open fields and
marshes, the frame of low hills and the all-surrounding presence of
maple and beech and oak and pine, the wilderness.
Ben knew the unique world his mother's presence created, where without
much discomfort he was on his good behavior. With another sort of good
behavior he could enjoy the world of being-with-Father, one often lit
with unexpected mirth and kindness.
He possessed a sense of the outer world: an important Massachusetts, a
half-mythical Canada inhabited hatefully by the Others, a New York not
very real, an England thought of as Home--in a perfunctory way because
of the ocean that made England, for a Deerfield boy, only slightly
nearer than the moon. From his father Ben gained some clear perception
of the war, the giants France and England raging over old hates and new
advantages under two sick and stubborn sovereigns, Queen Anne of England
and the doddering Sun King Louis XIV of France--yet the ocean itself was
more actual to Ben than England or the war, for Ben's own father had
seen it once on a boyhood visit to Dorchester. He said, if your ear lay
close on the pillow at night, the murmuring you heard then was not
unlike the moaning of breakers on sand, and why shouldn't a boy (said
Joseph Cory) send himself to sleep by listening? The sound was eternal,
Joseph Cory said--somewhere, always, ocean was breaking on the sand.
North of Deerfield the greater wilderness was a world inviting no one, a
forest too old for imagining: green rounded hills secret in distance,
swamps, valleys obscure, streams of unknown sources. That belonged to
the bear and mountain lion, to the deer with midnight eyes and the comic
grandeur of moose; to the rabbit--bouncing bread and butter of the
wilderness--and the fox and weasel who followed him; to the down-footed
lynx and quiet-sliding rattlesnake. Hunters, trappers and fur-traders
knew something of that land, and had for nearly a hundred years.
The Abenaki knew everything about it--green depths of spring and
balsam-pungent air, ardent stillness of forest summer afternoon, autumn
explosions of gold and scarlet, and all the ways for men on an errand of
killing to travel through it in silence when the ground was white and
the evergreens bowed down and the northern lights a wavering of madness
between them and the February moon.
Ben was welcome in yet another world as no one else was: a world that
existed only when Reuben willed it.
Ru's talking-spells began when he was about six and able to find hidden
hens' nests in the shed, to the sharp-faced ladies' continuing
indignation. At that time the Corys still maintained the yellow-necked
rooster brought as a youth from Springfield (senile and resembling Louis
XIV in other ways but named Sir Pudden) who believed himself master of
the shed and hated Jesse Plum's boots. He and Ranger and Bonny knew all
about the nests. Ranger avoided them from a rigid sense of honor, with
only a pensive lift of the white eyebrows in his black face. Sir Pudden
stood about in glamorous attitudes--second nature if you have twelve
wives, all of them cloth-heads. Bonny entered the shed in those days on
a moral tiptoe, never certain whether the armed truce with Sir Pudden
was still in force. Sir Pudden, to Reuben's extreme sorrow, regretfully
became soup in the year 1699. Even sorrow was grist for Ru's talk-mill.
Bemused by the chickens' personalities, Reuben elaborated names for all
of them--Martha, Patience, Hoobah, Binega, many others. Every new batch
of fluff-balls drove him to a dither of vicarious maternity. At night he
kept Ben awake with flowing tales in which these names acquired
quasi-human characters who could range up and down in a special world
with horizons of Reuben's choosing.
In the conventionally documented world nobody ever chopped William
Stoughton into small red gobbets. That vinegar-blooded Saint, deputy
governor during the witchcraft frenzy of 1692 and again later, died in
1701, but not in the small red gobbets Duchess Hoobah made of him in one
of Reuben's narratives. The conventionally documented Stoughton would
not have been interested to learn how an obscure Joseph Cory,
remembering 1692, had loathed him out loud in the presence of wide-eared
children. It didn't matter. The past of one, or two, or two thousand
years, the fluid present, the future that can exist only in myth, all
came to focus in Reuben's here-and-now, in the theme and variations of a
small clean mouth chirping in the dark.
Ben seldom suppressed the talk. He liked to offer details of adult
wisdom, or new words that Reuben would roll with relish on the tongue.
The stories gained in sophistication, especially during the last three
or four years, when the boy had developed a taste for listening to Jesse
Plum. Princesses appeared; decapitations were limited to villains,
wizards and Frenchmen. Allegory too: the tales no longer rambled but
were innervated by unifying purpose, and Ben knew rather plainly that he
was receiving gifts from a mind altogether separate and unlike his own.
Ru also acquired some tact, and awareness of the times when Ben
preferred to sleep.
If he itched with questions, though, and found Ben reluctant to answer,
Ru might take advantage of his smaller size, punch and prod, try to
smother Ben with the covers or nag after the forbidden tickle-spot at
the edge of the ribs. He could hurt if he gripped a handful of hair, but
he generally managed to stop short of open war. Ben imagined, sometimes
with uneasiness, that his brother could study his mind, feel with his
nerves, control him as a small man controls a big horse with wit alone.
After such assaults, secondary eruptions would demonstrate that the
little wretch was still awake--pinches, pokes, muffled war whoops,
prohibited words: original sin taking its own time to simmer down.
Nowadays Ru's stories would be delivered _sotto voce_, lest Father shout
up telling the boys to go to sleep. The hushed story-teller's voice
illuminated the inner world, making of the night a sheltering room. Ben
would be more aware of his brother than if darkness had not hidden
him--the warmth, the harmless small-boy smell of him, above all the
voice and its comic or startling or grandiose inventions....
Ben sighed in the exasperation of insomnia, and slid out of bed to stand
barefoot in the cold, saying a proper prayer in an undertone. His mother
preferred to kneel, but admitted it was wise to conform to surrounding
custom lest one forget in a public place. Puritans did not kneel,
regarding it as a mark of popery. Faintly relieved, Ben walked to the
garret window to glance into the winter night, wondering if a dark
moving thing he saw was that it ought to be. Yes--the watch, on his
rounds. Ben could make out the black stem line of a jutting flintlock.
The shadowy important man marched along the northern limit of the
stockade, passing out of sight to Ben's left behind the meeting-house.
"Ben, what ails thee?--can't sleep?"
"Restless." Ben stumbled back into bed shivering, squirming down away
from the cold. "Go back to sleep--sorry I disturbed thee." It must be
after midnight, Ben thought, and all well. But as he tried to settle
himself, inviting sleep with a better conscience, the snow outside the
palisade, pressed high against the logs, nagged at him like the thought
of a broken lock on a back door.
_Chapter Two_
Ben surged up on a stiff arm, listening. The uproar had been in the
shed, he thought. Maybe Ranger had broken his rope and run out. Now Ben
could hear only the bumping sickly turbulence of his own heart. In a
dream he had been flying; the dream had betrayed him into this agony of
listening where no sound was, and fear grew over him like frost on a
stone image.
"_Arm!_"
That noise was part of the dream. In the dream, faceless beings had been
shouting, not willing that Ben should fly.
Then he knew the cry was the summons of the watch in a world of no
dreaming--a few rods away, near the north end of the palisade. It
flared, a jet of terror in darkness, and died.
The covers dropped. Cold slapped and squeezed Ben, but he could not move
until some sound released him from this frozen waiting.
It came, a yelling that soared upward like fire swallowing dry pine,
throbbing yells made by only one kind of creature alive.
A different voice pierced the clamor, snarling in search of authority:
"_A droit, vous! La-bas! Enfoncez les portes!_" And a wild drawled
afterthought: "_Prisonniers!_" The voice was smothered by the yells and
a whinnying of some other man's laughter.
Footsteps pounded on snow. Steel assaulted wood. Then--Reuben still
sleeping--the flintlocks began to talk, the near ones a dry thundering,
the farther ones like slamming doors.
Ben could move. He reeled up, shocked into panic, thrashing against
sullen-clinging bedclothes. "Ru!" Ben punched and shook him. "God damn
it, wake up!" Reuben made an empty noise. "Raid! It's the French!"
Reuben leaped under his hand, comprehending. "Here!--your britches. Your
shoes--no, bugger it, these're mine, where'd you put yours?" Ben
slammed his forehead on the foot of the bed, searching; his nightshirt
tripped him and he flung it off. A floor-splinter lanced fire into his
knee. He heard two thuds, one below the window, the other in the same
instant on the opposite wall. "_Ru!_"
"Leave off shouting, Ben."
"That bullet----"
"What bullet?"
"Never mind. _Will_ you tell me where your shoes are?"
Reuben could not answer. Joseph Cory's voice fumed at the foot of the
stairs: "Come down! Coats--don't forget your coats!"
Ben shouted: "We're coming!" He pursued the shoes under the fallen
bed-cover. He found his own breeches and shirt, then his hunting-knife
where it always rested on the table by the bed.
Orange glory beyond the window marvelously bloomed, flooding Reuben's
angelic face and thin naked body moving toward the square of light.
"Why," said Reuben--"why, the cods're burning us!"
"God's mercy, get away from that window!"
He had to pull Reuben from it; force the shoes on his feet and find
armholes for him. Father was calling again. Ben hustled his brother to
the head of the stairs. "Stay here. I'll get the coats."
The room shimmered. Red-black ghosts in a swirling jig hid the coats,
defying Ben to come get them and fall on his face. He got them; then he
too was drawn against his will to the window.
The fire danced on his left, the heart of it out of sight--west and
south, beyond the training field, the Hawks house perhaps. North, near
the meeting-house, a confusion of shapes under gunfire was twisting
toward some climax. Five fire-tinted men broke away, soundless to Ben,
moving with apparent slowness. One leaped forward in mid-stride to drop
in the white; his arms sought each other above his head, scooping the
snow as if he would embrace it, or climb like a hurt bug up the side of
a world for him overturned.
The others disregarded him, plunging toward the Cory house. Reuben was
trying to speak. "I'm here, Ru. We must go down--could be trapped."
Reuben mumbled something. "What?"
"Ben, I must----"
"God damn it, don't be looking for the pot, use the floor, if they burn
us who's to care?" Ben called again to his father, but his voice was
swallowed by a bang. Not his father's gun--Jesse Plum's musket, a piece
of trash the old man had picked up at third or fourth hand, likely to
shoot anywhere but forward. "Come on, Ru!"
"I'm sorry."
"Your coat. Here--I'll button it for you."
"Ben, I didn't pray tonight, nor I didn't forget neither."
"What? Oh, put on your coat!"
"I didn't pray."
Ben forced the boy's arms into the coat and lifted him, amazed at his
own strength, at the sureness of his feet on invisible stair-treads.
"Ru, you deceive yourself."
"Mr. Williams saith that without prayer----"
"Ru, be still!"
Jesse's wretched gun slammed again, a different sound, a spattering
clang, followed by the stridency of Jesse cursing and weeping.
Ben's mouth brushed Reuben's cheek; he tried to say something
reassuring. How could even a child suppose the disaster was on his
account? What of all those in Deerfield who did pray? He supposed Reuben
would presently recover his wits, and set him down, but held him still
in the hollow of his arm.
No true dark prevailed here in the entry facing south. The front room's
west window admitted the glare of the burning, showing the empty
four-poster. Ben's father was a specter in a nightshirt, cursing himself
for not having locked the shutters. "Where's Mother?"
"In the hall." That was the name for the rear room,
kitchen-parlor-workroom, heart of the little house. "Go to her, Reuben."
Ben let him go. The brass face of the clock blurred in its tall oaken
cabinet; Ben could not make it out. His time-sense said it was near
dawn.
Outside the front door voices set up a gobbling not in French. Joseph
Cory yelled: "I hear you, God damn you!" And to Ben, quietly: "See to
Jesse, I think his gun blowed. Find out if you will."
_If you will_--he had never spoken so to Ben before. Ben groped through
the doorway between the rooms; Reuben was shivering there alone. Ben
found his mother and Jesse Plum in the hall, Jesse swinging his gaunt
arms, one bare, the other trailing a wisp of nightshirt. The old man was
fending her off. "Don't impede me, Goody Cory! 'Tis a nothing--leave me
fetch my axe!" He lurched clear of her helpless hands, and Ben glimpsed
his right side where the nightshirt had been blasted away--cooked meat.
A piece of the gun-barrel stuck from a crack in the wall. Jesse seemed
unaware of pain.
"Let him be, Mother. Come away from the windows!" She heard, understood,
came to him. Jesse plunged into the woodshed and returned with his axe
dangling.
"A nothing!" Jesse hooted. The little blue eyes burned above a mad
smile. "I'll hold this side, Goody Cory. They won't pass, not by me.
I'll see their guts cheese and the dogs eating it." He raved on. Ben
hurried back to his father.
"Look!"
Only a blot with eyes, at the west window. In wide fluid motion like the
final leap of a cat, Joseph Cory swung his gun and fired. The thing
toppled away. Below the ridiculous starred hole in the glass a choking
body began a gradual dying.
"You got him."
"I got him," said Joseph Cory, and turned on his son a sickened face Ben
had never known. "What of Jesse?" The choking continued. Goodman Cory's
voice climbed, beating down that noise: "Speak up, boy!"
"His gun did blow, he's hurt but not down. He fetched his axe. I think
he knows what he's doing."
Goodman Cory reloaded the gun. "Ben, I'm weak." The choking became a
bubbling squeal. Goodman Cory stumbled toward the window.
Ben's mother was kneeling in the doorway between the rooms, Reuben
clutched in her arms, her cheek against his head. She was praying. The
light of the fires showed Ben her moving lips, her dark eyes that now
and then sought for him, too. Goodman Cory had halted short of the
window, crucified by uncertainty, the flintlock a stiff burden. "Ben,"
he said--"Ben, hear me...."
The crash of an axe against the oaken door blotted out at last the
clamor of a man strangling in his own blood. But Ben could still hear
his mother praying.
"A stone axe, not steel," said Joseph Cory, and nodded to Ben as one man
to another. "No good against our oak."
"Will you shoot through the door?"
"... _and forgive us our trespasses_ ..."
"Nay--only waste a bullet. Ben, thou art a man--if I'm lost, take
care of thy mother and Reuben. Be ready. Readiness--I mean
_alway_--later--all thy life--readiness, wherein I've failed."
"You've not failed."
"No time for kindness." He shook Ben's arm. "Ben--if God liveth he is
far away."
"... _for thine is the kingdom_ ..."
"Ben, hear me," said Goodman Cory. "I say God is far away, no whit
concerned with man."
"Deliver us," said Adna Cory--"deliver us from evil...."
"I wanted learning, Ben. Find more than I did."
The good oak was barely quivering under the petulant fury of the stone
axe. "But Father, you know so much----"
"I? Learning--oh, a key to so many doors! Why, I never found but a few,
sniffing at the threshold, a fool, a bumpkin. And Reuben must find
learning too." He pulled Ben close, crouching, whispering: "Ben, hear
me. I fear for Reuben. I pray you, keep him from being too much wounded.
I can't understand him, Ben. Thou art mine own, I _know_ thee--while
he--nay, I haven't words...."
"But Father, you will----"
The pounding ceased. Sudden footsteps thumped rhythmically on snow.
Something different smashed against the oak with the gross dullness of
the invincible. Goodman Cory pushed his son into the front room. "The
devils have found a log. Why, Ben, I shall live if I may."
It was an honest door, three-ply, studded with nails; the log ram
thundered five times before that barrier yielded. Then Ben's eyes winced
at high-crested devil-shadows surging in the orange glare.
Goodman Cory wasted no shot on the two who rushed the entrance. The
muzzle of his gun found their heads, snake-swift, aimed like the course
of a bullet. They collapsed in a mess of legs and arms. With thumping
violence a hatchet skidded across the floor.
Ben saw his father clamber over the stunned enemy and past the wreckage
of oaken boards. He heard his father shout in a voice so searching that
all the roaring confusion, magnified with the door down and a sudden
cold wind in the gap crying, was momentarily a silence: "Did you come
here to murder children?"
A French officer ten yards away in the corrupted snow gracefully lifted
his flintlock and shot Goodman Cory through the heart.
* * * * *
He said: "Mother, you must not shield me." But in her prayers she did
not hear him.
The room before him spread out as a mass of darkness holding two oblong
mouths of Hell, yet from moment to moment as his mother prayed, Reuben
was aware, coldly aware that those two hell-gates were simply windows of
the house where he lived: the west window displaying an absurd, pretty
hole--who'd have thought a bullet could go through without shattering
all the glass?--the south window a fainter gleaming, for its shutters
were partly closed and the glare of the fires came upon it
indirectly--beautiful in fact, rather like first light of a red-sky
morning; rather like----
Wind struck him, rushing through the ravished door, and Reuben thought:
_Now!_ "Mother, let me go! Let me----" but her cheek was heavy and hot
against his head; her arms would not understand; he could not hurt her
by struggling to free himself.
Someone, maybe Father, shouted a dim word or two outside and was
answered by a blast of gunfire. In the room behind them Jesse Plum
raved. _Mother, let me speak to you_--Reuben understood he had not said
it aloud.
"_Deliver us from evil--deliver us from evil...._"
It was coming.
Reuben had known it, waited for it, now watched with no astonishment as
the thing on all fours lurched obscenely from the entry into the front
room and fumbled about, snorting, searching for the axe.
Reuben caught his mother's wrists and pushed her arms away--no help for
it. Amazed at their clinging strength, he was more amazed that he had
the power to overcome it, and without harming her. He was free and not
free.
He could drive himself a few steps forward, but it seemed that the air
between him and the thing on all fours had thickened to monstrous glue.
His lungs must toil to fill themselves. He located the thing again as it
crouched and began to rise. With all his force, with a sense of huge
achievement, he spat on the face of it.
Reuben felt it at first simply as a brutal and foul indignity when the
thing, rising to a vast height, laid a hand flat across his face and
lifted him so, with nothing but iron thumb and finger gouging under his
cheekbones, and flung him sprawling. He struck the bed, and during some
long sluggish course of time, two or three seconds perhaps, he secured a
bedpost and hauled himself upright, finding that the firelight from the
west window was now behind him, and everything was changed. He must get
back across the room.
The thing towered to the ceiling between him and his mother, who still
knelt in the doorway and still prayed. He must get back across the room.
She would not look up. It might be she did not see, did not know the
stone axe was swinging down. He must go back across the room.
Reuben felt the scream wrenched out of his throat: he himself had
nothing to do with it. He was certain then that he was running back
across the room. This room or some other, in this world or some other.
* * * * *
Ben moved into the light, stumbling over the ravished door, falling,
gathering himself in one motion to go on, to kneel beside the
unresponding mouth, knowing that his father was dead. His mind retained
an ice-fire shrewdness, a corner-of-the-eye intelligence understanding
the smoking houses, the running, the shrieking, the fur-capped Frenchman
who was reloading, and shouting too in foreign-sounding English:
"_Surrender!_"--was that what the fool was yammering? To Ben he appeared
a stupid and trivial man with babyish pop eyes--couldn't the fellow
understand that Goodman Cory was dead?
Ben was on his feet, his father's gun dull and heavy--loaded, too, he
realized. The French officer fired, clumsily this time, and a
hornet-thing of no importance muttered past Ben's ear.
In the house, someone screamed.
Ben turned his back on the Frenchman dreamily. "Acquire learning?"
Delayed knowledge of the scream penetrated him like blown flame. A man
in the entry was struggling to rise. Automatically, with no conscious
anger, Ben clubbed the gun against the black head, catching the Indian
smell of acorn grease and paint. Should he now shoot through the
deerskin jacket?--no, because he must be already dead. Ben had heard and
felt the splintering of bone. And anyway this man was only one, and
there had been two.
The fires continued in his eyes and shifted to blackness. Here in the
front room he couldn't see. He knew his mother or maybe Reuben had
screamed. He understood the blackness was in his head, a vertigo, and he
called: "I'm coming to you, Mother!" The blackness dissolved, giving
back the room. He must look there, where she was lying, and the spilled
blood, and the boy kneeling beside her saying quite softly over and
over: "Mother--Mother...."
Out in the hall a muffled hammering went on and on. Ben explained aloud
carefully: "I will go and find out."
Jesse Plum's nightshirt still flapped on him in strips. He was bringing
down his axe repeatedly, though the Indian's head lay nearly separate
from the trunk. Ben stood quiet, compelled to watch until the head broke
from a band of skin and rolled on the drenched hearthstones, the
forehead displaying the gash of Jesse's first blow.
Jesse squinted at Ben, a puzzled and exhausted old man. His hairy legs
shivered, kneecaps dancing. "I was too late--plague and fire! Oh, the
fair things I looked for in this land! Gold--the Fountain--yah, the
Fountain, the things they'll tell a man! Benjamin, it be'n't right, it
be'n't right...." Reuben was still speaking, too; the empty silver
monotone reached Jesse's consciousness and he pulled himself to
erectness. "Goodm'n Cory?"
"They've shot him, Jesse."
"Dead?"
Ben did not speak. Jesse lurched to the east window. "This side's clear.
Fetch your brother, Ben. I'll get you out, I will so. Hatfield--Cap'n
Wells' fort anyway. Hurry--fetch him, Ben!"