"Jesus, I don't know. Killed one Inj'an with my axe." Jesse said that in
startled thoughtfulness as if just remembering. "My own gun got
me--peddler sold it me for a musket, bloody grape-shot it is now,
might've killed me deader'n a son of a bitch." The sergeant ran on to
the head of the column. "A'n't left you much," Jesse apologized, and
discovered the flask still in his hand. "Why, he's gone and left me it,
in the name of God."
"Come on, Jesse--he meant to. Come on!"
"I will, Ben. But do you boys walk on ahead--it be'n't right a thing so
ugly as me should walk naked in the sun, the Lord never intended it."
Some others of the column called to them, words sounding kind, passing
over Ben like a slightly warming breeze.
A vague time later--the column was gone and Ben was trying to ignore a
stitch in the side--Jesse's voice rose and fell in a fitful rambling;
the old man sang a little, too. "If I knowed that man's name I could
pray for him. The race is not alway to him that can the swiftest
run--call that a Psa'm, they do, no music in 'em, Church of England
myself, if so be it makes any difference when a man's a sinner and lost
and bound to Hell. I know what I'll do, I'll say to the Lord Jesus, that
man who gave me a drink on the Hatfield road the first day of March,
that's what I'll say, mark it, Ben, and pity but the dear Lord'd
understand, you would think--Benjamin? Won't he? I'll say, that man who
gave me a drink on the first bloody day of March, right about there on
the Hatfield road, do you see, and will that do fair enough, Benjamin?"
"Of course, Jesse."
"You're a sweet soul, Benjamin, to gi' me that out of the good learning
you got. I call that an act of kindness to an old fart that's wallowed
in ignorance and sin all his days, I won't forget it, I could kiss your
foot. I used to could sing, Benjamin. At Mother Gilly's house they'd use
to _ask_ me to sing, every smock there would ask me--her house was in
Stepney, not far from the Mile End Road. 'Brave Benbow lost his
legs'--that's a song I picked up from a chapman come by your father's
house, Benjamin, I think it was last year. 'Brave Benbow'--oh, bugger me
blind if I a'n't forgot it, anyway there was better songs in the days of
King Charles that won't come again, needn't to think they will, boy.
That's all past, that is...."
Ben's hand had relaxed. Reuben broke free and plunged blindly ahead to
drop face down in the snow, not rising.
Here the road curved near the frozen expanse of the Connecticut.
Distant in the south smoke threaded into the clouds, the smoke of decent
fires--Hatfield village, warmth and safety. Ben raised Reuben's limply
protesting body, brushing white smears from his face and collar. Jesse
stood by, trying to drink from an empty flask. "Ru, brother----"
"I can't go on, nor I will not."
"You must."
"I cursed you."
"What? That?--you know that was nothing."
"I'm rotten with sin. I let it happen. I did nothing. And yesterday she
chided me for using an ugly word, and I went out into the shed and
I--and----"
"That's nothing."
"You say that. I befouled myself. I didn't pray last night. So I'm to
die in sin and be damned forever."
"No. No...."
Jesse mumbled: "God-damn flask's empty." Ben's eyes were compelled to
follow the motion of a brown thing soaring up from Jesse's long arm,
flying, descending to the river ice and skidding off to lie still, a dot
of darkness. "Don't know m' own bloody strength," said Jesse Plum, and
chuckled in apology.
"Reuben, thou art no more in sin than any child of Adam."
"I let it happen. He came out of the dark. I let it happen."
"Reuben, get up on your feet!" As Reuben answered that angry shout with
nothing but a sick stare, Ben searched in desperation for anything at
all that might reach the boy's mind, and could find nothing, thwarted by
the barrier that rises or seems to rise between one self and another,
and so cried out unthinkingly: "For my sake then! Because I need thee
and love thee."
* * * * *
Reuben Cory clung to the power of a fantasy. The snow before him,
through which his feet could now drive with amazing patience and force,
was not really level but a stairway. Level it was--flat level, drearily
flat and white and cold--but his mind by quiet assertion made of it a
stairway: because a level may indicate infinity, but a stairway, any
stairway, must come to an end. Let it be a thousand miles or a thousand
years away, a stairway must come to an end, for the mind refused to
imagine one that went up forever, to no goal. Therefore each step was a
rising, something gained toward the summit where Ben stood waiting to
tell him he had done well.
By fantasy the universe might stand divided, into a region endurable and
an outer region. To the outer region one must return, soon, and Reuben
knew it.
From within the region of illusion that he knew to be illusion, Reuben
grew aware, and more comfortably, that old Jesse Plum was still rambling
on, and singing.
"Brave Benbow lost his legs, by chain-shot, by chain-shot...."
Reuben no longer resented the croaking sound as a hateful intrusion. The
old man meant no harm, and was drunk. Ben had refused to abandon him,
and Ben always knew best.
"Says Kirby unto Wade: 'We will run, we will run.'
Says Kirby unto Wade: 'We will run.
For I value no disgrace, nor the losing of my place,
But the enemy I won't face, nor his gun, nor his gun....'"
Peacefully, almost unobserved, the boundary between the two regions
dissolved. The snow was flat. For a few moments Reuben's mind was
completely engaged in an effort to understand how they had got away from
the house. The axe--came--down.... Then what? Out of this blank two
remote voices spoke with needle sharpness: "_Goodm'n Cory?_" "_They've
shot him, Jesse._" Maybe after that he had fainted. But now, to the
deepest privacy of his mind, Reuben could state: That home was not; that
he would be twelve in May; that his mother and father were dead; that he
was walking on flat snow into the outskirts of the village of Hatfield
with his brother and an old servant who was drunk and naked.
Hatfield buzzed. For a short way--questions from distracted citizens
spattered from all sides--Reuben knew that Jesse was shambling between
him and Ben, an arm on each, wobbling and protective; then under the
guidance of a pink fat man they passed into the thick warmth of the
ordinary's common room. In this hot haze and clatter of voices, Reuben's
senses clouded, not in retreat but bodily exhaustion. A birdy, ancient
woman hovered about them with noises of concern. Beside her face, Ben's
appeared, and Reuben searched the strangeness of it in a fluctuating
dark and brightness. They must be sitting near a fireplace, he reasoned,
and Ben's arm was preventing him from toppling over. Ben was speaking,
too. "What?"
"I said, rest thee a while, Ru."
The fat man had wrapped Jesse Plum in a huge brown horse-blanket; now
someone brought the old man a pewter tankard. At the rim of it gleamed
Jesse's little blue eyes, unfocused like those of a baby at the breast.
At length Reuben heard someone drawl in unbelieving admiration:
"Godso-o-o!" Jesse's grimy fingers fluttered; a frowzy-haired boy in a
grubby apron giggled and snatched the tankard before it could hit the
floor. Jesse collapsed into himself, a wired skeleton from which rose
the bubble and rasp of a sudden snore.
The fat man was talking in lardy tones. "Hoy! Killed an Inj'an, he did
say. He don't look it." Jowls shaking and puffy fingers gentle, he
twitched away the blanket to examine Jesse's burnt side. "Bad. Gun
blowed, he said. We'd ought to have goose-grease." The ragged boy was
peeking at it. The fat man lifted him away by a greasy spreading ear.
"Mind thy God-damned manners, pup--a'n't we all brothers in Christ? Go
fetch cobwebs. Good as grease, they'll mend a burn."
Jesse Plum was carried away, his slumber undisturbed, and Ben was
talking with the old woman.
Reuben supposed he ought to listen, say something himself. Their speech
came to him disconnected and obscure. "Grandmother in Springfield--Madam
Rachel Cory ... great-uncle--Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury."
"... sleigh gone a'ready to Hadley with others from Deerfield--be there
more on the way?"
"I think there was no one near us."
"... to your grandmother--certainly...."
Most unmanly, Reuben thought, to let his head sink, to leave Ben the
whole burden of caring for him, but with that head an unmanageable lump
of exhaustion there was no help for it. He found it strange that Ben's
voice should be rumbling directly under his ear and yet sound far away.
"Ma'am, if my brother might rest in a room where it's quiet?"
Reuben tried to protest as he was lifted. He could walk. The protest
fell short of words. An alien hand touched him, someone else offering to
take him. Ben's voice was oddly impatient: "Nay, I'll carry him...."
Reuben sensed the passage of a creaking stairway. Ben let him down, on a
cot, and as he stretched out his vision cleared, showing him a narrow
room, and Jesse Plum on a pallet nearby, snug in his horse-blanket,
brown gnarled feet innocently protruding, Adam's apple bobbing with his
snores. The old woman was hovering. "Nay then, boys, you bide here long
as you're a-mind. Jerusha'll get a cart, or you might wait on the
sleigh's returning if you wish. Eh, Lord, we saw the fires on the sky
before dawn, I'd only just come down to see after breakfast. Anyone'd
know you for brothers--eh, Lord, yes! What's your name?"
"Reuben and Benjamin Cory--I'm Benjamin."
"Eh, Lord, yes! I'm Goody Hawks, and you can trust my Jerusha--he'll get
you to Springfield one way or t'other. Some tea, ha?"
Reuben thought: I _must_ speak, if only for thanks. But Ben, sitting by
him, a hand spread without pressure on Reuben's chest, was saying
everything, taking care of everything. "You're most kind, ma'am."
"Eh, Lord, nothing--shame if we couldn't help the Lord's own on such a
day...."
Reuben saw his brother wince and lean down, pulling up the leg of his
breeches to bare his knee. Though it made the room swirl dangerously,
Reuben braced up on his elbow to look at the long splinter embedded
below Ben's kneecap.
"Law me!" Goody Hawks knelt by Ben, clucking and muttering. She secured
the end of the splinter in horny nails, drew it free with skillful
quickness and held it up. "You walked from Deerfield with that and all?
Marry, it's two inches long if I'm a day old. You must have a poultice
of sawdust or the like. I'll fetch it when I bring the tea. That'll draw
out any that's left--like draws like, you know--eh, Lord, what a thing,
I'd've dropped flat with it in twenty paces."
Reuben thought: I _will_ speak, and his hand reached out, and he heard
his own voice as a hoarse and stupid little noise: "Give it here."
Goody Hawks dropped the stained thing in Reuben's hand, apparently not
puzzled that he should want it, though Ben was, and studied him with
some mixture of amusement and concern. Reuben pushed the splinter into
his shirt pocket, and then, in some dread that Ben might ask questions
unanswerable, he lay back and shut his eyes.
He heard them whispering together a little while, the sound partly
smothered by the snoring of Jesse Plum. "... was there when our mother
was killed ... outside the house, but he was forced to see...."