As Goody Hawks tiptoed from the room, he felt again on his chest the
undemanding weightless warmth.
* * * * *
"Ben, what are we to do?"
"Nothing for now, except you should rest.... I suppose Grandmother will
have room for us. If not there's Uncle John at Roxbury."
"Last night I saw a part of his letter that Father didn't read aloud.
Uncle John must be a great infidel."
"What did he write?"
"'Nor no man, by threat of damnation nor promise of paradise, shall ever
betray me into the folly of hating my neighbor, whether in the name of
princes who are but men or in the name of a God I know not....' How
could anyone write such a thing, unless he...."
"Marry, I don't know. I think--oh, let it be, Ru. He's a good man, we
know that.... I suppose he only meant that the general opinion is not
his own, that his own religion is in some manner different."
"Yes, maybe.... Ben, is it true 'tis a hundred miles to Boston and
Roxbury?"
"More than a hundred, I believe."
"Will the French be coming down this way, you think?"
"They'd be here now, Ru, if that was their mind. Though I did hear
Captain Wells saying a few days ago that if the French found the wit and
the forces to drive down the river and hold it, they could cut the
Massachusetts in half. But, he said, he thought they hadn't the men, nor
the wit to think of it. There'll be no Inj'ans here."
"What'll we do--I mean in Springfield, or Roxbury?"
"Oh, I must be apprenticed to some trade or other. But thou
shalt--continue studies. That was Father's wish--'deed it was the very
last thing he spoke of before they broke down the door. And 'tis my wish
too, remember that. Thou must acquire learning, he said."
"And why should I have that, and thou not have it?"
"I shall too. But being older, I can be apprenticed now, to earn my keep
anyway, and I'll find means to study at the same time. I dare say
that'll be Grandmother's wish, or Uncle John's."
"What about going to sea?"
"D'you know, I believe that's why I keep thinking of Uncle John and
Roxbury. He's a shipowner. If thou couldst stay with him until a little
older, and study, why, I might well be able to sign on shipboard for a
while, so to earn my way."
"Ben, thou wilt never see thyself."
"Why? What does that mean?... Who ever can see himself?"
"Maybe no one. But thou especially--thou art ever thinking what may be
done for others, the while I've thought only of mine own--mine own----"
"Heavens, Ru! I'm selfish enough."
"Not as I've been. Nay, let me say it--it's on me to say it, Ben: I mean
to do better, to make thee not ashamed of me. I'm afeared, but I tell
thee, I will try to be brave."
_Chapter Three_
Ben Cory lifted and dropped the brass knocker of an oak door,
nail-studded, with hinges of dull-gleaming iron. "She may open to us
herself, Ru. Remember to take off your cap."
Ben recalled that the sole of Reuben's left shoe was cracked; he had
noticed it when he found the shoes after that nightmare search--actually
the morning of this same first day of windy March. Ben's own shoes were
still sound; the wet melting snow would be working up miserably through
that crack in Reuben's. He squeezed the boy's shoulder. At least they
were together. Undoubtedly Grandmother Cory would provide decent shoes.
The alien town oppressed him; Reuben too would be feeling the loneliness
of a place where no one knew them. Other windows they had passed were
alive with the mild glory of candles; Ben had noted this as they climbed
the hill road from the frozen river, to the house with two chimneys that
Jesse Plum had pointed out. Madam Cory's windows stood blankly gray in
the graying evening.
Ben missed Jesse here. The old man, who had snored all afternoon in the
oxcart that drowsily brought them down from Hatfield, had gone into a
flutter of anxious apology at the prospect of approaching Madam Cory's
house. "It a'n't fitten, Benjamin," he said. "Your grandmother was never
no-way partial to me. I'll come later, ha? You don't take it unkind?
That's her house, third back from the hill road, with the two
chimbleys." Meanwhile his sad little blue eyes had fixed on a tavern
signboard down the riverside street, a yellow rooster against startling
blue. "She was never no-way partial--" still fluttering, apologizing,
promising to come later, Jesse set off for the sign of the rooster at a
feeble run....
The door at last squeaked open. The one observing them was only a
servant in a drab russet jacket, bulging with heavy muscle. His baldness
was fringed with gray at the temples, the thick skin of his face
channeled like a withering pumpkin, his voice the hushed croak of a good
soul enjoying a funeral. "You are Madam Cory's grandsons?"
"Yes. Word arrived about us?"
The big man nodded. "A militia rider from Hatfield. Madam Cory is at
evening prayers. Come this way." He led them through a chilly entry into
a parlor crowded with polished lifeless shapes. Ben selected a black
throne; Reuben kept hold of his hand, speechless. "I am Jonas
Lloyd--sir. Me and m' good wife, we does for Madam Cory. I trust you'll
be some comfort in her affliction.... That is the Mister's chair--Mr.
Matthew Cory's, your grandfather's. I fear Madam Cory doth prefer it be
not used."
Ben scrambled out of it to stand in disgust by the cold fireplace. Jonas
Lloyd's canine brown eyes assessed their ragged clothes; he nodded in
sad approval of Ben's action, and faded away with the silence of
well-trained muscle. Reuben muttered: "Dare we sit elsewhere?"
"Try it anyway."
"You was here once, Ben. Is the house as you remember it?"
"I can't remember it--I was a pisstail baby."
"I suppose we oughtn't use such words here?"
"You're right. I must remember."
They explored the room, timidly. A pot clattered in the unknown kitchen.
A dog barked outdoors and was chided by some woman's elderly peevish
voice. In the dying light, they could not make much of a painting on the
wall--someone lean, stern, undoubtedly dead, with the high-bridged Cory
nose; probably Grandfather Matthew, of whom Ben's father had seldom
spoken. Jonas Lloyd had made no move to light the candles or the
firewood standing ready on the hearth. Ben ventured onto another chair;
no ghost pitched him out of it. Reuben sank on the floor and rested his
cheek against Ben's knee, then jerked away, feeling the poultice that
Goody Hawks had bound on the splinter-wound. "Did I----"
"Nay, it don't hurt," said Ben, and pulled him back, and tried to smooth
his tangled hair, but only a vigorous combing would do that.
"Ben, how ever did we get over the palisade?"
"Jesse--he pulled you up and jumped with you."
"Why can't I remember it?"
"Oh, you was--I don't know. Hush--that's over...." Ben could find no
light at all beyond the windows. Enough light filtered in from the
hallway where a rushlight burned to show him Reuben's face gone vague
and absent. As time crawled on, Ben wondered how anyone could spend an
hour at evening prayers. Adna Pownal Cory would have called it excess of
zeal.
His memory of his grandmother ought not to be so dim, he thought. When
he was four, his mother had been expecting another child--a girl who
lived only a week, as it happened--and Madam Cory offered to take him
for a month or so; Adna Cory would not let two-year-old Reuben out of
her care, for he was sickly, but she let Ben go. Madam Cory was then
forty-nine, to Ben timelessly ancient. Ben could recall little except a
struggle to say a Psalm right for her. Gray skirt, stiff white bodice,
plain cap--and Ben _could_ not get in all those new words of the Psalm.
Grandmother's hand was dry and cool. "Dost thou not _wish_ to be saved,
Benjamin?..."
After Grandfather Cory died in 1688, Grandmother's younger sister and
brother-in-law moved in with her--Patience and Recovered Herrin. The
Herrins were blessed with six surviving children, whom they must have
distributed somehow around the house. Ben could dredge up no infantile
memory of them but a blur of faces sharing nothing, voices tediously
speaking not for him. He knew that Patience had died in '97, and
Recovered had gathered up his brood, married again and moved away.
Ben recovered no memory of the Pownals breezing in at Springfield to
look at him, though they must have done so. Ben's aunt Mercy Pownal
visited Deerfield in 1701, wearing a red silk hood, reckless
short-sleeved bodice and scarlet cheyney jacket that shocked Mr.
Williams and others to the bone, especially in view of a rumor that the
woman could read Greek and Latin, had been to London (or
Philadelphia?--some foreign place anyway) and, worst of all, was
twenty-nine and yet unmarried. Ben remembered his mother trying to speak
a formal welcome and crying instead. Then the two clung to each other in
the doorway, the tall woman leaning her cheek against Mother's head,
saying: "Nay, it's good, Adna, good--I wish I was in thy little shoes."
Moments later Ben's mother was showing her over the small house, still
sniffling, also chuckling like a skylark.
At another time came the marvel of Uncle Zebina Pownal, in black curls,
who plumped down on all fours claiming to be a moose so the boys could
ride him--a tame moose, he said, but amoosing; possibly Reuben's first
pun, for the boy nearly strangled getting it down. Uncle Zebina sang,
music of England; he had gone there, and heard the new inventions of
Henry Purcell, who died young. Father was obliged to warn Uncle Zebina
that the Deerfield neighbors would think ill of such music. "We must not
interfere with their sadness, to be sure," said Uncle Zebina, and for
the remainder of his visit he made the music a sweet conspiracy, humming
softly and shielding his big red mouth with a comic hand.
But those were Deerfield memories and clouded with a strangeness. In
1702, the year of King William's death and Queen Anne's accession, when
war broke out again, the bearded patriarch Enos Pownal, Mother's
grandfather, had pulled up stakes in wrath at Springfield sold his fine
house to some lowborn Dutchman from Albany, and sailed for the West
Indies with most of the tribe. Enos died at sea, but the tribe went on,
Mercy and Zebina and a flock of others, to settle at Kingston. Ben's
mother occasionally received letters from them that left her
brilliant-eyed. Even at fourteen Ben had never heard the whole story of
that very Pownal-like upheaval; it carried overtones of religion and
politics, and suppressed echoes of the word "smuggling."
No use--the woman now at evening prayers would take on no reality for
Ben, as the Benjamin Cory four years old was an infinity removed. Yet he
found it astonishingly easy to bring up recollection from the age of
six of Reuben's four-year-old self, a wild passionate atom submerged in
serious illness every few months, a being who must somehow be shielded,
not hurt....
He thought of the journey just ended, the brown oxen slopping on
dreamily through the mush of a thaw that had come on a benign breeze out
of the south, the pearls falling from bare oak and dark-clothed pine to
make gray periods in the white. He saw again Jesse Plum snoring, shaken
about but no part of him awake except one hand that clung with a life of
its own to the rail of the cart; he felt again Reuben huddled against
him, speaking hardly a word in all the hours of the journey. The driver
walking with the team had been a deaf-mute servant of the Hatfield
ordinary, beyond communication in a hushed universe of his own. Across
the river from Springfield the oxen had refused to venture on the ice.
At Ben's prodding Jesse Plum had waked, his mind still shrinking within
the rags of sleep, and the mute had swung the cart about for home.
Somewhere in that passage, Ben recalled, he had glimpsed a flash of
life--a wintering jay, clean as a fragment of sky, lighting on a branch
to scold the human thing. The cart crawled on; gazing back, Ben had been
able to see the bird rise into the wider blue, in airy departure not
wholly lost.
The bulk of Jonas Lloyd abruptly shut off the light. The man was
rumbling with the studied cheerfulness of a hangman: "You may come now."
He led them up a drafty staircase and indicated an open doorway at the
rear of the upper hall and padded back into the gloom below.
A canopied four-poster filled the center of Madam Cory's bedroom, a neat
pleasant room with western windows that would overlook the river by
daylight. The quiet woman sat by one of these, pallid hands folded in
her gray-skirted lap. Her eyes were, like Reuben's, ocean-gray, but
unacquainted with laughter. A table beside her held a leather-bound
Bible and one candle in a pewter sconce.
"Well, come to me then! Are you afeared of an old woman?"
Ben was dazed to discover--so vast had been the infantile image--that
his grandmother was not large at all. She sat no higher in the little
chair than Reuben would have done. "We are not--not too presentable,
Grandmother."
"That's no matter. You must be Benjamin--awkward still, I see. And
Reuben, whom I never saw--yes, yes, anyone would know you for brothers.
You take after your mother's side somewhat, in appearance." Rachel Cory
sighed gustily. "Thankful heart, Benjamin--don't cry! We all die, don't
we? Pity but men would give more thought to what cometh after. I said
don't cry. Your father's death, Benjamin, is a grievous thing, and you
will remember that I have lost a son. Am I weeping? Am I, my dear?"
"No, Grandmother."
"Benjamin, let us understand one another from the beginning. I remember
you as a child, willful and headstrong. If you and Reuben are to bide
here until you can maintain yourselves, as of course you shall, you must
walk in the one right way. Your father erred, who might have been one of
the Saints; concerning your poor mother, I will not speak. Your father
strayed. Benjamin, Reuben, in the Book of Psalms it is written: The
judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
* * * * *
Reuben heard and did not hear his grandmother: the sound of words in her
deep, positive voice reached him, but not the meaning--it was not as
though she had spoken in a foreign language, but as though his own
comprehension were momentarily numb. He saw Ben look away from her in
stunned blankness, and then no more reflection was possible, for a wild
hoarse singing had broken loose in the night outside.
Rachel Cory winced and leaned to her window; it was too dark, Reuben
guessed, for anything to be recognized. "Well," she said with the
precision of disgust, "there is one heedless enough. You might as well
understand, Springfield is no Canaan."
"Brave Benbow lost his legs, by chain-shot, by chain-shot,
Brave Benbow lost his legs--"
"The constable is slack again. It has been weeks since we suffered open
sodden drunkenness in the streets. I do regret it should have happened
on the evening of your arrival. Take a lesson from it if you have the
wit. Benjamin, one thing you and Reuben must understand: in all the time
the Lord hath permitted me to dwell here----"
"Yaphoo! If I a'n't a futtering he-goat of Hell there a'n't no name for
me. Behold, I'm the brazen serpent of the wilderness--_yaphoo!_ Look on
me, you pocky smock-tumblers, you pot-walloping get of Belial, on my
bosom I got the bleeding bloody cross, only it slipped some, there's
some men fail at everything, can't even carry a cross right side up and
be God-damned to you, s's I!" In panic fear of laughing, Reuben coughed,
and tried to look out the window so that his back would be turned to his
grandmother. "You harken unto me, you jolly whoremasters, you cuckoldy
cods and Roundheads too, harken how I pickled my wounds in the juice of
the vine! Why, bugger 'em all, s's I, and you too--a'n't I meek and
lowly? Yaphoo! A'n't I crushed to the dust nor can't sink no further
down, a piss-poor toad under the heel of the Almighty? Look down! Don't
I stay alive because Hell won't have me? You broke my heart, Lord, you
fried my brains, now scourge me with a bull's pizzle, I won't say
nothing. Yaphoo!" The voice was moving away. Reuben prayed that Ben
would not speak. "Ah, Lord, look down!" Yes, it was fainter, muffled, as
if walls intervened; Jesse must have turned a corner of the street. "Out
of the deeps, O Lord--_yaphoo!..._"