She nodded grimly, letting out her breath in a shaken sigh. "I trust so.
Some idle scum of the river-front.... In all the time the Lord hath
permitted me to dwell here, I have tried to maintain my house as, let us
say, a small imperfect Zion, if that be not vanity. I will tolerate no
ungodliness, Benjamin, Reuben--no foul speech, no unconsidered acts.
You'll never find me unkind or failing in understanding, but the walking
is strict. You will be at meeting without fail on Sabbath and Lecture
Days. These are wicked times. The faith is everywhere assailed, every
day bringeth new inventions. See to it that I find you on the side of
the Saints. Well, you must be weary and hungry. Jonas will see to your
supper and show you to your room."
They were dismissed.
No more music came from Jesse Plum.
Jonas was waiting, and led the boys to the kitchen where his rawboned
wife Anna had kept a supper warm. Anna Lloyd sniffed more than she
spoke, through a ribbon of nose overhanging the shrunken area where most
of her teeth had been lost. Neatly dressed and clean, perhaps she would
never seem so, kitchen smoke and years of drudgery having found
permanent lodgment in her wrinkles. She was incurious about Deerfield
and the boys; her few questions were aimed at some region not well
defined because of a cast in her eye.
Here in his own domain Jonas laid aside solemnity, straddling a chair,
carelessly pawing Anna's scrawny bottom now and then, a caress such as
he might have granted to a useful dog.
Reuben pushed the lukewarm stew around on his trencher for politeness'
sake. He noticed that Ben was actually eating the stuff and emptying his
mug of thin beer. Then Jonas recovered his mantle of stately gloom and
guided them back upstairs to a room of their own. It was at the rear of
the house overlooking a yard; except for Grandmother Cory's, probably
the best room in the house. Jonas lit a candle and padded away.
The room contained another four-poster with a dark blue canopy. The
small-paned windows shone brilliantly clean, the furniture stood just
so, defying any sinfulness of disorder. A framed sampler on the wall
aimed its message so that anyone retiring or rising must be advised: _I
will also vex the hearts of many people, when I shall bring thy
destruction among the nations, into the countries which thou hast not
known. Ezekiel xxxii; 9._
Staring at this, Reuben thought: There was never such a thing in my
mother's house. "Ben," he said, and turned to his brother in sudden
need--"Ben, I'm only now understanding."
"Understanding, Ru?"
"We're alone. There's nothing. Only you and me."
* * * * *
It came to Ben belatedly, lying still under the dark canopy, the candle
out, that once again neither he nor Reuben had prayed. For his own part
he had not even thought of it, being too concerned with finding some
word of comfort for Reuben in that moment of desolate comprehension.
Now, since there was some possibility that the boy had fallen asleep, he
dared not move.
He thought of Jesse Plum--surely a drinking companion must have steered
the old man away to sleep it off in some tolerant kennel.
"_The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether._"
She might have been there in the room.
Ben faced up to the words for the first time, retreated incredulously,
was compelled to return, wondering if Reuben could have understood them
as he did now. In effect his grandmother had said it was right and
fitting that their father (her son) should die.
Ben thought: _Fanatic...._ His father had used that term now and then,
but indecisively, defining it but giving Ben the impression that a
fanatic was a person you weren't likely to meet. The word was clarified
for Joseph Cory's son now that it owned a face.
Laboriously Ben instructed himself: in the morning he would tell his
grandmother that he and Reuben intended to go on to Roxbury.
At least that was decision, not frivolously reached; now perhaps he
could rest. Reuben stirred and mumbled, but quieted at a pressure of
Ben's arm. Ben watched the canopy, a blackness against softer dark.
Moonlight must have arrived outside, faint, without consolation. In
random air the canopy swayed like the bough of a sublimely silent tree
possessed by midnight. Ben watched it, remembering.
Reuben was five, the first time he nearly died. Mr. Williams, a frontier
minister of many duties, had felt obliged to offer what medical aid he
could. He called the illness a calenture, came to the house to pray,
provided some remedies that Ru promptly vomited. One of these was
crushed sow bugs, recommended by the great Cotton Mather. Adna Cory
stayed by the bedside, seeming unable to hear anything said to her by
anyone but Reuben. Ben could remember firelight mixed with a gleam of
candles, flooding through the half-open door of the back room where
Reuben cried and drowsed and burned. Ru's breath had been loud and
rapid on the night Ben recalled most clearly--it must have been the
night before the fever broke and they began to think the child would
live.
Ben's father was sleeping as usual in the front room; he needed to be up
early and out for the corn-planting that will not wait even on the
shadow of death. He had snuffed his candle but sat up still dressed,
bony hands dangling, and said: "Thou shouldst go to bed, Ben--'tis
late."
Lost, missing his mother in her deafness, Ben did not want to go to bed.
The garret would be black, with the certainty of the lion under the bed
of which Ben must not speak because it was not real. Voices in the other
room dragged him toward other perils, cliffs not quite seen--the flowing
tenor of Mr. Williams, now and then a word from his mother. Drawn
elsewhere was his body, awkwardly, into the curve of his father's arm.
"Thou shouldst be told, thy brother may die." But Father himself had
told him, that morning; it was strange he could forget.
Ben remembered asking why God let people be ill, and then something,
blurred now, about the drowning of Bonny's kittens. Lowering his face to
his father's shirt, Ben had discovered a heartbeat heavy and
interesting, overriding his father's words, leaving only fragments for
later memory: "I wouldn't have thee question Mr. Williams concerning
such a thing ... over-sure he knoweth all truth ... do themselves suffer
from the sin of pride, as if knowledge of holy things resembled the
goods of a man of business...." But Father had said something more,
important, and it would not now come to mind.
"A promise to thyself is binding, unless a better wisdom----"
No, that was later, when Ben was ten years old and had been told to
search his heart for any call to a particular life-work....
In the other room: "The broth was from a turkey Plum shot for us, Mr.
Williams. He couldn't swallow the meat, I made a broth in the room of
it. I know he got strength of it."
And Mr. Williams, melodious: "Goody Cory, I have prayed that this
affliction might bring you and your good husband to a better
understanding of the Christian's necessities. Oh, how advantageous
gracious supplications are! God accounts forgetting his mercies a
forgetting himself--no time more fit for praise than a time of trial.
Why, can't you see this visitation must be God's means of bringing you
and Goodman Cory and----"
"There was _hominy_ in it!" An ecclesiastical sigh followed that wail,
and the rapid, harsher sighs of Reuben fighting to live.
But what else had his father said? Was it before they went outdoors?--in
Ben's memory they were already in the yard, the house door closed. "No
rain tomorrow." A breeze was blowing off the river. Joseph Cory had
shown his son the inviolate shining of Polaris. "That star tells sailors
where the north is, Ben. It never changes."
"Why, don't they alway know that?"
"Compasses sometimes fail. Nothing distracts Polaris."
Later he carried Ben up to bed and sat by him in the dark a while,
speaking of a book of voyages by one Hakluyt, promising he would try to
secure a copy and they would read it together. And he wrote of it
afterward to Uncle John, who sent it as a gift with Ben's name in his
own hand. Now it would be smoke.
In the Springfield house, boards squeaked upstairs--probably an attic
bedroom for Jonas Lloyd and his sad wife. A rooster somewhere woke with
the abrupt foolishness of his kind and crowed four times. Jesse Plum
would say that was a sign somebody would give you money in four days, or
maybe four changes of the moon.
"Thou didst have a sister, Ben, and thou too small to understand, who
lived but a few days. If Ru dies, so I keep thee I'll bear it somehow.
North, right of the meeting-house, up a little--that is Polaris."
He said that.
In devotions at Deerfield, Ben's father had often read from the Book of
Job, as his mother owned a fondness for the Epistle of James.
_Where is the way where light dwelleth?_
* * * * *
The voice exclaimed: "Behold the judgment true and righteous on those
conceived in sin and born in iniquity!" Then for Reuben the dark was
pierced with little fires that grew, and in growing illuminated many
writhing faces in the pit, and blackened arms that could not quite reach
the rim of it. This was the pit where blood boiled in the veins and
burst them, yet one never died, never.
Out of the midnight arch above him a monstrous sorrowing thing with a
stubble of gray beard swooped down. Flame twisted from its side, still
it could catch hold of the bubble of glass where Reuben sought to hide
himself, catch hold and thrust at it repeatedly with a forked black
phallus, while Reuben could not scream to frighten it away. He could
not, because now began--he had foreseen it--the one torment he always
dreaded most of all: suffocation, a gasping for clean air where none
was, lungs locked and heaving, yielding at last because they must and
drawing in the sulfur fumes--yet one never died. All were agreed on the
definition of eternity....
Meanwhile, on the other side of the palisade of burning logs, Ben and
Great-uncle John Kenny of Roxbury were strolling quietly, talking
quietly, watching Reuben with calm. Ben, however, was not faceless like
Uncle John, not too remote or impersonal. Ben grinned as he jerked his
thumb toward a more distant place, where a little old man with a white
beard sat on his hams cutting figures out of paper with a rusty pair of
scissors, impaling some of them, tearing some of them, burning some of
them with solemn care like an old chapman cooking meat in the open on a
forked twig. To whom Reuben advanced through muddy snow and said as he
had been instructed: "Forgive us our transparencies." Some one of the
words must have been wrong, for the little man rose up gibbering from a
toothless gap and came for him viciously, the scissors raised like a
hatchet. Reuben was able to scream at last and fling himself away----
Into the warmth where Ben--_Oh, this is waking!_--where Ben was saying:
"Hush thee, Ru, hush! Don't be so afeared! I'm here, I'm with thee."
* * * * *
As Reuben slept on, peacefully after his nightmare, morning
imperceptibly arrived, a pallor in an unfamiliar window long dark; much
more time must pass, Ben knew, before true dawn. This was that neutral
hush before one is compelled to accept a finished thing and say: All
that was yesterday. Now and then in the sluggishly advancing, sluggishly
dying night, Ben had listened to a drip of melting from the roof. The
patient monotone had ceased, Ben never knowing the moment. He crept out
naked from under the covers, finding the room not too distressingly
cold, and knelt at one of the windows, wishing he might gain a glimpse
of the hill road that ran east, toward Roxbury.
Shadow-country of black and gray was brightening to the prosaic. An inky
monster on Ben's right became a woodshed and a higher structure that
must be a stable. A trotting-horse weather-vane grew clear, the horse's
head pointing away--so the wind had shifted to blow from the west, and
that had probably brought an end to the thaw. Ben fumbled on his clothes
and returned to the window. During this brief absence had begun the
day's miracle, a promise of fire on the underside of cloud.
The snow and mud in the yard below him showed a tangle of blurry tracks
enlarged by yesterday's melting. At the rear of the yard rose the untidy
grandeur of an elm. A lake of churned mud by the stable resembled a
mammoth cluster of grapes, separate blobs of fruit supplied by outlying
hoofprints. Near the base of the elm a murky area suggested a man
sprawling with his head on his arm.
Maybe this very day, Ben thought, he and Reuben could be climbing that
hill road, discovering the far side of it. If he behaved politely his
grandmother was bound to let them go....
That shadow under the elm did create a dreadfully potent illusion of
humanity--almost-real legs in abandoned collapse.
Ben gasped and clawed open the bedroom door.
Anna Lloyd was pottering downstairs with a candle. At Ben's noise she
jumped, shielding the flame. "Oh, it's you. What's up?"
"Someone in the yard--" Ben shoved past her. She followed trembling,
covering the candle so that it gave little help.
He reached the back door of the kitchen. The key jammed; Anna Lloyd
shuffled up behind him wheezing: "Now what's all this, boy?"
The key gave way. Ben ignored her, running out across slush that had
frozen crisp and hard.
Jesse's face was recognizable. In the twist of his bluish open mouth one
could imagine an apologetic smile. Ben clutched his arm; the whole body
moved with it, stiff as a dead branch.
Behind Ben Anna Lloyd wailed thinly. She was gripping her candle though
it had blown out; morning light gave Ben her ugly peering face, more
peevish than sad. "Land of mercy! Oh, law, the Mist'ess'll be terrible
put out! Why, 'tis old Plum."
"Yes, he came with us from Deerfield. He must have been trying to reach
the stable, find some way to get in where it was warm without troubling
my grandmother. Fell and couldn't rise with the liquor in him--oh, when
the singing stopped I did think some friend----"
"Singing? Ooh!--he done all that commotion last night?" Ben did not
answer; she seemed useless, not open to communication, like a tiresome
dog. "Must call the Mist'ess immediate. She'll be terrible put
out--well, it a'n't _my_ fault, no one can say...."
There was more in her mumbling about the wages of sin. Ben's stomach
heaved. He lurched away from Anna Lloyd, back into the kitchen. He
grabbed a chair and straddled it, fighting nausea, head on his arm. In
this self-imposed darkness he heard the outer door bang, and Anna
shuffled past him muttering. Only a few moments passed before the house
was in a sputtering uproar--voices, hurrying feet, Jonas braying
something or other. So long as he could keep his face hidden, his body
quiet, he might not vomit. Soon enough his shoulder was tapped.
"Benjamin!"
"Yes, Grandmother."
"I suppose you can stand up when spoken to?"
He managed it. "I was feeling sick. Grandmother, I ought to have gone
out last night--to find out----"
"You knew, last night, you _knew_ it was that fellow Plum making that
foul commotion, knew and would not tell me. Benjamin, I marvel at you, I
do marvel."
"But I thought----"
"You thought!" She was dressed for the day; haggard, the mark of a
pillow fading on her cheek. "Well, well--you thought what?"
"When he stopped, I thought some friend must have taken him away, so you
needn't to trouble about him."
She said with intense patience: "Benjamin, I am not troubled about him.
I knew him long before you were born, and why my husband saw fit to
tolerate him I shall never know--excess of charity perhaps."
"He saved our lives."
"Indeed?"
"He got us over the palisade when the village was burning."
"Indeed? Any oaf can have a good impulse now and then. Someone else
would have lent a hand if not he. You're not beholden."
"There was no one else. Jesse was ever friendly to Ru and me. I never
knew him unkind, Grandmother."
"What? What? No unkindness to himself and others to live with the
conversation of a hog, to spend all the years God gave him in utter
blasphemy?" Her voice climbed. "Blasphemy, swinish drunkenness, sin and
corruption, knowing the truth--why, he was instructed; your grandfather
and I saw to that--knowing it and rejecting it, knowing his steps went
down to Hell and heedless continually. No unkindness?"
"He was not like that, Grandmother."
"You contradict me?... Benjamin, go in the parlor. I'll come to you
presently." She pointed at the door and Ben shambled through it, more in
flight than obedience.
The place was clammily cold, and dark. Ben remembered to avoid
Grandfather Matthew's throne. He stood by the fireplace spreading his
hands where no warmth was. Pain gnawed at his knee; he wondered if he
ought to have kept on Goody Hawks' poultice. Almost at once Grandmother
Cory was confronting him in the gloom. "Jonas!" When the big man tiptoed
in she said: "Open the shutters." Thin light brought no comfort. "Light
the fire--boy appears to be cold. Nay, first go wake that child upstairs
if he's slept through all this--I wonder he could."
"Oh, he could!" Ben snatched clumsily for something harmless to ease
the tension. "Wide awake one minute and then----"
"Benjamin, do please to be quiet. Jonas, bring Reuben down. He is to
stay with Anna; he is not to come in here." Ben saw Jonas' witch-wife
join him in the hallway and they went upstairs together. "Ah,
Benjamin!--about your miserable clothes, I had hoped to employ part of
this day in buying suitable garments for you and your brother, but now I
suppose the time must be spent otherwise--and Lecture Day at that, when
I must be at meeting after the noon hour. And you and Reuben ought to go
too, but of course I cannot take you to the meeting-house looking like
beggar boys and very likely lousy."
"We are not! Grandmother, I----"
"You won't find me failing in understanding, Benjamin, but pray
understand this once and for all: your failure last night to tell me
about that fellow Plum was a lie--a lie of silence.... Oh, when word
came yesterday I did pray that you and your brother might be brands from
the burning. I do pray for it yet. I made plans for you, I searched my
heart, I sought guidance, I even trusted I had found it. D'you think me
cold, unnatural? D'you imagine I don't love you, my grandson?" She
brushed with dry impatience at sudden tears. Footsteps sounded on the
stairs. Ben tried to catch a glimpse of Reuben, but the bulk of the
Lloyds hid him as they passed the doorway. "Benjamin, what am I to do
with you? What do you yourself think would be right for me to do with
you, a liar, a wilderness child who hath something like the conversation
of a savage?"
"Grandmother, about Jesse----"
"Plum again! And thus I'm answered! Why, the constable will see after
all that."
"Constable?"
"Town authorities, boy. Burial. Is that what you meant?"
"A pauper's burial."
"Thankful heart, boy, I can't understand you. You wish the creature
buried among the Saints?"
"No, I...." Ben searched his mind hopelessly. During the night many
polite convincing speeches had been prepared--scattered, one and all. He
blurted the one thought his mind could hold: "Reuben and I must go to
Uncle John Kenny at Roxbury."
"What!" She was whitely horrified. "You don't know what you say."
"Why, Grandmother, he was a friend to my father. They wrote to one
another. Once Uncle John sent me a book."
"He did?" She sat down slowly, little white hands stiff as ivory on the
arms of the chair. "That may serve to explain much.... Benjamin, I
require you to listen to me if only this once. I have reason to believe
that my poor brother John is an atheist. I will trust you did not know
this; now you do. He is an old man--as I'm old--and hardened, corrupt
with false learning, evil conversation, a blasphemer, often fuddled with
drink, a--a fornicator. He hath kept a mistress, at Roxbury, quite
openly, under the name of housekeeper--for all I know the whore is there
yet. Being wealthy, with friends in high places, none dares deal with
him--that's the pass our colony hath arrived at. We builded a Zion; it
becometh an abomination, a pen of swine, a nest of adulterers,
blasphemers, sodomites, worshippers of the golden calf--vipers.... And
now you wish me to allow you and that poor child your brother to go into
that--that filthiness. Benjamin, I will hear nothing more about going to
my brother at Roxbury. I will not send you to an even worse darkness
than you dwelt in at Deerfield."
"We dwelt in no darkness there!"
"Benjamin, be careful!"
The avalanche had him, all fences of caution swept aside. "You have no
right to speak so of my father! We _will_ go to Roxbury!"
"Benjamin, stop!"
"And you'll bury Jesse like a dead dog--your Christian charity!
Judgments--my father--you lie, lie!"
"Jonas!"
"Wasn't he your son? I believe nothing."
"Jonas! Jonas!"
"I won't bear it!" But now Jonas was behind him and twisting his right
arm up between the shoulders.
"Jonas, lock him in his room. Here!" She fumbled a bunch of keys from
her belt, with difficulty, for doubtless she could not see plainly.
"Here, take it, Jonas! The boy is possessed!" Eyes flaring to the
whites, she lifted the cluster of keys and struck Ben twice across the
mouth.
As Jonas frogmarched him to the stairs, Ben tried to see down the
hallway into the kitchen. Anna Lloyd was restraining Reuben, though at
the moment the boy was not trying to break free but stood leaning away
from her in a frozen motion, his white face empty.
Jonas hurled Ben into the bedroom. Ben pulled himself upright by a leg
of the four-poster in time to hear the door slam and the key chatter in
the lock. He spat blood from his lips, and heard the floor creak under
Jonas' swift departure; heard silence fall on the room like the booming
of another, larger door. Even then a part of his mind could fret at what
seemed the strangest thing of all: when she struck him with the keys,
his grandmother had looked exalted, almost happy--satisfied....
Hours crawled.
Now and then Ben Cory tried to retreat from images of the recent past
and terrors of the immediate present within the shelter of a lethargy, a
temporary refusal to think of anything at all. This was no good, since
no power could shut away the thought of Reuben alone with these people,
his own twelve-year-old temper explosive and perilous. Sooner or later
Ru was bound to lose control and fetch down the wrath as Ben himself had
done. Now when it was too late, Ben saw his outbreak as a betrayal of
Reuben, a betrayal of trust. Once or twice he pressed his forehead on
the window glass and tried to pray--seeing then that if only Reuben were
with him it would be quite possible to jump from this window with fair
safety into the snow.
A square of thin sunshine moved across the floor. It had neared the
window when high clouds obscured the sun of March; the square yielded,
grayed, vanished, like Ben's own trust in ancient certainties. Footsteps
sounded often, not for him. Voices flowed on somewhere; Ben heard the
homely commotion of household activity--doors closing, the hiss of
sweeping, a shovel scraping ash from a hearthstone, clatter of kitchen
gear.
Continually his ears strained for Reuben's treble or a light tread that
would be his. But plainly Reuben was forbidden to come to him. Someone
would, some time soon, he supposed. Someone in authority would be
obliged to deal with the wild beast, the blasphemer.
He sprawled on the bed, raising his right knee to soften the nagging of
the splinter-wound. Anxious to avoid the refuge of sleep, he fell into
it anyway, having had little or none last night, and woke to what was
surely the pallor of late afternoon. The house was quite silent; maybe
everyone had gone to the Lecture Day sermon. In spite of himself he
slept again, and roused, feeling ill and disoriented, in total dark.
From the window small lights could be found twinkling over on the left
where the hill road must be. Ben groped for the stub candle on the
mantel, and fought a dreary battle with his tinderbox, winning at last
the consolation of a pale candle-flame. His knee felt hot, and throbbed.
He let down his breeches but could find nothing very wrong. The
splinter-wound was slightly raised; he saw or imagined faint steaks of
red up his thigh. His clothing must have chafed the wound while he
slept. As he moved sluggishly about the room the throbbing ceased and he
could forget it. The lightheadedness--that would be hunger. Anger was no
longer hot but heavy, lead in the stomach.
He thought what had roused him had been a murmur of talk somewhere. He
no longer heard it. Nothing happened; no one came. The flame of the
candle worked downward. One of the lights near the hill road winked out,
a friend gone away.... Cry out? Rattle the door, bang on the walls?
Pride as well as caution forbade. They could not keep this up forever.
Ben Cory of Deerfield could wait them out....
From slumped dejection on the bed, Ben saw the door opening so gradually
and softly that he feared his eyes were playing a trick. Even as Reuben
slipped in and closed the door with the same caution, Ben was slow to
believe it. Reuben had not even troubled to lay a finger over his lips,
certain that Ben would smother any sound of greeting.
Reuben's shirt bulged. He lifted from it a rolled-up length of harness
leather five or six feet long, and crossed at once to the window. As
Ben joined him he spoke sparingly, in an undertone that would not carry
so far as a whisper: "Must be now--we'll have no other chance. I have
some food. Bit of new snow, maybe enough to hide our tracks."
They worked together in silence and complete understanding, easing the
window open, fastening the end of the strap to a shutter-hook. Though
far short of the ground, it lessened the drop to reasonable safety. Ben
let himself down first, dropping easily on the old snow. Large soft
flakes of the new were dreamily floating. He stood in silence with
waiting arms.
* * * * *
"Ah, what happened to the day?"
"Ben, hush! We mustn't be heard talking in the street...."
"Right, here, Ru. Up the hill and east...."
"That might be the last house, you think?"
"Hope so."
"The day was a bad dream, Ben. Take this--you ha'n't eaten all day. Got
another half-loaf under my shirt, and a chunk I cut from a ham I found
in the shed, all I could carry.... Think this'll cover our tracks?"
"Not unless it thickens some."
"Pray it does."
"Nay, it better hold off a while or we'll lose these sled-tracks and
direction with 'em...."
"I cursed old Anna when she was holding me. She--I mean
Grandmother--made me wash my mouth with vinegar, then I must sit not
moving all morning. Then they all went to meeting but Jonas, who locked
me in a closet so he could mind his chores. Damn them all, I say
God-damn them!"
"Hush, Ru! Grandmother only thought----"
"I say she doesn't think. I say she hath no heart at all, and your
mouth'll be scarred all your days like Sam Belding's head."
"It will not--and don't speak so loud. Could be houses back of those
trees, it's too dark to be sure."
"I will be quiet, Ben, but I say I cannot forgive her nor I will not,
and I'll sooner die in the snow than ever go back in that house."
"We can't go back, that's sure. But Ru, to her we were--don't you
understand?--sinful. And I _was_, too--I ought never to have spoken to
her so. I lost my head somehow."
"But Mother, or Father, or anyone with a heart, would have forgiven
anything you said at such a time. I cursed you, when I was out of my
wits. You forgave at once, when I reminded you you could scarce remember
it."
"What you said _was_ nothing. What I said to Grandmother was--well, too
much somehow. There's a strangeness--let's not think of it. We need all
our wits to find the way here.... Can you make out the sled-marks? My
eyes don't feel just right."
"Yes, I can see them. Ben, art thou fevered? Thy hand is too hot."
"I don't think so. I was hungry, and the food you brought will hold me
up."
"They let me eat heavy at supper, and I did so, knowing we might have a
chance--Ben, are you having trouble walking?"
"No, no, I slipped, that was all. It's from fretting all day in that
room and doing nothing. My head's clearing already."
"You were to have a flogging in the morning. It would have been today,
but the minister was ill. He preached for Lecture Day, but then went
home with a sore throat. Grandmother and old Anna were talking of it
when they came back, Anna saying the flogging should be in the public
square, but Grandmother said it would be at the house, and first the
minister should instruct you and pray. I say let them pray for their own
salvation."
"Ru----"
"I'll be quiet. But I make no peace with them, never."
"The snow's stopped?"
"It's less here under the trees."
"Trees? We're under--oh yes, I see."
"Ben--thou didst not know it?"
"I was keeping my eyes on the ground, to find those sled-marks."
"Oh ... I was thinking and planning all evening. They put me in an attic
room, next the Lloyds, I was forced to wait till they went a-futtering
and then a-snoring.... Ben, if it's a hundred miles to Roxbury--we can
do ten miles, maybe fifteen, in a day. You've got your knife, and I
stole one from the kitchen--better than nothing. We can find something.
The food will last a few days anyway."
"We'll get to Roxbury."
"Wish to rest a while?"
"I think I'd best not, Ru, unless--art thou tired?"
"I'll never tire. And then the Spice Islands?"
_Chapter Four_
In windless calm under the pines, Reuben's dark-dilated eyes could still
find the furrows where sled-runners had passed, and the half-moons of
dainty hoof prints. Nothing stirred within the vague archway continually
opening before him. Gradually, tree and rock and snow came to possess
sharper lines, stronger shadows; somewhere, a birth of new light--"Ben,"
he said, "it's the moon."
"Where, Ru? I can't find it."
"Somewhere ahead...."
Since they came under the shelter of the trees--and that was a long time
ago--Reuben had felt no longer the cold kiss of snowflakes. It had been
nothing but a flurry, now ended. At a curve in the road he discovered,
through a break in the treetops, a grayness brightening. He halted; Ben
blundered into him, arms slipping clumsily around him as if in need of
support. Dull rags of cloud dropped away from the naked radiance. "I
told you, Ben. There she rides." Ben was smiling. "Ben--all's well?... I
did right? We could not have stayed, and thou to be flogged, maybe put
in the stocks."
"The stocks, was it?"
"Yes, old Anna was yattering about that too when they came home from the
sermon, and Grandmother never said her nay."
"Of course thou'st done right.... They'll search. That snow wasn't
enough to hide anything."
"No.... We've walked more than an hour--must have done five miles."
"We can walk another five." Though standing quietly, Ben was breathing
too fast, his eyes too steadily fixed on the new light in the sky.
In the woods Ben always had been leader. And there it was Ben's natural
way to send his glance flickering everywhere. Reuben recalled the voice
of Jesse Plum: "No Inj'an'll ever surprise you, Ben. Swoonds, you could
look at a squirrel while the little bugger jumps from one branch to the
next, and tell me its age and gender, and if she be female whether she
got little 'uns." Jesse had not croaked that in flattery. Wilderness had
been near and vital to Jesse; he never made a mock of it, and was
capable of scolding either boy for walking noisily in dead leaves.
"Ben, do you feel----"
"All's well. Let's go on."
Reuben walked on ahead, trying to set an easier pace. Surely, surely
there was no _reason_ why Ben should fall ill....
In time the forest opened to a park-like region where perhaps in past
seasons the Indians had followed their custom of burning over the land,
killing new growth and brush, allowing established trees to expand their
side branches in isolation. Through more than a mile of this they
walked. Ben did not speak.
The sled-tracks passed abruptly over the edge of a slope. Reuben could
make out no treetops directly ahead, though a thick cluster of them
stood to his left; the part of the slope where the road ran down would
be open ground. A ghost of alien sound disturbed him.
He held out his hand, but Ben either failed to see it or was unwilling
that his brother should go ahead alone; he still followed closely--more
quietly though, more careful of his steps--when Reuben reached the
beginning of the slope.
The thing could not be more than thirty feet away, a living blot of long
shadow on the trampled white.
The slope ran steeply down. At the bottom, a flat expanse to the right
must be the northern end of a pond or lake, frozen, snow-covered. The
sled-tracks, plain in moon-shadow, skirted that level surface and
disappeared in thicker woods beyond. On Reuben's left, all the way down
the slope and connecting with the farther woods, hemlocks loomed densely
black, branches bowing to the ground.
The thing gazed up across the wild turkey between its paws, and Reuben
understood the sound--crunch of monstrous teeth on frail bone. Ben drew
his knife and pushed in front muttering: "He won't attack, Ru. They're
timid--Jesse alway said...."
The panther had flattened in alarm and readiness, all motionless but for
a quiver at the tip of the tail. Round ears spread back on a skull
smooth and cruel as the head of a snake, and moonlight greenly sparked
from eyes arrogant with the majesty of loneliness. Once or twice the
angry head dipped as if meaning to snatch up the meat and save it from
the human threat; the motions were abortive, the beast preferring to
freeze, and watch, and wait.
Reuben yielded no time to the weakening pain of anticipation. He scooped
a handful of damp snow into a ball, swung on his heel in the fine free
motion that Ben himself had taught him, and let fly.
The snowball hit the great face on the nose, spattering wonderfully.
Unbelieving, Reuben watched a grayish blur shoot away to the black
shelter of the hemlocks, belly to earth.
A violent tremor of reaction took hold of Reuben; he heard Ben gasp.
"Ru--Ru--oh, _man_, how he scooned off!" Ben sat down laughing
helplessly in the snow.
"Ay," said Reuben, shaken and panting and full of pride. "I allow, Mr.
Cory, he might travel some little time, Mr. Cory." The tremor was
overcome by the swift joyous action of running down the slope to bring
back the remains of the turkey. "See, Ben--he's left us both legs and
some of the back and breast."
"Poor puss! My own little brother, a man who'd steal from a----"
"Snow down your backside!" said Reuben, and jumped for him.
Ben caught him fairly and pulled him off his feet, but in the mimic
struggle Ben stiffened suddenly and groaned: "Ru--help me up!" Before
Reuben could do so, Ben was on his feet without help, denying his own
words: "It's nothing, Ru--I got a little dizzy, nothing more."
"Ben, if you----"
"We can't go back.... Hoy, here's a thought! All that turkey blood on
the snow--couldn't we make it seem----"
"Law you!" Reuben yelped and war-danced. Ben could not be ill, he
thought, so long as he was able to produce such a dazzling conception.
"Ben, a marvelous bloody swindle--why, damme, they'll mumble it in
chimney comers till the Devil's blind, and his eyes a'n't sore yet.
Think of it!--those poor lost boys!"
"Small red gobbets."
"What?"
"Hast thou forgotten? Thine own tales----"
"Oh, that. Nay then, behold how bravely they did stand before the
beast--alas, all for nothing, though Benjamin Cory with his good right
arm did--did make varsall sure to pick up the turkey feathers."
Eagerly Ben joined him in that undertaking. Reuben found and scuffed out
the line of tracks where the gobbler had walked out from under the trees
into calamity. As they viewed the shambles critically in devoted
silence, it seemed to Reuben that there ought to be more blood. Beside
the patch of snow where the stain was largest, Reuben dropped on his
back with outflung arms to leave a tragic imprint. Ben grunted approval,
but then spoke with a discouragement that was unlike him: "It'll never
deceive a woodsman."
"Oh, Ben, they'll be townfolks that find it. Superstitious too. If our
own trail ends here, what can they think? We must go under the trees,
where--where _he_ went."
"Oh, him!" Ben recovered, laughing again not quite naturally. "He's na'
but a spent fart, Ru. He'll travel as you said, and then I picture him
climbing a tree to grieve all day tomorrow about what my little brother
did to him. 'Snowballs!' he'll say. '_Me_, to be whopped by a
snowball--why, bugger me blind, and all the time it was that Reuben Cory
no bigger'n a boar's tit!'"
"You're no Goliar neither, in fact I could whup you handy with my arse
tied under my chin. Now drag me, Ben, from here to the trees, along that
line where he ran. That'll make a fine confusion and wipe out your own
tracks. Then we'll follow his marks under the trees and smear our own
till they can't tell which from nohow."
"That's the thing. What a catamount was he! Know what he did? Laid us
out like a pair of sticks, he did, your ankle crossed on mine, took both
feet in his mouth, poor wretch, and for his sins went a-blundering
through the woods with a boy dangling on each side."
"I tell you, Ben, the superstitious will believe madder things than
that. La, some of the tales Jesse used to tell!"
"_Miaaow!_" Ben doubled over, laughing far too much. "Why, of course--by
the time the tale is carried back to Springfield he won't be a catamount
at all. He'll be taller'n a house, the Old Nick himself with a passel of
demons. It'll be a--a----" he stopped, watching Reuben blankly, all
laughter spent.
Reuben said: "It will be a judgment of the Lord." Ben stared, and
nodded, and looked away, searching the northern sky above the hemlocks.
Following his gaze, Reuben lost himself a while in the wonder of open
night, seeing Cassiopeia released from a last fringe of departing cloud,
and the Great Bear slanting toward the North Star. Reuben darkly felt
the absence of some familiar thing, something his own mind ought to
supply and would not. The night was serene, without complication
beautiful, answering nothing.
* * * * *
Ben Cory followed his brother in slowly deepening weariness. The time
must be not far from dawn. The moon rode high and lonely, dimmed by new
cloud battalions from the west. Ben groped at the thought of sleep; but
Reuben, who was wise about everything tonight, might tell him it was not
yet time. Ben suffered a passing resentment, that the boy could walk on
ahead so untiringly, so unconcerned.
In this more open part of the woods they were not attempting to disguise
their tracks. Reuben said it was no longer worth it, and Reuben knew
best. Ben tried to step in his brother's prints, nowhere else. This
seemed a clever thing to do--when he could remember to do it, and forget
the pain in his knee, and ignore certain soft dark waves that now and
then approached him from nowhere and flowed away independently of any
shadow on the moon.
Back there under the crowded hemlocks, a very long time ago, it had not
appeared necessary after all to search for the panther's prints and
follow them. All the way down that slope, and far beyond it where the
land rose again and the hemlocks continued, many patches of snowless
ground allowed them to progress without leaving marks. For an hour, or
two or three hours perhaps, they had worked their way along these areas.
Glimpses of the moon held them to a general easterly direction. In
several places--Ben recalled this with solemn pride in Reuben's
wisdom--Reuben had spread his jacket across a patch of snow too wide to
jump, so that they might step on it and leave a vague blur nothing like
a footprint, rather like the impress of some animal's body lying down.
At the least, their efforts would provide a most confusing trail unless
the searchers brought dogs; they reassured each other of this from time
to time. Advance by this method had been tormentingly slow, yet after a
while Reuben, who knew everything, announced that they must have covered
another mile.
The road and the sled-tracks were things forgotten. The eastward
direction was still a certainty: the moon had said so, until it climbed
too high to be a fair guide. The trees had thinned out, the snow lay
continuous on the ground; Reuben who knew everything said they might as
well walk naturally again, since there was no help for it anyway, and to
blur the tracks here would be a waste of effort. Ben had a confused
sense of walking on higher ground where a light wind was blowing.
Once, back in the darker woods, he had heard the wail of a mountain cat,
so thin and far away that hills and hollows must have intervened. Their
friend, maybe, lamenting at snowballs. Reuben had laughed at it. Later
Ben caught another sound, a remote tenor howling, lonely at first but
answered by another and another. Reuben who knew everything had not
laughed at that. Ben thought or imagined that he heard it still.
No wolves had come.
Or if they have come, he thought, I can't see them. They slip along
fogfooted behind the larger trees--that tree or that one--maybe. If they
are truly come, my brother Reuben will know and tell me. In time for me
to draw my knife. Wolves do understand cold steel, they say....
"Ru----"
The boy turned quickly and came back to him. Ben saw his face fade and
brighten; the eyes, improbably large, watched him from a mighty depth.
Now that, Ben thought, that is certainly an effect of the new
cloud-wrack passing over the moon. How warm it is! he thought--nay, damn
the thing, how cold! Nothing's truly warm since Mother died, therefore I
was deluded.... "Ru, what's the time?"
"Can't be far from dawn."
"How do you know?"
"I can feel it.... Some kind of shack over there--see it? A hunter's
lean-to, that's what it is."
"Looks more like a beast."
"Can't you see the poles? Come on--it's not far."
"Ru, listen!"
"Yes, I hear them. They're a long way off. Come!"
"Wait, Ru!" The waves of darkness, each time they advanced on him, were
climbing higher, toward his eyes. "Listen to me, Reuben, and not to the
wolves." Perhaps the next one would go over his head, and he could be
quiet. "Listen to me--in my father's house are many mansions."
"Ben, save thy breath. Lean on me. It's not far."
* * * * *
Nothing came in search of them that night. For another hour Reuben heard
the wolves, unable to guess in what region of the secret night they were
crying. The shrill desolation of the noise wavered from every quarter of
the dark, ceasing at times; then the mind could propose that it had
never sounded, until it started up afresh, as pain will.
A flood of intense and soundless fire grew along the lower edge of a
mass of winter clouds that had gathered and thickened in the latter part
of the night. At some time before the kindling of that sullen splendid
flame the howling of the wolves was ended.
Ben had fallen into sleep. When they reached the lean-to he appeared to
have shaken off some of his confusion. He spoke reasonably; he stretched
out on the heap of leaves and long-dead balsam boughs, insisting that
Reuben lie down and rest also. Doing so mainly to humor him, Reuben
heard his brother mutter something about Roxbury and then grunt in the
plaintive way he always did when sleep had taken him.
When the clouds caught fire Ben still slept, his cheeks raging hot and
his hands restless.
The lean-to had been shrewdly made, by some hunter looking to his own
welfare. Heavy poles slanted against the base of a perpendicular bank
some seven feet high, with others laid across them horizontally; on
these brush was piled; snow had gathered, making a dense roof. The back
was closed with tougher brush. Near the open end the hunter had
thoughtfully heaped dead sticks so that the next comer need not
immediately search for firewood. The shelter stood near a curve of the
bank, the open end facing east and secure from any wind but the most
violent. The space under the roof, barely enough to allow a large man
some elbow room, was almost warm, and became unmistakably so after the
boys had lain there a few minutes. But Ben shivered continually in his
fevered sleep.
Reuben wrapped his coat around Ben's legs. He dreaded lighting a fire:
it seemed to him still that to be discovered by searchers from
Springfield was a sharper peril than any other. They would do nothing
for Ben's sickness, he thought--flog him and let him die. Reuben
collected evergreen branches small enough to hack off with the kitchen
knife, and piled them at Ben's sides and over him, to hold in the body
warmth. This occupied him for half an hour. The sky flamed. It was the
third day of March.
He found he could study the position with some practicality; he could
weigh the odds for survival, and say: we have a pound or so of smoked
ham, half a loaf, part of a raw turkey; we are at least ten miles from
Springfield, and anyway I cannot leave him to search for help. Having
done this once or twice, he found it unprofitable to toil through the
summary again, yet the emptiness of the morning hour demanded action of
the mind, if only to hold away a madness of panic.
He saw Springfield consumed like Deerfield by flame from heaven, then
saw himself in the bleak honesty of morning as a foolish child for
creating such an image: Springfield wasn't to blame. If he dared leave
Ben and go back there, he might dodge the powers represented by
Grandmother Cory and find help. But he could not leave Ben to retrace a
journey of ten miles. Wolves hunted sometimes by daylight; wolves and
Indians. They could find Ben sick and sleeping.
Ben shook in a chill; his tossing pushed away some of the cover. Reuben
restored it and lay close against him to give what warmth he could until
the shivering passed. Panting, with some faint shine of sweat on his
forehead, Ben said: "Right of the meeting-house--yes, I see it."
Reuben tried then, long and earnestly, to pray in the manner of his
childhood, repeating familiar words aloud, since Ben was too far lost in
sleep and sickness to be disturbed. During the act of supplication, some
memory nagged. Something demoralizing, to be refused, but at last it
sharpened into focus in spite of him. His mother had prayed: "Deliver us
from evil ..." her clear voice completing the words, twice, three times
perhaps in that reddened doorway until she received the answer, the
blow, itself a completion which God had allowed. To Reuben the sound of
his own voice became alien, then contemptible, a disgusting whine. A
human being ought never to sound like that. Why should God listen to
such a squeak?
In the abrupt silence the words of that question swelled to vast
importance. They were not right. The question was not the right one.
Change it. Shorten it.
Why should God listen?...
The question was still not the right one.
Reuben crawled out into cold sunless light. He searched the east. The
sun was present, a hazed white blur just visible in the overcast. New
snowflakes were already drifting, far apart, without a wind.
Why God?...
That was not merely the sun but something of the mind, old, vaguely
evil, dying, dissolving not quite as a dream dissolves but with the
illogic and inconsequence of a dream.