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Wilderness of Spring

by Edgar Pangborn · English · Gutenberg #39907 · 763,053 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Wilderness of Spring

Author: Edgar Pangborn


        
Release date: June 3, 2012 [eBook #39907]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39907

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILDERNESS OF SPRING ***




Produced by Bruce Albrecht, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net











                      _Wilderness of Spring_

                        By EDGAR PANGBORN


    ... For if I am in sore plight, I would not therefore wish
    affliction to be the lot of all the world. No, indeed, no! since,
    besides, I am distressed by the fate of my brother Atlas, who,
    towards the west, stands bearing on his shoulders the pillar of
    heaven and earth, a burthen not easy for his arms to grasp.

                                   --AESCHYLUS, _Prometheus Bound_.


    _Rinehart & Company, Inc._
    NEW YORK       TORONTO

    _Published simultaneously in Canada by
    Clarke, Irwin & Company, Ltd., Toronto_

    Copyright _1958 by Edgar Pangborn

    Printed in the United States of America

    All Rights Reserved

    Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-5139_


     _To my Sister_,
    MARY C. PANGBORN




NOTE: Pastor John Williams of Deerfield is a historical figure; Belding,
Stebbins, Hoyt, Wells and Hawks were actual names in the Deerfield of
1704. With these minor exceptions, all characters in this novel are
completely fictitious, not intended to suggest any actual person living
or dead.

The language of the dialogue is a compromise, an attempt to convey some
quality of early eighteenth-century speech, but not to create a literal
reproduction of it, since that might be tedious and obscure in some
places to modern readers. For a literal reproduction the worst nuisance
would have been those words, such as "naughty," that have changed not in
form but in meaning or emotional charge. I have tried to avoid all these
except where the context should make plain their archaic sense. I think
the use of "thee" and "thou" is substantially correct. At that time the
second person singular could be used in English as in most European
languages today, for intimates and children, but the universal "you" was
already displacing it. The third person singular verb ending was
obsolescent but still in some use; "hath" and "doth" seem to have
survived long after the ending was abandoned in other verbs.

In the modern (_Everyman_) edition of Montaigne, the essay that Mr.
Kenny asks for is entitled "Of Training" instead of "Use Makes Perfect."
The copy from Mr. Kenny's library was the seventeenth-century
translation by Charles Cotton.

My special thanks to Mrs. Kelsey Flower of Deerfield, who gave me
welcome aid with the research; and to the personnel of the State Library
at Albany, N.Y. for their unfailing helpfulness and courtesy.

E.P.




PART ONE




_Chapter One_


High clouds drove across the dark toward abiding calm. Ben Cory watched
them rolling under west wind down a winter sky, until his father's voice
drew him back into the pool of firelight and candleshine. The moment's
alarm of loneliness lingered, another occasion when the self disturbed
by the not-self desires the assurance of boundaries. Where does the self
end and the universe begin? Ben knew the inquiry to be a corridor where
many doors open on darkness but not all.

Most of the days of that February had been whitely brilliant, the nights
heavy with malignant doubts of wartime. Outside Deerfield's palisade,
where one did not go alone, Ben at fourteen could never forget the
enemy, the Others. Indians and French--or say danger itself, a thing of
the mind harsh as an arrow in the flesh. In the cave of darkness that
was the garret at bedtime, with Reuben's breath tickling his shoulder,
the thought of the Others often entered behind Ben Cory's eyes. If sleep
refused him his parents' talk might be recalled, and that sense of the
Others, the quiet-footed, would become a commentary like secret
laughter. They could laugh, those bronze people of the wilderness; they
could laugh and cry, as wolves do.

On this evening of the twenty-ninth of February, 1704, snow was drifted
mightily against Deerfield's palisade, crusted and frozen over. All
winter the village had shivered to warnings: the French might try it.
Governor Dudley sent reinforcements as generously as other commitments
of a scared Massachusetts would allow; then the waiting, and the snow.

Ben's father had recently received a letter from Great-uncle John Kenny
of Roxbury. As he discussed it that evening with Ben's mother, the boys
could listen. From an Englishman who escaped Port Royal and reached
Boston, Mr. Kenny had learned the French were friendlier than ever with
the Abenaki tribes of Acadia. Joseph Cory read aloud: "I am moved to
wonder whether we may ever know a time when the good works of men shall
be no longer set at naught by embroilments of faction and credo, or by
maneuvering of states and principalities. It is a sorry thing that a man
should refrain from speaking his mind, overborne by the righteous who
forget it was said: _Be not righteous overmuch: Ecclesiastes vii; 16_. I
hate no man for that he believeth in other fashion than I do, be he
Anabaptist, Quaker, Papist, I care nothing. He hath his light, so let me
live by mine own."

Ben's mother was sewing, in her favorite small chair by the fireplace,
the day's work never quite ended, candlelight mild on her dark face and
her fingers that hurried because she was troubled. "Truly, Joseph, he
displayeth much pride."

"Is it wrong, Adna, a man should be proud? Brave too--nay, reckless,
seeing the letter might have fallen in the wrong hands."

"But--to make himself, as it were, judge of all things...."

Ben glanced at the enigma of his younger brother's face, wondering which
view Reuben would share.

Hesitantly Adna Cory said: "You've spoke, times, of inviting Mr. Kenny
here. I'd be pleased of course. In the spring, perhaps, before such time
as you'll be too busied with the plowing and all?"

Joseph Cory sighed. Ben's parents often left much unsaid, the silences a
communication not always excluding himself and Reuben. Neither now
mentioned the smallness of the house, the cramping difficulties of
living on a raw frontier. Even by frontier standards the house was
meager--two rooms downstairs and the lean-to where old Jesse Plum dwelt
in frowsty security; upstairs the garret and that was all. Ben knew his
mother's family was or had been wealthy; so was Grandmother Cory in
Springfield. But Joseph Cory was proud, with a sharp-cornered aversion
to owing anyone anything.

The land spread generously fruitful here at the edge of wilderness; good
times ought to bloom in this village if ever an end came to the alarms
and imperatives of war. Under that stress it suffered the bleakness of a
place often forgotten, where a handful of garrison soldiers tried to
hold themselves ready for disaster, nourishing scant patience for
Deerfield and not loved there. They cleaned their dark tools and cursed
the weather, the Indians, the French, the pay or lack of it, above all
their own foolishness in joining the militia.

Ben's mother and father were surely wondering in silence how the house
could provide for such a guest as John Kenny, Grandmother Cory's elder
brother, a fabulous merchant-importer, owner of ships and warehouses of
the fat Boston trade. To Ben, Uncle John was a figure of learning,
wealth and magnificence moving seven or eight feet tall in a haze of
legend, mythical as Dudley or the Mathers or Queen Anne. Ben had heard
his father call Uncle John slight and frail--a stiff breeze would blow
him away; Ben's mind noted the information, his heart not accepting it
at all. Joseph Cory said at last: "Well, Adna, he's sixty-seven. I
suppose he seldom leaves Roxbury, especially now when all's uncertain. I
hear the Boston road is fair as far as Hadley, but they mean for good
riders, young men. Up from Hadley 'tis what you remember, love, muddy as
dammit even when the spring's past. And he's not in the best
health--says so here, further on."

Ben noticed Reuben's face drooping in resignation. Ru would know, as Ben
did, that even if Uncle John were invited he probably could not come.
The untamed roads were lonely; an old man on horseback could die swiftly
from an arrow or bullet out of the brush.... Ben supposed he ought to
take up a candle and persuade Reuben to bed. At fourteen Ben was
expected to assume many of a man's responsibilities, not least of them
the jumpy task of riding herd on his brother, who would be twelve in
May.

Ben stood tall for his age, his slimness toughened by farm and other
work to wiry flexibility. He could split wood nearly as well as his
father, mend shoes better than Jesse Plum, manage the big kettles for
his mother's candlemaking. But he could search his face in a mirror for
signs of maturity and find maddeningly few. It remained a mild,
large-eyed boy's face, high at the forehead, the jaw square but rounded
at the chin. Father's craggy nose had character; Father was said to
resemble Great-grandfather Stephen Cory, the sailor.

Legend placed Stephen Cory aboard Lord Howard's flagship when the Armada
came against England in 1588. It just might have been true, for he was
past middle life when he gave up the wild universe of the sea and begat
Ben's grandfather Matthew Cory, and he was in his salt-encrusted
seventies when he died in 1643 in the little new town of Boston. Whether
the myth was true or false, Stephen Cory lived gaudily in Ben's fancy,
strutting the quarterdeck, thrusting a beaky face like Joseph Cory's to
the leaping spray and the enormous winds.

But Ben Cory in these prosaic modern times had grown resigned to a nose
that stayed straight and small like his mother's, and his mouth was wide
and full like hers--not a mouth for sternness, said the mirror. If Ben
glared commandingly at the glass, somebody inside him hooted with
merriment. His voice had changed but could still crack; the down on his
face did not yet need shaving, being light in color.

"I never heard," said Joseph Cory, "that the Abenaki had any better
stomach for winter campaigns than any other damned Inj'ans."

Adna Cory bit off a thread. "Septembers, Octobers, after they have their
own corn harvested, then they come." Adna Pownal Cory would have been
thinking of many past times when summer was fading but no dead leaves
lay fallen to rustle warnings of approach. "A September, was it not,
when they attacked the Beldings? Poor Sam! Thou wast six that year,
Benjamin, and all warrior with no mind to be hustled out of the
way--remember?"

"Yes, Mother, I do." A September Sabbath. The Beldings had gone to bring
their corn from the outer fields before the service, when Indians
ambushed the wagon, raging briefly into the village and away.

The Corys were not members of the church. Joseph Cory had been brought
up in the congregation at Springfield, but when he came to Deerfield
with his bride in 1688 he had declined either to join or to explain his
failure to do so. Adna Cory was a member of the Anglican communion,
which had been permitted to exist in Massachusetts for several years. On
many Sundays and Lecture Days, in defense against public opinion, the
family went to the meeting-house, the boys rigidly enduring the rhymed
Psalms and the tedium of Mr. John Williams, who tended to preach in a
sort of febrile blank verse.

They had stayed at home on the morning the Beldings were ruined. Ben
remembered the explosion of Sabbath quiet into screams and shots, Father
snatching the flintlock from its deerhorn rack and Mother gone very
white, hurrying himself and four-year-old Reuben up to the garret. Ben
was no warrior then--Adna Cory's fantasy developed that later, maybe
from Ben's insistence on crowding in front of Reuben because he hoped to
see what was going on.

For the Beldings help came too late--the mother and three children
killed, the father and two other children taken captive to Canada,
another child wounded and left for dead. Later Ben watched a soldier
carrying in nine-year-old Sam Belding, who had revived and hidden in the
swamp. The thin legs dangled; Sam's head rolled against the soldier's
jacket, a bloody mess. Sam lived. Ben at six had understood it
adequately: we, and the Others. The village could be furious but not
astonished. Sam Belding's head became a commonplace, like any pitiable
thing seen long enough for the seeing mind to grow its own scar.

"Now I think of it," Joseph Cory said, "there may have been Abenaki with
the French who raided Schenectady fourteen years ago." He left the table
to sit near the fire, long-limbed and rangy, tired from a day at the
woodpile and at mending harness. He adjusted a log on the flames and
yawned, smiling at his cavernous noise, rubbing his palms up over his
forehead; a clean and sober man, still young. Ben grew bemused with a
fancy that his father's face had become translucent to some other fire
behind the hawk-nosed profile, untidy sandy hair, pointed chin, friendly
thin mouth, speculative gray eyes. "Those poor fools at Schenectady!
That you don't remember, Ben. The meeting voted our palisade as soon as
word came from Schenectady--early March, you but a few weeks old. I was
an angry man that year as well as proud." His glance at his wife
invited sharing of other memories; Adna Cory lifted a dark eyebrow and
blushed a little, not quite smiling. "We all labored beyond ourselves to
build that stockade, Ben, chopping frozen ground. Had cause--they were
caught asleep at Schenectady, those Dutchmen. Men at Albany warned 'em
of danger, but they were carrying on some factional quarrel with the
people at Albany, and to show how lightly they held any word from that
source they put up snowman sentinels. Marry come up!--and went to bed,
so the Inj'ans and French walked in through the open gates. Snowmen!
They that were butchered in bed were the fortunate. I'll never
understand my fellow men. Babes and women cut open and burned alive...."

The Abenaki, Ben knew, had not changed. Climbing out there with Reuben
the other day, he had seen the snow, high and hard-crusted against the
stockade walls. Beyond the window clouds would be still rushing in their
silence. Ben heard his mother saying in distress: "So long ago, Joseph!
Let it be."

"Oh, Adna, I do rattle on.... I hear Captain Wells is not content about
our palisade. It will stand, so we have men behind it, not snowmen. And
I hear the common talk that Dudley should have done better by us. I
think he did what he could. What's one minikin village in all the
Massachusetts?--but you can't ask the village to see it so, it a'n't
human. Dudley's politics and religion cause them to damn him for all
else. Should caterpillars ravage the corn again it will be Dudley's
fault, same as the poor man keepeth the butter from coming in the chum
and is to blame if Goody What's-'er-name hath a flux."

"I pray our Father we never need the stockade." Adna Cory's voice held a
drawling note of fatigue or drowsiness, not responding to her husband's
labored mirth. She studied Ben; the one long glance, he knew, would tell
her whether he needed buttons sewn on or holes mended, whether his face
and hands wanted washing, whether his supper had been sufficient,
whether he was likely to remember about hearing and prompting Reuben in
prayers at bedtime. The glance gave Ben a passing mark and moved on to
embrace Reuben. "Mm--sitting there like Mumchance that was hanged for
saying nothing! Sleep got thee, Ru? Eyes drawing sand?"

Reuben smiled angelically and stretched, his thin face reflecting her
own--small nose, high forehead, pointed ears. He bore an even more
emphatic resemblance to Ben, his eyes a darker gray. The ocean must be
gray like that, Ben supposed, the gray Atlantic that his father had once
glimpsed and never forgotten--speaking of it sometimes like a man who
has promised himself to revisit a mystery if the demands of daily
existence ever allow it.

Ben knew that a vulnerable quality in Reuben troubled their father. It
was easy to wound Reuben. Ben had done it more than once, without intent
and with regret in the same moment. No doubt Joseph Cory prayed the boy
would grow stronger armor with increase of manhood.

       *       *       *       *       *

Reuben Cory watched his tall brother lift a candle in its pewter sconce
and trim a blob of wax with his thumbnail. Ben's hand, firm below the
flame and golden, brought Reuben the amazement of a miracle, a thing
never seen before. A familiar knife-scar on the forefinger--even that
was new, though Reuben recalled quite well how Ben had got it ignobly a
year ago by losing his patience when Jesse Plum was showing him how to
whittle a maple stick. A text from the prescribed Scriptural reading
sounded in Reuben's mind, as happened so often when he was startled,
delighted or disturbed: _I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and
wonderfully made_. But it seemed to the boy that something here was
false. The thought might be dutiful and correct, yet was he actually
praising the Lord for having made Ben beautiful? Why, hardly. Rather he
knew, as with Puritan skill and insistence he searched his heart, that
he was more of a mind to praise Ben for being himself--which was heresy,
and of course absurd. Uncle John's letter must be to blame.

The marvel of Ben's hand moved out of the concentrated light. Reuben
rose, aware that Ben wished him to come along without a fuss. The
letter, lying open as his father had left it on the table, pulled at
him. His mother would not be pleased to have him study it. In spite of
that, in spite of his own uneasiness, his eyes probed swiftly at it, and
hungrily. Mr. Kenny had used a brownish ink; light slanting from a new
angle as Ben moved the candle transfigured the writing to iridescent
gold: _It is a sorrie thing that a Man should refrayne from speaking his
Minde.... He hath his Light, so let mee live by mine owne._ Reuben's
eyes snatched a few lines further on, words his father had not read
aloud: _Nor no man, by threat of Damnation nor Promiss of Paradise,
shall ever betray me into the Folly of hating my Naybor, whether in the
name of Princes who are but Men or in the name of a God I knowe not._

Reuben turned away clumsily, shocked and confused. It was clear why his
father had read no more aloud. His mother might have offered no comment
at all; but.... Ben was regarding him kindly, perhaps puzzled, across
the hot flower of the candle. "Come on, Ru----" and Ben's voice cracked
woefully, baritone to treble and back to a rumble.

Looking then at none of them, Reuben could feel certain lines of force:
their mother's tender amusement at the cracking of Ben's voice, and
Ben's helpless annoyance at that amusement, and from the other seat by
the fireplace a quiet contemplation neither amused nor much concerned
with judgment. And here at the center of the lines of force, here within
himself, a wonder much like a pain just below the ribs, that anyone so
admired and respected as Uncle John could be such a tremendous heretic.
_A God I know not?_--that shook the ground. And Reuben was certain that,
for the present at least, he could not speak to his father about that
fretful thing under the ribs.

Nor even to Ben.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ben noticed that Reuben was making less snickering circumstance than
usual of diving under the covers in the chill of the garret. Both had
wriggled into dark security before Ben remembered that Ru had not said
prayers at all--for him almost unprecedented--nor had Ben himself done
so. Uneasily Ben decided to let it go this once. Reuben had lapsed into
heavy stillness and would certainly resent a jab in the back. As for
himself, he could pray silently in bed: Father and Mother both said so.

So far as Ben knew, Reuben was sleeping as well as ever these nights,
starting dutifully on his own side buried to the nose, but later
twitching in sleep, flinging himself about--frequently plagued, Ben
knew, by terrifying dreams. Often, when he was well down in sleep, his
arm would arrive on Ben's chest with a hard impatient flop; then,
usually, quiet. Ben could not remove the arm without waking him, which
might bring on an hour's talking-spell. Ben enjoyed those, but on these
February nights Ben wanted to sleep, and an unfamiliar difficulty in it
was annoying him like a sore tooth.

Was he a coward, that he should die a little whenever some obscure night
noise resembled distant shouts or gunfire? What was bravery anyway, and
why could you never be certain you possessed it?

Had he stumbled into sin without knowing it? He could uncover no kernel
of serious iniquity. All winter he had been rigidly good, because
(Father said, Mother said) his brother looked up to him and needed the
example of virtue. Yet they ought to know--Mother surely did--that
Reuben was the nearer to grace.

No angel of course. Ru's normally loving temper could be submerged in
sullen withdrawal or red-faced wrath. The brothers had quarreled a few
times; only a few, since for Ben the experience was too shattering,
turning the natural world upside down in loss and destruction. Nowadays
Ben thought he knew how to read the danger signs and head off an
explosion.

It could not be sin that held him wakeful. More likely fear--listening
for the town watch to become a voice instead of a crunch of boots. Ben
had fallen into the habit of noting that squeak of leather on snow, then
straying into some waking dream in which a stern Ben Cory with a thinner
mouth played a heroic part or died interestingly.

He could enter other waking dreams, the only region where a warm
personification of desire is unfailingly obliging, never giggles
secretly with other girls, never snuffles from a cold in the head or
talks back. More than a year ago Ben had suffered a three months'
obsession with a tangible human being named Judith. He saw it now as a
childish aberration of the far past--the girl's father was the
tithingman; one must draw the line somewhere. He had seen Judith hardly
at all this winter, being no longer obliged to attend the little
Deerfield school; when he did glimpse her he was heart-free. But no
flesh-and-blood creature had superseded her, and often in the waking
dreams his lively collaborator looked like Judith, as she said and did
those shameless things which were saved (he hoped) from sinfulness by
the covering assumption: We'd be married, of course, before we did
anything like that, or that. Ben had spoken to the tangible Judith
perhaps a dozen times during his obsession, as the occasions of school
made it flat-out necessary; to Judith of the dreams he spoke at length,
wittily, memorably, relishing her praise, her sharing of all his views,
as she whispered under his ear in the dark and Ben could imagine he knew
the sliding of a silken thigh and searching fingers.

Dreams of sleep followed no such intelligent direction. Ben experienced
few of them, for usually his sleep was profound. The wench who did once
recently delight him in one of these bore no resemblance to Judith or
anyone. Ben had managed to glimpse little more of her than a pert
earlobe and tumbling hair. The agony of climax had not even ended when
he woke with wet loins and the exasperation of not quite remembering.
Better and worse than waking dreams; worse because waking demolished
them as full sunshine kills a rainbow, and better because they left him
in something like temporary peace as no waking fantasy ever did.

Aware of the near warmth of Reuben, of Father and Mother sleeping
downstairs, and beyond the snow-burdened roof the hard great glitter of
February night, Ben could also discover aloneness, a cool splendor of
thought wide-ranging, since a mind free of daytime bounds need recognize
few others, sometimes none at all.

Did Heaven and Hell fill everything beyond the earth? Well, how could
they? Something else must include them, if only emptiness.

At the ancient game of contemplating time, Ben found no great alarm in
staring down either direction of forever, while the brain refused to
conceive an end or a beginning, but too much of this wearied him like
an effort to grasp air in the hand. He could not follow those
speculations without coming to something like a blank wall. Possibly God
put it there; possibly if God put the wall there men should stay away
from it.

On such cold nights, while Ben wrestled not too urgently with eternity,
the house might achieve a transitory perfection of silence. Then a
contracting beam would set off a snap like gunshot. It could be real
gunshot; after thin worry of listening Ben would know it was not. He
might hear his father downstairs sigh and turn over in the four-poster
that would not quite accommodate his long legs. Down in the fireplace an
ember might pop in the banked-up ash--like a knocking, like floorboards
disturbed by an otherwise noiseless footfall. Out in the shadows a
village dog might bark, and Ranger in the shed boom back at him.
Sometimes the gray cat Bonny, who liked to come smokefooting in and curl
on the boys' bed, would take to snoring lightly. If it was a night when
Jesse Plum's narrow ruddy nose was troubling him, Jesse in his lean-to
might imitate anything from a waterfall to a hog-killing. Or Ben would
hear the hollow baritone of an owl, the lamenting of a wolf, the nearly
human scream of a mountain cat. But true silence also might arrive, and
it would seem to Ben that if he could himself be silent as the dark,
permitting no least sound of breath, there might come to him another
moment of revelation such as he had once known--he could not quite
recall the time--when he had dropped on his back in the grass, and
looking up, had discovered the brilliant life of new birch leaves
between him and the immortal blue of spring.

       *       *       *       *       *

Reuben was wakeful too, but sought to conceal it by lying motionless
even after his back began to itch, since the desire for talk was at
present not in him. For a while he was both hurt and relieved that Ben
had not reminded him to pray. But terror was latent in this; his mind
winced away from it and sought the consolation of a decision: as soon as
Ben should fall asleep--and Ben usually snored a little--he would get up
and stand by the window and atone for the omission by offering up a
better prayer than usual, one in fact that he preferred Ben not to hear,
since he particularly intended to ask God's blessing on Ben himself.
Once the decision was reached the comfort of it was genuine, allowing
his body to relax as fear dissolved away. Unaware of the surreptitious
approach of sleep, he found himself recalling things far away, wherever
it is that yesterdays go, and at the same time wondered why his mind
should so becloud itself with forgetting. He wanted--after a time quite
eagerly wanted to recreate a certain day, the day when Jesse Plum and
the Indian Meco brought in a lion. As he invited it the recollection
brightened, yet remained under a nimbus of the not-remembered.

Reuben knew Jesse Plum's history in a general way. The old man had
arrived from England as an indentured servant some time in the early
1670's, a long-jawed hulk with certain fixed ideas, one of which was
that nobody loved him any more than you could put in your eye and see
never the worse. After his first term of servitude he had drifted to
Springfield and cemented himself to Grandfather Matthew Cory's family
with the suctorial power of the meek. Reuben knew that in the same year
when his father and mother were married and came to Deerfield,
Grandfather Cory died, and after his death Grandmother Rachel Cory had
no place for a godless sot; her son at Deerfield casually inherited
Jesse, and Jesse did nobly, working for his keep and a trifle over,
aware that Goodman Joseph Cory could seldom be stern toward anyone but
himself.

Jesse's thin nose, wedged between gently wandering milky blue eyes,
possessed an intuition for alcohol, as a good bloodhound's nose will
hold him firm on the trail. Jesse never rebelled nor complained. His
mention of the Pain in his Back was simply a special kind of breathing
with words, his muscle the sort of unlovely boot-leather that can always
beat out one more day's wear. He tended to be somewhere else at
plowing-time, and Reuben had seen him approach overt emotion in the
presence of a woodpile, but he never failed at harvest--Jesse was doing
his best and said so himself. A neighbor, Benoni Stebbins, observing
Jesse's slowly receding back, once declared in Reuben's hearing that
some men are born tired--the charitable heart can only hope they'll find
time for enough rest before Judgment.

Jesse talked most colorfully when resting; Jesse was a man of memories.
In youth he had known the Great Plague of 1665 and the fire that laid
London flat the following year; of these he almost never spoke, but he
loved to croak on by the hour with less sorrowful recollections of the
motherland.

The Indian Meco must have met inquiries about his true name with a
bubble and purr of Algonkian syllables inconvenient for English tongues.
Reuben had almost forgotten him until tonight, and calculated in the
dark: that was four years ago, the day they brought in a lion. Reuben
could then find Meco's image--scrawnily tall, gnarled, bald, the softer
wrinkles of his eroded face fallen in from a bulging forehead and
stupendous hooked nose. Meco wore a cast-off English bodice as a
favorite breechclout. A Pocumtuck, he was believed to have claimed in
his bruised English. If that was true he had reason for a desolate old
age: the Mohawks almost annihilated that nation in 1664, and the remnant
was further cut down in King Philip's War of 1675-'76 against the
English. Not too small a war--Joseph Cory remembered it as a background
thunder of his own childhood. The Indians burned Springfield; at
Deerfield an innocent small stream earned the name of Bloody Brook and
bore it still. The war ended when Sachem Metacomet of the Wampanoags,
called King Philip, was betrayed by one of his own people and shot, and
most of the survivors of his tribe were sold by the irritated Saints of
Massachusetts into West Indian slavery.

Meco lived and foraged God knew where--somewhere in the highlands beyond
the Pocumtuck River. At least Reuben had always seen him appear from
that direction, an undecipherable message out of the region of sundown
and west wind.

The Day of the Lion--midsummer of four years past, so Ben had been ten
and Reuben a little past eight: the year the century turned. Jesse Plum
vanished before sunrise; by afternoon the household grew convinced he
had wandered off with Meco. The two satisfied each other in
conversation, an affair of huge parturient silences, a drink, a further
scanning of horizons--all this a genuine mental mining rewarded in the
end by the substantial nugget of a grunt.

When the family sat at supper one of the Hoyt boys danced in, expanded
with joy, announcing: "They killed a catamount!" The youth was swooping
on when Joseph Cory asked: "Boy--who did? When, pray, and how, may a man
arise to inquire?"

"Well, they killed a catamount," said the younger Hermes, and fled, not
wishing to miss any more of the triumph which was entering the north
gate of the stockade, collecting startled admirers. A progress of two,
Jesse Plum and Meco, bearing on a pole between them the corpse of a
mountain cat. They were both drunk as David's sow. Respectfully they
dumped the tawny ruin in the dooryard.

"In the hills," Jesse Plum declaimed. "Yah!" He waved (Goodman Cory's)
gun approximately east, toward the Pocumtuck Range. "Now he'll slay no
more cattle." He set the gun down with care. "Why, he might've attackted
the boys, then I couldn't never 've forgave myself, no never." Jesse
lifted knotty hands defying all powers that could threaten the Cory
children, and Meco began a stately shuffle, perhaps the tentative offer
of a victory dance, but found himself in the wrong mood. Smiling at
everyone, Jesse explained: "'S the Lord's guidance."

Father asked: "There's been cattle killed?"

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!"

Reuben writhed away from Ben's touch. "Jesse, help me with him!"

Jesse caught him up. Reuben fought in dumb fury, but Jesse held him fast
ignoring that, and rushed through the woodshed, opening the door at the
far end with a thrust of a horny foot. "Stay close, Ben!" They were
stumbling across snow trampled by the flight of others, in the shadow of
their own house that stood between them and the fires; then out of that
shadow toward a beginning of winter dawn. Men and women were running
about here, unrecognizable in wounds and terror and nakedness, people
Ben had known all his life, swept into the panic of a crushed anthill.
The east wall of the stockade rose cruelly high. There Jesse set Reuben
down. The boy swung about mechanically, walking back toward the fires.
Ben grabbed and slapped him; he only stared.

Jesse snatched off the wreck of his nightshirt and twisted it into a
cord, running it through the belt of Reuben's breeches. "Go first,
Ben--I'll h'ist you."

Ben swarmed up somehow. Jesse yelled: "Drop! You must catch him." Then
Jesse was up too, clutching the palisade with his knees, hauling on the
makeshift rope before Reuben's groping hand could discard it. Jesse
gained a grip on Reuben's armpit, and Ben flung himself down. "Ready,
Jesse!" But instead of letting Ben catch his brother, the old man leaped
with him, turning in mid-air so that he fell under Reuben, who sprawled
free and ripped loose the cord.

Ben grabbed the boy's arm. Jesse reeled up on his knees. "Get to
Hatfield! I'm undone. The filthy papists've done me in."

Reuben had at least delivered himself from his witless trance. He tugged
to free his arm and wailed: "Let me go!"

"Get up, Jesse! You can't sit there so."

Jesse shook his head, a stubborn child. "I stink. There's men fail at
everything--you don't understand." He whimpered, trying to cover his
crotch. "I be naked, can't you see? You go on. I'm done."

"Let me go, Ben! Let me go back! Let me go, damn you!"

Ben's eyes were watering from the cold and from a billow of smoke the
wind flung down on them. "God damn it, Jesse, you think we'd abandon
you? Get up!"

"Plague and fire...."

"_Get up!_"

"Oh, I--I will, Ben. It's the old liquor rising up in me. Ben, I
couldn't help that, it was on me to drink. Leave me gather my wits. O
Lord Jesus, is it coming day already? I will get up, Ben, don't fret."
And he did, jerky in motion like an ill-made doll, willing to follow....

Some confusion of battle still fumed by Captain Wells' fortified house
beyond the southeast corner of the palisade. Ben heard gunfire, the
heart-cracking sound of a woman wailing unseen. Leading, gripping
Reuben's wrist, Ben avoided that fort, plunging into the woods and
white-packed underbrush to circle it and come out well to the south on
the Hatfield road--unmistakable, familiar, over there on his right under
enormous morning sky. Others in flight had marked the road with the
signature of bloody drops, clear against white now that the sun was
surely rising.

Reuben pulled back continually. Ben's right knee throbbed, he couldn't
think why. He knew Jesse was following. Impossible to run in this white
muck. He could push on, the sun at his left hand, and not look back. He
was aware not of time but only of breathing, of driving forward in pain
against the sodden snow and retaining his hold of Reuben's wrist; yet
time was moving too, as it would forever, and the sun advancing.

He realized that for some while now he had heard no gunfire. They had
surely not come so far on the Hatfield road as not to hear it, for the
morning was still. It must have ended. The wind had dropped, the air
becoming sluggish, almost warm. Drowsy....

Reuben struggled abreast of him and beat feebly at his shoulder. "Ben,
you must let me go back. Mother----"

"Ru, thou knowest she is dead."

"You never loved her or you could not say it."

Ben faced about, feeling the sun of March, seeing on the backward trail
nothing familiar, only a rising faraway smoke. That must have been
Deerfield. Nearby, the quiet world of snow was lightly patterned with
tracks of forest life; no wind at all now to disturb the shadowy trees
and undergrowth. Ben knew his brother was nearly sane, already ashamed
of the words just spoken. Jesse had halted, swaying and mumbling in his
cold nakedness, looking back. "I loved her, Reuben. Now save thy breath
for walking."

More time unmeasurable passed in the dreary plodding. Small shadows down
the trail became large, large shadows became men--angry men from
Hatfield, some of them soldiers. A blunt-faced sergeant of militia
shouted to Ben: "They still there, boy?"

"Yes," Ben wheezed--"I think so."

The sergeant paused, seeing Jesse's side. "You're bad hurt."

Someone tossed a jacket over Jesse. The sergeant offered a leather flask
and Jesse grabbed his arm, muttering uneasily: "Water?"

"Water of Jamaica."

"God magnify you!" Jesse drank. "Don't know you--'d pray for you was I
a'ready in Hell."

The sergeant jerked his head at the north. "How many?"

"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...."

Reuben thought: _A stairway. I am lying still--nevertheless a stairway._

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!..._"

Precariously, Reuben said: "I think he's gone, Grandmother."

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.

Reuben said aloud: "Why?..."

_The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether._

The snow would thicken, covering all things. It increased as he watched,
the white ball fading, blotted out at last in the gray and white
morning. The cold was not severe. No wind was blowing.

Reuben said: "I do not believe it."

He crept back into the shelter to hold his brother in his arms.

       *       *       *       *       *

Late in the morning Ben woke in a remission of the fever, knowing Reuben
was not far away. To the complex interesting lines above him--evidently
a roof--he said experimentally: "I must have been sick."

"Lie quiet!" The power of Reuben's hand on his chest startled him, the
sodden ache of his own muscles dismayed him. "We can't go on today, Ben.
It's snowing heavy. I mean to light a fire--with all the snow they'll
never see the smoke, if they come this way at all."

"They?--oh." Ben doubtfully remembered. It would not do for Reuben to
guess how puzzled he was; craftily he asked: "How far you think we came
from Hatfield?"

"Hatfield?"

"How stupid I am!" The unintended words drawled out of his mouth and
floated away. "Meant Deerfield. My leg...." Reuben (who knew everything)
helped him shove down his breeches, then allowed him to sit up and look
at the splinter-wound, a yellowish scabby island in a puddle of pink. He
wished to study it, but Reuben was already pulling up the musty
repellent garment and urging him back on the pile of sweet-smelling
leaves. "Suppose that's what made me sick?"

"Maybe."

"Suppose I ought to be bled?"

"I daren't, Ben. I don't know how a physician does it. I might cut wrong
and not be able to stop the flow."

"I'll do well enough."

"Yes, but you must eat, or you'll weaken."

Ben considered this. He was hungry, yes, but wasn't some difficulty
connected with the idea of eating? Meanwhile someone, apparently
himself, was burdened with a bladder about to burst. "Must go outside."

"Watch out!" Reuben somewhere sounded frightened or angry. "You'll fetch
down the roof if you try to stand."

That was sensible, Ben observed--of course he would, and then they'd
have all the trouble of building it over. He located Reuben kneeling in
a whiteness outside, ready to help him in spite of his stupidity, and
crawled to him. Improbably, the boy transformed himself into a pillar
under Ben's right arm, a curve of warm iron around Ben's middle--only
Reuben who knew everything could have thought of that.

Out here in the blind white morning, Ben was distressed by inability to
interpret what he saw. The swirling pallor might conceal a thousand
significant shapes. He simply must not urinate on what might easily turn
out to be Grandmother Cory's doorstep. He asked with care: "Here?"

"Anywhere. Hurry! You must get back under cover."

"That's right," said Ben humbly, suffering a panic dread that his
bladder would never let go; it did, with relief like an end of pain. But
still the gray and white was all a whirling bewilderment. He knew the
sentinel monsters to be trees; nothing or everything might be stirring
just beyond reach of his vision in these enormous distances. "Where is
the way where light dwelleth?"

"What?"

"Which way is Roxbury?"

"That's east," said Reuben, and jerked his head. "Don't think about it
now. Come back under cover. Damnation, Ben, help me a little! You know I
can't lift you if you fall."

Ben walked with extreme care, and then crawled, back on the pile of
leaves. Darkness approached and slid away. Reuben was shaking his
shoulder, urging him to eat something. "What? What is it?"

"Some of the ham I stole--don't you remember?"

"Yes. But.... How much have we?"

"A plenty. See--all this. And the turkey too--I'll cook that when I have
a fire going."

"Oh yes, the turkey.... Ru----"

"I ate all I wanted while you were sleeping."

He would lie of course, Ben thought. But with a face changeable as
sunlight on a wind-rippled pond, Reuben had never been a good liar. Ben
lifted a heavy arm to turn that face into the wan daylight. "You--did?"

"I swear to you, Ben, we have enough for several days, and I ate all I
needed an hour ago."

Ben struggled over the mouthfuls. The meat lay heavy in him, threatening
nausea; that passed. He accepted a final wave of darkness--not true
darkness, simply a voluntary closing of the eyes. Certainly not
unconsciousness, because he could feel Reuben wrapping some cloth around
his legs. He wondered what it was, the curiosity not powerful enough to
raise his ponderous eyelids. Later he heard Reuben speak--close to his
ear maybe; surely not far away, or the words could not have reached him
with that sweetness and clarity: "_Intreat me not to leave thee, or to
return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and
where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy
God my God: where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried:
the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and
me._"

       *       *       *       *       *

The wolves came that night, not with howling but in silence.

Through the afternoon, under the long patient drive of snow, Reuben had
gone out after more dead wood whenever Ben seemed quiet in his sleep. He
had struggled with Ben's tinderbox to the edge of despair, and won a
flame at last, the fire then leaping bravely and settling to steadiness
under the endless slanting white, the smoke pushed away from the opening
of the lean-to by a faint breeze out of the west. When he had gathered
all the firewood he could find without going beyond reach of Ben's
voice, Reuben used the stolen kitchen knife to hack off a green ash
sapling and trim it to a six-foot spear. He was wearing Ben's knife now
at his belt, but was unwilling to employ it in such labor--besides, the
tedious task of trimming and whittling disposed of much time when there
was nothing else to do and he knew it might be dangerous to think. All
afternoon he heard only the crackle of his fire, the sustained mild
hiss of the snow, and the small sounds of Ben's troubled slumber. His
mind heard the wolves, knowing they would come.

The hunter-builder had chosen this location cleverly. Thick brambles and
a looping confusion of wild grape covered the high bank above the
lean-to; a beast could squirm through it, no doubt, but probably would
not try, and surely would not jump down from it so long as someone
tended a fire below. This fair security in the rear left only a
half-circle of territory that needed watching. At the western end of
that little arc, where the lean-to itself shut off his view if he sat by
the opening, Reuben laid ready a stack of dead wood mixed with evergreen
branches. It would be a moment's work to carry a brand to that pile,
sending it up in a fine blaze to guard the blind spot. The wolves would
not like that.

This was his last act of preparation before evening came on. He knew of
evening as a gradual failing of the light, a growth of shadows in the
continual drift of snowflakes, a shift from gray to black. At one time
it had been afternoon; then afternoon resembling evening. Then night.
Reuben became ears and eyes.

He could never hear their feet when they came, but all night he must
listen for any change in Ben's breathing or any call from him, such a
sound as might be smothered by fire noises or the small narcotic
monotone of the snow. He sought to imitate Ben's way of looking
everywhere, never allowing his gaze to become frozen in a stare. If
something seemed to move out yonder, as happened many times deceivingly
after darkness beyond the fire had grown complete, he must flick a
glance at it, look away, return, and so assure himself that it was
nothing, maybe a leap of fire-shadow, a harmless swaying of a branch of
the giant spruce that stood twenty yards away.

He knew the truth of it, and with relief because it ended the sour agony
of anticipation, when twin emeralds to the left of the spruce blinked on
and off and shone again nearer. Two other pairs of jewels flashed into
life, one to the right, the third directly below the tower of the tree.
"I know you," he called. "I know you for what you are."

He stood up to look beyond the lean-to. A fourth pair of hunting lights
had been approaching the blind spot, and halted at sight of him. Reuben
drew forth a burning stick. He walked slowly, with care for the flame,
and touched it to the dead wood and pine needles. The lights in the snow
did not retire; they watched, curious and cold. In the sudden radiance
they acquired a gray body, taut, startled at the new flame but not yet
in retreat and visible to Reuben in sharp detail. A bitch wolf carrying
young, her belly not much distended but seeming so because of the
gauntness of her ribs and a wiry thinness of long flanks.

Only four; probably no others. They ranged in small groups like
families, Jesse Plum used to say. The tales of large wolf packs, Jesse
insisted, were travelers' fancies. A few of the young sometimes remained
with the old ones until full-grown, then drifted away to start families
of their own. "Be you ever confronted by 'em," said Jesse once, "they'll
be few, boys, and no great peril unless they can get behind you in the
dark. True, they can kill you and eat you, but they do doubt it, they
understand cold steel and they be full of fear, the way all creatures
fear man, and so do I." Well, in the complex story that grew from that
opening, Jesse had been assailed by ten wolves who were not wolves;
after he climbed seventy feet to the top of a beech, the great dog wolf
leader had scrambled up after him, snapping at his heels but unable to
reach them so long as Jesse remembered to make certain signs in the air.
All that had been perfectly understood as a fireside fantasy, designed
to send the children off to the black garret in a good mood. Here,
Reuben told himself, he faced only four common wolves, angry with the
long winter hunger but afraid of the fire. The gummy spruce branch in
his hand still sputtered hotly. He flung it at the somber eyes. The
bitch wolf casually dodged the brand. He saw the gray evil of her glide
away to join the three others in deeper obscurity.

He sat on his heels near the opening of the lean-to, the green ash spear
lying under his right hand, and listened for Ben's breathing. That sound
reached him at last, seeming untroubled; then he could watch with
greater assurance. If anything pushed through the brambles and dry brush
at the top of the bank, he would hear it and be ready.

The eyes shifted, winked, vanished to reappear in silence. He found no
more than four pairs at any time. If they became three or two, that
might mean fresh danger. They remained, for a long time, four.

Reuben wondered when the snowfall had ceased. He remembered noticing
that it was thinning when the eyes first appeared. Now it was over, the
air clean and mild, a weak wind still sending the smoke away from the
place where Ben lay sleeping. Reuben glanced upward in search of stars
and found a few. Maybe--though not for hours yet, he thought--the moon
would return, and shine on a smooth silver blank where yesterday his
feet and Ben's had scrawled a trail.

He began to feel acquainted with those eyes. "You over on the left," he
called--"you're Snotnose. You under the spruce, you're Trundletail, and
your mother is Doxy Tumble." For a while he amused and warmed himself by
hurling snowballs at them.

They slunk away, not far. The unconcern of their withdrawal conveyed the
arrogance of contempt. They could wait.

Reuben's amusement died like the breaking of a weapon in his hand. He
thought: _What do they know?_ He stood as tall as he could, waving the
green spear, and shouted at them: "I know you! Dirty dogs! Offal! I spit
on you!" He fought back a desire to rush out in pursuit of them, with
Ben's knife and the green spear.

That would be mad. They would understand his smallness, his singleness,
and close in, tear him apart, move on to the shelter where Ben lay
helpless and sleeping.... Reuben carried more wood to the other fire,
then forced himself to squat once more patiently on his heels, and keep
count of the pairs of eyes. Four. He could wait, too. How long?

Eternal hours. Like those that must have already passed since the wolves
came. Or had they been there forever?

Why, of course they had. The breed was immortal. They had never been far
from Deerfield. They owned the wilderness before ever Christians came to
it. They howled in Rome, when Reuben Cory was not. Meeting the green
ancient stare from the dark, Reuben felt his face stiffly smiling. He
thought: It's true, true--there was a time when I was not. Something new
began--something--the name of it I, Reuben Cory. Well, this I may have
known, but until now I did never believe it.... He shivered, and
although there was cool pleasure in it he drove away the consolation of
philosophy because anything that dimmed alertness was dangerous. He
could wait.

In a reasonable world, one slept for a part of each revolution of the
beautiful sun. Reuben thought back in search of the last time he had
slept--Springfield, before Jesse was found in the snow. Danger hid in
this reflection also, the danger of self-pity. He put an end to it: _I
will not sleep._

It came to him that if one is hungry enough, any creature not downright
poisonous is meat. Suppose, somehow----?

He could not go out against them, away from the fires. Either they would
rush him all four together, or they would run away--good meat lost. But
suppose, somehow, one of them might be tempted to come alone--say the
old gray bitch who had already tried a sneak approach. How?

Wisdom lurked in her, a cold flame behind a long gray face. Reuben
thought of her as their leader. He discovered that he hated her, in a
swelling ecstasy not extended to her slinking companions. The thought of
killing her, at first a random flicker like a further warning of
madness, became a purpose, a source of power, a wildness deserving a
better name than lunacy because of its very absurdity. For ten minutes
or perhaps an hour Reuben hovered apart from his mind and watched the
thought grow. A boy does not kill a grown wolf with a little stick.

And yet the point was sharp. The ash would bend like a bow but never
break. His hand and eye were true, true as Ben's.

The fire beyond the lean-to was dying down. This had happened
before--how many times? Marching over to refresh it, Reuben found he
could not remember. No moon yet, therefore dawn must be remote in the
future. He stood with his spear on the unimpeded ground between the two
fires, considering, brooding.

The passion of hatred held something of love or at least a sultry need,
a hunger not of the belly. He studied the pairs of eyes--four--wondering
which pair might be hers. He fell to muttering, aiming at the gray bitch
wolf every foulness of indecent words he could recall. Words only,
unrelieving, lacking the thrust and achievement of a spear. New words
startled him: "Such meat should help him...."

He had not the strength to do any harm with a thrown spear; he would
only lose the weapon. Sometimes the very power of a stronger adversary
can be made to work for you. If you know how. If you dare.

Reuben knew he was not mad. Within the passion was a coldness to match
her own; shrewdness; wicked planning with all the treachery of a wolf
and the bravery. No time now to think of courage or fear. Endless time
to know the unbearable need for an act of love.

Reuben sank to his heels on this open ground, the lean-to at his back,
fires not great to the left and the right of him, between him and the
wolves only an expanse of flame-lit snow. He dropped the green ash spear
in that white so that the sharp end was covered. His hand curling midway
on the shaft owned a separate life, refusing to suffer from the harsh
coldness. Gradually he allowed his head to droop, lift feebly and droop
again, while his upturned eyes, perhaps not plain to the enemy,
maintained alertness. Seeing all. Clever as Ben's.

The beasts were cruelly wise, Jesse Plum used to say. Out of thickets
and moon-shadows they watched men's ways, as dogs did. Unlike dogs they
watched only for signs of weakness, and this from no motives but hunger
and savagery--except, said Jesse, those wolves which were not wolves.

He must be not reckless but wise and cold as they. He must be ready also
to recognize the need for retreat. Supposing they all four came
together, then he must jump to life quickly, scare them with noise and
bustling and renewal of the fires. But supposing, when this interminable
ordeal of crouching, waiting and feigning weakness came to an end,
supposing it ever did--supposing his feet had not grown numb and frozen
to betray him--supposing the old gray bitch should advance alone, while
Ben lay sleeping and the Great Bear slanted toward the North Star----

She was coming.

He would not believe it for a while. Slowly he explained to himself
that one of them must have crept out into the open a long time ago, as
some trick of the firelight deceived him into calling it another shadow.
Then he knew this was not so. She was coming to him. With all his heart
he accepted it.

He lowered his head once more, and in that moment witnessed the brief
belly-to-earth advance, the freezing down to watch him again across a
much smaller distance. This could only be the one he hated, no other.
She was coming to him. The others remained a shifting of eyes beyond the
clear ground--afraid of him, mere offal, mere dogs as she was not--or
else they were holding back because they knew her reasons and his own.

He knew that if he were to jump to his feet and dodge back behind the
fire, she would not rush, not yet. No gambler, she would slide away and
wait for the certainty, wait till dawn or beyond dawn or beyond the next
dawn. He could not do it. It might be wiser, safer; might almost be a
duty to Ben that he should retreat to comparative safety, now, while he
had time. His body would not do it. His body would only wait like a
bowstring, clutching the spear, controlling that deceitful droop of his
head until the approaching moment when one of them--a half-starved alien
beast or a boy who must remember the doorway of a reddened room where he
clung sickly to a bedpost and did nothing--one of them would die
quickly.

Was she only a wolf? Some wolves, Jesse said----

Was it possible--he was up on his feet in the surging act of
madness--was it possible she could hate and love him in the same way?

He could not understand.

His mind must have flown away, missing the interval, the second of
decision. But she was here. She was down. It was over.

She had screamed once, he thought, like a human thing; his ears held
something of the strangled cry. More of the moment returned, her flaring
mouth receiving the point in mid-air, her own driven weight spitting her
upon it. It could not have happened.

It had happened, and she was down, and it was over, and he could
remember his own backward staggering at the impact while all of him
tightened down on that center of existence where his hands grasped the
green ash spear. There followed some wave of elastic power in his legs,
and all the force was then flowing the other way until it was over.

Simple butchery remained. He must follow with the spear her agonized
writhing, hating no longer. No danger. Her failing paws threshed and
tore at the shaft of the death she had swallowed. Her blood fumed out
around it from a pierced lung.

It was all over.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Thursday night we came away--remember? That was the night you fell
sick, and was burning and tossing all day Friday. Saturday you was
better, but once or twice you didn't know me. It was the Friday night
when the wolves came."

"Are they still about? Nay, they can't be on so fair a morning. I feel
washed clean, Ru. Weak, but--oh, I could do anything."

"Weaker than you know. It'll pass. I saw the wolves last on Saturday.
They scented something, I think, and drifted away."

"It's all so still under the sun, and warm--what? I thought this was
Saturday."

"This is Monday, Ben. Yesterday was the Sabbath. I hadn't thought of
that till now, when you began asking me about the time. It was yesterday
your fever broke for good. These three days have been a hundred years.
I've had much time to think, when there was nothing else I could
do--mind the fire, gather more wood, then either think or go mad, but
I've not gone mad. I have not prayed, Ben, since before dawn on the
Friday morning."

"I don't know what I should say about that. Father said, just before he
died--did you hear?--said that God is far away."

"And Mother's last prayer was not answered. She prayed, 'Deliver us from
evil.' And mine have never been answered."

"But we can't know that."

"I can't say that I know anything, anything at all, except that I'm here
with you, and the air has turned warm, and the Bay Path road must be
somewhere a mile or so over yonder, and tomorrow we shall try for
Roxbury."

"And that thou hast killed a wolf.... Ru, if I didn't see that carcass
under my nose----"

"I never lied to you. Oh--tales for your fancy now and then."

"I know that. What did you do with the hide?"

"Flung it out to the cannibals. The entrails too, and the head. They
were delighted."

"Puh! What's this part I'm eating now and enjoying so?"

"Have you swallowed it, Mr. Cory?"

"I have, and you needn't try to make me puke."

"A puppy. She was carrying young--six. I had one whole, when you was
still in the fever."

"Ow-ooh!"

"Oh, ay, your ears'll turn furry any day now. I say, Ben, when we're
dirty-rich and famous, let's keep a few wolves on hand--you know, so to
have roasted pups for guests of distinction."

"Now you sound like yourself."

"Do I?... Ben, I--something happened that night, Friday night."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know whether I can tell it.... When I dragged the carcass to
the fire I was crying like a fool, I don't know why. Sat there crying
with her bloody head on my knees, some-way I couldn't make it seem she
was only a piece of meat. Later I could, later it didn't matter. And
then--well...."

"What is it, Ru?"

"I found my britches were wet. Nay, not what you think, and not her
blood neither, though that's dried all over 'em and I declare we both
smell like the Devil's own. Remember you told me how some time soon,
whenever it happened, I'd be spending the seed?"

"Oh--of course."

"Ben, I didn't know it when it happened. It must have been the moment
when I was killing her. I didn't know it could happen that way."

"I didn't neither."

"Is something wrong with me?"

"No, no."

"You see, I already knew how it feels. I did confess to you about
that--long ago, remember? That was the time when you told me, about the
change, and the seed."

"Yes. Well, they say it's a sin to bring it on, but I think it must be
venial, Ru, for Jesse said once that every man's vessels are alway in
need of it. The dreams don't help. Nothing's wrong with you."

"But why didn't I know it when it happened?"

"Oh, the excitement--why, you must have been white-hot, to stand up to a
wolf with nothing but a little stick. I didn't know it could happen that
way, but I think it's not so strange."

"Jesse Plum.... Why did Father never speak of those things?"

"I don't know, Ru."

"Did he to you?"

"No, he never.... Look: I remember I spent once, merely from lifting a
big rock. And--oh, tree-climbing, things like that. So you see--anyway
there's nothing wrong with you, brother, nothing."

"Do you have those dreams much, Ben?"

"Not too often. You?"

"Oh, they...."

"You will. You'll be dreaming about girls, and----"

"I ... You'll be strong enough to go on tomorrow, Ben. One thing: we
needn't fret now about anyone following from Springfield. That snow will
have covered everything. I hope they found the turkey blood before it
began a-falling. We can go slowly, rest as soon as we come to another
fair shelter. This morning might be the start of another thaw, even an
early spring--only look at the tears of that spruce, how they fall in
the sun! We'll find more food some-way, now that you're well. There must
be towns between here and Roxbury, where we could work for a few meals,
a few nights' rest."

"Why, sure, we'll make it.... What happened to your jacket?"

"My--oh, the wolf."

"But the wolf did not reach you, brother."

"I dragged her."

"And so got your jacket torn and muddy on the inside? But I found it
wrapped around my legs yesterday when I woke with a clear head, and you
slipped it away, but I knew. Last night when it turned a little colder
you put it around me again, thinking I was asleep, and I was silent,
wishing to speak but too stupid."

"No need. You'd have done the same. Don't speak of it now."

"Very well. But----"

"Thou owest me nothing. I've been forced to think of these things--so
many hours, Ben, when I--nay, but how could there be any owing or
standing beholden between thee and me?"

"I think I owe thee everything."

"No! Pray understand, Ben. It's not a thing to be measured--why, it's
not a thing at all, but--oh, like a region one travels through, an area
of light."

"Love, a region?"

"What else? Can you own it or give it or take it? It came to me, Ben,
that we only dwell in it, as in the sun, or this morning air."




PART TWO




_Chapter One_


Ben Cory searched the bay, his eyes ardent for greater distances. Here
at the wharf the ships relinquished wakefulness and power, becoming
boxes of cargo for the calculations of landsmen: the harbor is not the
sea.

"Watch, Ben--he'll take in sail presently." John Kenny was holding his
dwarfish body erect to make the most of it, ancient head slanted so that
he might look down his nose even at Boston Bay. He thrust his
gold-headed cane against a crack in the wharf--his wharf, and smiled at
the boy--his boy. "Luck of the Artemis, this breeze. When she nears the
wharf Jenks will haul his tops'l to set her aback. You'll see her reach
the piling a-tiptoe, a lady, all whisper and dignity. Didn't I say she'd
be the lucky thing, when I took thee and Reuben up the Mystic to watch
her a-building on the ways?"

"Yes, Uncle John." The mild westerly breeze fluttered Mr. Kenny's gray
coat and the gray owl-tufts above his ears. It woke the dance of
whitecaps under April sky, and seventeen is a kind of April. "She's a
fair ship, sir."

"Hoy, mind your terms! A ship is all square-rigged, commonly a
three-master. Two-masted, a ketch, is _Artemis_--well, a loose name,
seeing we use it also to mean small harbor craft. But with her
fore-and-aft mizzen you mustn't be calling her a ship. I wish Reuben had
come. He's missing a pretty sight, and all to go strolling in the
woods." Ben winced inwardly, knowing that the old man, for all his
understanding, had been hurt by that. He ought to know by this time, Ben
thought, how when the black mood came over Reuben there was nothing to
do but let the boy alone, let him go walk in the woods or whatever else
he wished. Ben himself did not know whether it was the flame of
Deerfield that attacked Reuben at such times; had not been able to
learn, in all the three years since they came to Roxbury and Uncle John
had opened heart and home to them. "_Artemis_ is near three hundred ton,
Ben. That's not big, but she could sail anywhere in the world."

The lonely man, blue-eyed and gaunt, who stood at the outermost end of
Kenny's wharf, swung about to gaze at the old merchant. Ben had not
until now observed the stranger's face, motionless as a boulder in a
patch of grass against the raised collar of a shabby green coat. Grave,
Irish maybe, handsome in spite of a signature of smallpox from jutting
cheekbones to the edge of an angular jaw. Under a battered tricorne hat
Ben saw coal-black hair and a forehead high and pale. The mouth was
thin, the upper lip compressed. Hands projected immensely from frayed
sleeves, a sailor's hands broadened at the knuckles. Others on the wharf
had been watching _Artemis_; discouraged by the chill of the breeze,
they had abandoned the airy region to Ben and Mr. Kenny and the
blue-eyed man.

Anchored in the near waters or drawn up to the many docks, an orderly
jungle stirred to the bay's mild motion--stem masts, steep bowsprits,
nervous bodies of the drowsing wind-wanderers. To Ben's eyes, Clarke's
Wharf over yonder hardly dwarfed Mr. Kenny's single squat warehouse and
three hundred feet of pier. All around Ben spread an apparent confusion
of ropes, tackle, mooring-posts, more meaningful than when he had first
stumbled through it three years ago, but still a confusion to one whose
hand had never yet felt the lurching sting and thrust of a working rope
across the palm.

Woolgathering, Ben had missed some remark about _Artemis_' rigging. "She
owes much to that fore-and-aft mizzen. Fore-and-aft or square, either'll
bring you the service of all the winds, but the way of the fore-and-aft
is a woman's way, Ben, seeming to yield, winning by yielding. Your
squares'l is male, standing up to wrestle the sky breast to breast--nay,
but he can drive almost as near the wind's eye--point or two less,
what's a point or two in a long journey? _Artemis_ don't roll too much.
I've been aboard her under sail only the once, when we tried her out.
She didn't roll much, for all Mr. Jenks tempted her to it so to learn
her paces. Fast she is, Ben. You can feel it even now when she's picking
her way slow as a dream."

"Sir, if I--supposing I might ship aboard----"

"You?" Mr. Kenny jabbed his cane at the planking, his crinkled face gone
blank. "Ben, boy, you must stick to your studies. You'll have sea enough
when Mr. Hibbs brings your Greek far enough on to read the Odyssey.
Better to drown in poetry than salt water."

"Still, Uncle John, the sea----"

"Now let me tell you a thing: never admit to a sailor that you love the
sea, if love is the word. He'd despise you for a landsman. A sailor may
love a ship, if she be fair and not vicious. Not the sea, not the old
blind murdering bitch-mother."

"No, I think love is not the word, but--nay, I don't know."

"You think I don't feel it? Didn't I take ship as a common seaman when I
was twenty? I ran away, Ben. My father's blood was partly cold
vinegar--something of that you felt in your day with my good sister. My
brother George's and mine was red, and hot. Well, I had but a few years
of it, he too. Not for me with my piddling strength. We went into trade,
we prospered, and I'm a landsman--but I know her. Sometimes if my bad
toe's a-troubling or I go to bed with too much drink in me, I dream I'm
fathoms down in the cold, the green dark. I see their faces, I mean
those of the dead, men I knew who own no grave except the sea. They
float by me orderly, no crowding--hoy, you learn not to crowd a man in
the neighborhood of live ropes! They go by me one by one--Amyas Holt
maybe, that was first officer of the ship _Marigold_ and would never
sing except he was stone cold sober, but I _have_ heard him sing, marry
have I. Went down with the _Marigold_ off the Bermudas--all hands....
Isn't the land fair, Ben? Full of good things? Good work, women,
children, warmth of an earned fireside? And the time of year that's
coming now?--but maybe you suppose an old man don't notice the spring.
Is not the land fair?"

"Yes, Uncle John," said Ben, and turned his face away.

"Sometimes I see Danny Roeder too, laughing boy, ready for anything,
dead of the scurvy when we stood thirty-four days becalmed south of the
Line, a run to Recife in the ship _Providence_--most of his teeth fallen
from puffed purple gums, not laughing then.... I've but now remembered,
Ben, this is the first time you've seen _Artemis_ afloat. When she left
the ways last August you and Reuben were a trifle indisposed."

Ben grinned weakly in acknowledgement. Last August he and Reuben had had
the measles. After a day or so of misery they had grown busily critical
of each other's spots, the despair of Mr. Kenny's housekeeper Kate
Dobson, who tried to make them mind the orders of Mr. Welland the doctor
and stay covered up in bed. Plump Kate did not frown on pillow fights in
principle. She suppressed a few nobly, knowing her massive rear to be
prime target, because she believed the boys were in a rarely tender
condition. Kate had heard that measles could become the lapsing
fever--whatever that was, and never mind that Mr. Welland rumbled and
chuckled and took snuff and said it wa'n't so. Kate had sniffed
pointedly and severely about Mr. Welland of Roxbury, asking after his
gentle departure how a head under such a Lord-help-a-sinner wig as he
wore could hold knowledge of the healing art or in fact anything else.

More than a year in building and the pride of Mr. Kenny's ancient years,
_Artemis_ took to the water--tide and wind and season won't wait on the
measles--with no help from Ben and his brother. By the time Mr. Welland
decreed they could leave the house, she was gone, with half a cargo,
mostly hardware and woolens from England. She slipped down to Newport to
fill her hungry hull with flour and cheese; on to Virginia for a quick
turnover; then with tobacco and what remained of the Yankee
hardware--anything you like from frying pans to thimbles--she was for
Jamaica in the warm seas. At Kingston she ran into a bit of trouble;
Captain Jenks sent word of it by a homeward-bound. Tropic fever and
smallpox had played hell with his crew, and he was delayed seeking
replacements. He would not put out in late winter even on the
Kingston-Boston run with nothing better than a passel of louse-gnawed
Jamaican monkeys who'd die like Caribbee butterflies at the first breath
of a northerly and anyway couldn't tell the head from the hawse-holes.
Jenks ripped out other comments, cramped by the need of setting quill to
paper, concerning Jamaican speed in loading his logwood and molasses
while the remnants of his good crew were too sick or drunk to lend a
hand. "They doe labour a Moment," he wrote, "and falle into a most
sweete bloudie Slummber." Snorting over that letter in the company of
Ben and Reuben, John Kenny remarked that he couldn't picture man, monkey
or butterfly winning much sweet slumber when Mr. Jenks spoke in his
natural voice--the which, said Mr. Kenny, was the secret of Mr. Jenks'
virtue, for by raising that voice to strong conversational pitch he
could lift you the father and mother of a typhoon out of a flat calm.

A clop of hoofs, a grind of halting wheels--Ben heard that above the
mutter of small waves fumbling the piles of the wharf, and turned to see
the coach drawing up near Mr. Kenny's warehouse. A dark woman stepped
out, doll-size with distance, helping two others alight. The breeze
snatched at full skirts; an arm flew up restraining a blue bonnet; Ben
heard a ripple of remote laughter, and the women consulted, bonnets
grouped like the heads of little lively fowl. Plainly not working-women
nor dockside sluts, they must have some errand at the warehouse, and
would not be coming out here into the raw smell of tar, fish,
sewage-corrupted water and salt air. Mr. Kenny, with slightly dulled
hearing, was unaware of them. Ben looked again to _Artemis_.

"Watch, Ben! Wouldn't you think he was bearing down smack onto the bow
of that three-master? She's a New Yorker, by the way. Hoy!" Mr. Kenny
danced a stiff caper. "Like an old woman threading a needle! But if the
watchman on that Mannahatta tub pissed his britches, no shame to him at
all. Watch!"

The lonely blue-eyed man was watching too, in the curve of his long back
something hawk-like.

Mr. Kenny relaxed, chuckling. "Ben, I recall you've never met Mr. Jenks.
When he's ashore he never visits around, damn the dear man, not even to
Roxbury. There's a reason--never mind. Had he a contrary wind this
afternoon he'd likely bring her in anyhow. Once I watched him fetch my
wallowing old _Hera_ to this wharf. Filthy little northeast blow, and
she about as comfortable to handle as a bull on ice. I thought he'd
drop anchor alee of Bird Island and wait. Not Jenks--brought her in like
a homing dove. Knows every inch and instant of the tides as they'll
never be known by your landside chart-makers, noticed it a thousand
times. I don't mean he'll take foolish risks. With _Hera_ that time--to
him it was a nothing, did it easy as a milkmaid strips a cow. _Hera_
went down off the Cape--'d I ever tell you?--seven years ago in a fog.
Floating hulk stove in her la'board side. Filled in twenty minutes, no
fault of Jenks, and didn't he bring off every man alive in one boat and
one damned little dory? Not a soul lost."

He had told of it before. Ben never found it difficult to hear Uncle
John's repeated tales as if new. In a way they were, since Ben knew he
had probably missed something in the earlier telling.

Wharf hands slouched from the warehouse, taking command of the space
where soon the figurehead under the low-slung bowsprit of _Artemis_
would gaze inward toward her homeland, if that grave white face,
something less than a woman's and something more, knew any homeland now
but the one she shared with Mother Carey's chickens. The men busied
themselves over ropes and fenders, with raucous horseplay. The blue-eyed
man certainly noticed them, but never turned from observing _Artemis_
with the intentness of a schoolmaster or a lover.

The roustabouts brought a stench of cheap taverns, rum, tobacco, sweat.
Bulky short-worded men, some tattooed and wonderfully scarred, their
noise slightly restrained by the presence of an important merchant and a
well-dressed boy. The boy envied their carelessness. To watch them you'd
think the homecoming of _Artemis_ from her maiden voyage was a trifle,
worth no more than a shot of spit off the jetty. Ben saw a leather-hided
giant twiddle free a length of rope and try it on the legs of a
companion who yelped and grappled with him harmlessly.

Behind Ben a crystalline voice abruptly asked: "Will she anchor, Mr.
Kenny, or come in to moor direct?"

"Direct, my dear." Mr. Kenny was beaming, a hand on the girl's arm. "Did
your father ever make me pay lighterage if he could help it?"

"What a pert breeze! I vow I'm brave to be out in it."

"This little air? Why, Faith, it would scarce raise a kite for a running
boy. Anyway 'twas no breeze put the brier roses in your cheeks, you was
born with those, well I remember."

Mr. Kenny's back was turned to Ben. Ben was standing quite alone,
hearing yet the long murmuring of the water, as he fought away the dead
weight of shyness and discovered the April grace of her, dressed in
shining blue, wind-clasped; looked again, and encountered a wounding
sweetness of blue eyes.

       *       *       *       *       *

John Kenny's woodland had never been surveyed; somewhere it blended into
crown-grant timberland or unclaimed wilderness. His house stood beyond
the natural limits of Roxbury--he liked that--on a rolling rise of
ground south of the road to Cambridge. From his back pasture, Reuben
Cory had heard him say, you could keep under forest cover all the way to
Providence, and maybe he'd do it some time, the old man said, if ever
the Saints came a-snapping too close at his heels. John Kenny might have
started saying that twenty or thirty years ago when it wasn't entirely a
jest.

From the window of the room upstairs that he shared with Ben, Reuben
stared eastward beyond the Dorchester road, across open land and marsh
and water, to the low hills of Dorchester Neck two miles away, gray and
brown yet alive with a subdued radiance under the afternoon sun of
April. Beyond those harmless hills moved the sunrises, and the stern
Atlantic that seemed to be tugging at his brother's heart and giving him
no rest.

Driven by his own dark unease of spring, by some dread of human voices
and the wrong questions they ask, by shame at the ungracious whim that
had prompted him to stay home--after all, if he was not going in to
watch the return of _Artemis_, sighted yesterday playing games off the
Cape with a contrary wind, then he had no proper excuse for this
half-holiday from study--driven above all by a need for the April day as
it might come to him lonely in a golden calm at the edge of wilderness,
Reuben slipped downstairs light as a cat, out past the black wet ground
of the kitchen garden and down a long slope into the south pasture, then
on toward soft-spoken hemlocks.

Reuben had discovered a bodily sureness in these solitary journeys, a
trust in his own senses, and a puzzled, reaching love for the life of
the unhuman world. Sometimes he stole out of the house at night, with
owl and fox and whippoorwill, if the moon was shining to help him; Ben
slept sweetly never knowing that. Ben often came with him into the
daytime woodland, but to stroll out here with Ben belonged to another
category of experience. The world of I-am-alone cannot share an orbit
with other planets, as the world and Reuben-self that existed in Ben's
presence could exist nowhere else.

He would never be tall like Ben, nor quite as strong. At fifteen that no
longer troubled him. His own hard wiry thinness was sufficient; it would
carry him, he supposed, wherever he cared to go.

At the lower end of the pasture he climbed a stile into the
spicy-smelling hush. A wood road continued on the other side; Reuben
soon abandoned it, following landmarks that brought him to one of his
better-loved havens, where Ben had often loafed with him.

Over a huge flat-topped boulder a spruce towered to sixty feet, the
droop of branches enclosing the rock; one could imagine the hide of a
gray monster lurking in the green. The boughs slanted steeply, creating
a room with a granite floor and walls of gold-flecked shadow, a gentle
and a secret place--old; the spruce must have been already old in the
time of King Philip's War. A midget brook passed here. It had gouged a
pool at the outer end of the granite block, not deep even in the time of
spring rains, but reflections of the spruce gave it an ocean infinity of
green.

Wander a few yards down the brook and you owned another world, where the
water widened to larger ponds, supporting patches of feather-topped
marsh grass here and there. Maples on firmer ground bordered this damp
clearing, which by itself became many worlds in the flow of the
seasons--the world of deep summer, for example, when you could watch
mating dances of the small green dragonflies that never come near
houses.

Reuben climbed silently into the sanctuary under the spruce and lay out
on the rock to stare into the pool refreshed by the rains of April. He
invited to his ears all least disturbances of the enclosing silence--a
weak murmur upstream where the trifling water hurried over pebbles, a
breath of motion in the needles of the spruce, a bluejay's complaint
softened by distance, a cow lowing more than a mile away; a greater
mystery, the beat of his own heart in the rib-cage pressed against rock,
not quite pain. He saw the face of himself the stranger in the water
below, and shut his eyes. When the flesh is quiet, he thought, the mind
is also. Why? I alway knew that. The quiet is brief.

Why?...

Because (I think) everything is part of a journey. I am never, I was
never still. Perhaps there is no stillness except in death.

Human sounds reached him, a brushing of last year's grass in that
clearing downstream, a vague cough. Reuben sat up, annoyed and puzzled.

It could not be anyone with the privilege of bidding him to cease
idling. Uncle John was in Boston with Ben. The tutor was sulking in his
room--it hurt Mr. Hibbs that a boy granted a half-holiday should elect
to spend it as he pleased, and anyway Mr. Gideon Hibbs was not at home
in any forest outside the _Eclogues_ of Virgil. Uncle John's gardener
and handy man Rob Grimes was accounted for too--Reuben had heard his axe
in the woodshed.

If some poacher or Indian were fooling about the back land, Uncle John
would wish to know. Reuben slipped from the rock with no sound, and
wormed a gradual way through the brush. Someone sneezed. Poachers try
not to sneeze; prowling Indians just don't; still Reuben maintained his
caution because of a wild-animal pleasure in it. Having stolen by
degrees to the edge of the clearing, he observed the stout bowed back
and lightly fringed bald head of a man kneeling by a shallow pond,
parting the dead grass to stare down into the water. Surely not a
poacher examining a trap; the man was familiar somehow.

Reuben identified him, but doubtfully. Acting on an impulse of gentle
wickedness, he slid out from the bushes and sat cross-legged with his
chin in his hands, all as quietly as a mouse crossing a heap of flour.

Rising at last from his peculiar inspection of the pond water, the man
sneezed again. He turned unknowing, and jumped delightfully. He said
"God bless me!" and closed his large mouth two or three times while a
slow chuckle shook him from fringed head to dingy shoes--a memorably
ugly man pitted with smallpox scars from a button chin to a bulging
forehead. His clothes were snuff-stained; respectable once, now a second
best suited to the woods. His little dark eyes gleamed mirthful and sad,
intent. A ribbony nose ended in a flared tip with a double knob. Reuben
marveled that having known this face at his bedside, and that not long
ago, he could have been confused in remembering it.

"I'm sorry, sir--didn't go for to startle you, Mr. Welland." "Oh, didn't
you!"

"It was the wig."

"The wig, sir? Oh, you mean the absence of my wig. I'm in a manner
disguised. I understand your synecdoche, or do I mean hypallage?"

"Metonymy," said Reuben.

"Brrr!" said Amadeus Welland. "Mm-yas, of course, 'tis the spotted
child, the younger one. How's your brother, Mr. Cory?" "Well," said
Reuben, and laughed happily for no plain reason.

Sighing and grunting as the elderly do, the little man sat on the
ground, not too ungracefully in spite of stooped plumpness and a modest
melon of potbelly. His darkened snuff-stained hands were firm, not very
wrinkled; he might be less ancient than he seemed. "Ah, the wig! The
structure! I employ it, you understand, for medical purposes. Wondrous
therapeutic--I dare venture you and your brother were so frightened by
it that you were forced to recover in spite of the worst my simples
could do. Yet plainly no one in his right mind could dwell in such a
thing, let alone go for a walk in the woods."

"I can see that, sir."

"You can, ha? I bought it in Newport," said Mr. Welland dreamily. "Ten
years ago. The moths have been at it a little since then; at that time
there were more ribbons in it, and I was younger myself. It doth own one
other function beside the medical. Not exactly duplicity nor
artifice--let us say, concealment. As a scholar, Mr. Cory, you'll
discover how a man of learning must often hide in the bushes, not only
from the ignorant, sir, but even more from the almost-wise. Now a man of
medicine, if he hath also some pretension to scholarship, is much
exposed, sir, much exposed to the winds of mischance, and so must even
carry his own dem'd shrubbery about with him, and that's what I do.
Honestly, Reuben, a'n't it a _hell_ of a wig?"

       *       *       *       *       *

"Oh, Mr. Kenny!" said Faith Jenks. "Brier roses? I'll rest content with
that till you say a prettier." She studied Ben with silent laughter.

Laughing of course at the pimples. For a year Ben's face had been
lightly tormented. Huge wrists jutted; his nose was too small, his mouth
too big, the devil with all of it. Since she chose to laugh, Ben hated
her; thus occupied, he discovered as one caught in the embrace of ocean
that he was in love.

Maybe she had not been laughing. Her own small dainty mouth showed no
obvious quirk. Not brier roses. Damask roses, remembered--remembered----

In a dooryard garden at Deerfield.

Why, they would be blooming still! The village burned, and many died,
but not the secret life under the snow. _She planted them...._ At the
first urgency of summer sun they would have waked, spreading over
scorched fallen timbers in the desolate ground to spill the sweetness
from their clear June faces. For the first time Ben thought: I must go
back--some day. I must learn whether that is true.

The blue of Faith's coat and dress conspired with the bay and the blue
of heaven to make her eyes deeper than any sky of April. She stood
taller than Mr. Kenny, a woman grown, full-breasted, poised, maybe no
older than Ben in years but in command of all she said and did. His
quick glance told him she was in the habit of biting her right
thumbnail, and he rebuked himself for noticing it--merely such a flaw as
a goddess needs if she's to wear the semblance of common clay.

"Your mother's well, my dear?"

"Ay, Mr. Kenny, but not well enough to be out in this changeable
weather. She wished to come but I prevailed on her. Poor Mother is so
readily distracted!"

"I know. Ah, forgive me!--Mistress Faith Jenks, Mr. Benjamin Cory, my
grand-nephew, more a son. Hoy, and Charity--how's my lady Charity?" This
to a brief, blunt block of child who made some breathy noise. Faith was
holding out her hand. Ben knew he could not kiss it (as Ru could have
done) nor speak at all without sounding like a crow.

She had pity, letting his fingers know the electric softness and taking
her hand away. Ben confronted the glare of my lady Charity. About
thirteen, grim with crippling shyness, Charity tilted her square face
back in a blue bonnet that reflected her sister's in everything but
grace. A freckled paw jerked out and dropped before Ben could grasp it,
clenching its tiny companion. "'D do," she said, and examined her
shoe-tips in a cold quiet of despair.

A third strange face watched Ben--still, brown, impersonal; a Negro
girl, therefore a servant, probably a slave, but with no beaten,
cringing air such as Ben had noticed in the slaves of Pastor Williams at
Deerfield or in the few he had glimpsed in Boston and Roxbury. Her
slenderness was clad Puritan-fashion in white and gray, somehow not
subdued by the radiance of Faith. She stood apart, unconcerned as the
lady _Artemis_. Charity had taken a few awkward backward steps until the
brown girl's long-fingered hand dropped on her shoulder and there
remained. Dark eyes moved on to contemplate the open daylight and blue
water, disturbing Ben with the sense of a quiet alien and strong.

"Indeed," Faith was saying, "I've heard of you, Mr. Cory, and hoped we
might meet sooner. We don't go about much, with my father so much away
at sea. You was of Deerfield, I think?"

"Yes." Why, that was no croak! "I feel it to be long ago."

She smiled compassionately; everyone knew the story of Deerfield. "'Deed
you and your brother are men of mystery. I fear your noses are buried in
big old long books from a day's end to the next."

Mr. Kenny sighed and intervened. "True, Faith, their tutor and I, we
make 'em toil like galley slaves. Harvard in the autumn--the both of
'em, I'm proud to say. Might have entered last year, but I wished 'em
better prepared, Mr. Leverett of Harvard concurring, seeing they had no
classics in childhood." Ben squirmed; it sounded as though having no
classics in childhood was rather like being born with one leg.

"Your brother isn't in Boston today to see the _Artemis_?"

"No, Mistress Faith, he--well...."

"Mr. Reuben," said Uncle John too lightly, "was of a mind to go walking
in the woods."

"Ah, the _pretty_ thing!" Faith exclaimed, and Ben gave her credit for
divine tactfulness. "Mr. Kenny, why is the bowsprit slanted so low to
the water? I never saw the like on another vessel, no never."

"A whim of mine, my dear. I meddled with the builders. But your father
hath told me the thought's good--larger spread of jib, and a stronger
angle against the tension of the stays. Yet when I wanted it so I merely
thought 'twould make a handsomer line to the eye. Mph!--so peradventure
art is good for something?"

"Sir...." The lonely blue-eyed man had come lightly from the end of the
wharf, his hat held to his breast with no attempt to hide its
shabbiness. His shoes were cracked and stained. A rip in the green coat
was mended with large seaman's stitches, evidence that no woman tended
him, that his feline neatness was his own achievement. He bowed, as Mr.
Kenny's wizened mask watched courteously down the nose. "I fear I
intrude--is it I'm addressing the owner of the ketch?"

"I am her owner, sir."

"I've not seen a fairer craft in my seafaring years, and they some
twenty or more in all manner of vessels, all manner of places too
betwixt here and the Indies, that'll be the eastern Indies--Molucca,
Ceylon...."

His voice was baritone, resonant and sweet, a power stirring in it like
a drumbeat felt in the marrow. A plangent overtone rang in every word. A
lifting inflection suggested the speaker loved his words, reluctant to
put a period to them. Ben had never heard that in New England
speech--once, maybe, in that lost time when Uncle Zebina Pownal came out
of nowhere to sing for them.

"Ay, she's fair," said Mr. Kenny, admitting the obvious.

"And if it's you that oversaw the designing, as (forgive my rudeness) I
thought I overheard you say, then may I be shaking your hand?"

Mr. Kenny held it out impulsively, defenses down. Ben saw in his
great-uncle what he thought of as the "_Artemis_ look"--love me, love my
ketch. Pushing aside a transient alarm, Ben himself gave way to one of
his gusty moments of allegiance. This blue-eyed man must be admirable
and wise. His pale quiet, the odd way his face took little share in the
ardor of his voice--why, merely the reasonable caution of a man who must
have voyaged everywhere and seen everything on the everlasting seas. One
would do well to listen when he spoke, and remember.

"I am John Kenny of Roxbury, sir. The ketch is the _Artemis_, Peter
Jenks captain, her maiden voyage now ending."

"_Artemis!_ O the fair true name for such a lady! Daniel Shawn, sir,
your humble servant." No man's servant, and Ben knew it. Presented to
the elder daughter of Peter Jenks, captain, Mr. Shawn kissed her
fingers, and Ben writhed, not in jealousy but at his own incompetence:
that was how it ought to be done, and Faith was clearly pleased.
"_Artemis!_--what other name would be possible?" said Mr. Shawn, and
grew intent on brushing his coat lapel, asking casually in the same
breath: "Doth she carry letters of marque, Mr. Kenny?"

"That she don't," said John Kenny rather blankly. "Armed she is--you can
see the la'board falconet from here--but no letters of marque, sir. I've
not a word to say against the privateersmen, in these years of war when
the French do beset us so, but for my ships I'll have no part of it,
having made mine own small fortune in the hard way, Mr.
Shawn--refraining, let us say, from the thought of easy prizes because I
know mine own share of human frailty, and proposing so to continue."

"For which I honor you, sir," said Mr. Shawn, and having brushed the
lapel to his satisfaction and smiled with wonderful sweetness, he
changed the subject. "I've heard of your father, Mistress Jenks, the way
I suppose most seaman have in this part of the world, and he noble as
any captain under sail, now that's no lie."

Faith blushed, overwhelmed; her right hand wandered to her mouth. Mr.
Kenny was visibly wondering whether to steer Charity into another social
ordeal. Charity leaned against the brown girl, observing _Artemis_ to
the exclusion of all else on earth, particularly Benjamin Cory. Faith
turned to Ben, astoundingly, swaying so near that her face under the
ribboned calash must tilt up to look at him. She clutched the bonnet,
though it was well tied. "Pray allow me to tack into the lee of you, Mr.
Cory, to shelter my silly bonnet--your shoulders are broad enough."

Later in white nights Ben thought: _She said that, and to me...._

Later also Ben found it hard to recall anything else said by Faith or
himself--small talk, surely--in those moments of nearness while
_Artemis_, clear of the harbor shipping, moved down on them tranquilly,
a great wind-begotten dream realizing herself in the here-and-now.

A round bulky man held a rope at the bow of _Artemis_. Below him a face
cruelly pure and calm, carved from apple-wood a year ago by an old
artist of Dorchester who was nearly blind, stared into a world of many
homelands. In the momentary enclosing silence, Ben saw a flash of
startled recognition between that stout man in the bow and Daniel Shawn;
since both looked away immediately, Ben dismissed it as a vagary of his
own imagination, or none of his business. The stout man was unknown to
Ben, perhaps one of the replacements signed on at Kingston; a greasy,
unrevealing face. Ben heard a flurry of shouts from men aboard and men
on the dock who knew each other. He also found a face he knew, and
waved--the mate, yellow-haired Jan Dyckman, who had visited at Roxbury,
brick-solid and big, a shy and gentle soul ashore, moving with a warm
confidence in all the ways of his Lutheran God. But Jan did not see
Ben's wave or had no time for it, taut at the starboard rail and
watching simultaneously every inch of remaining canvas, every ripple
between _Artemis_ and the wharf.

"Ahoy, Mistress Faith!" That was a north-wind voice overriding all other
commotion, from the bald giant looming aft near the helmsman. _Artemis_
was yet some thirty yards away, gliding, barely disturbing the filthy
dockside water. Ben's glance took in the giant--it could only be Peter
Jenks--with a wonder that such an iron mountain could have begotten the
loveliness of Faith. Even that far away Captain Jenks was more than
life-size, and surely knew it. His nose was flattened like a board, set
in deep leather creases between small eyes icy blue in the
sunlight--courageous arctic eyes without compassion.

Faith jumped at her father's shout, clutching her skirt prettily.
"Clarissa! My kerchief--quickly!" Her hand behind her snapped a finger
impatiently before the Negro girl gave her a white kerchief; then Faith
was running, waving the cloth, expertly careless of ropes and tackle and
the roustabouts who lurched out of her path. She knew her way; she was
not impeding them, and stepped back properly when it was time for that
rope in the bow to leap ashore.

Another snaked from the pier to be caught amidships. The lady _Artemis_
needed no restraining thrust of the fenders. She nudged wet timbers as
one arranging a pillow for her head, and fell asleep.

 

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