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 lyin
g 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.
The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 65