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 un
der 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.”
* * * *
<
br /> 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.
The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 67