The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  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.