“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!”
The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 69