The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “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 brighteni
ng. 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.…