The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  In time the forest opened to a park-like region where perhaps in past seasons the Indians had followed their custom of burning over the land, killing new growth and brush, allowing established trees to expand their side branches in isolation. Through more than a mile of this they walked. Ben did not speak.

  The sled-tracks passed abruptly over the edge of a slope. Reuben could make out no treetops directly ahead, though a thick cluster of them stood to his left; the part of the slope where the road ran down would be open ground. A ghost of alien sound disturbed him.

  He held out his hand, but Ben either failed to see it or was unwilling that his brother should go ahead alone; he still followed closely—more quietly though, more careful of his steps—when Reuben reached the beginning of the slope.

  The thing could not be more than thirty feet away, a living blot of long shadow on the trampled white.

  The slope ran steeply down. At the bottom, a flat expanse to the right must be the northern end of a pond or lake, frozen, snow-covered. The sled-tracks, plain in moon-shadow, skirted that level surface and disappeared in thicker woods beyond. On Reuben’s left, all the way down the slope and connecting with the farther woods, hemlocks loomed densely black, branches bowing to the ground.

  The thing gazed up across the wild turkey between its paws, and Reuben understood the sound—crunch of monstrous teeth on frail bone. Ben drew his knife and pushed in front muttering: “He won’t attack, Ru. They’re timid—Jesse alway said.…”

  The panther had flattened in alarm and readiness, all motionless but for a quiver at the tip of the tail. Round ears spread back on a skull smooth and cruel as the head of a snake, and moonlight greenly sparked from eyes arrogant with the majesty of loneliness. Once or twice the angry head dipped as if meaning to snatch up the meat and save it from the human threat; the motions were abortive, the beast preferring to freeze, and watch, and wait.

  Reuben yielded no time to the weakening pain of anticipation. He scooped a handful of damp snow into a ball, swung on his heel in the fine free motion that Ben himself had taught him, and let fly.

  The snowball hit the great face on the nose, spattering wonderfully. Unbelieving, Reuben watched a grayish blur shoot away to the black shelter of the hemlocks, belly to earth.

  A violent tremor of reaction took hold of Reuben; he heard Ben gasp. “Ru—Ru—oh, man, how he scooned off!” Ben sat down laughing helplessly in the snow.

  “Ay,” said Reuben, shaken and panting and full of pride. “I allow, Mr. Cory, he might travel some little time, Mr. Cory.” The tremor was overcome by the swift joyous action of running down the slope to bring back the remains of the turkey. “See, Ben—he’s left us both legs and some of the back and breast.”

  “Poor puss! My own little brother, a man who’d steal from a—”

  “Snow down your backside!” said Reuben, and jumped for him.

  Ben caught him fairly and pulled him off his feet, but in the mimic struggle Ben stiffened suddenly and groaned: “Ru—help me up!” Before Reuben could do so, Ben was on his feet without help, denying his own words: “It’s nothing, Ru—I got a little dizzy, nothing more.”

  “Ben, if you—”

  “We can’t go back.… Hoy, here’s a thought! All that turkey blood on the snow—couldn’t we make it seem—”

  “Law you!” Reuben yelped and war-danced. Ben could not be ill, he thought, so long as he was able to produce such a dazzling conception. “Ben, a marvelous bloody swindle—why, damme, they’ll mumble it in chimney corners till the Devil’s blind, and his eyes a’n’t sore yet. Think of it!—those poor lost boys!”

  “Small red gobbets.”

  “What?”

  “Hast thou forgotten? Thine own tales—”

  “Oh, that. Nay then, behold how bravely they did stand before the beast—alas, all for nothing, though Benjamin Cory with his good right arm did—did make varsall sure to pick up the turkey feathers.”

  Eagerly Ben joined him in that undertaking. Reuben found and scuffed out the line of tracks where the gobbler had walked out from under the trees into calamity. As they viewed the shambles critically in devoted silence, it seemed to Reuben that there ought to be more blood. Beside the patch of snow where the stain was largest, Reuben dropped on his back with outflung arms to leave a tragic imprint. Ben grunted approval, but then spoke with a discouragement that was unlike him: “It’ll never deceive a woodsman.”

  “Oh, Ben, they’ll be townfolks that find it. Superstitious too. If our own trail ends here, what can they think? We must go under the trees, where—where he went.”

  “Oh, him!” Ben recovered, laughing again not quite naturally. “He’s na’ but a spent fart, Ru. He’ll travel as you said, and then I picture him climbing a tree to grieve all day tomorrow about what my little brother did to him. ‘Snowballs!’ he’ll say. ‘Me, to be whopped by a snowball—why, bugger me blind, and all the time it was that Reuben Cory no bigger’n a boar’s tit!’”

  “You’re no Goliar neither, in fact I could whup you handy with my arse tied under my chin. Now drag me, Ben, from here to the trees, along that line where he ran. That’ll make a fine confusion and wipe out your own tracks. Then we’ll follow his marks under the trees and smear our own till they can’t tell which from nohow.”

  “That’s the thing. What a catamount was he! Know what he did? Laid us out like a pair of sticks, he did, your ankle crossed on mine, took both feet in his mouth, poor wretch, and for his sins went a-blundering through the woods with a boy dangling on each side.”

  “I tell you, Ben, the superstitious will believe madder things than that. La, some of the tales Jesse used to tell!”

  “Miaaow!” Ben doubled over, laughing far too much. “Why, of course—by the time the tale is carried back to Springfield he won’t be a catamount at all. He’ll be taller’n a house, the Old Nick himself with a passel of demons. It’ll be a—a—” he stopped, watching Reuben blankly, all laughter spent.

  Reuben said: “It will be a judgment of the Lord.” Ben stared, and nodded, and looked away, searching the northern sky above the hemlocks.

  Following his gaze, Reuben lost himself a while in the wonder of open night, seeing Cassiopeia released from a last fringe of departing cloud, and the Great Bear slanting toward the North Star. Reuben darkly felt the absence of some familiar thing, something his own mind ought to supply and would not. The night was serene, without complication beautiful, answering nothing.

  * * * *

  Ben Cory followed his brother in slowly deepening weariness. The time must be not far from dawn. The moon rode high and lonely, dimmed by new cloud battalions from the west. Ben groped at the thought of sleep; but Reuben, who was wise about everything tonight, might tell him it was not yet time. Ben suffered a passing resentment, that the boy could walk on ahead so untiringly, so unconcerned.

  In this more open part of the woods they were not attempting to disguise their tracks. Reuben said it was no longer worth it, and Reuben knew best. Ben tried to step in his brother’s prints, nowhere else. This seemed a clever thing to do—when he could remember to do it, and forget the pain in his knee, and ignore certain soft dark waves that now and then approached him from nowhere and flowed away independently of any shadow on the moon.

  Back there under the crowded hemlocks, a very long time ago, it had not appeared necessary after all to search for the panther’s prints and follow them. All the way down that slope, and far beyond it where the land rose again and the hemlocks continued, many patches of snowless ground allowed them to progress without leaving marks. For an hour, or two or three hours perhaps, they had worked their way along these areas. Glimpses of the moon held them to a general easterly direction. In several places—Ben recalled this with solemn pride in Reuben’s wisdom—Reuben had spread his jacket across a patch of snow too wide to jump, so that they m
ight step on it and leave a vague blur nothing like a footprint, rather like the impress of some animal’s body lying down. At the least, their efforts would provide a most confusing trail unless the searchers brought dogs; they reassured each other of this from time to time. Advance by this method had been tormentingly slow, yet after a while Reuben, who knew everything, announced that they must have covered another mile.

  The road and the sled-tracks were things forgotten. The eastward direction was still a certainty: the moon had said so, until it climbed too high to be a fair guide. The trees had thinned out, the snow lay continuous on the ground; Reuben who knew everything said they might as well walk naturally again, since there was no help for it anyway, and to blur the tracks here would be a waste of effort. Ben had a confused sense of walking on higher ground where a light wind was blowing.

  Once, back in the darker woods, he had heard the wail of a mountain cat, so thin and far away that hills and hollows must have intervened. Their friend, maybe, lamenting at snowballs. Reuben had laughed at it. Later Ben caught another sound, a remote tenor howling, lonely at first but answered by another and another. Reuben who knew everything had not laughed at that. Ben thought or imagined that he heard it still.

  No wolves had come.

  Or if they have come, he thought, I can’t see them. They slip along fogfooted behind the larger trees—that tree or that one—maybe. If they are truly come, my brother Reuben will know and tell me. In time for me to draw my knife. Wolves do understand cold steel, they say.…

  “Ru—”

  The boy turned quickly and came back to him. Ben saw his face fade and brighten; the eyes, improbably large, watched him from a mighty depth. Now that, Ben thought, that is certainly an effect of the new cloud-wrack passing over the moon. How warm it is! he thought—nay, damn the thing, how cold! Nothing’s truly warm since Mother died, therefore I was deluded.… “Ru, what’s the time?”

  “Can’t be far from dawn.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can feel it.… Some kind of shack over there—see it? A hunter’s lean-to, that’s what it is.”

  “Looks more like a beast.”

  “Can’t you see the poles? Come on—it’s not far.”

  “Ru, listen!”

  “Yes, I hear them. They’re a long way off. Come!”

  “Wait, Ru!” The waves of darkness, each time they advanced on him, were climbing higher, toward his eyes. “Listen to me, Reuben, and not to the wolves.” Perhaps the next one would go over his head, and he could be quiet. “Listen to me—in my father’s house are many mansions.”

  “Ben, save thy breath. Lean on me. It’s not far.”

  * * * *

  Nothing came in search of them that night. For another hour Reuben heard the wolves, unable to guess in what region of the secret night they were crying. The shrill desolation of the noise wavered from every quarter of the dark, ceasing at times; then the mind could propose that it had never sounded, until it started up afresh, as pain will.

  A flood of intense and soundless fire grew along the lower edge of a mass of winter clouds that had gathered and thickened in the latter part of the night. At some time before the kindling of that sullen splendid flame the howling of the wolves was ended.

  Ben had fallen into sleep. When they reached the lean-to he appeared to have shaken off some of his confusion. He spoke reasonably; he stretched out on the heap of leaves and long-dead balsam boughs, insisting that Reuben lie down and rest also. Doing so mainly to humor him, Reuben heard his brother mutter something about Roxbury and then grunt in the plaintive way he always did when sleep had taken him.

  When the clouds caught fire Ben still slept, his cheeks raging hot and his hands restless.

  The lean-to had been shrewdly made, by some hunter looking to his own welfare. Heavy poles slanted against the base of a perpendicular bank some seven feet high, with others laid across them horizontally; on these brush was piled; snow had gathered, making a dense roof. The back was closed with tougher brush. Near the open end the hunter had thoughtfully heaped dead sticks so that the next comer need not immediately search for firewood. The shelter stood near a curve of the bank, the open end facing east and secure from any wind but the most violent. The space under the roof, barely enough to allow a large man some elbow room, was almost warm, and became unmistakably so after the boys had lain there a few minutes. But Ben shivered continually in his fevered sleep.

  Reuben wrapped his coat around Ben’s legs. He dreaded lighting a fire: it seemed to him still that to be discovered by searchers from Springfield was a sharper peril than any other. They would do nothing for Ben’s sickness, he thought—flog him and let him die. Reuben collected evergreen branches small enough to hack off with the kitchen knife, and piled them at Ben’s sides and over him, to hold in the body warmth. This occupied him for half an hour. The sky flamed. It was the third day of March.

  He found he could study the position with some practicality; he could weigh the odds for survival, and say: we have a pound or so of smoked ham, half a loaf, part of a raw turkey; we are at least ten miles from Springfield, and anyway I cannot leave him to search for help. Having done this once or twice, he found it unprofitable to toil through the summary again, yet the emptiness of the morning hour demanded action of the mind, if only to hold away a madness of panic.

  He saw Springfield consumed like Deerfield by flame from heaven, then saw himself in the bleak honesty of morning as a foolish child for creating such an image: Springfield wasn’t to blame. If he dared leave Ben and go back there, he might dodge the powers represented by Grandmother Cory and find help. But he could not leave Ben to retrace a journey of ten miles. Wolves hunted sometimes by daylight; wolves and Indians. They could find Ben sick and sleeping.

  Ben shook in a chill; his tossing pushed away some of the cover. Reuben restored it and lay close against him to give what warmth he could until the shivering passed. Panting, with some faint shine of sweat on his forehead, Ben said: “Right of the meeting-house—yes, I see it.”

  Reuben tried then, long and earnestly, to pray in the manner of his childhood, repeating familiar words aloud, since Ben was too far lost in sleep and sickness to be disturbed. During the act of supplication, some memory nagged. Something demoralizing, to be refused, but at last it sharpened into focus in spite of him. His mother had prayed: “Deliver us from evil…” her clear voice completing the words, twice, three times perhaps in that reddened doorway until she received the answer, the blow, itself a completion which God had allowed. To Reuben the sound of his own voice became alien, then contemptible, a disgusting whine. A human being ought never to sound like that. Why should God listen to such a squeak?

  In the abrupt silence the words of that question swelled to vast importance. They were not right. The question was not the right one.

  Change it. Shorten it.

  Why should God listen?…

  The question was still not the right one.

  Reuben crawled out into cold sunless light. He searched the east. The sun was present, a hazed white blur just visible in the overcast. New snowflakes were already drifting, far apart, without a wind.

  Why God?…

  That was not merely the sun but something of the mind, old, vaguely evil, dying, dissolving not quite as a dream dissolves but with the illogic and inconsequence of a dream.

  Reuben said aloud: “Why?…”

  The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

  The snow would thicken, covering all things. It increased as he watched, the white ball fading, blotted out at last in the gray and white morning. The cold was not severe. No wind was blowing.

  Reuben said: “I do not believe it.”

  He crept back into the shelter to hold his brother in his arms.

  * * * *

 
Late in the morning Ben woke in a remission of the fever, knowing Reuben was not far away. To the complex interesting lines above him—evidently a roof—he said experimentally: “I must have been sick.”

  “Lie quiet!” The power of Reuben’s hand on his chest startled him, the sodden ache of his own muscles dismayed him. “We can’t go on today, Ben. It’s snowing heavy. I mean to light a fire—with all the snow they’ll never see the smoke, if they come this way at all.”

  “They?—oh.” Ben doubtfully remembered. It would not do for Reuben to guess how puzzled he was; craftily he asked: “How far you think we came from Hatfield?”

  “Hatfield?”

  “How stupid I am!” The unintended words drawled out of his mouth and floated away. “Meant Deerfield. My leg.…” Reuben (who knew everything) helped him shove down his breeches, then allowed him to sit up and look at the splinter-wound, a yellowish scabby island in a puddle of pink. He wished to study it, but Reuben was already pulling up the musty repellent garment and urging him back on the pile of sweet-smelling leaves. “Suppose that’s what made me sick?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Suppose I ought to be bled?”

  “I daren’t, Ben. I don’t know how a physician does it. I might cut wrong and not be able to stop the flow.”

  “I’ll do well enough.”

  “Yes, but you must eat, or you’ll weaken.”

  Ben considered this. He was hungry, yes, but wasn’t some difficulty connected with the idea of eating? Meanwhile someone, apparently himself, was burdened with a bladder about to burst. “Must go outside.”

  “Watch out!” Reuben somewhere sounded frightened or angry. “You’ll fetch down the roof if you try to stand.”

  That was sensible, Ben observed—of course he would, and then they’d have all the trouble of building it over. He located Reuben kneeling in a whiteness outside, ready to help him in spite of his stupidity, and crawled to him. Improbably, the boy transformed himself into a pillar under Ben’s right arm, a curve of warm iron around Ben’s middle—only Reuben who knew everything could have thought of that.