The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

* * * *

  In the nights that followed Ben’s return from Boston with a glowing dreambound face, April became May, but Reuben did not slip outdoors while the house was slumbering to walk in the dark woods. He had done so sometimes last year and the year before—usually on summer nights of light airs and starshine when beauty like something dangerous commanded him to approach, even though it be madness or immolation, because to retreat was a sure kind of dying. The summery warmth was continuing; the nights following Ben’s return were as soft and full of sorcery as any that had ever called outside his window, but Reuben did not go. A certain new trouble had come on him, and part of it was a simple and shameful physical fear, like that of the boy who watched the careful advance of a wolf.

  Shawn—that devil Shawn.

  To Reuben, on the morning after Jan Dyckman’s death, the office at the warehouse had stunk of guilt from the moment Shawn strode into it. He could rule that out as a morbid fancy for which Mr. Welland might have chided him; he could damn himself half-heartedly for owning a suspicious nature; nevertheless one fact remained clear to him (and apparently to nobody else): the death of Jan Dyckman was simply too convenient for Mr. Shawn, and Shawn was a man driven by a demon of ambition. Never mind whether the ambition itself was good or bad: whatever it was, Reuben felt, it crowded to fullness that part of the man’s nature which in most human beings held the capacity for love, kindness, and compromise with the needs of other lives.

  And now, Reuben knew, he would find no calm out there in the calling, sweet-breathing night if he must imagine that devil Shawn behind every tree, and fear the moonlight itself because it would illuminate his body for—what? A knife-throw? A lethal rush?

  Once Reuben had supposed that everyone possessed something like his own electric awareness of the emotional state of others. In school at Deerfield he used to foresee disaster whenever the teacher was about to break into rage at Johnny Hoyt or Tom Hawks or some other favorite butt; Reuben had never been wrong, wincing in sympathy for five or ten minutes before the ruler slammed on a palm or the birch was lifted in ceremony from the wall. At fifteen he still found it difficult to credit that few actually did possess that awareness. The thing itself, he guessed, was merely a sharp observation for tiny shifts of expression or inflections of the voice.… Shawn had reeked of guilt—but more. The large blue eyes had met Reuben’s once above the glittering coin; and had understood.

  Unable to suggest anything in the realm of proof, Reuben quailed at thought of speaking out. On Sunday, briefly alone with Uncle John, he did attempt it, and fumbled it; the old man was shocked, confused, a little angry and apparently not in a mood to listen; Reuben in misery cancelled his own words. After that, with pain but doggedly, Reuben considered the possibility that he was suffering from green vicious jealousy because Ben so plainly admired the big Irishman. But the one fact that needed no proof, the fact of the convenience of Jan Dyckman’s death for a man who wished to be mate of Artemis, remained like a cold lump of indigestion, inescapable and sour.… That devil Shawn would not have used the knife himself. That would be Judas Marsh. It could be one-eyed Marsh behind the peaceful dark trees of John Kenny’s orchard.

  When Reuben could sleep at all, Shawn invaded sickly dreams, his features rather changed, sometimes carrying a flintlock, but always rubbing the brilliant coin, sardonically ready to tell Reuben something or other. His words (usually) were no more than “Floreat Rex”—but the Irishman’s true meaning appeared to be that the house was afire, or that somebody, somewhere, was being flogged, and Reuben too much a womanish coward to do anything about it. “Floreat Rex,” said Shawn, meaning also of course: “I think I’ll cut that off—you can’t plant anything with it.” Three times Reuben woke in a sweat from such a snarling dream, the third and worst time being on the Saturday night after Ben’s return from his hour with Faith in the garden—of which he told Reuben with shy self-deprecating astonishment, a need to speak, a need to marvel aloud that anyone could be as fortunate as himself.

  On Monday night Reuben dreamed that he was (as he truly was) lying in his bed in this familiar lovely room, but frozen to immobility, the house as silent as though everyone had died and no wind would ever again rattle a shutter or chuckle outside in the expanding leaves. One sound, however, could be felt—leisured footsteps on the stairs. Reuben’s eyes were glued shut; he knew that, knew also that the stairs were dark, the night-light somehow blown out; but with another kind of vision he could watch the man Shawn coming up-black patch over left eye, bright farthing in the busy fingers of the left hand, flintlock in the right. If Reuben could have spoken, as he tried to do, he would have said: “I killed a wolf.” He could not. He knew that if he did, the man would merely lift him with gouging fingers under the cheekbones and toss him aside, because it was not for Reuben, or rather not only for Reuben, that he was gliding up the stairway. A halting then, a steady, purposeful raising of the flintlock until Reuben must stare down into the small black eye of the muzzle and understand that it was all over. Then waking, swift cool wave of understanding how once more the thing was a dream.

  It had been much like that not so many years ago, when the dreams were of Hell.

  The moon was not shining, but the sky was a field of a million untroubled lights. As Reuben got up and stretched a cramp out of his arms—his body must have been locked like iron in the dream—he could make out something of his brother’s face, enough to sense the tranquillity of Ben’s healthy sleep, and envy it.

  Ben’s smooth forehead was turned away; his hand, firm and large, curled childishly under his rounded chin. Ben’s eyelashes were long as a girl’s, darker than his brows and curling upward at the tips, darker than the thickening down on his lip that he must now shave every other day. Reuben sat quiet, staring in the dark, until the dim pattern of his brother’s face was set free from natural bounds, became incomprehensibly vast, all else a background, then dizzyingly small and far away, unreachable as an image in the bottom of a well.

  What are you? What am I?

  What is fear?

  What is happiness?—well, that arrives unsought, if at all: to seek it, I know, is to stumble in a quicksand; to wait wearily hoping for it is simply one tedious way of dying.

  What if nothing is real at all except the present moment?

  Why, if so, then eternity is only a word. As I look on him now, I look on him forever. But there’s deception here, for we do move and change: eternity is a word.

  If the present alone is real, then do we ourselves create it from moment to moment? What is memory? I remember looking over hemlocks to the North Star, and Ben looked there too, and I have no way of knowing, ever, what he saw. I remember a day of summer—

  Mid-July, for the hay was ripe then, and Reuben and his mother were returning from carrying a noon meal and a jug of beer to the outer fields. Other men beside Father were there, and Ben too, and some other older children and women to help with the raking, but Reuben at seven years old was no use with a rake. He had been allowed to carry the beer, sipping one mouthful and no more on the way. This was the homeward journey, and she in a smiling mood, tanned cheeks flushed, dark eyes full of mischief.

  She sat in the long grass by the palisade gate, sweeping her skirt about to cover her feet in one graceful glide of her arm, lightly as any young girl—

  (And so she was of course. Always young. Never to be old.)

  “Sit by me, Puppy.” No one else was about: only the men in the fields now toylike with distance, a flock of cloud-sheep radiant in the lower sky, a bumblebee lighting with clumsy abruptness on Reuben’s knee. “Ah, don’t stir! He won’t sting thee. See!—yellow packets on his legs, he’s been a-gathering. Tell me where he’s been and what did he see?” (Warmth of a laughing face expecting nonsense.)

  “Why, Mother, he went away over England, away over France, even way away over Boston, and he went awa-a-ay over the places in
Ben’s Hakluyt book where the Spice Islands are, and there was a king with ten thousand courtiers and he stung them. Every one.”

  “Now why? Did they do wrong?”

  “They stole the king’s beer.”

  “What, all ten thousand of ’em?”

  “Every-each of the ten thousand.”

  “Now, love, what a selfish old pig the king must’ve been, for if there was beer enough for all ten thousand, I vow that was more than he’d ever drink alone, la?”

  “Phoo, he was a big king.”

  “Ah, I see.… And was there a queen of the Spice Islands?”

  “There was, and she did try to prevent them stealing the beer, but one would be tying spoons to her apron the while the rest was after it, she could no-way catch ’em.”

  “Wicked things!… Was she beautiful?”

  “Ay, but not like you.”

  “Reuben, thou’lt have me weeping.”

  “Why, Mother? What for?”

  “I don’t know, Puppy. They say women must weep sometimes, if only because—I don’t know.… Don’t ever leave me.”

  * * * *

  On the same Monday night Ben Cory dreamed:

  Faith arrived in the coach to call politely on those who lived in the stockade, and Ben was embarrassed for them, because they allowed her blue skirt to become draggled in the mud as she stepped from the coach at the stockade gate. She was not annoyed, but walked in grace to the inner citadel under the red parasol that Clarissa held unopened above her head. Ben shook hands with her pleasantly, and climbed with the girl named Clarity up the long spiral ladder to the top of the citadel. “Deerfield hath no citadel,” said Clarity, Ben good-naturedly agreeing. From this eyrie they could watch the country beyond the stockade, while in the inner rooms far below, Faith and some friend of Uncle John’s were enjoying cakes and coffee and Madeira. “Like crosstrees,” said Clarity, Ben good-naturedly agreeing, and she placed her brown sweet sunlit hands at the edge of their perch and pulled at it to make it set up an agreeable swaying, entertaining as a swing in a garden.

  The forest beyond the stockade was alive with gray dogs.

  “He is compassed about,” Ben said, knowing Clarity shared his anxiety. “He may be obliged to sell a tetradrachm of the time of Dyckman.” Clarity nodded, moving their crow’s-nest back and forth with her little brown hands, so that he could see her body arch and sway, arch and sway, bending and straightening as the wind blew her hair back to him and hid her face from time to time—still he could look down and see Faith walking out through the stockade walls into the woods. The parasol was the only thing the gray dogs were likely to desire, and Clarity had that now, under her arm; therefore the dogs were not likely to attack Faith, but Ben nevertheless felt a certain gloom, because she was too far away, too far down for him to shout a warning. No real danger of course. He said to Clarity: “Mind that thing, Mistress Coronal—I must be going.”

  * * * *

  “Rest, John! All evening you was like a cat on a hot stove, la, and all Sunday too. Can’t you sleep? Can’t I help you sleep?”

  “I’d have been lost long ago but for your kindness, Kate.”

  “Oh, now! Something hot to drink? I could get it easy.”

  “I had enough in the evening, or too much. Besides, dear, I’m not certain the boys are asleep. Heard some stirring. One of them opening the window or the like. I don’t think Ru’s been sleeping well—red-eyed in the morning, and d’you know I can’t ask? Don’t know how.”

  “Don’t fret so—’tis only their time of life. Both brave boys, and will be grand men. In a few years you’ll have no cause for anything but pride in ’em, the both of ’em.”

  “That’s true.… Kate, it would not much amaze me if the boys—Reuben at least—were quite aware that sometimes I come up here to thy room at night. They’d never speak, never show the knowledge by so much as a look; I think they’d never even discuss it with each other alone; and neither would have any unkind thought about it.”

  “Oh.… All the same—”

  “I know. Best to remain discreet. Still, if we were wed—”

  “It’s not fitting, John. The gossip that’s gone on about us, all these years, it’s become a—a—what’s the word I want?”

  “A commonplace?”

  “Yes, of course—that, with a pox. But don’t you see?—if we was to wed now there’d be talk of another kind, and then—then I must be Madam Kenny and bear it like a lady, which I am not, John, and cannot be. Oh, let be as it is! I’d be most wretched, John—truly.… As you say, the boys would never speak of it. I know them too. I love them too, John.”

  “Well.… If it were spoken I suppose Ben would be—embarrassed, let us say, because he’s much aware of social opinion. And Reuben—who looketh down upon social opinion from his own mountaintop like a puzzled angel—Reuben would hold some thought about it which I could never understand, never interpret—Kate, I don’t know them!… I can’t see my own youth, Kate. I think of it. A thousand things keep coming back to me now that never did so in my fifties, or sixties—my father’s sniff, my Aunt Jessica’s passion for setting the furniture exactly parallel to the walls and washing her hands a hundred times a day—damme, the very shape of a knot in the ash stick my father used for correcting me, and didn’t I count it a great thing won if I was hit with the plain part of the stick and not with the knob! How Ru would have loathed him! I did too, but a long time after he was dead I suppose I acquired a certain comprehension, even gratitude in some matters. Well, those things come back, but only like little pictures, Kate. I can’t feel how it was, to be a youth of Ben’s age. I only know that once I was, and that in a world nothing like the one they live in, nothing like.… Mr. Welland stopped by at my office today.”

  “Mr. Welland!”

  “Nay, nothing to do with illness. I now learn, Kate, that our Reuben hath suddenly decided he wishes to study medicine.”

  “Marry come up!”

  “Ye-es. Well, I wish he might have discussed it with me first, but from what Mr. Welland told me, I believe the thought came suddenly, and I suppose Ru felt unready to speak to me about it, and Mr. Welland being in town anyway on some other errand—mph, anyway, so it is. Maybe a passing thing—but Welland seemed to think not, and was earnest, nay almost impassioned in telling me he thought the boy had a true call to it. I like Welland of course—honest man, courteous too, said he would be pleased to take Reuben as apprentice, by whatever arrangement suited my own plans for him. Man of learning too—I found we share many interests.… Damn the thing, I could have wished better for Reuben than—oh, pills, syrups, the whining of sick people, exposing himself to dangerous ills, but.…”

  “That’s what troubled you today?”

  “Uh—well, no. Of course I must have some talk with Reuben about this in—well, in a day or two.…”

  “Tell Kate.”

  “Kate, I have done a thing, the which seemed right to me at the time, and still does, but.…”

  “Tell Kate.”

  “Artemis is to sail tomorrow. The Tuesday afternoon, if the weather be right. The sky’s clear tonight—I dare say it will be fair.”

  “Oh?”

  “Ay—Barbados. And Ben does not know it, Kate, and will not know it until she is gone.”

  “Oh, John!”

  “I know. Now let me try to tell thee: Ben was most desirous to sail—you knew that—and I—I can’t have it, Kate. Not now, and he so young—the hardships, and his study disrupted, all that. A while ago—a week ago Saturday, I think—he spoke to me of this. He had the thought that Artemis might make a quick passage to New York. It was reasonable. He’d given it much thought evidently, and spoke up every inch a man, I was obliged to consider it, though I still think my own judgment is best, and so—so she’s for Barbados, and will su
rely bring enough on her return to clear away—certain debts, and put us in good posture for some time to come.… Well, let it be I’m simply a coward, Kate: I could not face him, and tell him he was not to go—that is, not now, when I—I tell thee, Kate, I can’t quite seem to recover from what happened to Iris. Not as I used to recover from such misfortune. Why, when Hera was lost—oh, I’m getting old. I simply could not bear to see the light go out of him, as I knew it would.”

  “But later, when he’s bound to know—”

  “Kate—dear—don’t you think it may be better for him to meet it as a thing already done, no room for discussion?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, John. He—it’s not for me to say.”

  “But you know I wish to hear whatever you think.”

  “I—don’t know. Some-way, it don’t seem.…”

  “You think he may be angry with me?”

  “I never saw Ben angry. Could be, I vow, if he was hurt.”

  “And you think this may hurt him, too much?”

  “I—don’t know, John. It seemed right to you, and—oh dearie me—”

  “Well, there, never mind. It’s done. I sha’n’t tell him till tomorrow. Nor Reuben of course, seeing I can’t burden him with the obligation to keep a secret from his brother.… I was obliged to cross Ben in one other particular—maybe it a’n’t important. He put in a good word once or twice for Mr. Shawn, you see, to replace poor Jan. I considered it. I like Shawn well enough—I suppose. But then yesterday—ay, Sunday it was—Reuben said something, to me alone, that gave me pause.”

  “Reuben did! John, I—did not like that Mr. Shawn.”

  “You too?”

  “I only glimpsed him the once, that evening he came here. I felt a coldness in him. I a’n’t wise in the head, John, but my heart knows a little sometimes. I did feel a coldness.”

  “Not so far from what Reuben said. We were speaking of Jan’s death, and Reuben said—blurted it, not his natural way at all, and I could see it cost him pain—Ru said: ‘Ha’n’t they even questioned him?’ I was obliged to ask whom he meant. He said: ‘Shawn, that devil Shawn.’ He said: ‘Will they not ask him concerning ends and means? Will they not ask him how far he would go to secure a vessel so to be another Francis Drake?’ Well, I—I chided him, Kate—it shocked me, not only because he lacks a man’s years. He apologized and said no more. But then today, it so happened another man applied—Will Hanson, New Haven man, a good sailor that Jenks knew from years past. Jenks wished to sign him on. I had meant to suggest Mr. Shawn, but I remembered what Reuben said and held my peace, and so—so Hanson will be mate when she sails tomorrow.… I’m getting old—fret and fume over decisions I’d’ve made a few years ago with a snap of the fingers—and been right too. Usually. Oh, my foot! God damn that bloody thing!”