Wilderness of Spring

by Edgar Pangborn

  _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 usherself, Ru. Remember to take off your cap."

  Ben recalled that the sole of Reuben's left shoe was cracked; he hadnoticed it when he found the shoes after that nightmare search--actuallythe morning of this same first day of windy March. Ben's own shoes werestill sound; the wet melting snow would be working up miserably throughthat crack in Reuben's. He squeezed the boy's shoulder. At least theywere together. Undoubtedly Grandmother Cory would provide decent shoes.

  The alien town oppressed him; Reuben too would be feeling the lonelinessof a place where no one knew them. Other windows they had passed werealive with the mild glory of candles; Ben had noted this as they climbedthe hill road from the frozen river, to the house with two chimneys thatJesse Plum had pointed out. Madam Cory's windows stood blankly gray inthe graying evening.

  Ben missed Jesse here. The old man, who had snored all afternoon in theoxcart that drowsily brought them down from Hatfield, had gone into aflutter of anxious apology at the prospect of approaching Madam Cory'shouse. "It a'n't fitten, Benjamin," he said. "Your grandmother was neverno-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 twochimbleys." Meanwhile his sad little blue eyes had fixed on a tavernsignboard down the riverside street, a yellow rooster against startlingblue. "She was never no-way partial--" still fluttering, apologizing,promising to come later, Jesse set off for the sign of the rooster at afeeble run....

  The door at last squeaked open. The one observing them was only aservant in a drab russet jacket, bulging with heavy muscle. His baldnesswas fringed with gray at the temples, the thick skin of his facechanneled like a withering pumpkin, his voice the hushed croak of a goodsoul 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 atevening prayers. Come this way." He led them through a chilly entry intoa parlor crowded with polished lifeless shapes. Ben selected a blackthrone; Reuben kept hold of his hand, speechless. "I am JonasLloyd--sir. Me and m' good wife, we does for Madam Cory. I trust you'llbe 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 benot used."

  Ben scrambled out of it to stand in disgust by the cold fireplace. JonasLloyd's canine brown eyes assessed their ragged clothes; he nodded insad approval of Ben's action, and faded away with the silence ofwell-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 peevishvoice. In the dying light, they could not make much of a painting on thewall--someone lean, stern, undoubtedly dead, with the high-bridged Corynose; probably Grandfather Matthew, of whom Ben's father had seldomspoken. Jonas Lloyd had made no move to light the candles or thefirewood standing ready on the hearth. Ben ventured onto another chair;no ghost pitched him out of it. Reuben sank on the floor and rested hischeek against Ben's knee, then jerked away, feeling the poultice thatGoody Hawks had bound on the splinter-wound. "Did I----"

  "Nay, it don't hurt," said Ben, and pulled him back, and tried to smoothhis 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 nolight at all beyond the windows. Enough light filtered in from thehallway where a rushlight burned to show him Reuben's face gone vagueand absent. As time crawled on, Ben wondered how anyone could spend anhour at evening prayers. Adna Pownal Cory would have called it excess ofzeal.

  His memory of his grandmother ought not to be so dim, he thought. Whenhe was four, his mother had been expecting another child--a girl wholived only a week, as it happened--and Madam Cory offered to take himfor a month or so; Adna Cory would not let two-year-old Reuben out ofher care, for he was sickly, but she let Ben go. Madam Cory was thenforty-nine, to Ben timelessly ancient. Ben could recall little except astruggle 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 andbrother-in-law moved in with her--Patience and Recovered Herrin. TheHerrins were blessed with six surviving children, whom they must havedistributed somehow around the house. Ben could dredge up no infantilememory of them but a blur of faces sharing nothing, voices tediouslyspeaking not for him. He knew that Patience had died in '97, andRecovered had gathered up his brood, married again and moved away.

  Ben recovered no memory of the Pownals breezing in at Springfield tolook at him, though they must have done so. Ben's aunt Mercy Pownalvisited Deerfield in 1701, wearing a red silk hood, recklessshort-sleeved bodice and scarlet cheyney jacket that shocked Mr.Williams and others to the bone, especially in view of a rumor that thewoman could read Greek and Latin, had been to London (orPhiladelphia?--some foreign place anyway) and, worst of all, wastwenty-nine and yet unmarried. Ben remembered his mother trying to speaka formal welcome and crying instead. Then the two clung to each other inthe 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, stillsniffling, 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 couldride him--a tame moose, he said, but amoosing; possibly Reuben's firstpun, for the boy nearly strangled getting it down. Uncle Zebina sang,music of England; he had gone there, and heard the new inventions ofHenry Purcell, who died young. Father was obliged to warn Uncle Zebinathat the Deerfield neighbors would think ill of such music. "We must notinterfere with their sadness, to be sure," said Uncle Zebina, and forthe remainder of his visit he made the music a sweet conspiracy, hummingsoftly and shielding his big red mouth with a comic hand.

  But those were Deerfield memories and clouded with a strangeness. In1702, the year of King William's death and Queen Anne's accession, whenwar broke out again, the bearded patriarch Enos Pownal, Mother'sgrandfather, had pulled up stakes in wrath at Springfield sold his finehouse to some lowborn Dutchman from Albany, and sailed for the WestIndies 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'smother occasionally received letters from them that left herbrilliant-eyed. Even at fourteen Ben had never heard the whole story ofthat very Pownal-like upheaval; it carried overtones of religion andpolitics, and suppressed echoes of the word "smuggling."

  No use--the woman now at evening prayers would take on no reality forBen, as the Benjamin Cory four years old was an infinity removed. Yet hefound it astonishingly easy to bring up recollection from the age ofsix of Reuben's four-year-old self, a wild passionate atom submerged inserious illness every few months, a being who must somehow be shielded,not hurt....

  He thought of the journey just ended, the brown oxen slopping ondreamily through the mush of a thaw that had come on a benign breeze outof the south, the pearls falling from bare oak and dark-clothed pine tomake gray periods in the white. He saw again Jesse Plum snoring, shakenabout but no part of him awake except one hand that clung with a life ofits own to the rail of the cart; he felt again Reuben huddled againsthim, speaking ha
rdly a word in all the hours of the journey. The driverwalking with the team had been a deaf-mute servant of the Hatfieldordinary, beyond communication in a hushed universe of his own. Acrossthe river from Springfield the oxen had refused to venture on the ice.At Ben's prodding Jesse Plum had waked, his mind still shrinking withinthe rags of sleep, and the mute had swung the cart about for home.

  Somewhere in that passage, Ben recalled, he had glimpsed a flash oflife--a wintering jay, clean as a fragment of sky, lighting on a branchto scold the human thing. The cart crawled on; gazing back, Ben had beenable to see the bird rise into the wider blue, in airy departure notwholly lost.

  The bulk of Jonas Lloyd abruptly shut off the light. The man wasrumbling with the studied cheerfulness of a hangman: "You may come now."He led them up a drafty staircase and indicated an open doorway at therear of the upper hall and padded back into the gloom below.

  A canopied four-poster filled the center of Madam Cory's bedroom, a neatpleasant room with western windows that would overlook the river bydaylight. The quiet woman sat by one of these, pallid hands folded inher gray-skirted lap. Her eyes were, like Reuben's, ocean-gray, butunacquainted with laughter. A table beside her held a leather-boundBible and one candle in a pewter sconce.

  "Well, come to me then! Are you afeared of an old woman?"

  Ben was dazed to discover--so vast had been the infantile image--thathis grandmother was not large at all. She sat no higher in the littlechair than Reuben would have done. "We are not--not too presentable,Grandmother."

  "That's no matter. You must be Benjamin--awkward still, I see. AndReuben, whom I never saw--yes, yes, anyone would know you for brothers.You take after your mother's side somewhat, in appearance." Rachel Corysighed gustily. "Thankful heart, Benjamin--don't cry! We all die, don'twe? Pity but men would give more thought to what cometh after. I saiddon't cry. Your father's death, Benjamin, is a grievous thing, and youwill 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 rememberyou as a child, willful and headstrong. If you and Reuben are to bidehere until you can maintain yourselves, as of course you shall, you mustwalk in the one right way. Your father erred, who might have been one ofthe Saints; concerning your poor mother, I will not speak. Your fatherstrayed. Benjamin, Reuben, in the Book of Psalms it is written: Thejudgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

  * * * * *

  Reuben heard and did not hear his grandmother: the sound of words in herdeep, positive voice reached him, but not the meaning--it was not asthough she had spoken in a foreign language, but as though his owncomprehension were momentarily numb. He saw Ben look away from her instunned blankness, and then no more reflection was possible, for a wildhoarse singing had broken loose in the night outside.

  Rachel Cory winced and leaned to her window; it was too dark, Reubenguessed, for anything to be recognized. "Well," she said with theprecision of disgust, "there is one heedless enough. You might as wellunderstand, 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 opensodden drunkenness in the streets. I do regret it should have happenedon the evening of your arrival. Take a lesson from it if you have thewit. Benjamin, one thing you and Reuben must understand: in all the timethe 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 forme. Behold, I'm the brazen serpent of the wilderness--_yaphoo!_ Look onme, you pocky smock-tumblers, you pot-walloping get of Belial, on mybosom I got the bleeding bloody cross, only it slipped some, there'ssome men fail at everything, can't even carry a cross right side up andbe 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 hisgrandmother. "You harken unto me, you jolly whoremasters, you cuckoldycods and Roundheads too, harken how I pickled my wounds in the juice ofthe vine! Why, bugger 'em all, s's I, and you too--a'n't I meek andlowly? Yaphoo! A'n't I crushed to the dust nor can't sink no furtherdown, a piss-poor toad under the heel of the Almighty? Look down! Don'tI stay alive because Hell won't have me? You broke my heart, Lord, youfried my brains, now scourge me with a bull's pizzle, I won't saynothing. Yaphoo!" The voice was moving away. Reuben prayed that Benwould not speak. "Ah, Lord, look down!" Yes, it was fainter, muffled, asif walls intervened; Jesse must have turned a corner of the street. "Outof 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 hathpermitted me to dwell here, I have tried to maintain my house as, let ussay, a small imperfect Zion, if that be not vanity. I will tolerate noungodliness, Benjamin, Reuben--no foul speech, no unconsidered acts.You'll never find me unkind or failing in understanding, but the walkingis strict. You will be at meeting without fail on Sabbath and LectureDays. These are wicked times. The faith is everywhere assailed, everyday bringeth new inventions. See to it that I find you on the side ofthe Saints. Well, you must be weary and hungry. Jonas will see to yoursupper 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 rawbonedwife Anna had kept a supper warm. Anna Lloyd sniffed more than shespoke, through a ribbon of nose overhanging the shrunken area where mostof her teeth had been lost. Neatly dressed and clean, perhaps she wouldnever seem so, kitchen smoke and years of drudgery having foundpermanent lodgment in her wrinkles. She was incurious about Deerfieldand the boys; her few questions were aimed at some region not welldefined 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 ashe 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 hismug of thin beer. Then Jonas recovered his mantle of stately gloom andguided them back upstairs to a room of their own. It was at the rear ofthe house overlooking a yard; except for Grandmother Cory's, probablythe best room in the house. Jonas lit a candle and padded away.

  The room contained another four-poster with a dark blue canopy. Thesmall-paned windows shone brilliantly clean, the furniture stood justso, defying any sinfulness of disorder. A framed sampler on the wallaimed its message so that anyone retiring or rising must be advised: _Iwill also vex the hearts of many people, when I shall bring thydestruction among the nations, into the countries which thou hast notknown. Ezekiel xxxii; 9._

  Staring at this, Reuben thought: There was never such a thing in mymother's house. "Ben," he said, and turned to his brother in suddenneed--"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 candleout, that once again neither he nor Reuben had prayed. For his own parthe had not even thought of it, being too concerned with finding someword of comfort for Reuben in that moment of desolate comprehension.Now, since there was some possibility that the boy had fallen asleep, hedared not move.

  He thought of Jesse Plum--surely a drinking companion must have steeredthe 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 themas he did now. In effect his grandmother had said it was righ
t andfitting 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 afanatic was a person you weren't likely to meet. The word was clarifiedfor Joseph Cory's son now that it owned a face.

  Laboriously Ben instructed himself: in the morning he would tell hisgrandmother that he and Reuben intended to go on to Roxbury.

  At least that was decision, not frivolously reached; now perhaps hecould rest. Reuben stirred and mumbled, but quieted at a pressure ofBen's arm. Ben watched the canopy, a blackness against softer dark.Moonlight must have arrived outside, faint, without consolation. Inrandom air the canopy swayed like the bough of a sublimely silent treepossessed by midnight. Ben watched it, remembering.

  Reuben was five, the first time he nearly died. Mr. Williams, a frontierminister of many duties, had felt obliged to offer what medical aid hecould. He called the illness a calenture, came to the house to pray,provided some remedies that Ru promptly vomited. One of these wascrushed sow bugs, recommended by the great Cotton Mather. Adna Corystayed by the bedside, seeming unable to hear anything said to her byanyone but Reuben. Ben could remember firelight mixed with a gleam ofcandles, flooding through the half-open door of the back room whereReuben cried and drowsed and burned. Ru's breath had been loud andrapid on the night Ben recalled most clearly--it must have been thenight before the fever broke and they began to think the child wouldlive.

  Ben's father was sleeping as usual in the front room; he needed to be upearly and out for the corn-planting that will not wait even on theshadow of death. He had snuffed his candle but sat up still dressed,bony hands dangling, and said: "Thou shouldst go to bed, Ben--'tislate."

  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 bedof which Ben must not speak because it was not real. Voices in the otherroom dragged him toward other perils, cliffs not quite seen--the flowingtenor of Mr. Williams, now and then a word from his mother. Drawnelsewhere was his body, awkwardly, into the curve of his father's arm."Thou shouldst be told, thy brother may die." But Father himself hadtold 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 tohis father's shirt, Ben had discovered a heartbeat heavy andinteresting, overriding his father's words, leaving only fragments forlater memory: "I wouldn't have thee question Mr. Williams concerningsuch a thing ... over-sure he knoweth all truth ... do themselves sufferfrom the sin of pride, as if knowledge of holy things resembled thegoods 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 tosearch 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 ofit. I know he got strength of it."

  And Mr. Williams, melodious: "Goody Cory, I have prayed that thisaffliction might bring you and your good husband to a betterunderstanding of the Christian's necessities. Oh, how advantageousgracious supplications are! God accounts forgetting his mercies aforgetting 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 youand 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?--inBen's memory they were already in the yard, the house door closed. "Norain tomorrow." A breeze was blowing off the river. Joseph Cory hadshown his son the inviolate shining of Polaris. "That star tells sailorswhere 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 tosecure a copy and they would read it together. And he wrote of itafterward to Uncle John, who sent it as a gift with Ben's name in hisown hand. Now it would be smoke.

  In the Springfield house, boards squeaked upstairs--probably an atticbedroom for Jonas Lloyd and his sad wife. A rooster somewhere woke withthe abrupt foolishness of his kind and crowed four times. Jesse Plumwould say that was a sign somebody would give you money in four days, ormaybe four changes of the moon.

  "Thou didst have a sister, Ben, and thou too small to understand, wholived 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 ofJob, 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 thoseconceived in sin and born in iniquity!" Then for Reuben the dark waspierced with little fires that grew, and in growing illuminated manywrithing faces in the pit, and blackened arms that could not quite reachthe rim of it. This was the pit where blood boiled in the veins andburst them, yet one never died, never.

  Out of the midnight arch above him a monstrous sorrowing thing with astubble of gray beard swooped down. Flame twisted from its side, stillit could catch hold of the bubble of glass where Reuben sought to hidehimself, catch hold and thrust at it repeatedly with a forked blackphallus, while Reuben could not scream to frighten it away. He couldnot, because now began--he had foreseen it--the one torment he alwaysdreaded most of all: suffocation, a gasping for clean air where nonewas, lungs locked and heaving, yielding at last because they must anddrawing in the sulfur fumes--yet one never died. All were agreed on thedefinition of eternity....

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the palisade of burning logs, Ben andGreat-uncle John Kenny of Roxbury were strolling quietly, talkingquietly, watching Reuben with calm. Ben, however, was not faceless likeUncle John, not too remote or impersonal. Ben grinned as he jerked histhumb toward a more distant place, where a little old man with a whitebeard sat on his hams cutting figures out of paper with a rusty pair ofscissors, impaling some of them, tearing some of them, burning some ofthem with solemn care like an old chapman cooking meat in the open on aforked twig. To whom Reuben advanced through muddy snow and said as hehad been instructed: "Forgive us our transparencies." Some one of thewords must have been wrong, for the little man rose up gibbering from atoothless gap and came for him viciously, the scissors raised like ahatchet. 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, morningimperceptibly arrived, a pallor in an unfamiliar window long dark; muchmore time must pass, Ben knew, before true dawn. This was that neutralhush before one is compelled to accept a finished thing and say: Allthat was yesterday. Now and then in the sluggishly advancing, sluggishlydying night, Ben had listened to a drip of melting from the roof. Thepatient monotone had ceased, Ben never knowing the moment. He crept outnaked from under the covers, finding the room not too distressinglycold, and knelt at one of the windows, wishing he might gain a glimpseof the hill road that ran east, toward Roxbury.

  Shadow-country of black and gray was brightening to the prosaic. An inkymonster on Ben's right became a woodshed and a higher structure thatmust be a stable. A trotting-horse weather-vane grew clear, the horse'shead pointing away--so the wind had shifted to blow from the west, andthat had proba
bly brought an end to the thaw. Ben fumbled on his clothesand returned to the window. During this brief absence had begun theday'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 tracksenlarged by yesterday's melting. At the rear of the yard rose the untidygrandeur of an elm. A lake of churned mud by the stable resembled amammoth cluster of grapes, separate blobs of fruit supplied by outlyinghoofprints. Near the base of the elm a murky area suggested a mansprawling with his head on his arm.

  Maybe this very day, Ben thought, he and Reuben could be climbing thathill road, discovering the far side of it. If he behaved politely hisgrandmother was bound to let them go....

  That shadow under the elm did create a dreadfully potent illusion ofhumanity--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 shejumped, 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 Lloydshuffled up behind him wheezing: "Now what's all this, boy?"

  The key gave way. Ben ignored her, running out across slush that hadfrozen crisp and hard.

  Jesse's face was recognizable. In the twist of his bluish open mouth onecould imagine an apologetic smile. Ben clutched his arm; the whole bodymoved with it, stiff as a dead branch.

  Behind Ben Anna Lloyd wailed thinly. She was gripping her candle thoughit had blown out; morning light gave Ben her ugly peering face, morepeevish than sad. "Land of mercy! Oh, law, the Mist'ess'll be terribleput out! Why, 'tis old Plum."

  "Yes, he came with us from Deerfield. He must have been trying to reachthe stable, find some way to get in where it was warm without troublingmy grandmother. Fell and couldn't rise with the liquor in him--oh, whenthe singing stopped I did think some friend----"

  "Singing? Ooh!--he done all that commotion last night?" Ben did notanswer; she seemed useless, not open to communication, like a tiresomedog. "Must call the Mist'ess immediate. She'll be terrible putout--well, it a'n't _my_ fault, no one can say...."

  There was more in her mumbling about the wages of sin. Ben's stomachheaved. He lurched away from Anna Lloyd, back into the kitchen. Hegrabbed a chair and straddled it, fighting nausea, head on his arm. Inthis self-imposed darkness he heard the outer door bang, and Annashuffled past him muttering. Only a few moments passed before the housewas in a sputtering uproar--voices, hurrying feet, Jonas brayingsomething or other. So long as he could keep his face hidden, his bodyquiet, he might not vomit. Soon enough his shoulder was tapped."Benjamin!"

  "Yes, Grandmother."

  "I suppose you can stand up when spoken to?"

  He managed it. "I was feeling sick. Grandmother, I ought to have goneout last night--to find out----"

  "You knew, last night, you _knew_ it was that fellow Plum making thatfoul commotion, knew and would not tell me. Benjamin, I marvel at you, Ido marvel."

  "But I thought----"

  "You thought!" She was dressed for the day; haggard, the mark of apillow fading on her cheek. "Well, well--you thought what?"

  "When he stopped, I thought some friend must have taken him away, so youneedn'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 totolerate 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 elsewould 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 neverknew him unkind, Grandmother."

  "What? What? No unkindness to himself and others to live with theconversation of a hog, to spend all the years God gave him in utterblasphemy?" Her voice climbed. "Blasphemy, swinish drunkenness, sin andcorruption, knowing the truth--why, he was instructed; your grandfatherand I saw to that--knowing it and rejecting it, knowing his steps wentdown 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 youpresently." She pointed at the door and Ben shambled through it, more inflight than obedience.

  The place was clammily cold, and dark. Ben remembered to avoidGrandfather Matthew's throne. He stood by the fireplace spreading hishands where no warmth was. Pain gnawed at his knee; he wondered if heought to have kept on Goody Hawks' poultice. Almost at once GrandmotherCory was confronting him in the gloom. "Jonas!" When the big man tiptoedin she said: "Open the shutters." Thin light brought no comfort. "Lightthe fire--boy appears to be cold. Nay, first go wake that child upstairsif he's slept through all this--I wonder he could."

  "Oh, he could!" Ben snatched clumsily for something harmless to easethe tension. "Wide awake one minute and then----"

  "Benjamin, do please to be quiet. Jonas, bring Reuben down. He is tostay with Anna; he is not to come in here." Ben saw Jonas' witch-wifejoin him in the hallway and they went upstairs together. "Ah,Benjamin!--about your miserable clothes, I had hoped to employ part ofthis day in buying suitable garments for you and your brother, but now Isuppose the time must be spent otherwise--and Lecture Day at that, whenI must be at meeting after the noon hour. And you and Reuben ought to gotoo, but of course I cannot take you to the meeting-house looking likebeggar boys and very likely lousy."

  "We are not! Grandmother, I----"

  "You won't find me failing in understanding, Benjamin, but prayunderstand this once and for all: your failure last night to tell meabout that fellow Plum was a lie--a lie of silence.... Oh, when wordcame yesterday I did pray that you and your brother might be brands fromthe burning. I do pray for it yet. I made plans for you, I searched myheart, I sought guidance, I even trusted I had found it. D'you think mecold, unnatural? D'you imagine I don't love you, my grandson?" Shebrushed with dry impatience at sudden tears. Footsteps sounded on thestairs. Ben tried to catch a glimpse of Reuben, but the bulk of theLloyds hid him as they passed the doorway. "Benjamin, what am I to dowith you? What do you yourself think would be right for me to do withyou, a liar, a wilderness child who hath something like the conversationof a savage?"

  "Grandmother, about Jesse----"

  "Plum again! And thus I'm answered! Why, the constable will see afterall 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 creatureburied among the Saints?"

  "No, I...." Ben searched his mind hopelessly. During the night manypolite convincing speeches had been prepared--scattered, one and all. Heblurted the one thought his mind could hold: "Reuben and I must go toUncle 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 oneanother. Once Uncle John sent me a book."

  "He did?" She sat down slowly, little white hands stiff as ivory on thearms of the chair. "That may serve to explain much.... Benjamin, Irequire you to listen to me if only this once. I have reason to believethat my poor brother John is an atheist. I will trust you did not knowthis; now you do. He is an old man--as I'm old--and hardened, corruptwith false learning, evil conversation, a blasphemer, often fuddled withdrink, a--a fornicator. He hath kept a mistress, at Roxbury, quiteopenly, under the name of housekeeper--for all I know the whore is thereyet. Being wealthy, with friends in high places, none dares deal withhim--that's the pass our colony hath arrived at. We builded a Zion; itbecometh an abomination, a pen of swine, a nest of adulterers,blasphemers, sodomites, worshippers of the golde
n calf--vipers.... Andnow you wish me to allow you and that poor child your brother to go intothat--that filthiness. Benjamin, I will hear nothing more about going tomy brother at Roxbury. I will not send you to an even worse darknessthan 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 noright 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 rightarm up between the shoulders.

  "Jonas, lock him in his room. Here!" She fumbled a bunch of keys fromher belt, with difficulty, for doubtless she could not see plainly."Here, take it, Jonas! The boy is possessed!" Eyes flaring to thewhites, she lifted the cluster of keys and struck Ben twice across themouth.

  As Jonas frogmarched him to the stairs, Ben tried to see down thehallway into the kitchen. Anna Lloyd was restraining Reuben, though atthe moment the boy was not trying to break free but stood leaning awayfrom her in a frozen motion, his white face empty.

  Jonas hurled Ben into the bedroom. Ben pulled himself upright by a legof the four-poster in time to hear the door slam and the key chatter inthe lock. He spat blood from his lips, and heard the floor creak underJonas' swift departure; heard silence fall on the room like the boomingof another, larger door. Even then a part of his mind could fret at whatseemed 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 pastand terrors of the immediate present within the shelter of a lethargy, atemporary refusal to think of anything at all. This was no good, sinceno power could shut away the thought of Reuben alone with these people,his own twelve-year-old temper explosive and perilous. Sooner or laterRu was bound to lose control and fetch down the wrath as Ben himself haddone. Now when it was too late, Ben saw his outbreak as a betrayal ofReuben, a betrayal of trust. Once or twice he pressed his forehead onthe window glass and tried to pray--seeing then that if only Reuben werewith him it would be quite possible to jump from this window with fairsafety into the snow.

  A square of thin sunshine moved across the floor. It had neared thewindow when high clouds obscured the sun of March; the square yielded,grayed, vanished, like Ben's own trust in ancient certainties. Footstepssounded often, not for him. Voices flowed on somewhere; Ben heard thehomely commotion of household activity--doors closing, the hiss ofsweeping, a shovel scraping ash from a hearthstone, clatter of kitchengear.

  Continually his ears strained for Reuben's treble or a light tread thatwould be his. But plainly Reuben was forbidden to come to him. Someonewould, some time soon, he supposed. Someone in authority would beobliged to deal with the wild beast, the blasphemer.

  He sprawled on the bed, raising his right knee to soften the nagging ofthe splinter-wound. Anxious to avoid the refuge of sleep, he fell intoit anyway, having had little or none last night, and woke to what wassurely the pallor of late afternoon. The house was quite silent; maybeeveryone had gone to the Lecture Day sermon. In spite of himself heslept again, and roused, feeling ill and disoriented, in total dark.

  From the window small lights could be found twinkling over on the leftwhere the hill road must be. Ben groped for the stub candle on themantel, and fought a dreary battle with his tinderbox, winning at lastthe consolation of a pale candle-flame. His knee felt hot, and throbbed.He let down his breeches but could find nothing very wrong. Thesplinter-wound was slightly raised; he saw or imagined faint steaks ofred up his thigh. His clothing must have chafed the wound while heslept. As he moved sluggishly about the room the throbbing ceased and hecould forget it. The lightheadedness--that would be hunger. Anger was nolonger hot but heavy, lead in the stomach.

  He thought what had roused him had been a murmur of talk somewhere. Heno longer heard it. Nothing happened; no one came. The flame of thecandle 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 graduallyand softly that he feared his eyes were playing a trick. Even as Reubenslipped in and closed the door with the same caution, Ben was slow tobelieve 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 harnessleather five or six feet long, and crossed at once to the window. AsBen joined him he spoke sparingly, in an undertone that would not carryso far as a whisper: "Must be now--we'll have no other chance. I havesome food. Bit of new snow, maybe enough to hide our tracks."

  They worked together in silence and complete understanding, easing thewindow open, fastening the end of the strap to a shutter-hook. Thoughfar short of the ground, it lessened the drop to reasonable safety. Benlet himself down first, dropping easily on the old snow. Large softflakes of the new were dreamily floating. He stood in silence withwaiting 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. Gotanother half-loaf under my shirt, and a chunk I cut from a ham I foundin 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 anddirection with 'em...."

  "I cursed old Anna when she was holding me. She--I meanGrandmother--made me wash my mouth with vinegar, then I must sit notmoving all morning. Then they all went to meeting but Jonas, who lockedme in a closet so he could mind his chores. Damn them all, I sayGod-damn them!"

  "Hush, Ru! Grandmother only thought----"

  "I say she doesn't think. I say she hath no heart at all, and yourmouth'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 thosetrees, 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 youunderstand?--sinful. And I _was_, too--I ought never to have spoken toher so. I lost my head somehow."

  "But Mother, or Father, or anyone with a heart, would have forgivenanything you said at such a time. I cursed you, when I was out of mywits. You forgave at once, when I reminded you you could scarce rememberit."

  "What you said _was_ nothing. What I said to Grandmother was--well, toomuch somehow. There's a strangeness--let's not think of it. We need allour wits to find the way here.... Can you make out the sled-marks? Myeyes 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 meup."

  "They let me eat heavy at supper, and I did so, knowing we might have achance--Ben, are you having trouble walking?"

  "No, no, I slipped, that was all. It's from fretting all day in thatroom 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 wenthome with a sore throat. Grandmother and old Anna were talking of it
when they came back, Anna saying the flogging should be in the publicsquare, but Grandmother said it would be at the house, and first theminister should instruct you and pray. I say let them pray for their ownsalvation."

  "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 atticroom, next the Lloyds, I was forced to wait till they went a-futteringand then a-snoring.... Ben, if it's a hundred miles to Roxbury--we cando ten miles, maybe fifteen, in a day. You've got your knife, and Istole 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?"