Mr. Nordholt’s voice was choked with some very strong emotion, and Len knew that something bad had happened. He went rapidly over his own actions on those three days but found nothing that could be brought up against him.
“Someone,” said Mr. Nordholt, “entered this house during my absence and stole from it three books.”
Len stiffened in his seat. He remembered Esau saying, “We need a book——”
“Those books,” said Mr. Nordholt, “are the property of the township of Piper’s Run. They are pre-Destruction books, and therefore irreplaceable. And they are not for idle or indiscriminate use. I want them back.”
He stood aside, and Mr. Harkness rose. Mr. Harkness was short and thick, and bandy-legged from walking all his life after a plow, and his voice had a rusty creak in it. He always prayed the longest prayers in meeting. Now he looked along the rows of benches with two little steely eyes that were usually as friendly as a beagle’s.
“Now then,” said Mr. Harkness, “I’m going to ask each one of you in turn, did you take them or do you know who did. And I don’t want any lies or any bearing of false witness.”
He stumped over to the left-hand corner and began, walking down the benches and back again. Len listened to the monotonous No Mr. Harkness coming closer and closer, and he sweated profusely and tried to loosen his tongue. After all, he did not know that it was Esau. Thou shalt not bear false witness, Mr. Harkness just said so, and to look guilty when you’re not is a sort of false-witnessing. Besides, if they get to looking around too close they might find out about the——
Harkness’ eye and finger were pointed straight at him.
“No,” said Len, “Mr. Harkness.”
It seemed to him that all the guilt and fear in the world were loud and quivering in those three words, but Mr. Harkness passed on. When he came to the end of the last row he said,
“Very well. Perhaps you’re all telling the truth, perhaps not. We’ll find out. Now I’ll say this. If you see a book that you know does not belong to the person who has it, you are to come to me, or to Mr. Nordholt or to Mr. Glasser or Mr. Clute or Mr. Fenway. You are to ask your parents to do the same. Do you understand that?”
Yes, Mr. Harkness.
“Let us pray. Oh God, Who knowest all things, forgive the erring child, or man, as it may be, who has broken Thy commandment against theft. Turn his soul toward righteousness, that he may return that which is not his, and make him patient of chastisement——”
Len took a chance on his way home and made a circle down through the woods, running most of the way to make up for the extra distance. The sun had melted some of the icy armor on the trees, but it was still bright enough to hurt the eyes, and the footing was treacherous. He was blown and weary by the time he got to the hollow tree.
There were three books in it, wrapped up in canvas beside the radio, dry and safe. The covers and the paper inside fascinated him with faded colors for the eye and unfamiliar textures for the touch. They had an indefinable something in common with the radio.
One was a dark green book called Elementary Physics. One was thin and brownish, with a long title: Radioactivity and Nucleonics: An Introduction. The third was fat and gray, and its name was History of the United States. The words of the first two meant nothing to Len, except that he recognized the Radio part. He turned the pages, hastily, with shaking fingers, trying to take it all in at one glance and seeing nothing but a blur of print and pictures and curious line drawings. Here and there on the pages someone had marked and written in the margins, “Monday, test,” or “To here,” or “Write paper on La. Purchase.”
Len felt a hunger and a craving he had not known before, because nothing had ever aroused them. They were up in his head, and they were so strong they made it ache. He wanted to read. He wanted to take the books and wrap himself around them and absorb them to the last word and picture. He knew perfectly well what his duty was. He did not do it. He folded the canvas around the books again and replaced them carefully in the hollow tree. Then he ran back on the circuitous route home, and his mind was spinning all the way with stratagems to deceive Pa and make guilty trips to the woods appear innocent. His conscience made a single peep, no louder than a day-old chick, and then was still.
5
Esau was almost in tears. He flung down the book he was holding and said furiously, “I don’t know what the words mean, so what good does it do me? I just took a big risk for nothing!”
He had been over and over the book on physics and the one on radioactivity, and Len had been over and over them with him. The one on radioactivity they had laid aside because it didn’t seem to have anything to do with radios, and anyway they could not make head or tail of what it was about. But the book on physics—another puzzling misuse of a word that had almost caused Esau to pass it by in his search through Mr. Nordholt’s library—did have a part in it about radio. They had scowled and mumbled over it until the queer-shaped and unpronounceable words were stamped on their brains and they could have drawn diagrams of waves and circuits, triodes and oscillators in their sleep, without in the least understanding what they were.
Len picked the book up from between his feet, where it had landed, and brushed the dirt from its cover. Then he looked inside it and shook his head. He said sadly,
“It doesn’t tell you how to make voices come out.” “No. It doesn’t tell what the knobs and the spool are for, either.” Esau turned the radio gloomily between his hands. One of the knobs they knew made it noisy or quiet—alive or dead, Len thought of it unconsciously. But the others remained a mystery. By making the noise very soft and holding the radio against their ears they had learned that the sound came out of one of the openings. What the other two were for was also a mystery. No one of the three looked like its mates, so it was logical to guess that they were for three different purposes. Len was pretty sure that one of them was to let heat out, like the ventilators in the hayloft, because you could feel it get warm if you held your hand over it for a while. But that still left one, and the enigmatic spool of metal thread. He reached out and took the radio from Esau, just liking the feel of it between his hands, a kind of humming quiver it had like a blade of swamp grass in the wind.
“Mr. Hostetter must know how it works,” he said.
They were sure in their hearts that Mr. Hostetter, like Mr. Soames, was from Bartorstown.
Esau nodded. “But we don’t dare ask him.”
“No.”
Len turned the radio over and over, fingering the knobs, the spool, the openings. A chill wind rattled the bare branches overhead. There was ice in the Pymatuning, and the fallen log he sat on was bitter underneath him.
“I just wonder,” he said slowly.
“Wonder what?”
“Well, if they talk back and forth with these radios, they wouldn’t do it much in the daytime, would they? I mean, people might hear them. If it was me, I’d wait until night, when everybody would be asleep.”
“Well, it ain’t you,” said Esau crossly. But he thought about it, and gradually he got excited. “I’ll bet that’s right. I’ll bet that’s just exactly right! We only fooled with it in the daytime, and naturally they wouldn’t talk then. Can you see Mr. Hostetter doing it up in the town square, with everybody swarming around and a dozen kids hanging on every wheel?”
He got up and began to pace up and down, blowing on his cold fingers. “We’ll have to make plans, Len. We’ll have to get away at night.”
“Yes,” said Len eagerly, and then was sorry he had spoken. That was not going to be so easy.
“Coon hunt,” said Esau.
“No. My brother’d want to go. Maybe Pa, too.”
Possum hunt was the same thing, and jacklighting deer was no better.
“Well, keep thinking.” Esau began to put the books and the radio away. “I got to get back.”
“Me, too.” Len looked regretfully at the fat gray history, wishing he could take it with them. Esau had picked it up on impulse
because it had pictures of machines in it. It was hard going and full of strange names and a lot he did not understand, but it tormented him all the time he was reading it, wondering what was coming on the next page. “Maybe it’d be best just to watch a chance and slip away alone, whichever one of us can, and not try to come together.”
“No, sir! I stole it, and I stole the books, and nobody’s going to hear a voice without me there!”
He looked so savage that Len said all right.
Esau made sure everything was safe and stepped back. He looked at the hollow tree, scowling. “Not much use to come back here any more till then. And we’ll be sugarin’ off ’fore long, and there’s lambing, and then——”
With a mature depth of bitterness that startled Len, Esau said, “Always something, always some reason why you can’t know or learn or do! I’m sick of it. And I’m damned if I’m going to spend my whole life that way, shoveling dung and pulling cow tits!”
Len walked home alone, pondering deeply on those words. He could feel something growing in him, and he knew it was growing in Esau, too. It frightened him. He didn’t want it to grow. But he knew that if it stopped growing he would be partly dead, not physically, but like cows or sheep, who eat the grass but do not care what makes it grow.
That was the end of January. In February there was a warm spell, and all over the countryside men and boys went with taps and spiles and buckets to the maple trees. The smoke from the sugarbush blew out on the wind, the first banner of oncoming spring. The last deep snow came and melted off again. There was a period of alternating freeze and thaw that made Pa worry about the winter wheat heaving out of the ground. The wind blew chill from the northwest, and it seemed as though it would never get warm again. The first lamb came bleating into the world. And as Esau had said, there was no spare time for anything.
The willows turned yellow, and then a pale, feathery green. There were some warm days that made you feel all lazy and slithering like a winter snake thawing in the sun. New calves bawled and staggered after their mothers, with more yet to come. The cows were nervous and troublesome, and Len began to get an idea. It was so simple he wondered why he had not thought of it before. After evening chores, when Brother James had closed the barn, Len sneaked back and opened the lower door. An hour later they were all out in the cold dark rounding up cows, and when they got them back inside and counted, two were missing. Pa muttered angrily about the stupid obstinacy of beasts that preferred to run away and calve under a bush, where if anything went wrong there was no help. He gave Len a lantern and told him to run the half mile down the road to Uncle David’s house and ask him and Esau to help. It was as easy as that.
Len covered the half mile at a fast lope, his mind busy foreseeing possibilities and preparing for them with a deceitful ease that rather horrified him. He had been given much to laziness, but never to lying, and it was awful how fast he was learning. He tried to excuse himself by thinking that he hadn’t told anybody a direct falsehood. But it didn’t do any good. He was like one of those whited sepulchers they told about in the Bible, fair without and full of wickedness within. And off to his right as he ran the woods showed in the starlight, very black and strange.
Uncle David’s kitchen was warm. It smelled of cabbage and steam and drying boots, and it was so clean that Len hesitated to step into it even after he had scraped his feet outside. There was a scrap of rag rug just inside the door and he stood on that, getting his message out between gasping for breath and trying to catch Esau’s eye without looking too transparently guilty. Uncle David grumbled and muttered, but he began to pull on his boots, and Aunt Mariah got his jacket and a lantern. Len took a deep gulp of air.
“I think I saw something white moving down in the west field,” he said. “Come on, Esau, let’s look!”
And Esau came, with his hat on crooked and one arm still out of his jacket. They ran away together before Uncle David could think to stop them, stumbling and leaping over rough pasture where every hollow was full from recent rain, and then into the west field, angling all the time toward the woods. Len muffled the lantern under his coat so that Uncle David could not see from the road when they actually entered the woods, and he kept it hidden for some time afterward, knowing the way pretty well even in the dark, once he found his trail.
“We can say later that the lantern went out,” he told Esau.
“Sure,” said Esau, in a strange, tight voice. “Let’s hurry.”
They hurried. Esau grabbed the lantern and ran recklessly on ahead. When they got to the place where the waters met he set the light down and got out the radio with hands that could hardly hold it for shaking. Len sat down on the log, his mouth wide open, his arms pressed to his aching sides. Piper’s Run was roaring like a real river, bankfull. It made a riffle and a swirl where it swept into the Pymatuning. The water rushed by foaming, very high now, almost level with the land where they were, dim and disturbed in the starlight, and the night was filled with the sound of it.
Esau dropped the radio.
Len jumped forward with a cry. Esau made a grab, fast and frantic. He caught the radio by the protruding spool. The spool came loose and the radio continued to fall, but slower now, swinging on the end of the wire that unreeled from Esau’s hand. It fell with a soft thump into the last year’s grass. Esau stood staring at it, and at the spool, and the wire between.
“It’s broken,” he said. “It’s broken.”
Len went down on his knees. “No it isn’t. Look here.” He moved the radio close to the lantern and pointed. “See those two little springs? The spool is meant to come out, and the wire unwinds——”
Enormously excited, he turned the knob. This was something they had not known or tried before. He waited until the humming began. It sounded stronger than it had. He motioned Esau to move back, and he did, reeling out the wire, and the noise got stronger and stronger, and suddenly without warning a man’s voice was saying, very scratchy and far away, “—back out to civilization myself next fall, I hope. Anyway, the stuff’s on the river ready to load as soon as the——”
The voice faded with a roar and a swoop. Like one half stunned, Esau reeled the wire out to the very end. And a faint, faint voice said, “Sherman wants to know if you’ve heard from Byers. He hasn’t con——”
And that was all. The roaring and whistling and humming went on, so loud that they were afraid it might be heard all the way to where the others were out hunting cows. Once or twice they thought they could hear voices again behind it, but they could not make any more words come clear. Len turned the knob and Esau rolled the wire on the spool and clipped it back in place. They put the radio in the hollow tree, and picked up the lantern, and went away through the woods. They did not speak. They did not even look at each other. And in the dim light of the lantern their eyes were wide and brightly shining.
6
The cloud of dust showed first, far down the road. Then the top of the canvas tilt glinted white where the sun fell on it, shining strongly through the green trees. The tilt got higher and rounder, and the wagon began to show underneath it, and the team in front lengthened out from a confused dark blob of motion to six great bay horses stepping along as proud as emperors, their harness gleaming and the trace chains all ajingle.
High up on the wagon seat, handling the long reins lightly, was Mr. Hostetter, his beard rippling in the wind and his hat and shoulders and the trouser legs over his shins all powdered brown from the road.
Len said, “I’m scared.”
“What have you got to be scared about?” said Esau. “You ain’t going.”
“And maybe you’re not, either,” muttered Len, looking up at the log bridge as the wagon rocked and rattled over it. “I don’t think it’s that easy.”
It was June, in full bright leaf. Len and Esau stood beside Piper’s Run just at the edge of the village, where the mill wheel hung slack in the water and kingfishers dropped like bolts of blue flame. The town square was less than a hundre
d yards away, and the whole township was in it, everybody who was not too young, too old, or too sick to be moved. There were friends and relatives up from Vernon and down from Williamsfield, and from Andover and Farmdale and Burghill and the lonely farmsteads across the Pennsylvania line that were nearer to Piper’s Run than to any village of their own. It was the strawberry festival, the first big social event of the summer, where people who had perhaps not seen each other since the first snow could get together and talk and pleasantly stuff themselves, sitting in the dappled sunshine under the elms.
A crowd of boys had run out along the road to meet the wagon. They were running beside it now, shouting up to Mr. Hostetter. The girls, and the boys still too little to run, stood along the edges of the square and waved and called out, the girls in their bonnets and their long skirts blowing in the warm wind, the tiny boys exactly like their fathers in homespun and broad brown hats. Then everybody began to move, flowing across the square toward the wagon, which went slower and slower and finally stopped, the six great horses tossing their heads and snorting as though they had done a mighty thing to get that wagon there and were proud of it. Mr. Hostetter waved and smiled and a boy climbed up and put a dish of strawberries in his hand.
Len and Esau stayed where they were, looking at Mr. Hostetter from a distance. Len felt a curious thrill go through him, partly of sheer guiltiness because of the stolen radio and partly of intimacy, almost of comradeship, because he knew a secret about Mr. Hostetter and was in a sense set apart himself. Somehow, though, he did not want to meet Mr. Hostetter’s eyes.
“How are you going to do it?” he asked Esau.
“I’ll find a way.”
He was staring at the wagon with a fanatic intensity. Ever since that night when they had heard voices Esau had turned somehow strange and wild, not outside but inside, so that sometimes Len hardly knew him any more. I’m going there, he had said, meaning Bartorstown, and he had been like one possessed, waiting for Mr. Hostetter.
American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56 Page 46