American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56

by Gary K. Wolfe

  Pa hollered up the stairs, and that ended it. Ten minutes later the cart was rattling out of the yard, with Len sitting very stiffly beside his father, and neither of them speaking. And Len was thinking about God, and Satan, and the town elders and the preaching man, and Soames and Hostetter and Bartorstown, and it was all confused, but he knew one thing. God was not going to forgive him. He had chosen the way of the transgressor, and he was beyond all hope damned. But he would have all of Bartorstown to keep him company.

  Uncle David’s cart caught up with them and they went into town together, with Esau huddled in the corner and looking small and fallen-in, as though the bones had all been taken out of him. When they came to the house of Mr. Harkness, Pa and Uncle David got out and stood talking together, leaving Len and Esau to hitch the horses. Esau did not look at Len. He avoided even turning toward him. Len did not look at him, either. But they were side by side at the hitching rack, and Len said fiercely under his breath, “I’ll wait for you on the point till moonrise. Then I’m going on.”

  He could feel Esau start and stiffen. Before he could open his mouth Len said, “Shut up.” Then he turned and walked away, to stand respectfully behind his father.

  There was a very long, very unhappy session in the parlor of Mr. Harkness’ house. Mr. Fenway, Mr. Glasser, and Mr. Clute were there too, and Mr. Nordholt. When they were through, Len felt as though he had been skinned and drawn, like a rabbit with its inmost parts exposed. It made him angry. It made him hate all these slow-spoken bearded men who tore and picked and peeled at him.

  Twice he felt that Esau was on the point of betraying him, and he was all ready to make his cousin out a liar. But Esau held his tongue, and after a while Len thought he saw a little stiffening come back into Esau’s backbone.

  The examination was finished at last. The men conferred. At last Mr. Harkness said to Pa and Uncle David, “I’m sorry that such a disgrace should be brought upon you, for you’re both good men and old friends. But perhaps it will serve as a reminder to everybody that youth is not to be trusted, and that constant watchfulness is the price of a Christian soul.”

  He swung about very grimly on the boys. “A public birching for both of you, on Saturday morning. And after that, if you should be found guilty a second time, you know what the punishment will be.”

  He waited. Esau looked at his boots. Len stared steadily past Mr. Harkness’ shoulder.

  “Well,” said Mr. Harkness sharply. “Do you know?”

  “Yes,” said Len. “You’ll make us go away and never come back.” He looked Mr. Harkness in the eye and added, “There won’t be a second time.”

  “I sincerely hope not,” said Mr. Harkness. “And I recommend that both of you read your Bibles, and meditate, and pray, that God may give you wisdom as well as forgiveness.”

  There was some more talk among the elders, and then the Colters went out and got into their carts and started home again. They passed Mr. Hostetter’s wagon in the town square, but Mr. Hostetter was not in sight.

  Pa was silent most of the way, except that all at once he said, “I hold myself to blame in this as much as you, Len.”

  Len said, “I did it. It wasn’t any fault of yours, Pa. It couldn’t be.”

  “Somewhere I failed. I didn’t teach you right, didn’t make you understand. Somewhere you got away from me.” Pa shook his head. “I guess David was right. I spared the rod too much.”

  “Esau was in it more than me,” said Len. “He stole the radio in the first place, and all Uncle David’s lickings didn’t stop him. It wasn’t any way your fault, Pa. It was all mine.” He felt bad. Somehow he knew this was the real guilt, and it couldn’t be helped.

  “James was never like this,” said Pa to himself, wondering. “Never a moment’s worry. How can the same seed produce two such different fruits?”

  They did not speak again. When they got home Ma and Gran and Brother James were waiting. Len was sent to his room, and as he climbed the narrow stairs he could hear Pa telling briefly what had happened, and Ma letting out a little whimpering sob. And suddenly he heard Gran’s voice lifted high and shrill in mighty anger.

  “You’re a fool and a coward, Elijah. That’s what you all are, fools and cowards, and the boy is worth the lot of you! Go ahead and break his spirit if you can, but I hope you never do it. I hope you never teach him to be afraid of knowing the truth.”

  Len smiled and a little quiver went through him, because he knew that was meant for his ears as much as Pa’s. All right, Gran, he thought. I’ll remember.

  That night, when the house was stone-dead quiet, he tied his boots around his neck and crept out the window to the summer-kitchen roof, and from there to the limb of a pear tree, and from there to the ground. He stole out of the farmyard and across the road, and there he put his boots on. Then he walked on, skirting the west field where this season’s young oats were growing. The woods loomed very dark ahead. He did not once look back.

  It was black and still and lonely in among the trees. Len thought, It’s going to be like this a lot from now on, you might as well get used to it. When he reached the point he sat down on the same log where he had sat so often before, and listened to the night music of the frogs and the quiet slipping of the Pymatuning between its banks. The world felt huge, and there was a coldness at his back as though some protective covering had been sheared away. He wondered if Esau would come.

  It began to get light down in the southeast, a smudgy grayness brightening slowly to silver. Len waited. He won’t come, he thought, he’s scared, and I’ll have to do this alone. He got up, listening, watching the first thin edge of the moon come up. And a voice inside him said, You can still run home and climb in the window again, and nobody will ever know. He hung on hard to the limb of a tree to keep himself from doing it.

  There was a rustle and a thrashing in the dark woods, and Esau came.

  They peered at each other for a moment, like owls, and then they caught each other’s hands and laughed.

  “Public birching,” Esau said, panting. “Public birching, hell. The hell with them.”

  “We’ll walk downstream,” Len said, “until we find a boat.”

  “But after that, what?”

  “We keep on going. Rivers run into other rivers. I saw the map in the history book. If you keep going long enough you come to the Ohio, and that’s the biggest river there is hereabouts.”

  Esau said stubbornly, “But why the Ohio? It’s way south, and everybody knows Bartorstown is west.”

  “But where west? West is an awful big place. Listen, don’t you remember the voice we heard? The stuff is on the river ready to load as soon as the something. They were Bartorstown men talking, about stuff that was going to Bartorstown. And the Ohio runs west. It’s the main highway. After that, there’s other rivers. And boats must go there. And that’s where we’re going.”

  Esau thought about it a minute. Then he said, “Well, all right. It’s a place to start from, anyway. Besides, who knows? I still think we were right about Hostetter, even if he did lie about it. Maybe he’ll tell the others, maybe they’ll talk about us over their radios, how we ran away to find them. Maybe they’ll help us, even, when they find a safe time. Who knows?”

  “Yes,” said Len. “Who knows?”

  They walked off along the bank of the Pymatuning, going south. The moon climbed up to give them light. The water rippled and the frogs sang, and in Len Colter’s mind the name of Bartorstown rang with the sound of a great bell.

  Book Two

  8

  The narrow brown waters of the Pymatuning fatten the Shenango. The Shenango flows down to meet the Mahoning, and the two of them together make the Beaver. The Beaver fattens the Ohio, and the Ohio runs grandly westward to help make mighty the Father of Waters.

  Time flows, too. Little units grow into big ones, minutes into months and months into years. Boys become men, and the milestones of a long search multiply and are left behind. But the legend remains a legend, a
nd the dream a dream, glimmering, fading, ever somewhere farther on toward the sunset.

  There was a town called Refuge, and a yellow-haired girl, and they were real.

  Refuge was not at all like Piper’s Run. It was bigger, so much bigger that its boundaries were already straining against the lawful limits, but size was not the chief difference. It was a matter of feeling. Len and Esau had noticed that same feeling in a number of places as they worked their way along the river valleys, particularly where, as in Refuge, highway and waterway conjoined. Piper’s Run lived and breathed with the slow calm rhythm of the seasons, and the thoughts of the folk who lived there were calm too. Refuge bustled. The people moved faster, and thought faster, and talked louder, and the streets were noisier at night, with a passing of drays and wagons and the voices of stevedores along the wharves.

  Refuge stood on the north bank of the Ohio. It had come by its name, Len understood, because people from a city farther along the river had taken refuge there during the Destruction. It was the terminus now for two main trading routes stretching as far as the Great Lakes, and the wagons rolled day and night while the roads were passable, bringing down baled furs and iron and woolen cloth, flour and cheeses. From east and west along the river came other traffic, bearing other things, copper and hides and tallow and salt beef from the plains, coal and scrap metal from Pennsylvania, salt fish from the Atlantic, kegs of nails, fine guns, paper. The river traffic moved around the clock, too, from spring to early winter, flatboats and launches and tugs towing long strings of loaded barges, going with a fine brave smoke and clatter from their steam engines. These were the first engines Len and Esau had ever seen, and at first they were frightened out of their wits by the noise, but they soon got used to them. They had, one winter, worked in a little foundry near the mouth of the Beaver, making boilers and feeling as though they were already helping to mechanize the world. The New Mennonites frowned on the use of any artificial power, but the river-boat men belonged to different sects and had different problems. They had to get cargoes upriver against the current, and if they could harness steam in a simple and easily handmade engine to help them, they were going to do it, cutting the ethic to fit the need.

  On the Kentucky side of the river, just opposite, there was a place called Shadwell. Shadwell was much smaller than Refuge and much newer, but it was swelling out so fast that even Len and Esau could see the difference in the year or so they had been there. The people of Refuge did not care much for Shadwell, which had only happened because traders had begun to come up out of the South with sugar and blackstrap and cotton and tobacco, drawn by the commerce of the Refuge markets. A couple of temporary sheds had gone up, and a ferry dock, and a cabin or two, and before anybody realized it there was a village, with wharves and warehouses of its own, and a name, and a growing population. And Refuge, already as large as a town was permitted by law to be, sat sourly by and watched the overplus of trade it could not handle flow into Shadwell.

  There were few Amish or Mennonites in Refuge. The people mostly belonged to the Church of Holy Thankfulness, and were called Kellerites after the James P. Keller who founded the sect. Len and Esau had found that there were few Mennonites anywhere in the settlements that lived by commerce rather than by agriculture. And since they were excommunicate themselves, with no wish to be traced back to Piper’s Run, they had long ago discarded the distinctive dress of their childhood faith for the nondescript homespuns of the river towns. They wore their hair short and their chins naked, because it was the custom among the Kellerites for a man to remain clean-shaven until he married, when he was expected to grow the beard that distinguished him more plainly than any removable ring. They went every Sunday to the Church of Holy Thankfulness, and joined in the regular daily devotions of the family they boarded with, and sometimes they forgot that they had ever been anything but Kellerites.

  Sometimes, Len thought, they even forgot why they were here and what they were looking for. And he would make himself remember the night when he had waited for Esau on the point above the Pymatuning, and everything that had gone before to bring him there, and it was easy enough to remember the physical things, the chill air and the smell of leaves, the beating, and the way Pa’s face had looked as he lifted the strap and brought it whistling down. But the other part of it, the way he had felt inside, was harder to call to mind. Sometimes he could do it only with a real effort. Other times he could not do it at all. And at still other times—and these were the worst— the way he had felt about leaving home and finding Bartorstown seemed to him childish and absurd. He would see home and family so clearly that it was a physical pain in him, and he would think, I threw them all away for a name, a voice in the air, and here I am, a wanderer, and where is Bartorstown? He had found out that time can be a traitor and that thoughts are like mountaintops, a different shape on every side, changing as you move away.

  Time had played him another trick, too. It had made him grow up and given him a lot of brand-new things to worry about.

  Including the yellow-haired girl.

  It was an evening in mid-June, hot and sultry, with the sunset swallowed up in the blackness of an oncoming storm. The two candles on the table burned straight up, with no quiver of air from the open windows to trouble them. Len sat with his hands folded and his head bent, looking down into the remains of a milk pudding. Esau sat on his right, in the same attitude. The yellow-haired girl sat across from them. Her name was Amity Taylor. Her father was saying grace after meat, sitting at the head of the table, and at the foot, her mother listened reverently.

  “—didst stretch out the garment of Thy mercy to shelter us in the day of Destruction——”

  Amity glanced up from under the shadows of her brows in the candlelight, looking first at Len and then at Esau. “—our thanks for the limitless abundance of Thy blessing——”

  Len felt the girl’s eyes on him. His skin was thin and sensitive to that touch, so that without even looking up he knew what she was doing. His heart began to thump. He felt hot. Esau’s hands were in his line of vision, folded between Esau’s knees. He saw them move and tighten, and he knew that Amity had looked at Esau too, and he got even hotter, thinking about the garden and the shadowy place under the rose arbor.

  Wouldn’t Judge Taylor ever shut up?

  The Amen came at last, muffled in the louder voice of thunder. Hurry, thought Len. Hurry with the dishes or there won’t be any walking in the garden. Not for anybody. He jumped up, scraping his chair back over the bare floor. Esau jumped up too, and he and Len went to picking up plates off the table so fast they jostled each other. On the other side of the candlelight, Amity slowly stacked the cups, and smiled.

  Mrs. Taylor went out, carrying two serving dishes into the kitchen. At the hall door, the judge seemed on the point of going to his study, as he always did immediately after the final grace. Esau turned suddenly and gave Len a covert glare of anger, and whispered, “Stay out of this.”

  Amity walked toward the kitchen door, balancing the stack of cups in her two hands. Her yellow hair hung down her back in a thick braid. She wore a dress of gray cotton, high in the neck and long in the skirt, but it did not look on her at all the way a similar dress did on her mother. She had a wonderful way of walking. It made Len’s heart come up in his throat every time he saw it. He glared back at Esau and started after her with his own load of plates, making long strides to get ahead. And Judge Taylor said quietly from the hall door, “Len —come into the study when you’ve put those down. They can get along without you for one washing.”

  Len stopped. He gave Taylor a startled and apprehensive look, and said, “Yes, sir.” Taylor nodded and left the room. Len glanced briefly at Esau, who was openly upset.

  “What does he want?” asked Esau.

  “How should I know?”

  “Listen. Listen, have you been up to anything?”

  Amity went slowly through the swinging door, with her skirt moving gracefully around her ankles. Len flush
ed.

  “No more’n you have, Esau,” he said angrily. He went after Amity and put his pile of dishes down on the sink board. Amity began to roll her sleeves up. She said to her mother, “Len can’t help tonight. Daddy wants him.”

  Reba Taylor turned from the stove, where a pot of wash water simmered over the coals. She had a mild, pleasant, rather vacuous face, and Len had marked her long ago as one of the incurious ones. Life had passed over her so easily.

  “Dear, dear,” she said. “Surely you haven’t done anything wrong, Len?”

  “I hope not, ma’am.”

  “I’ll bet you,” said Amity, “that it’s about Mike Dulinsky and his warehouse.”

  “Mr. Dulinsky,” said Reba Taylor sharply, “and get about your dishes, young lady. They’re your concern. Run along, Len. Very likely the judge only wants to give you some advice, and you could do worse than listen to it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Len, and went out, across the dining room and into the hall and along that to the study, wondering all the way whether he had been seen kissing Amity in the garden, or whether it was about the Dulinsky business, or what. He had often gone to the judge’s study, and he had often talked with him, about books and the past and the future and sometimes even the present, but he had never been called in before.

  The study door was open. Taylor said, “Come in, Len.” He was sitting behind his big desk in the angle of the windows. They faced the west, and the sky beyond them was a dull black as though it had been wiped all over with soot. The trees looked sickly and colorless, and the river lay at one side like a strip of lead. Taylor had been sitting there looking out, with an unlighted candle and an unopened book beside him. He was rather a small man, with smooth cheeks and a high forehead. His hair and beard were always neatly trimmed, his linen was fresh every day, and his dark plain suit was cut from the finest cloth that came into the Refuge market. Len liked him. He had books and read them and encouraged other people to read them, and he was not afraid of knowledge, though he never made a parade of having any more than he needed in his profession. “Don’t call undue attention to yourself,” he often told Len, “and you will avoid a great deal of trouble.”