“Honest men, Len, both of them. Yes, they are. Both of them got up this morning all fired up with nobility and good purpose and went and did the right as they saw it. There’s never been an act done since the beginning, from a kid stealing candy to a dictator committing genocide, that the person doing it didn’t think he was fully justified. That’s a mental trick called rationalizing, and it’s done the human race more harm than anything else you can name.”
“Burdette, maybe,” said Len. “He’s another one like the man at the preaching that night. But not the judge. He knew better.”
“Not at the time. That’s the hell of it. The doubts always come later, and they’re usually too late. Take yourself, Len. When you ran away from home, did you have any doubts about it? Did you say to yourself, I am now going to do an evil thing and make my parents very unhappy?”
Len looked down at the gleaming water for a long time without answering. Finally he said, in an oddly quiet voice, “How are they? Are they all right?”
“The last I heard they were fine. I didn’t go up this spring myself.”
“And Gran?”
“She died, a year ago last December.”
“Yes,” said Len. “She was terrible old.” It was strange how sad he felt about Gran, as though a part of his life had gone. Suddenly, with painful clarity, he saw her again sitting on the stoop in the sunlight, looking at the flaming October trees and talking about the red dress she had had so long ago, when the world was a different place.
He said, “Pa couldn’t ever quite make her shut up.”
Hostetter nodded. “My own grandmother was much the same way.”
Silence again. Len sat and watched the river, and the past lay heavy on him, and he did not want to go to Bartorstown. He wanted to go home.
“Your brother’s doing fine,” said Hostetter. “Has two boys of his own now.”
“That’s good.”
“Piper’s Run hasn’t changed much.”
“No,” said Len. “I reckon not.” And then he added, “Oh, shut up!”
Hostetter smiled.
“That’s the advantage I have over you. I’m going home. It’s been a long time.”
“Then you didn’t come from Pennsylvania at all.”
“My people did, originally. I was born in Bartorstown.”
An old anger rose and pricked at Len. “Listen,” he said, “you knew why we ran away. You must have known all along where we were and what we were doing.”
“I felt sort of responsible,” Hostetter admitted. “I kept tabs.”
“All right,” said Len, “why did you make us wait so long? You knew where we wanted to go.”
Hostetter said, “Do you remember Soames?”
“I’ll never forget him.”
“He trusted a boy.”
“But,” said Len, “I wouldn’t——” Then he remembered how Esau had put Hostetter in a bad place. “I guess I see what you mean.”
“We’ve got one unbreakable law in Bartorstown. That law is Hands Off, and because of it we’ve been able to keep going all these years when the very name of Bartorstown is enough to hang you. Soames broke it. I’m breaking it now, but I got permission. And believe me, that was the feat of the century. For one solid week I talked myself hoarse to Sherman——”
“Sherman,” said Len, straightening up. “Yes, Sherman. Sherman wants to know if you’ve heard from Byers——”
“What the hell are you talking about?” asked Hostetter, staring.
“Over the radio,” said Len, and the old excitement came back on him like a stroke of summer lightning. “The voices talking that night I let the cows out of the barn and we went after them down to the creek, and Esau dropped the radio. The spool thing reeled out, and the voices came—Sherman wants to know. And something about the river. That’s why we went down to the Ohio.”
“Oh yes,” said Hostetter. “The radio. That was the start of the whole thing, wasn’t it? I owed Esau something for stealing it. I owed him for the blood I sweated when I found it was gone.” Hostetter shivered. “Christ. When I think how close he came to exposing me—— I’d never have made it back alive, you know. Your own people would have told me to go and never show my face again, but the word would have spread. I had to throw Esau to the wolves, and I won’t say I was sorry. But it was too bad you got dragged into it.”
“I never blamed you. I told Esau it wasn’t going to be that easy.”
“Well, you can thank the farmers, because if it hadn’t been for them I’d never have talked Sherman into letting me pick you up. I told him you were sure to get it from one side or the other, and I didn’t want your blood on my conscience. He finally gave in, but I’ll tell you, Len, the next time somebody gives you a piece of good advice, you take it.”
Len rubbed his neck where the rope had scratched it. “Yes, sir. And thanks. I won’t forget what you did.”
Quite sternly, speaking as Pa had used to speak sometimes, Hostetter said, “Don’t. Not for me particularly, or for Sherman, but because of a lot of people and ideas that might just depend on your not forgetting.”
Len said slowly, “Are you afraid you can’t trust me?”
“It isn’t exactly a question of trust.”
“What is it, then?”
“You’re going to Bartorstown.”
Len frowned, trying to understand what he was getting at. “But that’s where I want to go. That’s why—all this happened.”
Hostetter pushed the flat-brimmed hat back from his forehead so that his face showed clear in the moonlight. His eyes rested shrewdly and steadily on Len.
“You’re going to Bartorstown,” he repeated. “You have a place all dreamed up inside your head, and you call it by that name, but that isn’t where you’re going. You’re going to the real Bartorstown, and it’s probably not going to be very much like the place in your head at all. You may not like it. You may come to have pretty strong feelings about it. And that’s why I say, don’t forget you owe us something.”
“Listen,” said Len. “Can you learn in Bartorstown? Can you read books and talk about things, and use machines, and really think?”
Hostetter nodded.
“Then I’ll like it there.” Len looked out at the dark still country slipping by in the night, the sleeping, murderous, hateful country. “I never want to see any of this again. Ever.”
“For my sake,” said Hostetter, “I hope you’ll fit in. I’m going to have trouble enough as it is, explaining the girl to Sherman. She wasn’t included. But I couldn’t see what else to do.”
“I was wondering about her,” Len said.
“Well, she’d come down there to Esau, to try and help him get away. She said she couldn’t go back to her parents. She said she was going to stay with Esau. And it seemed like she pretty well had to.”
“Why?” asked Len.
“Don’t you know?”
“No.”
“Best reason in the world,” said Hostetter. “She’s got his child.”
Len sat staring with his mouth open. Hostetter got up. And a man came out of the deckhouse and said to him, “Sam’s talking to Collins on the radio. Maybe you’d better come down, Ed.”
“Trouble?”
“Well, it seems like our friend we dumped in the water back there meant what he said. Collins says two towboats went by together just after moonrise. They didn’t have any tow, and they were chock full of men. One was from Refuge, the other from Shadwell.”
Hostetter scowled, knocking the ashes out of his pipe and crushing them carefully under his boots. He said to Len, “We asked Collins to keep watch, just in case. He’s got a shantyboat and acts as a mobile post. Well, come on. This is all part of being a Bartorstown man. You might as well get used to it.”
15
Len followed Hostetter and the other man, whose name was Kovacs, into the deckhouse. This was about two thirds the length of the boat, and it was built more as a roof over the cargo hold than it was to provi
de any elegance for the crew. There were some narrow bunks built in around the walls, and Amity was lying in one of them, her hair all tumbled around her head and her face pale and swollen with tears. Esau was sitting on the edge of the bunk, holding her hand. He looked as though he had been sitting there a long time, and he had an expression Len could not remember seeing on him before, haggard and careworn and concerned.
Len looked at Amity. She spoke to him, not meeting his eyes, and he said hello, and it was like speaking to a stranger. He thought, with an already fading pang, of the yellow-haired girl he had kissed in the rose arbor and wondered where she had gone so swiftly. This was a woman here, somebody else’s woman, already marked by the cares and troubles of living, and he did not know her.
“Did you see my father, Len?” she asked. “Is he all right?” “He was, the last I saw of him,” Len told her. “The farmers
weren’t after him. They never touched him.”
Esau got up. “You get some sleep now. That’s what you need.” He patted her hand and then pulled down a thin blanket that had been nailed overhead by way of a curtain. She whimpered a little, protestingly, and told Esau not to go too far away. “Don’t worry about that,” said Esau, with just the faintest trace of despair. “There isn’t any place to go.” He glanced quickly at Len, and then at Hostetter, and Len said, “Congratulations, Esau.”
A slow red flush crept up over Esau’s cheekbones. He straightened his shoulders and said almost defiantly, “I think it’s great. And you know how it was, Len. I mean, why we couldn’t get married before, on account of the judge.”
“Sure,” said Len. “I know.”
“And I’ll tell you one thing,” said Esau. “I’ll be a better father to it than my dad ever was to me.”
“I don’t know,” said Len. “My father was the best in the world, and I didn’t turn out so good either.”
He followed Hostetter and Kovacs down a steep hatch ladder into the cargo hold.
The barge did not draw much water, but she was sixty feet long and eighteen wide, and every foot of space in her was crammed with chests and bales and sacks. She smelled strongly of wood and river water, flour and cloth, old tallow and pitch, and a lot of things Len could not identify. From beyond the after bulkhead, sounding muffled and thunderous, came the thumping rhythm of the engine. Just under the hatch a sort of well had been left so that a man could come down the ladder and see that nothing had broached or shifted, and the ladder looked like a solid piece of construction butting onto a solid deck. But a square section of the planking had been swung aside and there was a little pit there, and in the pit was a thing that Len recognized as a radio, although it was larger than the one he and Esau had had, and different in other ways. A man was sitting beside it, talking, with a single lantern hung overhead to give him light.
“Here they are now,” he said. “Wait a minute.” He turned and spoke to Hostetter. “Collins reckons the best thing would be to contact Rosen at the falls. The river’s fairly low now, and he figures with a little help we could slip them there.”
“Worth trying,” said Hostetter. “What do you think, Joe?”
Kovacs said he thought Collins was right. “We sure don’t want any fights, and they’re bound to catch up to us, running light.”
Esau had come down the ladder, too. He was standing by Len, listening.
“Watts?” he asked.
“I guess so. He must have gone scurrying around clear over to Shadwell to get men.”
“They’re crazy mad,” said Kovacs. “They can’t very well get back at the farmers, so they’ll take it out on us. Besides, we’re fair game whenever you find us.” He was a big burly young man, very brown from the sun. He looked as though it would take a great deal to frighten him, and he did not seem frightened now, but Len was impressed by his great determination not to be caught by the boats from Refuge.
Hostetter nodded to the man at the radio. “All right, Sam. Let’s talk to Rosen.”
Sam said good-by to Collins and began to fiddle with the knobs. “God,” said Esau, almost sobbing, “do you remember how we worked with that thing and couldn’t raise a whisper, and I stole those books——” He shook his head.
“If you hadn’t happened to listen in at night,” said Hostetter, “you never would have heard anything.” He was crouched down beside the pit now, hanging over Sam’s shoulder.
“That was Len’s idea,” said Esau. “He figured you’d run too much risk of being seen or overheard in the daytime.”
“Like now,” said Kovacs. “We’ve got the aerial up—pretty obvious, if you had light enough to see it.”
“Shut up,” said Sam, bending over the radio. “How do you expect me to—— Hey, will you guys give me a clear channel for a minute? This is an emergency.” A jumble of voices coming in tinny confusion from the speaker clarified into a single voice which said, “This is Petto at Indian Ferry. Do you want me to relay?”
“No,” said Sam. “I want Rosen. He’s within range. Lay low, will you? We’ve got bandits on our tail.”
“Oh,” said the voice of Petto. “Sing out if you want help.” “Thanks.” Sam fiddled with the knobs some more and continued to call for Rosen. Len stood by the ladder and watched and listened, and it seemed in retrospect that he had spent nearly all of his life in Piper’s Run down by the Pymatuning trying to make voices come out of an obstinate little box. Now, in a daze of wonder and weariness, he heard, and saw, and could not realize yet that he was actually a part of it.
“This is so much bigger than the one we had,” said Esau, moving forward. His eyes shone, the way they had before, so that his handsome, willful face looked like a boy’s face again, and the subtle weakness of the mouth was lost in eagerness. “How does it work? What’s an aerial? How——”
Kovacs began to explain rather vaguely about batteries and transistors. His mind was not on it. Len’s gaze was drawn to Hostetter’s face, half shaded by the brim of his hat—the familiar brown Amish hat, the familiar square cut of the hair and the shape of the beard—and he thought of Pa, and he thought of Brother James and his two boys, and of Gran who would not regret the old world any more, and of Baby Esther who must be grown tall by now, and he turned his head away so that he could not see Hostetter but only the impersonal dark beyond the lantern’s circle, full of dim and meaningless cargo shapes. The engine thumped, slow and steady, with a short sighing like the breathing of someone asleep. He could hear the paddle blades strike the water, and now he could hear other sounds too, the woody creaking of the barge itself and the sloughing and bubbling of the river sliding underneath the hull. One of those moments of disorientation came to him, a wild interval of wondering what he was doing in this place, ending in a realization that a lot had happened in the last twenty-four hours and he was tired out.
Sam was talking to Rosen.
“We’re going to crack on some speed now. It should be right after daybreak, if we don’t run onto a sand bar.”
“Well, watch it,” said the scratchy voice of Rosen from the speaker. “The channel’s tricky now.”
“Is anything getting down the rapids?”
“Nothing but driftwood. It’s all locking through, and I’ve got them piled up at both ends of the canal. I don’t want to tamper with the gates unless I’m forced to it. I’ve spent years building myself up here, but the slightest breath of suspicion——”
“Yeah,” said Sam. “It would look a little coincidental, I guess. Of course, we could just ram through——”
“Not with my barge,” said Kovacs. “We’ve got a long way to go in her yet, and I like her bottom in one piece. There must be another way.”
“Let me think,” said Rosen.
There was a long pause while he thought. The men waited around the radio, breathing heavily.
Rather timidly, a voice spoke, saying, “This is Petto again, at Indian Ferry.”
“Okay. What?”
“Well, I was just thinking. The river’s low n
ow, and the channel’s narrow. It ought to be easy to block.”
“Do you have anything in mind?” asked Hostetter.
“There’s a dredge working right off the end of the point,” said Petto. “The men come in at night to the village, so we don’t have to worry about anyone drowning. Now, if you could pass here while it’s still dark, and I could be out by the dredge ready to turn her loose, the river makes a bend right here and the current would swing her on broadside, and I’ll bet nothing but a canoe would get by her till she was towed off again.”
“Petto,” said Sam, “I love you. Did you hear that, Rosen?”
“I heard. Sounds like a solution.”
“It does,” said Kovacs, “but when we get there, lock us through fast, just in case.”
“I’ll be watching,” said Rosen. “So long.”
“All right,” said Sam. “Petto?” They began to talk, arranging signals and timing, discussing the condition of the channel between their present position and Indian Ferry. Kovacs turned and looked at Len and Esau.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ve got a job for you. Know anything about steam engines?”
“A little,” said Len.
“Well, all you have to know about this one is to keep the fire up. We’re in a hurry.”
“Sure,” said Len, glad of something to do. He was tired, but he could stand to be more tired if it would stop his mind from whirling around over old memories and unhappy thoughts, and the picture of Dulinsky’s dying face, which was already becoming confused with the face of Soames. He scrambled up the ladder after Kovacs. In the deckhouse, Amity had apparently fallen asleep, for she made no move when they passed, Esau going on his tiptoes and looking nervously at the blanket curtaining her bunk. For a minute the night air touched them, clean and cool, and then they went down again into the pit where the boiler was. Here there was a smell of hot iron and coal dust, and a very sweaty-looking man with a broad shovel moving between the bin and the fire door. Kovacs said, “Here’s some help, Charlie. We’re going to move.”
Charlie nodded. “Extra shovels over there.” He kicked open the door and began to pile in the coal. Len took his shirt off. Esau started to, but stopped with it half unbuttoned and said, looking at the boiler, “I thought it would be different.”
American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56 Page 54