Mr. Hostetter ran across the open space to another trader’s wagon, parked beside a clump of trees. Len couldn’t see the name on the canvas, but he was sure it was Soames’s wagon. Esau watched too. The preaching man was going at it again, waving his arms high hi the air.
Mr. Hostetter jumped out of the other wagon and ran back. He was carrying a small chest, maybe a foot long, under one arm. He climbed up onto the seat, and Len scuttled forward inside the wagon. “Please,” he said. “Can I sit beside you?”
Hostetter handed him the box. “Stow this inside. All right, climb up. Where’s Esau?”
Len looked back. Esau was curled up on the floor, lying with his face down on a bundle of homespun. He called him, but Esau did not answer. “Passed out,” said Hostetter. He uncurled his whip with a crack and shouted to the horses. The six great bays leaned like one horse into the breastbands and the wagon rolled. It rolled faster and faster, and the firelight was left behind, and the voice of the crowd. There was the dark road and the dark tree beside it, the smell of dust, and the peaceful fields. The horses slowed to an easier gait. Mr. Hostetter put his arm around Len, and Len clung to him.
“Why did they do it?” he asked.
“Because they’re afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of yesterday,” said Mr. Hostetter. “Of tomorrow.” Suddenly, with astounding fury, he cursed them. Len stared at him, open-mouthed. Hostetter shut his jaws tight in the middle of a word and shook his head. Len could feel him tremble all over. When he spoke again his voice was normal, or almost.
“Stick with your own people, Len. You won’t find any better.”
Len murmured, “Yes, sir.” Nobody spoke after that. The wagon rocked along and the motion made Len drowsy, not a good drowsiness of sleep, but the sickish kind that comes with exhaustion. Esau was very quiet in the back. Finally the team slowed to a walk, and Len saw that they were back in the fairgrounds.
“Where’s your wagon?” asked Hostetter, and Len told him. When they came in sight of it, the fire was built up again and Pa and Uncle David were standing beside it. They looked grim and angry, and when the boys got down they did not say a word, except to thank Hostetter for bringing them back. Len looked at Pa. He wanted to get down on his knees and say, “Father, I have sinned.” But all he could do was to stand there and begin to sob and shake again.
“What happened?” asked Pa.
Hostetter told him, in four words. “There was a stoning.”
Pa looked at Esau and Uncle David, and then he looked at Len and sighed. “Only once in a long time do they really do such a thing, but this had to be the time. The boys were forbidden, but they would go, and so they had to see it.” He said to Len, “Hush, boy. Hush now, it’s all over.” He pushed him, not ungently, toward the wagon. “Go on, Lennie, you get into your blanket and go to sleep.”
Len crept under the wagon and rolled the blanket around him and lay there. A weak, dark feeling came over him, and the world began to slip away, carrying with it the memory of Soames’s dying face. Through the canvas he heard Mr. Hostetter saying, “I tried to warn the man this afternoon that the fanatics were whispering about him. I followed him there tonight, to get him to come away. But I was too late, there was nothing I could do.”
Uncle David asked, “Was he guilty?”
“Of proselyting? You know better than that. The men of Bartorstown don’t proselyte.”
“Then he was from Bartorstown?”
“Soames came from Virginia. I knew him as a trader, and a fellow man.”
“Guilty or not,” Pa said heavily, “it’s an unchristian thing. And blasphemous. But as long as there are crazed or crafty leaders to play on old fears, a mob like that will turn cruel.”
“All of us,” answered Hostetter, “have our old fears.”
He climbed up on the seat again and drove away. But Len never heard the end of his going.
3
Three weeks had gone by, lacking a day or two, and in Piper’s Run it was October, and a Sabbath afternoon. Len sat alone on the side stoop.
After a while the door behind him opened, and he knew from the scuffling footsteps and the thump of the cane that it was Gran coming out. She clamped one bony, amazingly strong hand on his wrist and clambered down two steps and then sat, folding up stiffly like a dry twig when you bend it.
“Thank you, thank you,” said Gran, and began arranging her several layers of skirts around her ankles.
“Do you want a rag for under you?” asked Len. “Or do you want your shawl?”
“No, it’s warm in the sun.”
Len sat down again, beside her. With his brows pulled together and his mouth pulled down, he looked nearly as old as Gran and much more solemn. She peered at him closely, and he began to feel uncomfortable, knowing that he had been sought out.
“You’re mighty broody these days, Lennie.”
“I guess so.”
“You ain’t sulking, are you? I hate a sulker.”
“No, Gran. I’m not sulking.”
“Your pa was right to punish you. You disobeyed him, and you know now he forbid you for your own good.”
Len nodded. “I know.”
Pa had not delivered the expected beating. In fact, he had been gentler than Len would have dreamed possible. He had spoken very seriously about what Len had done and what he had seen, and he had finished with the statement that Len was not to go to the fair next year at all, and perhaps not the year after, unless he had been able to prove by then that he could be trusted. Len considered that Pa had been mighty decent. Uncle David had licked Esau to the last inch of his skin. And since at this moment Len did not feel that he ever wanted to see the fair again, being denied it was no hardship.
He said so, and Gran smiled her toothless ancient smile and patted his knee. “You’ll feel different a year from now. That’s when it’ll hurt.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, if you’re not sulking, there’s something else the matter with you. What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Lennie, I’ve had a lot to do with boys, and I know no natural healthy boy should mope around like you do. And on a day like this, even if it is the Sabbath.” She looked up at the deep blue sky and sniffed the golden air, and then she looked at the woods that encircled the farmstead, seeing them not as groups of individual trees but as a glorious blur of colors she had almost forgotten the names for. She sighed, half in pleasure, half in regret
“Seems like this is the only time you see real colors any more, when the trees turn in the fall. The world used to be full of colors. You wouldn’t believe it, Lennie, but I had a dress once, as red as that tree.”
“It must have been pretty.” He tried to picture Gran as a little girl in a red dress and failed, partly because he could not imagine her as anything but an old woman, and partly because he had never seen anybody dressed in red.
“It was beautiful,” said Gran slowly, and sighed again.
They sat together on the step, and did not speak, and looked at nothing. And all at once Gran said, “I know what ails you. You’re still thinking about the stoning.”
Len began to shake a little. He did not want to, but he couldn’t make it stop. He blurted out, “Oh, Gran, it was—He still had one boot on. He was all naked except for this one boot, and he looked so funny. And they kept on throwing stones—”
If he shut his eyes, he could see again how the blood and the dirt ran together on the man’s white skin, and how the hands of the people rose and fell.
“Why did they do it, Gran? Why?”
“Better ask your pa.”
“He said they were afraid, and that fear makes stupid people do wicked things, and that I should pray for them.” Len ran the back of his hand violently across his nose. “I wouldn’t pray a word for them, except that somebody would throw stones at them.”
“You’ve only seen one bad thing,” said Gran, shaking her head with the close white cap slowly from side to
side, her eyes half shut and looking inward. “If you’d seen the things I saw, you’d know what fear can do. And I was younger than you, Lennie.”
“It was awful bad, wasn’t it, Gran?”
“I’m an old woman, an old old woman, and I still dream—There were fires in the sky, red fires, there and there and there.” Her gaunt hand pointed out three places in a semicircle westward, and from south to north. “They were cities burning. The cities I used to go to with my mother. And the people from them came, and the soldiers came, and there were shelters in every field, and people crowded into the barns and the houses anywhere they could, and all our stock was butchered to feed them, forty head of fine dairy cows. Those were bad, bad times. It’s a mercy anybody lived through them.”
“Is that why they killed the man?” asked Len. “Because they’re afraid he might bring all that back again—the cities, and all?”
“Isn’t that what they said at the preaching?” said Gran, knowing full well, since she had been to preachings herself many decades ago when the terror brought the great boiling up of faith that birthed new sects and strengthened the old ones.
“Yes. They said he tempted the boys with some kind of fruit, I guess they meant from the Tree of Knowledge like it says in the Bible. And they said he came from a place called Bartorstown. What is Bartorstown, Gran?”
“You ask your pa,” she said, and began to fuss with her apron. “Where’d I put that handkerchief? I know I had it—”
“I did ask him. He said there wasn’t any such place.”
“Hmph,” said Gran.
“He said only children and fanatics believed in it”
“Well, I ain’t going to tell you any different, so don’t try to make me.”
“I won’t, Gran. But was there ever, maybe a long time ago?”
Gran found her handkerchief. She wiped her face and her eyes with it, and snuffled, and put it away, and Len waited.
“When I was a little girl,” said Gran, “we had this war.”
Len nodded. Mr. Nordholt, the schoolmaster, had told them a good bit about it, and it had got connected in his mind with the Book of Revelations, grand and frightening.
“It came on for a long time, I guess,” Gran continued. “I remember on the teevee they talked about it a lot, and they showed pictures of the bombs that made clouds just like a tremendous mushroom, and each one could wipe out a city, all by itself. Oh yes, Lennie, there was a rain of fire from heaven and many were consumed in it! The Lord gave it to the enemy for a day to be His flail.”
“But we won.”
“Oh yes, in the end we won.”
“Did they build Bartorstown then?”
“Before the war. The gover’ment built it. That was when the gover’ment was still in Washington, and it was a lot different than it is now. Bigger, somehow. I don’t know, a little girl doesn’t care much about those things. But they built a lot of secret places, and Bartorstown was the most secret of all, way out West somewhere.”
“If it was so secret, how did you know about it?”
“They told about it on the teevee. Oh, they didn’t tell where it was or what if was for, and they said it might be only a rumor. But I remember the name.”
“Then,” said Len softly, “it was real!”
“But that’s not saying it is now. That was a long time ago. It’s maybe just the memory of it hung on, like your pa said, with children and fanatics.” She added tartly under her breath that she wasn’t either one of those, herself. Then she said, “You leave it alone, Lennie. Don’t have any truck with the Devil, and he won’t have any with you. You don’t want happening to you what happened to that man at the preaching.”
Lennie turned hot and cold all over again. But curiosity made him ask in spite of that, “Is Bartorstown such a terrible place?”
“It is,” said Gran with sour wisdom, “if everybody thinks it is. Oh, I know! All my life I’ve had to watch my tongue. I can remember the world the way it was before. I was only a little girl, but I was old enough for that, almost as old as you. And I can remember very well how we got to be Mennonites, that never were Mennonites before. Sometimes I wish—” She broke off, and looked again at the flaming trees. “I did love that red dress.”
Another silence.
“Gran.”
“Well, what is it?”
“What were the cities like, really?”
“Better ask your pa.”
“You know what he always says. Besides, he never saw them. You did, Gran. You can remember.”
“The Lord in His infinite wisdom destroyed them. It’s not up to you to question. Nor me.”
“I’m not questioning—I’m only asking. What were they like?”
“They were big. A hundred Piper’s Runs wouldn’t have made up a half of even a small city. They had all hard pavements, with walks to the side for the people, and big wide roads in the middle for the cars, and there were great big buildings that went way up in the air. They were noisy, and the air smelled different, and there were always a lot of people hurrying back and forth. I always liked to go to the city. Nobody thought they were wicked then.”
Len’s eyes were large and round.
“They had big movie theaters, huge, with plush seats, and supermarkets twice as big as that barn, with every kind of food in them, all in bright shiny packages—the things you could buy any day in the week that you’ve never even heard of, Lennie! White sugar, we thought nothing of it. And spices, and fresh vegetables all winter, frozen into little bricks. And the things there were in the stores! Oh, so many things, I couldn’t begin to tell you, clothes and toys and ’lectric washers and books and radios and teevee sets—”
She rocked back and forth a little, and her old eyes flashed.
“Christmas time,” she said. “Oh, at Christmas time with the windows all decorated and the lights and the carols! All colors and brightness and people laughing. It wasn’t wicked. It was wonderful.”
Len’s jaw dropped. He sat that way, with his mouth open, and a heavy step vibrated along the floor from inside, and he tried to tell Gran to hush, but she had forgotten he was there.
“Cowboys on the teevee,” she mumbled, reaching far back across the troubled decades. “Music, and ladies in beautiful dresses that left their shoulders all bare. I thought I would look like that when I got big. Picture books, and Mr. Bloomer’s drugstore with the ice cream and the chocolate rabbits at Easter—”
Pa came out the door. Len got up and went down to the bottom of the steps. Pa looked at him, and Len crumbled inside, thinking that life had been nothing but trouble for the last three weeks.
“Water,” said Gran, “that ran out of shiny faucets when you turned them. And a bathroom right in the house, and ’lectric light—”
Pa said to Len, “Did you get her talking?”
“No, honest,” said Len. “She started off herself, about a red dress.”
“Easy,” said Gran. “All easy, and bright, and comfortable. That was the world, And then it was gone. So fast.”
Pa said, “Mother.” She glanced up at him, sidelong, and her eyes were like two faded sparks, snapping and flaring. She said, “Flat-hat.”
“Now, Mother—”
“I wish I had it back,” said Gran. “I wish I had a red dress, and a teevee, and a nice white porcelain toilet, and all the other things. It was a good world! I wish it hadn’t ended.”
“But it did end,” said Pa. “And you are a foolish old woman to question the goodness of God.” He was talking less to her than to Len, and he was very angry. “Did any of those things help you to survive? Did they help the people of the cities? Did they?”
Gran turned her face away and would not answer.
Pa came down and stood in front of her. “You understand me, Mother. Answer me. Did they?”
Tears came into Gran’s eyes, and the fire died out of them. “I’m an old woman,” she said. “It isn’t right for you to yell at me that way.”
“Mo
ther. Did those things help one single person to survive?”
She let her head fall forward and moved it slowly from side to side.
“No,” said Pa, “and I know because you told me how no food came in any more to the markets, and nothing would work on the farms because there was no power any more, and no fuel. And only those who had always lived without all the luxuries, and done for themselves with their own hands, and had no truck with the cities, came through without hurt and led us all in the path of peace and plenty and humility before God. And you dare to scoff at the Mennonites! Chocolate rabbits,” said Pa, and stamped his boots on the earth. “Chocolate rabbits! No wonder the world fell.”
He swung around to include Len in the circle of his wrath. “Haven’t you got any thankfulness in your hearts, either of you? Can’t you be grateful for a good harvest, and good health, and a warm house, and plenty to eat? What more does God have to give you to make you happy?”
The door opened again. Ma Colter’s face appeared, round and pink and full of reproof, framed in a tight white cap. “Elijah! Are you raising your voice to your mother, and on the Sabbath day?”
“I had provocation,” said Pa, and stood breathing hard through his nose for a minute or two. Then, more quietly, he said to Len, “Go to the barn.”
Len’s heart sank down into his knees. He began to shuffle away across the yard. Ma came clear out the door, onto the stoop.
“Elijah, the Sabbath day is no time—”
“It’s for the good of the boy’s soul,” said Pa, in the voice that meant no more argument. “Just leave this to me, please.”
Ma shook her head, but she went back inside. Pa walked behind Len toward the open barn doors, Gran sat where she was on the steps.
“I don’t care,” she whispered. “Those things were good.” After a minute she repeated fiercely, “Good, good, good!” Tears ran slowly down her cheeks and dropped onto the bosom of her drab homespun dress.
The Long Tomorrow Page 3