He was very dizzy, from the pounding and the blow on the head he had already had up on the north road, so that he was not sure what happened except that suddenly there seemed to be more men, more bodies around him, more upheaval. He was thrown sharply aside. The hands seemed to have let go of him. He hit a tree trunk and slid down it to the ground. There was a face above him. It had blue eyes and a sandy beard with two wide streaks of gray in it, one at each corner of the mouth. He said to the face, “If there weren’t so many of you I could kill you all.” And it answered him, “You don’t want to kill me, Len. Come on, boy, get up.”
Tears came suddenly into Len’s eyes. “Mr. Hostetter,” he said. “Mr. Hostetter.” He put up his hands and caught hold of him, and it seemed like a long time ago, in another hour of darkness and fear. Hostetter gave him a strong pull up to his feet and jerked the rope from around his neck.
“Run,” he said. “Run like the devil.”
Len ran. There were several other men with Hostetter, and they must have charged in hard with the poles and boat hooks they had, because the Refuge men were pretty well scattered. But they were not going to give Len up without a fight, and the intrusion of Hostetter and his party had convinced them that they were right about Bartorstown. They were determined now to get Hostetter too, shouting and cursing, gathering together again and searching for anything they could use as weapons, stones, fallen branches, clods. Len staggered and stumbled as he went, and Hostetter put a hand under his arm and rushed him along.
“Boat waiting,” he said. “Farther down.” Things began to fly through the air around them. A stone bounced off Hostetter’s back and he hunched his head down until his broad-brimmed hat seemed to sit flat on his shoulders. They ran in among a grove of trees and out on the other side, and Len stopped suddenly.
“Esau,” he said. “Can’t go without Esau.”
“He’s already aboard,” said Hostetter. “Come on!”
They ran again, across a pasture sloping down to the water’s edge, and the cows went bucketing away with their tails in the air. At the lower end of the pasture was another clump of trees, growing right on the bank, and in their partial concealment a big steam barge was tied up, with a couple of men standing on the deck holding axes, ready to chop the lines free. Smoke began to puff up suddenly from the single low stack, as though a banked fire had been stirred swiftly to life. Len saw Esau hanging over the rail, and there was someone beside him, someone with yellow hair and a long skirt.
There was a board laid from the bank to the rail. They scrambled up over it onto the deck and Hostetter shouted at the men with the axes. Stones were flying again, and Esau caught Amity and hurried her around to the other side of the deckhouse. The axes flashed. There was more shouting, and the Refuge men, with Watts in the lead, rushed right down to the bank and Watts and two others ran out onto the plank. Len did not see Ames among them. The lines parted and went snaking into the water. Hostetter and Len and some others grabbed up long poles and pushed off hard. The plank fell into the water with Watts and the other men that were on it. There was a roar and a clatter from below, the deck shook and sparks burst up through the stack. The barge began to move out into the current. Watts stood waist-deep in the muddy water by the bank and shook his fists at them.
“We know you now!” he shouted, his voice coming thin across the widening gap. “You won’t get away!”
The men on the bank behind him shouted too. Their voices grew fainter but the note of hatred remained in them, and the ugliness in the gestures of their hands. Len looked back at Refuge. They were well out in the river now and he could see past the waterfront. Smoke obscured much of the town, but he could see enough. What Burdette’s farmers had left untouched the spreading fire was taking for its own.
Len sat down on the deck with his back against the house. He put his arms across his knees and laid his head on them and felt an overwhelming desire to cry like a little boy, but he was too tired even to do that. He just sat and tried to make his mind as blank as the rest of him felt. But he could not do it, and over and over he saw Dulinsky stop and fall down slowly into the hot dust of the north road, and he smelled the smell of a great burning, and Burdette’s harsh voice sounded in his ears, saying, “We will have no cities in our midst.”
After a while he became aware that somebody was standing over him. He looked up, and it was Hostetter, holding his hat in his hand and wiping his forehead wearily on his coat sleeve.
“Well, boy,” he said, “you’ve got your wish. You’re on your way to Bartorstown.”
14
It was night, warm and tranquil. There was a moon, lighting the surface of the river and turning the two banks into masses of black shadow. The barge supped along, chuffing gently as it added a bit to the deck, tied down securely and covered with canvas against the rain. Len had found a place in it. He had slept for a while, and he was sitting now with his back against a bale, watching the river go by.
Hostetter came by, walking slowly along the narrow space left clear on the foredeck, trailing a fragrance of tobacco smoke from an old pipe. He saw Len sitting up, and stopped. “Feel better?”
“I feel sick,” Len said, so viciously that Hostetter knew what he meant. He nodded.
“You know now how I felt the night they killed Bill Soames.”
“Murderers,” said Len. “Cowards. Bastards.” He cursed them until the words choked in his throat. “You should have seen them standing there across the road. And then Burdette shot him. He shot him just the way you’d shoot some vermin you found in the corn.”
“Yes,” said Hostetter slowly, “we’d have had you out of there sooner if you hadn’t gone up after Dulinsky. Poor devil. But I’m not surprised.”
“Couldn’t you have helped him?”
“Us? You mean Bartorstown?”
“He wanted the same things you want. Growth, progress, intelligence, a future. Couldn’t you have helped?”
There was an edge to Len’s voice, but Hostetter only took the pipe out of his mouth and asked quietly, “How?”
Len thought about that. After a while he said, “I suppose you couldn’t.”
“Not without an army. We don’t have an army, and if we did have we wouldn’t use it. It takes an almighty force to make people change their whole way of thinking and living. We had a force like that just yesterday as time goes for a nation, and we don’t want any more of them.”
“That’s what the judge was afraid of. Change. And he just stood there and watched Dulinsky die.” Len shook his head. “He died for nothing. That’s what he died for, nothing.”
“No,” said Hostetter, “I wouldn’t say that. But it takes more than one Dulinsky. It takes a lot of them, one after the other, in different places—”
“And more Burdettes, and more burnings.”
“Yes. And someday one will come along at the right time, and the change will be made.”
“That’s a lot to look forward to.”
“That’s the way it is. And then all the Dulinskys will become martyrs to a great ideal. In the meantime, you’re disturbers of the peace. And damn it, Len, you know in a way they’re right. They’re comfortable and happy. Who are you—or any of us—to tell them it’s all got to be torn up and changed?”
Len turned and looked at Hostetter in the moonlight. “Is that why you just stand by and watch?”
Hostetter said, with just the faintest note of impatience in his voice, “I don’t think you understand about us yet. We’re not supermen. We’ve got all we can do just to stay alive, without trying to remake a country that doesn’t want to be remade.”
“But how can you say they’re right? Ignorant butchers like Burdette, hypocrites like the judge—”
“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 genoci
de, 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 terribly 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 shanty-boat 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 provide 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 lo
ng 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 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.”
The Long Tomorrow Page 13