The ecstasy of abasement and repentance stayed with him until one day he fell and hurt his knee against a rock, and the pain was pain merely, with no holiness about it. The world rocked around him and fell sharply into place with all the mist cleared out of it. He was hungry and cold and tired. The mountains were high and the prairies wide. Piper’s Run was a thousand miles away. His knee hurt like the very devil, and an old growling rebellion rose up in him to say, All right, I’ve done my penance. Now that’s enough.
That was the end of the first phase. Joan began to look at him like she used to. “For a while there,” she said, “you weren’t much better than a New Ishmaelite, and I began to get scared.”
He muttered something about repentance being good for the soul, and shut her up. But secretly her words stung him and made him feel ashamed. Because they were more than partly true.
But he still had to get back to Piper’s Run. Only now he realized that the path to it was very long and hard just as the path away from it had been, and that no mystical power was going to get him there. He was going to have to walk it on his own two feet.
“But once we get there,” he would say, “we’ll be safe. The Bartorstown men can’t touch us there. If they denounced us they’d denounce themselves. We’ll be safe.”
Safe in the fields and the seasons, safe in the not-thinking, not-wanting. A contented mind and a thankful heart. Pa said those were the greatest blessings. He was right. Piper’s Run is where I lost them. Piper’s Run is where I will find them again.
Only when I think now of Piper’s Run I see it tiny and far off, and there is a lovely light on it like the light of a spring evening, but I can’t bring it close. When I think of Ma and Pa and Brother James and Baby Esther I can’t see them clearly, and their faces are all blurred.
I can see myself, all right, running with Esau across a pasture at night, kneeling in the barn straw with Pa’s strap coming down hard on my shoulders. I can see myself as I was then. But when I try to see myself as I will be, a grown man but a part of it again, I can’t.
I try to see Joan wearing the white cap and the humility, but I can’t see that, either.
Yet I have to get back. I have to find what I had there that I’ve never had since I left it. I have to find certainty.
I have to find peace.
Then one evening just at sundown Len saw the man driving a trader’s wagon with a team of big horses. He crossed a green swell of the prairie, showing briefly on the skyline, and was gone so quickly that Len was not sure he had really seen him. Joan was on her knees making a fire. He made her put it out, and that night they walked a long way by moonlight before he would stop again.
They fell in with a band of hunters—this was safe because the Bartorstown men did not go with the hunters, and Joan made doubly sure. They told a tale of New Ishmaelites to account for their condition, and the hunters shook their heads and spat.
“Them murdering devils,” one of them said. “I’m a believing man myself”—and he looked warily at the sky—“but killing just ain’t no way to serve the Lord.”
And yet you would kill us if you knew, thought Len, to serve the Lord. And he nagged Joan, who had never needed to guard her tongue so rigidly, until she was afraid to speak her name.
“Is it all like this?” she whispered to him, in the privacy of their blankets at night. “Are they all like wolves ready to tear you?”
“About Bartorstown they are. Never tell where you came from, never give them a hint so they could even guess.”
The hunters passed them on to some freighters, joining up at a rendezvous point to go south and east with a load of furs and smelted copper. Joan made sure there were no Bartorstown men among them. She kept her tongue tightly between her teeth, looking with doubtful eyes at the tiny sun-baked towns they stopped in, the lonely ranches they passed.
“It’ll be different in Piper’s Run, won’t it, Len?”
“Yes, it’ll be different.”
Kinder, greener, more fruitful, yes. But in other ways no, not different. Not different at all.
What is it that lies on the whole land, in the dusty streets and the slow beat of the horse hoofs, in the faces of the people?
But Piper’s Run is home.
On a clear midnight he thought he saw a solitary wagon tilt far off, glimmering under the moon. He took Joan and they scurried eastward alone, over river beds drying white in the summer sun, working their way from ranch to ranch, settlement to settlement
“What do people do in these places?” Joan asked, and he answered angrily, “They live.”
The blazing days went by. The long hard miles unrolled. The vision of Piper’s Run faded, little by little, no matter how he clung to it, until it was so faint he could hardly see it. He had been going a long time on momentum, and now that was running out. And the man on the wagon hounded him all through the summer days, plodding relentlessly out of the vast horizon, out of the wind and the prairie dust. Len’s going became more of a running from than a running to. He never saw the face of the man. He could not even be sure it was the same wagon. But it followed him. And he knew.
In September, in a little glaring town lost in a gray-green sea of bear grass and shinnery on the Texas border, he sat down to wait.
“You fool,” Joan told him despairingly, “it isn’t him. It’s only your guilty conscience makes you think so.”
“It’s him. You know it.”
“Why should it be? Even if it is someone from there—”
“I can tell when you’re lying, Joan. Don’t.”
“All right! It is him, of course it’s him. He was responsible for you. He was sworn for you to Sherman. What do you think?”
She glared at him, her thin brown hands curled into fists, her eyes flashing.
“You’re going to let him take you back, Len Colter? Aren’t you a man yet, for all that beard? Get on your feet. Let’s go.”
“No.” Len shook his head. “I never realized he was sworn.”
“He won’t be alone. There’ll be others with him.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“You are going to let him take you.” Her voice was shrill, breaking like a child’s. “He’s not going to take me. I’m going on.”
He spoke to her in a tone he had never used before. “You’ll stay by me, Joan.”
She stared at him, startled, and then came a look of doubt, a stirring of some dark apprehension.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s what I got to decide.” His face had grown stony and hard, impassive as flint. “Two things I’m sure of. I ain’t going to run. And I won’t be taken.”
She stayed by him, quiet, frightened of she knew not what.
Len waited.
Two days. He has not come yet, but he will. He was sworn for me.
Two days to think, to stand waiting on the battlefield. Esau never fought this battle, nor Brother James. They’re the lucky ones. But Pa did, and Hostetter did, and now it is my time. The battle of decision, the time of choice.
I made a decision in Piper’s Run. It was a child’s decision, based on a child’s dreams. I made a decision in Bartorstown, and it was still a childish decision, based on emotion. Now I am finished with dreams. I am finished with emotions. I have fasted my forty days in the wilderness and I am through with penance. I stand stripped and naked, but I stand as a man. What decision I make I will make as a man, and there will be no turning back from it after it is made.
Three days, to tear away the last sweet sunlit hopes.
I will not go back to Piper’s Run. Whichever way I go, it will not be there. Piper’s Run is a memory of childhood, and I am finished with memories, too. That door is closed behind me, long ago. Piper’s Run was a memory of peace, but no matter which way I go I know now that I will never have peace.
For peace is certainty, and there is no certainty but death.
Four days, to set the stubborn feet firmly on the ground,
teaching them not to run.
Because I am finished with running. Now I will stop and choose my way.
Sooner or later a man has to stop and choose his way, not out of the ways he would like there to be, or the ways there ought to be, but out of the ways there are.
Five days, in which to choose.
There were people in the town. It was the time of the fall trading, the hot dead time when the shinnery stands gray and stiff and the bear grass rustles in the wind and every plank of wood is as dry as a cracked bone. They came in from the outlying ranches to barter for their winter supplies, and the traders’ wagons were lined up in a row at the end of the one short, dusty street.
All over the land, he thought, it is the time of the fall trading. All over the land there are fairs, and the wagons are pulled up, and the men trade cattle and the women chaffer over cloth and sugar. All over the land it is the same, unchanging. And after the trading and the fair there is the preaching, the fall revival to stock the soul against the winter too. This is life. This is the way it is.
He walked the street restlessly, up and down. He stood by the traders’ wagons, looking into the faces of the people, listening to their talk.
They have found their truth. The New Ishmaelites have found theirs, and the New Mennonites, and the men of Bartorstown.
Now I must find mine.
Joan watched him from under the corners of her eyelids and was afraid to speak.
On the fifth night the trading was all done. Torches were set up around a platform in the trampled space at the end of the street. The stars blazed bright in the sky and the wind turned cool and the baked earth breathed out its heat. The people gathered.
Len sat on the crushed dry shinnery, holding Joan’s hand. He did not notice after all when the wagon rolled in quietly at the other side of the crowd. But after a while he turned, and Hostetter was sitting there beside him.
30
The voice of the preacher rang out strong and strident. “A thousand years, my brethren. A thousand years. That’s what we was promised. And I tell you we are already in that blessed time, a-heading toward the Glory that was planned for them that keeps the way of righteousness. I tell you—”
Hostetter looked at Len in the flickering light of the wind-blown torches, and Len looked at him, but neither of them spoke.
Joan whispered something that might have been Hostetter’s name. She pulled her hand away from Len’s and started to scramble around behind him as though she wanted to get to Hostetter. Len caught her and pulled her down.
“Stay by me.”
“Let me go. Len—”
“Stay by me.”
She whimpered and was still. Her eyes sought Hostetter’s.
Len said to both of them, “Be quiet. I want to listen.”
“—and except you go as little children, the Book says, you won’t never get in. Because Heaven wasn’t made for the unrighteous. It wasn’t made for the scoffer and the unbeliever. No sir, my brothers and sisters! And you ain’t in the clear yet. Just because the Lord has chose to save you out from the Destruction, don’t you think for a minute—”
It was on another night, at another preaching, that I set my foot upon the path.
A man died that night. His name was Soames. He had a red beard, and they stoned him to death because he was from Bartorstown.
Let me listen. Let me think.
“—a thousand years!” cried the preacher, thumping on his dusty Book, stamping his boots on the dusty planks. “But you got to work for it! You can’t just set down and pay no heed! You can’t shirk your bounden duty to the Lord!”
Let it blow through me like a great wind. Let the words sound in my ears like trumpets.
I can speak. A power has been given me. I can kill another man as that boy killed Soames, and free myself.
I can speak again, and lead the way to Bartorstown as Burdette led his men to Refuge. Many will die, just as Dulinsky died. But Moloch will be thrown down.
Joan sits rigid beside me. The tears run on her cheeks. Hostetter sits on the other side. He must know what I am thinking. But he waits.
He was part of that other night. Part of Refuge. Part of Piper’s Run and Bartorstown, the one end and the other and in the middle.
Can I wipe it all away with his blood?
Hallelujah!
Confess your sins! Let your soul be cleansed of its burden of black guilt, so the Lord won’t burn you again with fire! Hallelujah!
“Well, Len?” said Hostetter.
They are screaming as they screamed that night. And what if I rise and confess my sin, offering this man as a sacrifice? I will not be cleansed of knowledge. Knowledge is not like sin. There is no mystical escape from it
And what if I throw down Moloch, with the bowels of fire and the head of brass?
The knowledge will still exist. Somewhere. In some book, some human brain, under some other mountain. What men have found once they will find again. Hostetter is rising to his feet. “You’re forgetting something I told you. You’re forgetting we’re fanatics too. You’re forgetting I can’t let you run loose.”
“Go ahead,” said Len. He stood up, too, dragging Joan with him by the hand. “Go ahead if you can.”
They looked at each other in the torchlight, while the crowd stamped and raised the dust and shouted hallelujah.
I have let it blow through me, and it is just a wind. I have let the words sound in my ears, and they are nothing but words, spoken by an ignorant man with a dusty beard. They do not stir me, they do not touch me. I am done with them, too.
I know now what lies across the land, the slow and heavy weight. They call it faith, but it is not faith. It is fear. The people have clapped a shelter over their heads, a necessity of ignorance, a passion of retreat, and they have called it God, and worshiped it. And it is as false as any Moloch. So false that men like Soames, men like Dulinsky, men like Esau and myself will overthrow it. And it will betray its worshipers, leaving them defenseless in the face of a tomorrow that will surely come. It may be a slow coming, and a long one, but come it will, and all their desperation will not stop it. Nothing will stop it.
“I ain’t going to speak, Ed. Now it’s up to you.”
Joan caught her breath and held it in a sob.
Hostetter looked at Len, his feet set wide apart, his big shoulders hunched, his face as grim and dark as iron under his broad hat. Now it was Len’s turn to wait.
If I die as Soames died, it will not matter except to me. This is important only because I am I, and Hostetter is Hostetter, and Joan is Joan, and we’re people and can’t help it. But for today, yesterday, tomorrow, it is not important. Time goes on without any of us. Only a belief, a state of mind, endures, and even that changes constantly, but underneath there are two kinds—the one that says, Here you must stop knowing, and the other which says, Learn.
Right or wrong, the fruit was eaten, and there can’t ever be a going back.
I have made my choice.
“What are you waiting for, Ed? If you’re going to do it, go on.”
Some of the tightness went out of the line of Hostetter’s shoulders. He said, “I guess neither one of us was built for murder.”
He bent his head, scowling, and then he lifted it again and gave Len a hard and blazing look.
“Well?”
The people cried and shouted and fell on their knees and sobbed.
“I still think,” said Len slowly, “that maybe it was the Devil let loose on the world a hundred years ago. And I still think maybe that’s one of Satan’s own limbs you’ve got there behind that wall.”
The preacher tossed his arms to the sky and writhed in an ecstasy of salvation.
“But I guess you’re right,” said Len. “I guess it makes better sense to try and chain the devil up than to try keeping the whole land tied down in the hopes he won’t notice it again.”
He looked at Hostetter. “You didn’t get me killed, so I guess you’ll have to let me come b
ack.”
“The choice wasn’t entirely mine,” said Hostetter. He turned and walked away toward the wagons. Len followed him, with Joan stumbling at his side. And two men came out of the shadows to join them. Men that Len did not know, with deer rifles held in the crooks of their arms.
“I had to do more than talk for you this time,” said Hostetter.
“If you had denounced me, these boys might not have been able to save me from the crowd, but you wouldn’t have grown five minutes older.”
“I see,” said Len slowly. “You waited till now, till the preaching.”
“Yes.”
“And when you threatened me, you didn’t mean it. It was part of the test.”
Hostetter nodded. The men looked hard at Len, clicking the safeties back on their guns.
“I guess you were right, Ed,” one of them said. “But I sure wouldn’t have banked on it.”
“I’ve known him a long time,” said Hostetter. “I was a little worried, but not much.”
“Well,” said the man, “he’s all yours.” He did not sound as though he thought Hostetter had any prize. He nodded to the other man and they went away, Sherman’s executioners vanishing quietly into the night.
“Why did you bother, Ed?” asked Len. He hung his head, ashamed for all that he had done to this man. “I never made you anything but trouble.”
“I told you,” said Hostetter. “I always felt kind of responsible for the time you ran away.”
“I’ll pay you back,” said Len earnestly. Hostetter said, “You just did.” They climbed up onto the high seat of the wagon. “And you,” Hostetter said to Joan. “Are you ready to come home?” She was beginning to cry, in short fierce sobs. She looked at the torchlight and the people and the dust. “It’s a hideous world,” she said. “I hate it.”
“No,” said Hostetter, “not hideous, just imperfect. But that’s nothing new.”
The Long Tomorrow Page 24