Wilderness of Spring Part 15

"Hoy, mind your terms! A ship is all square-rigged, commonly a three-master. Two-masted, a ketch, is _Artemis_--well, a loose name, seeing we use it also to mean small harbor craft. But with her fore-and-aft mizzen you mustn't be calling her a ship. I wish Reuben had come. He's missing a pretty sight, and all to go strolling in the woods." Ben winced inwardly, knowing that the old man, for all his understanding, had been hurt by that. He ought to know by this time, Ben thought, how when the black mood came over Reuben there was nothing to do but let the boy alone, let him go walk in the woods or whatever else he wished. Ben himself did not know whether it was the flame of Deerfield that attacked Reuben at such times; had not been able to learn, in all the three years since they came to Roxbury and Uncle John had opened heart and home to them. "_Artemis_ is near three hundred ton, Ben. That's not big, but she could sail anywhere in the world."

The lonely man, blue-eyed and gaunt, who stood at the outermost end of Kenny's wharf, swung about to gaze at the old merchant. Ben had not until now observed the stranger's face, motionless as a boulder in a patch of gra.s.s against the raised collar of a shabby green coat. Grave, Irish maybe, handsome in spite of a signature of smallpox from jutting cheekbones to the edge of an angular jaw. Under a battered tricorne hat Ben saw coal-black hair and a forehead high and pale. The mouth was thin, the upper lip compressed. Hands projected immensely from frayed sleeves, a sailor's hands broadened at the knuckles. Others on the wharf had been watching _Artemis_; discouraged by the chill of the breeze, they had abandoned the airy region to Ben and Mr. Kenny and the blue-eyed man.

Anch.o.r.ed in the near waters or drawn up to the many docks, an orderly jungle stirred to the bay's mild motion--stem masts, steep bowsprits, nervous bodies of the drowsing wind-wanderers. To Ben's eyes, Clarke's Wharf over yonder hardly dwarfed Mr. Kenny's single squat warehouse and three hundred feet of pier. All around Ben spread an apparent confusion of ropes, tackle, mooring-posts, more meaningful than when he had first stumbled through it three years ago, but still a confusion to one whose hand had never yet felt the lurching sting and thrust of a working rope across the palm.

Woolgathering, Ben had missed some remark about _Artemis_' rigging. "She owes much to that fore-and-aft mizzen. Fore-and-aft or square, either'll bring you the service of all the winds, but the way of the fore-and-aft is a woman's way, Ben, seeming to yield, winning by yielding. Your squares'l is male, standing up to wrestle the sky breast to breast--nay, but he can drive almost as near the wind's eye--point or two less, what's a point or two in a long journey? _Artemis_ don't roll too much.

I've been aboard her under sail only the once, when we tried her out.

She didn't roll much, for all Mr. Jenks tempted her to it so to learn her paces. Fast she is, Ben. You can feel it even now when she's picking her way slow as a dream."

"Sir, if I--supposing I might ship aboard----"

"You?" Mr. Kenny jabbed his cane at the planking, his crinkled face gone blank. "Ben, boy, you must stick to your studies. You'll have sea enough when Mr. Hibbs brings your Greek far enough on to read the Odyssey.

Better to drown in poetry than salt water."

"Still, Uncle John, the sea----"

"Now let me tell you a thing: never admit to a sailor that you love the sea, if love is the word. He'd despise you for a landsman. A sailor may love a ship, if she be fair and not vicious. Not the sea, not the old blind murdering b.i.t.c.h-mother."

"No, I think love is not the word, but--nay, I don't know."

"You think I don't feel it? Didn't I take ship as a common seaman when I was twenty? I ran away, Ben. My father's blood was partly cold vinegar--something of that you felt in your day with my good sister. My brother George's and mine was red, and hot. Well, I had but a few years of it, he too. Not for me with my piddling strength. We went into trade, we prospered, and I'm a landsman--but I know her. Sometimes if my bad toe's a-troubling or I go to bed with too much drink in me, I dream I'm fathoms down in the cold, the green dark. I see their faces, I mean those of the dead, men I knew who own no grave except the sea. They float by me orderly, no crowding--hoy, you learn not to crowd a man in the neighborhood of live ropes! They go by me one by one--Amyas Holt maybe, that was first officer of the ship _Marigold_ and would never sing except he was stone cold sober, but I _have_ heard him sing, marry have I. Went down with the _Marigold_ off the Bermudas--all hands....

Isn't the land fair, Ben? Full of good things? Good work, women, children, warmth of an earned fireside? And the time of year that's coming now?--but maybe you suppose an old man don't notice the spring.

Is not the land fair?"

"Yes, Uncle John," said Ben, and turned his face away.

"Sometimes I see Danny Roeder too, laughing boy, ready for anything, dead of the scurvy when we stood thirty-four days becalmed south of the Line, a run to Recife in the ship _Providence_--most of his teeth fallen from puffed purple gums, not laughing then.... I've but now remembered, Ben, this is the first time you've seen _Artemis_ afloat. When she left the ways last August you and Reuben were a trifle indisposed."

Ben grinned weakly in acknowledgement. Last August he and Reuben had had the measles. After a day or so of misery they had grown busily critical of each other's spots, the despair of Mr. Kenny's housekeeper Kate Dobson, who tried to make them mind the orders of Mr. Welland the doctor and stay covered up in bed. Plump Kate did not frown on pillow fights in principle. She suppressed a few n.o.bly, knowing her ma.s.sive rear to be prime target, because she believed the boys were in a rarely tender condition. Kate had heard that measles could become the lapsing fever--whatever that was, and never mind that Mr. Welland rumbled and chuckled and took snuff and said it wa'n't so. Kate had sniffed pointedly and severely about Mr. Welland of Roxbury, asking after his gentle departure how a head under such a Lord-help-a-sinner wig as he wore could hold knowledge of the healing art or in fact anything else.

More than a year in building and the pride of Mr. Kenny's ancient years, _Artemis_ took to the water--tide and wind and season won't wait on the measles--with no help from Ben and his brother. By the time Mr. Welland decreed they could leave the house, she was gone, with half a cargo, mostly hardware and woolens from England. She slipped down to Newport to fill her hungry hull with flour and cheese; on to Virginia for a quick turnover; then with tobacco and what remained of the Yankee hardware--anything you like from frying pans to thimbles--she was for Jamaica in the warm seas. At Kingston she ran into a bit of trouble; Captain Jenks sent word of it by a homeward-bound. Tropic fever and smallpox had played h.e.l.l with his crew, and he was delayed seeking replacements. He would not put out in late winter even on the Kingston-Boston run with nothing better than a pa.s.sel of louse-gnawed Jamaican monkeys who'd die like Caribbee b.u.t.terflies at the first breath of a northerly and anyway couldn't tell the head from the hawse-holes.

Jenks ripped out other comments, cramped by the need of setting quill to paper, concerning Jamaican speed in loading his logwood and mola.s.ses while the remnants of his good crew were too sick or drunk to lend a hand. "They doe labour a Moment," he wrote, "and falle into a most sweete bloudie Slummber." Snorting over that letter in the company of Ben and Reuben, John Kenny remarked that he couldn't picture man, monkey or b.u.t.terfly winning much sweet slumber when Mr. Jenks spoke in his natural voice--the which, said Mr. Kenny, was the secret of Mr. Jenks'

virtue, for by raising that voice to strong conversational pitch he could lift you the father and mother of a typhoon out of a flat calm.

A clop of hoofs, a grind of halting wheels--Ben heard that above the mutter of small waves fumbling the piles of the wharf, and turned to see the coach drawing up near Mr. Kenny's warehouse. A dark woman stepped out, doll-size with distance, helping two others alight. The breeze s.n.a.t.c.hed at full skirts; an arm flew up restraining a blue bonnet; Ben heard a ripple of remote laughter, and the women consulted, bonnets grouped like the heads of little lively fowl. Plainly not working-women nor dockside s.l.u.ts, they must have some errand at the warehouse, and would not be coming out here into the raw smell of tar, fish, sewage-corrupted water and salt air. Mr. Kenny, with slightly dulled hearing, was unaware of them. Ben looked again to _Artemis_.

"Watch, Ben! Wouldn't you think he was bearing down smack onto the bow of that three-master? She's a New Yorker, by the way. Hoy!" Mr. Kenny danced a stiff caper. "Like an old woman threading a needle! But if the watchman on that Mannahatta tub p.i.s.sed his britches, no shame to him at all. Watch!"

The lonely blue-eyed man was watching too, in the curve of his long back something hawk-like.

Mr. Kenny relaxed, chuckling. "Ben, I recall you've never met Mr. Jenks.

When he's ash.o.r.e he never visits around, d.a.m.n the dear man, not even to Roxbury. There's a reason--never mind. Had he a contrary wind this afternoon he'd likely bring her in anyhow. Once I watched him fetch my wallowing old _Hera_ to this wharf. Filthy little northeast blow, and she about as comfortable to handle as a bull on ice. I thought he'd drop anchor alee of Bird Island and wait. Not Jenks--brought her in like a homing dove. Knows every inch and instant of the tides as they'll never be known by your landside chart-makers, noticed it a thousand times. I don't mean he'll take foolish risks. With _Hera_ that time--to him it was a nothing, did it easy as a milkmaid strips a cow. _Hera_ went down off the Cape--'d I ever tell you?--seven years ago in a fog.

Floating hulk stove in her la'board side. Filled in twenty minutes, no fault of Jenks, and didn't he bring off every man alive in one boat and one d.a.m.ned little dory? Not a soul lost."

He had told of it before. Ben never found it difficult to hear Uncle John's repeated tales as if new. In a way they were, since Ben knew he had probably missed something in the earlier telling.

Wharf hands slouched from the warehouse, taking command of the s.p.a.ce where soon the figurehead under the low-slung bowsprit of _Artemis_ would gaze inward toward her homeland, if that grave white face, something less than a woman's and something more, knew any homeland now but the one she shared with Mother Carey's chickens. The men busied themselves over ropes and fenders, with raucous horseplay. The blue-eyed man certainly noticed them, but never turned from observing _Artemis_ with the intentness of a schoolmaster or a lover.

The roustabouts brought a stench of cheap taverns, rum, tobacco, sweat.

Bulky short-worded men, some tattooed and wonderfully scarred, their noise slightly restrained by the presence of an important merchant and a well-dressed boy. The boy envied their carelessness. To watch them you'd think the homecoming of _Artemis_ from her maiden voyage was a trifle, worth no more than a shot of spit off the jetty. Ben saw a leather-hided giant twiddle free a length of rope and try it on the legs of a companion who yelped and grappled with him harmlessly.

Behind Ben a crystalline voice abruptly asked: "Will she anchor, Mr.

Kenny, or come in to moor direct?"

"Direct, my dear." Mr. Kenny was beaming, a hand on the girl's arm. "Did your father ever make me pay lighterage if he could help it?"

"What a pert breeze! I vow I'm brave to be out in it."

"This little air? Why, Faith, it would scarce raise a kite for a running boy. Anyway 'twas no breeze put the brier roses in your cheeks, you was born with those, well I remember."

Mr. Kenny's back was turned to Ben. Ben was standing quite alone, hearing yet the long murmuring of the water, as he fought away the dead weight of shyness and discovered the April grace of her, dressed in shining blue, wind-clasped; looked again, and encountered a wounding sweetness of blue eyes.

John Kenny's woodland had never been surveyed; somewhere it blended into crown-grant timberland or unclaimed wilderness. His house stood beyond the natural limits of Roxbury--he liked that--on a rolling rise of ground south of the road to Cambridge. From his back pasture, Reuben Cory had heard him say, you could keep under forest cover all the way to Providence, and maybe he'd do it some time, the old man said, if ever the Saints came a-snapping too close at his heels. John Kenny might have started saying that twenty or thirty years ago when it wasn't entirely a jest.

From the window of the room upstairs that he shared with Ben, Reuben stared eastward beyond the Dorchester road, across open land and marsh and water, to the low hills of Dorchester Neck two miles away, gray and brown yet alive with a subdued radiance under the afternoon sun of April. Beyond those harmless hills moved the sunrises, and the stern Atlantic that seemed to be tugging at his brother's heart and giving him no rest.

Driven by his own dark unease of spring, by some dread of human voices and the wrong questions they ask, by shame at the ungracious whim that had prompted him to stay home--after all, if he was not going in to watch the return of _Artemis_, sighted yesterday playing games off the Cape with a contrary wind, then he had no proper excuse for this half-holiday from study--driven above all by a need for the April day as it might come to him lonely in a golden calm at the edge of wilderness, Reuben slipped downstairs light as a cat, out past the black wet ground of the kitchen garden and down a long slope into the south pasture, then on toward soft-spoken hemlocks.

Reuben had discovered a bodily sureness in these solitary journeys, a trust in his own senses, and a puzzled, reaching love for the life of the unhuman world. Sometimes he stole out of the house at night, with owl and fox and whippoorwill, if the moon was shining to help him; Ben slept sweetly never knowing that. Ben often came with him into the daytime woodland, but to stroll out here with Ben belonged to another category of experience. The world of I-am-alone cannot share an orbit with other planets, as the world and Reuben-self that existed in Ben's presence could exist nowhere else.

He would never be tall like Ben, nor quite as strong. At fifteen that no longer troubled him. His own hard wiry thinness was sufficient; it would carry him, he supposed, wherever he cared to go.

At the lower end of the pasture he climbed a stile into the spicy-smelling hush. A wood road continued on the other side; Reuben soon abandoned it, following landmarks that brought him to one of his better-loved havens, where Ben had often loafed with him.

Over a huge flat-topped boulder a spruce towered to sixty feet, the droop of branches enclosing the rock; one could imagine the hide of a gray monster lurking in the green. The boughs slanted steeply, creating a room with a granite floor and walls of gold-flecked shadow, a gentle and a secret place--old; the spruce must have been already old in the time of King Philip's War. A midget brook pa.s.sed here. It had gouged a pool at the outer end of the granite block, not deep even in the time of spring rains, but reflections of the spruce gave it an ocean infinity of green.

Wander a few yards down the brook and you owned another world, where the water widened to larger ponds, supporting patches of feather-topped marsh gra.s.s here and there. Maples on firmer ground bordered this damp clearing, which by itself became many worlds in the flow of the seasons--the world of deep summer, for example, when you could watch mating dances of the small green dragonflies that never come near houses.

Reuben climbed silently into the sanctuary under the spruce and lay out on the rock to stare into the pool refreshed by the rains of April. He invited to his ears all least disturbances of the enclosing silence--a weak murmur upstream where the trifling water hurried over pebbles, a breath of motion in the needles of the spruce, a bluejay's complaint softened by distance, a cow lowing more than a mile away; a greater mystery, the beat of his own heart in the rib-cage pressed against rock, not quite pain. He saw the face of himself the stranger in the water below, and shut his eyes. When the flesh is quiet, he thought, the mind is also. Why? I alway knew that. The quiet is brief.

Why?...

Because (I think) everything is part of a journey. I am never, I was never still. Perhaps there is no stillness except in death.

Human sounds reached him, a brushing of last year's gra.s.s in that clearing downstream, a vague cough. Reuben sat up, annoyed and puzzled.

It could not be anyone with the privilege of bidding him to cease idling. Uncle John was in Boston with Ben. The tutor was sulking in his room--it hurt Mr. Hibbs that a boy granted a half-holiday should elect to spend it as he pleased, and anyway Mr. Gideon Hibbs was not at home in any forest outside the _Eclogues_ of Virgil. Uncle John's gardener and handy man Rob Grimes was accounted for too--Reuben had heard his axe in the woodshed.

If some poacher or Indian were fooling about the back land, Uncle John would wish to know. Reuben slipped from the rock with no sound, and wormed a gradual way through the brush. Someone sneezed. Poachers try not to sneeze; prowling Indians just don't; still Reuben maintained his caution because of a wild-animal pleasure in it. Having stolen by degrees to the edge of the clearing, he observed the stout bowed back and lightly fringed bald head of a man kneeling by a shallow pond, parting the dead gra.s.s to stare down into the water. Surely not a poacher examining a trap; the man was familiar somehow.

Reuben identified him, but doubtfully. Acting on an impulse of gentle wickedness, he slid out from the bushes and sat cross-legged with his chin in his hands, all as quietly as a mouse crossing a heap of flour.

Rising at last from his peculiar inspection of the pond water, the man sneezed again. He turned unknowing, and jumped delightfully. He said "G.o.d bless me!" and closed his large mouth two or three times while a slow chuckle shook him from fringed head to dingy shoes--a memorably ugly man pitted with smallpox scars from a b.u.t.ton chin to a bulging forehead. His clothes were snuff-stained; respectable once, now a second best suited to the woods. His little dark eyes gleamed mirthful and sad, intent. A ribbony nose ended in a flared tip with a double k.n.o.b. Reuben marveled that having known this face at his bedside, and that not long ago, he could have been confused in remembering it.

"I'm sorry, sir--didn't go for to startle you, Mr. Welland." "Oh, didn't you!"

"It was the wig."