Wilderness of Spring Part 2

Ru also acquired some tact, and awareness of the times when Ben preferred to sleep.

If he itched with questions, though, and found Ben reluctant to answer, Ru might take advantage of his smaller size, punch and prod, try to smother Ben with the covers or nag after the forbidden tickle-spot at the edge of the ribs. He could hurt if he gripped a handful of hair, but he generally managed to stop short of open war. Ben imagined, sometimes with uneasiness, that his brother could study his mind, feel with his nerves, control him as a small man controls a big horse with wit alone.

After such a.s.saults, secondary eruptions would demonstrate that the little wretch was still awake--pinches, pokes, m.u.f.fled war whoops, prohibited words: original sin taking its own time to simmer down.

Nowadays Ru's stories would be delivered _sotto voce_, lest Father shout up telling the boys to go to sleep. The hushed story-teller's voice illuminated the inner world, making of the night a sheltering room. Ben would be more aware of his brother than if darkness had not hidden him--the warmth, the harmless small-boy smell of him, above all the voice and its comic or startling or grandiose inventions....

Ben sighed in the exasperation of insomnia, and slid out of bed to stand barefoot in the cold, saying a proper prayer in an undertone. His mother preferred to kneel, but admitted it was wise to conform to surrounding custom lest one forget in a public place. Puritans did not kneel, regarding it as a mark of popery. Faintly relieved, Ben walked to the garret window to glance into the winter night, wondering if a dark moving thing he saw was that it ought to be. Yes--the watch, on his rounds. Ben could make out the black stem line of a jutting flintlock.

The shadowy important man marched along the northern limit of the stockade, pa.s.sing out of sight to Ben's left behind the meeting-house.

"Ben, what ails thee?--can't sleep?"

"Restless." Ben stumbled back into bed shivering, squirming down away from the cold. "Go back to sleep--sorry I disturbed thee." It must be after midnight, Ben thought, and all well. But as he tried to settle himself, inviting sleep with a better conscience, the snow outside the palisade, pressed high against the logs, nagged at him like the thought of a broken lock on a back door.

_Chapter Two_

Ben surged up on a stiff arm, listening. The uproar had been in the shed, he thought. Maybe Ranger had broken his rope and run out. Now Ben could hear only the b.u.mping sickly turbulence of his own heart. In a dream he had been flying; the dream had betrayed him into this agony of listening where no sound was, and fear grew over him like frost on a stone image.

"_Arm!_"

That noise was part of the dream. In the dream, faceless beings had been shouting, not willing that Ben should fly.

Then he knew the cry was the summons of the watch in a world of no dreaming--a few rods away, near the north end of the palisade. It flared, a jet of terror in darkness, and died.

The covers dropped. Cold slapped and squeezed Ben, but he could not move until some sound released him from this frozen waiting.

It came, a yelling that soared upward like fire swallowing dry pine, throbbing yells made by only one kind of creature alive.

A different voice pierced the clamor, snarling in search of authority: "_a droit, vous! La-bas! Enfoncez les portes!_" And a wild drawled afterthought: "_Prisonniers!_" The voice was smothered by the yells and a whinnying of some other man's laughter.

Footsteps pounded on snow. Steel a.s.saulted wood. Then--Reuben still sleeping--the flintlocks began to talk, the near ones a dry thundering, the farther ones like slamming doors.

Ben could move. He reeled up, shocked into panic, thrashing against sullen-clinging bedclothes. "Ru!" Ben punched and shook him. "G.o.d d.a.m.n it, wake up!" Reuben made an empty noise. "Raid! It's the French!"

Reuben leaped under his hand, comprehending. "Here!--your britches. Your shoes--no, b.u.g.g.e.r it, these're mine, where'd you put yours?" Ben slammed his forehead on the foot of the bed, searching; his nightshirt tripped him and he flung it off. A floor-splinter lanced fire into his knee. He heard two thuds, one below the window, the other in the same instant on the opposite wall. "_Ru!_"

"Leave off shouting, Ben."

"That bullet----"

"What bullet?"

"Never mind. _Will_ you tell me where your shoes are?"

Reuben could not answer. Joseph Cory's voice fumed at the foot of the stairs: "Come down! Coats--don't forget your coats!"

Ben shouted: "We're coming!" He pursued the shoes under the fallen bed-cover. He found his own breeches and shirt, then his hunting-knife where it always rested on the table by the bed.

Orange glory beyond the window marvelously bloomed, flooding Reuben's angelic face and thin naked body moving toward the square of light.

"Why," said Reuben--"why, the cods're burning us!"

"G.o.d's mercy, get away from that window!"

He had to pull Reuben from it; force the shoes on his feet and find armholes for him. Father was calling again. Ben hustled his brother to the head of the stairs. "Stay here. I'll get the coats."

The room shimmered. Red-black ghosts in a swirling jig hid the coats, defying Ben to come get them and fall on his face. He got them; then he too was drawn against his will to the window.

The fire danced on his left, the heart of it out of sight--west and south, beyond the training field, the Hawks house perhaps. North, near the meeting-house, a confusion of shapes under gunfire was twisting toward some climax. Five fire-tinted men broke away, soundless to Ben, moving with apparent slowness. One leaped forward in mid-stride to drop in the white; his arms sought each other above his head, scooping the snow as if he would embrace it, or climb like a hurt bug up the side of a world for him overturned.

The others disregarded him, plunging toward the Cory house. Reuben was trying to speak. "I'm here, Ru. We must go down--could be trapped."

Reuben mumbled something. "What?"

"Ben, I must----"

"G.o.d d.a.m.n it, don't be looking for the pot, use the floor, if they burn us who's to care?" Ben called again to his father, but his voice was swallowed by a bang. Not his father's gun--Jesse Plum's musket, a piece of trash the old man had picked up at third or fourth hand, likely to shoot anywhere but forward. "Come on, Ru!"

"I'm sorry."

"Your coat. Here--I'll b.u.t.ton it for you."

"Ben, I didn't pray tonight, nor I didn't forget neither."

"What? Oh, put on your coat!"

"I didn't pray."

Ben forced the boy's arms into the coat and lifted him, amazed at his own strength, at the sureness of his feet on invisible stair-treads.

"Ru, you deceive yourself."

"Mr. Williams saith that without prayer----"

"Ru, be still!"

Jesse's wretched gun slammed again, a different sound, a spattering clang, followed by the stridency of Jesse cursing and weeping.

Ben's mouth brushed Reuben's cheek; he tried to say something rea.s.suring. How could even a child suppose the disaster was on his account? What of all those in Deerfield who did pray? He supposed Reuben would presently recover his wits, and set him down, but held him still in the hollow of his arm.

No true dark prevailed here in the entry facing south. The front room's west window admitted the glare of the burning, showing the empty four-poster. Ben's father was a specter in a nightshirt, cursing himself for not having locked the shutters. "Where's Mother?"

"In the hall." That was the name for the rear room, kitchen-parlor-workroom, heart of the little house. "Go to her, Reuben."

Ben let him go. The bra.s.s face of the clock blurred in its tall oaken cabinet; Ben could not make it out. His time-sense said it was near dawn.

Outside the front door voices set up a gobbling not in French. Joseph Cory yelled: "I hear you, G.o.d d.a.m.n you!" And to Ben, quietly: "See to Jesse, I think his gun blowed. Find out if you will."

_If you will_--he had never spoken so to Ben before. Ben groped through the doorway between the rooms; Reuben was shivering there alone. Ben found his mother and Jesse Plum in the hall, Jesse swinging his gaunt arms, one bare, the other trailing a wisp of nightshirt. The old man was fending her off. "Don't impede me, Goody Cory! 'Tis a nothing--leave me fetch my axe!" He lurched clear of her helpless hands, and Ben glimpsed his right side where the nightshirt had been blasted away--cooked meat.

A piece of the gun-barrel stuck from a crack in the wall. Jesse seemed unaware of pain.