Wilderness of Spring Part 4

Out in the hall a m.u.f.fled hammering went on and on. Ben explained aloud carefully: "I will go and find out."

Jesse Plum's nightshirt still flapped on him in strips. He was bringing down his axe repeatedly, though the Indian's head lay nearly separate from the trunk. Ben stood quiet, compelled to watch until the head broke from a band of skin and rolled on the drenched hearthstones, the forehead displaying the gash of Jesse's first blow.

Jesse squinted at Ben, a puzzled and exhausted old man. His hairy legs shivered, kneecaps dancing. "I was too late--plague and fire! Oh, the fair things I looked for in this land! Gold--the Fountain--yah, the Fountain, the things they'll tell a man! Benjamin, it be'n't right, it be'n't right...." Reuben was still speaking, too; the empty silver monotone reached Jesse's consciousness and he pulled himself to erectness. "Goodm'n Cory?"

"They've shot him, Jesse."

"Dead?"

Ben did not speak. Jesse lurched to the east window. "This side's clear.

Fetch your brother, Ben. I'll get you out, I will so. Hatfield--Cap'n Wells' fort anyway. Hurry--fetch him, Ben!"

Reuben writhed away from Ben's touch. "Jesse, help me with him!"

Jesse caught him up. Reuben fought in dumb fury, but Jesse held him fast ignoring that, and rushed through the woodshed, opening the door at the far end with a thrust of a h.o.r.n.y foot. "Stay close, Ben!" They were stumbling across snow trampled by the flight of others, in the shadow of their own house that stood between them and the fires; then out of that shadow toward a beginning of winter dawn. Men and women were running about here, unrecognizable in wounds and terror and nakedness, people Ben had known all his life, swept into the panic of a crushed anthill.

The east wall of the stockade rose cruelly high. There Jesse set Reuben down. The boy swung about mechanically, walking back toward the fires.

Ben grabbed and slapped him; he only stared.

Jesse s.n.a.t.c.hed off the wreck of his nightshirt and twisted it into a cord, running it through the belt of Reuben's breeches. "Go first, Ben--I'll h'ist you."

Ben swarmed up somehow. Jesse yelled: "Drop! You must catch him." Then Jesse was up too, clutching the palisade with his knees, hauling on the makeshift rope before Reuben's groping hand could discard it. Jesse gained a grip on Reuben's armpit, and Ben flung himself down. "Ready, Jesse!" But instead of letting Ben catch his brother, the old man leaped with him, turning in mid-air so that he fell under Reuben, who sprawled free and ripped loose the cord.

Ben grabbed the boy's arm. Jesse reeled up on his knees. "Get to Hatfield! I'm undone. The filthy papists've done me in."

Reuben had at least delivered himself from his witless trance. He tugged to free his arm and wailed: "Let me go!"

"Get up, Jesse! You can't sit there so."

Jesse shook his head, a stubborn child. "I stink. There's men fail at everything--you don't understand." He whimpered, trying to cover his crotch. "I be naked, can't you see? You go on. I'm done."

"Let me go, Ben! Let me go back! Let me go, d.a.m.n you!"

Ben's eyes were watering from the cold and from a billow of smoke the wind flung down on them. "G.o.d d.a.m.n it, Jesse, you think we'd abandon you? Get up!"

"Plague and fire...."

"_Get up!_"

"Oh, I--I will, Ben. It's the old liquor rising up in me. Ben, I couldn't help that, it was on me to drink. Leave me gather my wits. O Lord Jesus, is it coming day already? I will get up, Ben, don't fret."

And he did, jerky in motion like an ill-made doll, willing to follow....

Some confusion of battle still fumed by Captain Wells' fortified house beyond the southeast corner of the palisade. Ben heard gunfire, the heart-cracking sound of a woman wailing unseen. Leading, gripping Reuben's wrist, Ben avoided that fort, plunging into the woods and white-packed underbrush to circle it and come out well to the south on the Hatfield road--unmistakable, familiar, over there on his right under enormous morning sky. Others in flight had marked the road with the signature of b.l.o.o.d.y drops, clear against white now that the sun was surely rising.

Reuben pulled back continually. Ben's right knee throbbed, he couldn't think why. He knew Jesse was following. Impossible to run in this white muck. He could push on, the sun at his left hand, and not look back. He was aware not of time but only of breathing, of driving forward in pain against the sodden snow and retaining his hold of Reuben's wrist; yet time was moving too, as it would forever, and the sun advancing.

He realized that for some while now he had heard no gunfire. They had surely not come so far on the Hatfield road as not to hear it, for the morning was still. It must have ended. The wind had dropped, the air becoming sluggish, almost warm. Drowsy....

Reuben struggled abreast of him and beat feebly at his shoulder. "Ben, you must let me go back. Mother----"

"Ru, thou knowest she is dead."

"You never loved her or you could not say it."

Ben faced about, feeling the sun of March, seeing on the backward trail nothing familiar, only a rising faraway smoke. That must have been Deerfield. Nearby, the quiet world of snow was lightly patterned with tracks of forest life; no wind at all now to disturb the shadowy trees and undergrowth. Ben knew his brother was nearly sane, already ashamed of the words just spoken. Jesse had halted, swaying and mumbling in his cold nakedness, looking back. "I loved her, Reuben. Now save thy breath for walking."

More time unmeasurable pa.s.sed in the dreary plodding. Small shadows down the trail became large, large shadows became men--angry men from Hatfield, some of them soldiers. A blunt-faced sergeant of militia shouted to Ben: "They still there, boy?"

"Yes," Ben wheezed--"I think so."

The sergeant paused, seeing Jesse's side. "You're bad hurt."

Someone tossed a jacket over Jesse. The sergeant offered a leather flask and Jesse grabbed his arm, muttering uneasily: "Water?"

"Water of Jamaica."

"G.o.d magnify you!" Jesse drank. "Don't know you--'d pray for you was I a'ready in h.e.l.l."

The sergeant jerked his head at the north. "How many?"

"Jesus, I don't know. Killed one Inj'an with my axe." Jesse said that in startled thoughtfulness as if just remembering. "My own gun got me--peddler sold it me for a musket, b.l.o.o.d.y grape-shot it is now, might've killed me deader'n a son of a b.i.t.c.h." The sergeant ran on to the head of the column. "A'n't left you much," Jesse apologized, and discovered the flask still in his hand. "Why, he's gone and left me it, in the name of G.o.d."

"Come on, Jesse--he meant to. Come on!"

"I will, Ben. But do you boys walk on ahead--it be'n't right a thing so ugly as me should walk naked in the sun, the Lord never intended it."

Some others of the column called to them, words sounding kind, pa.s.sing over Ben like a slightly warming breeze.

A vague time later--the column was gone and Ben was trying to ignore a st.i.tch in the side--Jesse's voice rose and fell in a fitful rambling; the old man sang a little, too. "If I knowed that man's name I could pray for him. The race is not alway to him that can the swiftest run--call that a Psa'm, they do, no music in 'em, Church of England myself, if so be it makes any difference when a man's a sinner and lost and bound to h.e.l.l. I know what I'll do, I'll say to the Lord Jesus, that man who gave me a drink on the Hatfield road the first day of March, that's what I'll say, mark it, Ben, and pity but the dear Lord'd understand, you would think--Benjamin? Won't he? I'll say, that man who gave me a drink on the first b.l.o.o.d.y day of March, right about there on the Hatfield road, do you see, and will that do fair enough, Benjamin?"

"Of course, Jesse."

"You're a sweet soul, Benjamin, to gi' me that out of the good learning you got. I call that an act of kindness to an old fart that's wallowed in ignorance and sin all his days, I won't forget it, I could kiss your foot. I used to could sing, Benjamin. At Mother Gilly's house they'd use to _ask_ me to sing, every smock there would ask me--her house was in Stepney, not far from the Mile End Road. 'Brave Benbow lost his legs'--that's a song I picked up from a chapman come by your father's house, Benjamin, I think it was last year. 'Brave Benbow'--oh, b.u.g.g.e.r me blind if I a'n't forgot it, anyway there was better songs in the days of King Charles that won't come again, needn't to think they will, boy.

That's all past, that is...."

Ben's hand had relaxed. Reuben broke free and plunged blindly ahead to drop face down in the snow, not rising.

Here the road curved near the frozen expanse of the Connecticut.

Distant in the south smoke threaded into the clouds, the smoke of decent fires--Hatfield village, warmth and safety. Ben raised Reuben's limply protesting body, brushing white smears from his face and collar. Jesse stood by, trying to drink from an empty flask. "Ru, brother----"

"I can't go on, nor I will not."

"You must."

"I cursed you."

"What? That?--you know that was nothing."

"I'm rotten with sin. I let it happen. I did nothing. And yesterday she chided me for using an ugly word, and I went out into the shed and I--and----"