Wilderness of Spring Part 8

"Thou didst have a sister, Ben, and thou too small to understand, who lived but a few days. If Ru dies, so I keep thee I'll bear it somehow.

North, right of the meeting-house, up a little--that is Polaris."

He said that.

In devotions at Deerfield, Ben's father had often read from the Book of Job, as his mother owned a fondness for the Epistle of James.

_Where is the way where light dwelleth?_

The voice exclaimed: "Behold the judgment true and righteous on those conceived in sin and born in iniquity!" Then for Reuben the dark was pierced with little fires that grew, and in growing illuminated many writhing faces in the pit, and blackened arms that could not quite reach the rim of it. This was the pit where blood boiled in the veins and burst them, yet one never died, never.

Out of the midnight arch above him a monstrous sorrowing thing with a stubble of gray beard swooped down. Flame twisted from its side, still it could catch hold of the bubble of gla.s.s where Reuben sought to hide himself, catch hold and thrust at it repeatedly with a forked black phallus, while Reuben could not scream to frighten it away. He could not, because now began--he had foreseen it--the one torment he always dreaded most of all: suffocation, a gasping for clean air where none was, lungs locked and heaving, yielding at last because they must and drawing in the sulfur fumes--yet one never died. All were agreed on the definition of eternity....

Meanwhile, on the other side of the palisade of burning logs, Ben and Great-uncle John Kenny of Roxbury were strolling quietly, talking quietly, watching Reuben with calm. Ben, however, was not faceless like Uncle John, not too remote or impersonal. Ben grinned as he jerked his thumb toward a more distant place, where a little old man with a white beard sat on his hams cutting figures out of paper with a rusty pair of scissors, impaling some of them, tearing some of them, burning some of them with solemn care like an old chapman cooking meat in the open on a forked twig. To whom Reuben advanced through muddy snow and said as he had been instructed: "Forgive us our transparencies." Some one of the words must have been wrong, for the little man rose up gibbering from a toothless gap and came for him viciously, the scissors raised like a hatchet. Reuben was able to scream at last and fling himself away----

Into the warmth where Ben--_Oh, this is waking!_--where Ben was saying: "Hush thee, Ru, hush! Don't be so afeared! I'm here, I'm with thee."

As Reuben slept on, peacefully after his nightmare, morning imperceptibly arrived, a pallor in an unfamiliar window long dark; much more time must pa.s.s, Ben knew, before true dawn. This was that neutral hush before one is compelled to accept a finished thing and say: All that was yesterday. Now and then in the sluggishly advancing, sluggishly dying night, Ben had listened to a drip of melting from the roof. The patient monotone had ceased, Ben never knowing the moment. He crept out naked from under the covers, finding the room not too distressingly cold, and knelt at one of the windows, wishing he might gain a glimpse of the hill road that ran east, toward Roxbury.

Shadow-country of black and gray was brightening to the prosaic. An inky monster on Ben's right became a woodshed and a higher structure that must be a stable. A trotting-horse weather-vane grew clear, the horse's head pointing away--so the wind had shifted to blow from the west, and that had probably brought an end to the thaw. Ben fumbled on his clothes and returned to the window. During this brief absence had begun the day's miracle, a promise of fire on the underside of cloud.

The snow and mud in the yard below him showed a tangle of blurry tracks enlarged by yesterday's melting. At the rear of the yard rose the untidy grandeur of an elm. A lake of churned mud by the stable resembled a mammoth cl.u.s.ter of grapes, separate blobs of fruit supplied by outlying hoofprints. Near the base of the elm a murky area suggested a man sprawling with his head on his arm.

Maybe this very day, Ben thought, he and Reuben could be climbing that hill road, discovering the far side of it. If he behaved politely his grandmother was bound to let them go....

That shadow under the elm did create a dreadfully potent illusion of humanity--almost-real legs in abandoned collapse.

Ben gasped and clawed open the bedroom door.

Anna Lloyd was pottering downstairs with a candle. At Ben's noise she jumped, shielding the flame. "Oh, it's you. What's up?"

"Someone in the yard--" Ben shoved past her. She followed trembling, covering the candle so that it gave little help.

He reached the back door of the kitchen. The key jammed; Anna Lloyd shuffled up behind him wheezing: "Now what's all this, boy?"

The key gave way. Ben ignored her, running out across slush that had frozen crisp and hard.

Jesse's face was recognizable. In the twist of his bluish open mouth one could imagine an apologetic smile. Ben clutched his arm; the whole body moved with it, stiff as a dead branch.

Behind Ben Anna Lloyd wailed thinly. She was gripping her candle though it had blown out; morning light gave Ben her ugly peering face, more peevish than sad. "Land of mercy! Oh, law, the Mist'ess'll be terrible put out! Why, 'tis old Plum."

"Yes, he came with us from Deerfield. He must have been trying to reach the stable, find some way to get in where it was warm without troubling my grandmother. Fell and couldn't rise with the liquor in him--oh, when the singing stopped I did think some friend----"

"Singing? Ooh!--he done all that commotion last night?" Ben did not answer; she seemed useless, not open to communication, like a tiresome dog. "Must call the Mist'ess immediate. She'll be terrible put out--well, it a'n't _my_ fault, no one can say...."

There was more in her mumbling about the wages of sin. Ben's stomach heaved. He lurched away from Anna Lloyd, back into the kitchen. He grabbed a chair and straddled it, fighting nausea, head on his arm. In this self-imposed darkness he heard the outer door bang, and Anna shuffled past him muttering. Only a few moments pa.s.sed before the house was in a sputtering uproar--voices, hurrying feet, Jonas braying something or other. So long as he could keep his face hidden, his body quiet, he might not vomit. Soon enough his shoulder was tapped.

"Benjamin!"

"Yes, Grandmother."

"I suppose you can stand up when spoken to?"

He managed it. "I was feeling sick. Grandmother, I ought to have gone out last night--to find out----"

"You knew, last night, you _knew_ it was that fellow Plum making that foul commotion, knew and would not tell me. Benjamin, I marvel at you, I do marvel."

"But I thought----"

"You thought!" She was dressed for the day; haggard, the mark of a pillow fading on her cheek. "Well, well--you thought what?"

"When he stopped, I thought some friend must have taken him away, so you needn't to trouble about him."

She said with intense patience: "Benjamin, I am not troubled about him.

I knew him long before you were born, and why my husband saw fit to tolerate him I shall never know--excess of charity perhaps."

"He saved our lives."

"Indeed?"

"He got us over the palisade when the village was burning."

"Indeed? Any oaf can have a good impulse now and then. Someone else would have lent a hand if not he. You're not beholden."

"There was no one else. Jesse was ever friendly to Ru and me. I never knew him unkind, Grandmother."

"What? What? No unkindness to himself and others to live with the conversation of a hog, to spend all the years G.o.d gave him in utter blasphemy?" Her voice climbed. "Blasphemy, swinish drunkenness, sin and corruption, knowing the truth--why, he was instructed; your grandfather and I saw to that--knowing it and rejecting it, knowing his steps went down to h.e.l.l and heedless continually. No unkindness?"

"He was not like that, Grandmother."

"You contradict me?... Benjamin, go in the parlor. I'll come to you presently." She pointed at the door and Ben shambled through it, more in flight than obedience.

The place was clammily cold, and dark. Ben remembered to avoid Grandfather Matthew's throne. He stood by the fireplace spreading his hands where no warmth was. Pain gnawed at his knee; he wondered if he ought to have kept on Goody Hawks' poultice. Almost at once Grandmother Cory was confronting him in the gloom. "Jonas!" When the big man tiptoed in she said: "Open the shutters." Thin light brought no comfort. "Light the fire--boy appears to be cold. Nay, first go wake that child upstairs if he's slept through all this--I wonder he could."

"Oh, he could!" Ben s.n.a.t.c.hed clumsily for something harmless to ease the tension. "Wide awake one minute and then----"

"Benjamin, do please to be quiet. Jonas, bring Reuben down. He is to stay with Anna; he is not to come in here." Ben saw Jonas' witch-wife join him in the hallway and they went upstairs together. "Ah, Benjamin!--about your miserable clothes, I had hoped to employ part of this day in buying suitable garments for you and your brother, but now I suppose the time must be spent otherwise--and Lecture Day at that, when I must be at meeting after the noon hour. And you and Reuben ought to go too, but of course I cannot take you to the meeting-house looking like beggar boys and very likely lousy."

"We are not! Grandmother, I----"

"You won't find me failing in understanding, Benjamin, but pray understand this once and for all: your failure last night to tell me about that fellow Plum was a lie--a lie of silence.... Oh, when word came yesterday I did pray that you and your brother might be brands from the burning. I do pray for it yet. I made plans for you, I searched my heart, I sought guidance, I even trusted I had found it. D'you think me cold, unnatural? D'you imagine I don't love you, my grandson?" She brushed with dry impatience at sudden tears. Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Ben tried to catch a glimpse of Reuben, but the bulk of the Lloyds hid him as they pa.s.sed the doorway. "Benjamin, what am I to do with you? What do you yourself think would be right for me to do with you, a liar, a wilderness child who hath something like the conversation of a savage?"

"Grandmother, about Jesse----"

"Plum again! And thus I'm answered! Why, the constable will see after all that."

"Constable?"