Chapter II: Part ONE: Chapter One (2)

The room before him spread out as a mass of darkness holding two oblong mouths of Hell, yet from moment to moment as his mother prayed, Reuben was aware, coldly aware that those two hell-gates were simply windows of the house where he lived: the west window displaying an absurd, pretty hole--who'd have thought a bullet could go through without shattering all the glass?--the south window a fainter gleaming, for its shutters were partly closed and the glare of the fires came upon it indirectly--beautiful in fact, rather like first light of a red-sky morning; rather like----

Wind struck him, rushing through the ravished door, and Reuben thought: _Now!_ "Mother, let me go! Let me----" but her cheek was heavy and hot against his head; her arms would not understand; he could not hurt her by struggling to free himself.

Someone, maybe Father, shouted a dim word or two outside and was answered by a blast of gunfire. In the room behind them Jesse Plum raved. _Mother, let me speak to you_--Reuben understood he had not said it aloud.

"_Deliver us from evil--deliver us from evil...._"

It was coming.

Reuben had known it, waited for it, now watched with no astonishment as the thing on all fours lurched obscenely from the entry into the front room and fumbled about, snorting, searching for the axe.

Reuben caught his mother's wrists and pushed her arms away--no help for it. Amazed at their clinging strength, he was more amazed that he had the power to overcome it, and without harming her. He was free and not free.

He could drive himself a few steps forward, but it seemed that the air between him and the thing on all fours had thickened to monstrous glue. His lungs must toil to fill themselves. He located the thing again as it crouched and began to rise. With all his force, with a sense of huge achievement, he spat on the face of it.

Reuben felt it at first simply as a brutal and foul indignity when the thing, rising to a vast height, laid a hand flat across his face and lifted him so, with nothing but iron thumb and finger gouging under his cheekbones, and flung him sprawling. He struck the bed, and during some long sluggish course of time, two or three seconds perhaps, he secured a bedpost and hauled himself upright, finding that the firelight from the west window was now behind him, and everything was changed. He must get back across the room.

The thing towered to the ceiling between him and his mother, who still knelt in the doorway and still prayed. He must get back across the room. She would not look up. It might be she did not see, did not know the stone axe was swinging down. He must go back across the room.

Reuben felt the scream wrenched out of his throat: he himself had nothing to do with it. He was certain then that he was running back across the room. This room or some other, in this world or some other.

* * * * *

Ben moved into the light, stumbling over the ravished door, falling, gathering himself in one motion to go on, to kneel beside the unresponding mouth, knowing that his father was dead. His mind retained an ice-fire shrewdness, a corner-of-the-eye intelligence understanding the smoking houses, the running, the shrieking, the fur-capped Frenchman who was reloading, and shouting too in foreign-sounding English: "_Surrender!_"--was that what the fool was yammering? To Ben he appeared a stupid and trivial man with babyish pop eyes--couldn't the fellow understand that Goodman Cory was dead?

Ben was on his feet, his father's gun dull and heavy--loaded, too, he realized. The French officer fired, clumsily this time, and a hornet-thing of no importance muttered past Ben's ear.

In the house, someone screamed.

Ben turned his back on the Frenchman dreamily. "Acquire learning?" Delayed knowledge of the scream penetrated him like blown flame. A man in the entry was struggling to rise. Automatically, with no conscious anger, Ben clubbed the gun against the black head, catching the Indian smell of acorn grease and paint. Should he now shoot through the deerskin jacket?--no, because he must be already dead. Ben had heard and felt the splintering of bone. And anyway this man was only one, and there had been two.

The fires continued in his eyes and shifted to blackness. Here in the front room he couldn't see. He knew his mother or maybe Reuben had screamed. He understood the blackness was in his head, a vertigo, and he called: "I'm coming to you, Mother!" The blackness dissolved, giving back the room. He must look there, where she was lying, and the spilled blood, and the boy kneeling beside her saying quite softly over and over: "Mother--Mother...."

Out in the hall a muffled 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 horny 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 snatched 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, damn you!"

Ben's eyes were watering from the cold and from a billow of smoke the wind flung down on them. "God damn 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 bloody 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 passed 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."

"God magnify you!" Jesse drank. "Don't know you--'d pray for you was I a'ready in Hell."

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, bloody grape-shot it is now, might've killed me deader'n a son of a bitch." 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 God."

"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, passing over Ben like a slightly warming breeze.

A vague time later--the column was gone and Ben was trying to ignore a stitch 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 Hell. 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 bloody 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, bugger 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----"

"That's nothing."

"You say that. I befouled myself. I didn't pray last night. So I'm to die in sin and be damned forever."

"No. No...."

Jesse mumbled: "God-damn flask's empty." Ben's eyes were compelled to follow the motion of a brown thing soaring up from Jesse's long arm, flying, descending to the river ice and skidding off to lie still, a dot of darkness. "Don't know m' own bloody strength," said Jesse Plum, and chuckled in apology.

"Reuben, thou art no more in sin than any child of Adam."

"I let it happen. He came out of the dark. I let it happen."

"Reuben, get up on your feet!" As Reuben answered that angry shout with nothing but a sick stare, Ben searched in desperation for anything at all that might reach the boy's mind, and could find nothing, thwarted by the barrier that rises or seems to rise between one self and another, and so cried out unthinkingly: "For my sake then! Because I need thee and love thee."

* * * * *

Reuben Cory clung to the power of a fantasy. The snow before him, through which his feet could now drive with amazing patience and force, was not really level but a stairway. Level it was--flat level, drearily flat and white and cold--but his mind by quiet assertion made of it a stairway: because a level may indicate infinity, but a stairway, any stairway, must come to an end. Let it be a thousand miles or a thousand years away, a stairway must come to an end, for the mind refused to imagine one that went up forever, to no goal. Therefore each step was a rising, something gained toward the summit where Ben stood waiting to tell him he had done well.

By fantasy the universe might stand divided, into a region endurable and an outer region. To the outer region one must return, soon, and Reuben knew it.

From within the region of illusion that he knew to be illusion, Reuben grew aware, and more comfortably, that old Jesse Plum was still rambling on, and singing.

"Brave Benbow lost his legs, by chain-shot, by chain-shot...."

Reuben no longer resented the croaking sound as a hateful intrusion. The old man meant no harm, and was drunk. Ben had refused to abandon him, and Ben always knew best.

"Says Kirby unto Wade: 'We will run, we will run.'
Says Kirby unto Wade: 'We will run.
For I value no disgrace, nor the losing of my place,
But the enemy I won't face, nor his gun, nor his gun....'"

Peacefully, almost unobserved, the boundary between the two regions dissolved. The snow was flat. For a few moments Reuben's mind was completely engaged in an effort to understand how they had got away from the house. The axe--came--down.... Then what? Out of this blank two remote voices spoke with needle sharpness: "_Goodm'n Cory?_" "_They've shot him, Jesse._" Maybe after that he had fainted. But now, to the deepest privacy of his mind, Reuben could state: That home was not; that he would be twelve in May; that his mother and father were dead; that he was walking on flat snow into the outskirts of the village of Hatfield with his brother and an old servant who was drunk and naked.

Hatfield buzzed. For a short way--questions from distracted citizens spattered from all sides--Reuben knew that Jesse was shambling between him and Ben, an arm on each, wobbling and protective; then under the guidance of a pink fat man they passed into the thick warmth of the ordinary's common room. In this hot haze and clatter of voices, Reuben's senses clouded, not in retreat but bodily exhaustion. A birdy, ancient woman hovered about them with noises of concern. Beside her face, Ben's appeared, and Reuben searched the strangeness of it in a fluctuating dark and brightness. They must be sitting near a fireplace, he reasoned, and Ben's arm was preventing him from toppling over. Ben was speaking, too. "What?"

"I said, rest thee a while, Ru."

The fat man had wrapped Jesse Plum in a huge brown horse-blanket; now someone brought the old man a pewter tankard. At the rim of it gleamed Jesse's little blue eyes, unfocused like those of a baby at the breast. At length Reuben heard someone drawl in unbelieving admiration: "Godso-o-o!" Jesse's grimy fingers fluttered; a frowzy-haired boy in a grubby apron giggled and snatched the tankard before it could hit the floor. Jesse collapsed into himself, a wired skeleton from which rose the bubble and rasp of a sudden snore.

The fat man was talking in lardy tones. "Hoy! Killed an Inj'an, he did say. He don't look it." Jowls shaking and puffy fingers gentle, he twitched away the blanket to examine Jesse's burnt side. "Bad. Gun blowed, he said. We'd ought to have goose-grease." The ragged boy was peeking at it. The fat man lifted him away by a greasy spreading ear. "Mind thy God-damned manners, pup--a'n't we all brothers in Christ? Go fetch cobwebs. Good as grease, they'll mend a burn."

Jesse Plum was carried away, his slumber undisturbed, and Ben was talking with the old woman.

Reuben supposed he ought to listen, say something himself. Their speech came to him disconnected and obscure. "Grandmother in Springfield--Madam Rachel Cory ... great-uncle--Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury."

"... sleigh gone a'ready to Hadley with others from Deerfield--be there more on the way?"

"I think there was no one near us."

"... to your grandmother--certainly...."

Most unmanly, Reuben thought, to let his head sink, to leave Ben the whole burden of caring for him, but with that head an unmanageable lump of exhaustion there was no help for it. He found it strange that Ben's voice should be rumbling directly under his ear and yet sound far away. "Ma'am, if my brother might rest in a room where it's quiet?"

Reuben tried to protest as he was lifted. He could walk. The protest fell short of words. An alien hand touched him, someone else offering to take him. Ben's voice was oddly impatient: "Nay, I'll carry him...."

Reuben sensed the passage of a creaking stairway. Ben let him down, on a cot, and as he stretched out his vision cleared, showing him a narrow room, and Jesse Plum on a pallet nearby, snug in his horse-blanket, brown gnarled feet innocently protruding, Adam's apple bobbing with his snores. The old woman was hovering. "Nay then, boys, you bide here long as you're a-mind. Jerusha'll get a cart, or you might wait on the sleigh's returning if you wish. Eh, Lord, we saw the fires on the sky before dawn, I'd only just come down to see after breakfast. Anyone'd know you for brothers--eh, Lord, yes! What's your name?"

"Reuben and Benjamin Cory--I'm Benjamin."

"Eh, Lord, yes! I'm Goody Hawks, and you can trust my Jerusha--he'll get you to Springfield one way or t'other. Some tea, ha?"

Reuben thought: I _must_ speak, if only for thanks. But Ben, sitting by him, a hand spread without pressure on Reuben's chest, was saying everything, taking care of everything. "You're most kind, ma'am."

"Eh, Lord, nothing--shame if we couldn't help the Lord's own on such a day...."

Reuben saw his brother wince and lean down, pulling up the leg of his breeches to bare his knee. Though it made the room swirl dangerously, Reuben braced up on his elbow to look at the long splinter embedded below Ben's kneecap.

"Law me!" Goody Hawks knelt by Ben, clucking and muttering. She secured the end of the splinter in horny nails, drew it free with skillful quickness and held it up. "You walked from Deerfield with that and all? Marry, it's two inches long if I'm a day old. You must have a poultice of sawdust or the like. I'll fetch it when I bring the tea. That'll draw out any that's left--like draws like, you know--eh, Lord, what a thing, I'd've dropped flat with it in twenty paces."

Reuben thought: I _will_ speak, and his hand reached out, and he heard his own voice as a hoarse and stupid little noise: "Give it here."

Goody Hawks dropped the stained thing in Reuben's hand, apparently not puzzled that he should want it, though Ben was, and studied him with some mixture of amusement and concern. Reuben pushed the splinter into his shirt pocket, and then, in some dread that Ben might ask questions unanswerable, he lay back and shut his eyes.

He heard them whispering together a little while, the sound partly smothered by the snoring of Jesse Plum. "... was there when our mother was killed ... outside the house, but he was forced to see...."

Reuben thought: _A stairway. I am lying still--nevertheless a stairway._

As Goody Hawks tiptoed from the room, he felt again on his chest the undemanding weightless warmth.

* * * * *

"Ben, what are we to do?"

"Nothing for now, except you should rest.... I suppose Grandmother will have room for us. If not there's Uncle John at Roxbury."

"Last night I saw a part of his letter that Father didn't read aloud. Uncle John must be a great infidel."

"What did he write?"

"'Nor no man, by threat of damnation nor promise of paradise, shall ever betray me into the folly of hating my neighbor, whether in the name of princes who are but men or in the name of a God I know not....' How could anyone write such a thing, unless he...."

"Marry, I don't know. I think--oh, let it be, Ru. He's a good man, we know that.... I suppose he only meant that the general opinion is not his own, that his own religion is in some manner different."

"Yes, maybe.... Ben, is it true 'tis a hundred miles to Boston and Roxbury?"

"More than a hundred, I believe."

"Will the French be coming down this way, you think?"

"They'd be here now, Ru, if that was their mind. Though I did hear Captain Wells saying a few days ago that if the French found the wit and the forces to drive down the river and hold it, they could cut the Massachusetts in half. But, he said, he thought they hadn't the men, nor the wit to think of it. There'll be no Inj'ans here."

"What'll we do--I mean in Springfield, or Roxbury?"

"Oh, I must be apprenticed to some trade or other. But thou shalt--continue studies. That was Father's wish--'deed it was the very last thing he spoke of before they broke down the door. And 'tis my wish too, remember that. Thou must acquire learning, he said."

"And why should I have that, and thou not have it?"

"I shall too. But being older, I can be apprenticed now, to earn my keep anyway, and I'll find means to study at the same time. I dare say that'll be Grandmother's wish, or Uncle John's."

"What about going to sea?"

"D'you know, I believe that's why I keep thinking of Uncle John and Roxbury. He's a shipowner. If thou couldst stay with him until a little older, and study, why, I might well be able to sign on shipboard for a while, so to earn my way."

"Ben, thou wilt never see thyself."

"Why? What does that mean?... Who ever can see himself?"

"Maybe no one. But thou especially--thou art ever thinking what may be done for others, the while I've thought only of mine own--mine own----"

"Heavens, Ru! I'm selfish enough."

"Not as I've been. Nay, let me say it--it's on me to say it, Ben: I mean to do better, to make thee not ashamed of me. I'm afeared, but I tell thee, I will try to be brave."

_Chapter Three_

Ben Cory lifted and dropped the brass knocker of an oak door, nail-studded, with hinges of dull-gleaming iron. "She may open to us herself, Ru. Remember to take off your cap."

Ben recalled that the sole of Reuben's left shoe was cracked; he had noticed it when he found the shoes after that nightmare search--actually the morning of this same first day of windy March. Ben's own shoes were still sound; the wet melting snow would be working up miserably through that crack in Reuben's. He squeezed the boy's shoulder. At least they were together. Undoubtedly Grandmother Cory would provide decent shoes.

The alien town oppressed him; Reuben too would be feeling the loneliness of a place where no one knew them. Other windows they had passed were alive with the mild glory of candles; Ben had noted this as they climbed the hill road from the frozen river, to the house with two chimneys that Jesse Plum had pointed out. Madam Cory's windows stood blankly gray in the graying evening.

Ben missed Jesse here. The old man, who had snored all afternoon in the oxcart that drowsily brought them down from Hatfield, had gone into a flutter of anxious apology at the prospect of approaching Madam Cory's house. "It a'n't fitten, Benjamin," he said. "Your grandmother was never no-way partial to me. I'll come later, ha? You don't take it unkind? That's her house, third back from the hill road, with the two chimbleys." Meanwhile his sad little blue eyes had fixed on a tavern signboard down the riverside street, a yellow rooster against startling blue. "She was never no-way partial--" still fluttering, apologizing, promising to come later, Jesse set off for the sign of the rooster at a feeble run....

The door at last squeaked open. The one observing them was only a servant in a drab russet jacket, bulging with heavy muscle. His baldness was fringed with gray at the temples, the thick skin of his face channeled like a withering pumpkin, his voice the hushed croak of a good soul enjoying a funeral. "You are Madam Cory's grandsons?"

"Yes. Word arrived about us?"

The big man nodded. "A militia rider from Hatfield. Madam Cory is at evening prayers. Come this way." He led them through a chilly entry into a parlor crowded with polished lifeless shapes. Ben selected a black throne; Reuben kept hold of his hand, speechless. "I am Jonas Lloyd--sir. Me and m' good wife, we does for Madam Cory. I trust you'll be some comfort in her affliction.... That is the Mister's chair--Mr. Matthew Cory's, your grandfather's. I fear Madam Cory doth prefer it be not used."

Ben scrambled out of it to stand in disgust by the cold fireplace. Jonas Lloyd's canine brown eyes assessed their ragged clothes; he nodded in sad approval of Ben's action, and faded away with the silence of well-trained muscle. Reuben muttered: "Dare we sit elsewhere?"

"Try it anyway."

"You was here once, Ben. Is the house as you remember it?"

"I can't remember it--I was a pisstail baby."

"I suppose we oughtn't use such words here?"

"You're right. I must remember."

They explored the room, timidly. A pot clattered in the unknown kitchen. A dog barked outdoors and was chided by some woman's elderly peevish voice. In the dying light, they could not make much of a painting on the wall--someone lean, stern, undoubtedly dead, with the high-bridged Cory nose; probably Grandfather Matthew, of whom Ben's father had seldom spoken. Jonas Lloyd had made no move to light the candles or the firewood standing ready on the hearth. Ben ventured onto another chair; no ghost pitched him out of it. Reuben sank on the floor and rested his cheek against Ben's knee, then jerked away, feeling the poultice that Goody Hawks had bound on the splinter-wound. "Did I----"

"Nay, it don't hurt," said Ben, and pulled him back, and tried to smooth his tangled hair, but only a vigorous combing would do that.

"Ben, how ever did we get over the palisade?"

"Jesse--he pulled you up and jumped with you."

"Why can't I remember it?"

"Oh, you was--I don't know. Hush--that's over...." Ben could find no light at all beyond the windows. Enough light filtered in from the hallway where a rushlight burned to show him Reuben's face gone vague and absent. As time crawled on, Ben wondered how anyone could spend an hour at evening prayers. Adna Pownal Cory would have called it excess of zeal.

His memory of his grandmother ought not to be so dim, he thought. When he was four, his mother had been expecting another child--a girl who lived only a week, as it happened--and Madam Cory offered to take him for a month or so; Adna Cory would not let two-year-old Reuben out of her care, for he was sickly, but she let Ben go. Madam Cory was then forty-nine, to Ben timelessly ancient. Ben could recall little except a struggle to say a Psalm right for her. Gray skirt, stiff white bodice, plain cap--and Ben _could_ not get in all those new words of the Psalm. Grandmother's hand was dry and cool. "Dost thou not _wish_ to be saved, Benjamin?..."

After Grandfather Cory died in 1688, Grandmother's younger sister and brother-in-law moved in with her--Patience and Recovered Herrin. The Herrins were blessed with six surviving children, whom they must have distributed somehow around the house. Ben could dredge up no infantile memory of them but a blur of faces sharing nothing, voices tediously speaking not for him. He knew that Patience had died in '97, and Recovered had gathered up his brood, married again and moved away.

Ben recovered no memory of the Pownals breezing in at Springfield to look at him, though they must have done so. Ben's aunt Mercy Pownal visited Deerfield in 1701, wearing a red silk hood, reckless short-sleeved bodice and scarlet cheyney jacket that shocked Mr. Williams and others to the bone, especially in view of a rumor that the woman could read Greek and Latin, had been to London (or Philadelphia?--some foreign place anyway) and, worst of all, was twenty-nine and yet unmarried. Ben remembered his mother trying to speak a formal welcome and crying instead. Then the two clung to each other in the doorway, the tall woman leaning her cheek against Mother's head, saying: "Nay, it's good, Adna, good--I wish I was in thy little shoes." Moments later Ben's mother was showing her over the small house, still sniffling, also chuckling like a skylark.

At another time came the marvel of Uncle Zebina Pownal, in black curls, who plumped down on all fours claiming to be a moose so the boys could ride him--a tame moose, he said, but amoosing; possibly Reuben's first pun, for the boy nearly strangled getting it down. Uncle Zebina sang, music of England; he had gone there, and heard the new inventions of Henry Purcell, who died young. Father was obliged to warn Uncle Zebina that the Deerfield neighbors would think ill of such music. "We must not interfere with their sadness, to be sure," said Uncle Zebina, and for the remainder of his visit he made the music a sweet conspiracy, humming softly and shielding his big red mouth with a comic hand.

But those were Deerfield memories and clouded with a strangeness. In 1702, the year of King William's death and Queen Anne's accession, when war broke out again, the bearded patriarch Enos Pownal, Mother's grandfather, had pulled up stakes in wrath at Springfield sold his fine house to some lowborn Dutchman from Albany, and sailed for the West Indies with most of the tribe. Enos died at sea, but the tribe went on, Mercy and Zebina and a flock of others, to settle at Kingston. Ben's mother occasionally received letters from them that left her brilliant-eyed. Even at fourteen Ben had never heard the whole story of that very Pownal-like upheaval; it carried overtones of religion and politics, and suppressed echoes of the word "smuggling."

No use--the woman now at evening prayers would take on no reality for Ben, as the Benjamin Cory four years old was an infinity removed. Yet he found it astonishingly easy to bring up recollection from the age of six of Reuben's four-year-old self, a wild passionate atom submerged in serious illness every few months, a being who must somehow be shielded, not hurt....

He thought of the journey just ended, the brown oxen slopping on dreamily through the mush of a thaw that had come on a benign breeze out of the south, the pearls falling from bare oak and dark-clothed pine to make gray periods in the white. He saw again Jesse Plum snoring, shaken about but no part of him awake except one hand that clung with a life of its own to the rail of the cart; he felt again Reuben huddled against him, speaking hardly a word in all the hours of the journey. The driver walking with the team had been a deaf-mute servant of the Hatfield ordinary, beyond communication in a hushed universe of his own. Across the river from Springfield the oxen had refused to venture on the ice. At Ben's prodding Jesse Plum had waked, his mind still shrinking within the rags of sleep, and the mute had swung the cart about for home.

Somewhere in that passage, Ben recalled, he had glimpsed a flash of life--a wintering jay, clean as a fragment of sky, lighting on a branch to scold the human thing. The cart crawled on; gazing back, Ben had been able to see the bird rise into the wider blue, in airy departure not wholly lost.

The bulk of Jonas Lloyd abruptly shut off the light. The man was rumbling with the studied cheerfulness of a hangman: "You may come now." He led them up a drafty staircase and indicated an open doorway at the rear of the upper hall and padded back into the gloom below.

A canopied four-poster filled the center of Madam Cory's bedroom, a neat pleasant room with western windows that would overlook the river by daylight. The quiet woman sat by one of these, pallid hands folded in her gray-skirted lap. Her eyes were, like Reuben's, ocean-gray, but unacquainted with laughter. A table beside her held a leather-bound Bible and one candle in a pewter sconce.

"Well, come to me then! Are you afeared of an old woman?"

Ben was dazed to discover--so vast had been the infantile image--that his grandmother was not large at all. She sat no higher in the little chair than Reuben would have done. "We are not--not too presentable, Grandmother."

"That's no matter. You must be Benjamin--awkward still, I see. And Reuben, whom I never saw--yes, yes, anyone would know you for brothers. You take after your mother's side somewhat, in appearance." Rachel Cory sighed gustily. "Thankful heart, Benjamin--don't cry! We all die, don't we? Pity but men would give more thought to what cometh after. I said don't cry. Your father's death, Benjamin, is a grievous thing, and you will remember that I have lost a son. Am I weeping? Am I, my dear?"

"No, Grandmother."

"Benjamin, let us understand one another from the beginning. I remember you as a child, willful and headstrong. If you and Reuben are to bide here until you can maintain yourselves, as of course you shall, you must walk in the one right way. Your father erred, who might have been one of the Saints; concerning your poor mother, I will not speak. Your father strayed. Benjamin, Reuben, in the Book of Psalms it is written: The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

* * * * *

Reuben heard and did not hear his grandmother: the sound of words in her deep, positive voice reached him, but not the meaning--it was not as though she had spoken in a foreign language, but as though his own comprehension were momentarily numb. He saw Ben look away from her in stunned blankness, and then no more reflection was possible, for a wild hoarse singing had broken loose in the night outside.

Rachel Cory winced and leaned to her window; it was too dark, Reuben guessed, for anything to be recognized. "Well," she said with the precision of disgust, "there is one heedless enough. You might as well understand, Springfield is no Canaan."

"Brave Benbow lost his legs, by chain-shot, by chain-shot,
Brave Benbow lost his legs--"

"The constable is slack again. It has been weeks since we suffered open sodden drunkenness in the streets. I do regret it should have happened on the evening of your arrival. Take a lesson from it if you have the wit. Benjamin, one thing you and Reuben must understand: in all the time the Lord hath permitted me to dwell here----"

"Yaphoo! If I a'n't a futtering he-goat of Hell there a'n't no name for me. Behold, I'm the brazen serpent of the wilderness--_yaphoo!_ Look on me, you pocky smock-tumblers, you pot-walloping get of Belial, on my bosom I got the bleeding bloody cross, only it slipped some, there's some men fail at everything, can't even carry a cross right side up and be God-damned to you, s's I!" In panic fear of laughing, Reuben coughed, and tried to look out the window so that his back would be turned to his grandmother. "You harken unto me, you jolly whoremasters, you cuckoldy cods and Roundheads too, harken how I pickled my wounds in the juice of the vine! Why, bugger 'em all, s's I, and you too--a'n't I meek and lowly? Yaphoo! A'n't I crushed to the dust nor can't sink no further down, a piss-poor toad under the heel of the Almighty? Look down! Don't I stay alive because Hell won't have me? You broke my heart, Lord, you fried my brains, now scourge me with a bull's pizzle, I won't say nothing. Yaphoo!" The voice was moving away. Reuben prayed that Ben would not speak. "Ah, Lord, look down!" Yes, it was fainter, muffled, as if walls intervened; Jesse must have turned a corner of the street. "Out of the deeps, O Lord--_yaphoo!..._"

Precariously, Reuben said: "I think he's gone, Grandmother."

She nodded grimly, letting out her breath in a shaken sigh. "I trust so. Some idle scum of the river-front.... In all the time the Lord hath permitted me to dwell here, I have tried to maintain my house as, let us say, a small imperfect Zion, if that be not vanity. I will tolerate no ungodliness, Benjamin, Reuben--no foul speech, no unconsidered acts. You'll never find me unkind or failing in understanding, but the walking is strict. You will be at meeting without fail on Sabbath and Lecture Days. These are wicked times. The faith is everywhere assailed, every day bringeth new inventions. See to it that I find you on the side of the Saints. Well, you must be weary and hungry. Jonas will see to your supper and show you to your room."

They were dismissed.

No more music came from Jesse Plum.

Jonas was waiting, and led the boys to the kitchen where his rawboned wife Anna had kept a supper warm. Anna Lloyd sniffed more than she spoke, through a ribbon of nose overhanging the shrunken area where most of her teeth had been lost. Neatly dressed and clean, perhaps she would never seem so, kitchen smoke and years of drudgery having found permanent lodgment in her wrinkles. She was incurious about Deerfield and the boys; her few questions were aimed at some region not well defined because of a cast in her eye.

Here in his own domain Jonas laid aside solemnity, straddling a chair, carelessly pawing Anna's scrawny bottom now and then, a caress such as he might have granted to a useful dog.

Reuben pushed the lukewarm stew around on his trencher for politeness' sake. He noticed that Ben was actually eating the stuff and emptying his mug of thin beer. Then Jonas recovered his mantle of stately gloom and guided them back upstairs to a room of their own. It was at the rear of the house overlooking a yard; except for Grandmother Cory's, probably the best room in the house. Jonas lit a candle and padded away.

The room contained another four-poster with a dark blue canopy. The small-paned windows shone brilliantly clean, the furniture stood just so, defying any sinfulness of disorder. A framed sampler on the wall aimed its message so that anyone retiring or rising must be advised: _I will also vex the hearts of many people, when I shall bring thy destruction among the nations, into the countries which thou hast not known. Ezekiel xxxii; 9._

Staring at this, Reuben thought: There was never such a thing in my mother's house. "Ben," he said, and turned to his brother in sudden need--"Ben, I'm only now understanding."

"Understanding, Ru?"

"We're alone. There's nothing. Only you and me."

* * * * *

It came to Ben belatedly, lying still under the dark canopy, the candle out, that once again neither he nor Reuben had prayed. For his own part he had not even thought of it, being too concerned with finding some word of comfort for Reuben in that moment of desolate comprehension. Now, since there was some possibility that the boy had fallen asleep, he dared not move.

He thought of Jesse Plum--surely a drinking companion must have steered the old man away to sleep it off in some tolerant kennel.

"_The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether._"

She might have been there in the room.

Ben faced up to the words for the first time, retreated incredulously, was compelled to return, wondering if Reuben could have understood them as he did now. In effect his grandmother had said it was right and fitting that their father (her son) should die.

Ben thought: _Fanatic...._ His father had used that term now and then, but indecisively, defining it but giving Ben the impression that a fanatic was a person you weren't likely to meet. The word was clarified for Joseph Cory's son now that it owned a face.

Laboriously Ben instructed himself: in the morning he would tell his grandmother that he and Reuben intended to go on to Roxbury.

At least that was decision, not frivolously reached; now perhaps he could rest. Reuben stirred and mumbled, but quieted at a pressure of Ben's arm. Ben watched the canopy, a blackness against softer dark. Moonlight must have arrived outside, faint, without consolation. In random air the canopy swayed like the bough of a sublimely silent tree possessed by midnight. Ben watched it, remembering.

Reuben was five, the first time he nearly died. Mr. Williams, a frontier minister of many duties, had felt obliged to offer what medical aid he could. He called the illness a calenture, came to the house to pray, provided some remedies that Ru promptly vomited. One of these was crushed sow bugs, recommended by the great Cotton Mather. Adna Cory stayed by the bedside, seeming unable to hear anything said to her by anyone but Reuben. Ben could remember firelight mixed with a gleam of candles, flooding through the half-open door of the back room where Reuben cried and drowsed and burned. Ru's breath had been loud and rapid on the night Ben recalled most clearly--it must have been the night before the fever broke and they began to think the child would live.

Ben's father was sleeping as usual in the front room; he needed to be up early and out for the corn-planting that will not wait even on the shadow of death. He had snuffed his candle but sat up still dressed, bony hands dangling, and said: "Thou shouldst go to bed, Ben--'tis late."

Lost, missing his mother in her deafness, Ben did not want to go to bed. The garret would be black, with the certainty of the lion under the bed of which Ben must not speak because it was not real. Voices in the other room dragged him toward other perils, cliffs not quite seen--the flowing tenor of Mr. Williams, now and then a word from his mother. Drawn elsewhere was his body, awkwardly, into the curve of his father's arm. "Thou shouldst be told, thy brother may die." But Father himself had told him, that morning; it was strange he could forget.

Ben remembered asking why God let people be ill, and then something, blurred now, about the drowning of Bonny's kittens. Lowering his face to his father's shirt, Ben had discovered a heartbeat heavy and interesting, overriding his father's words, leaving only fragments for later memory: "I wouldn't have thee question Mr. Williams concerning such a thing ... over-sure he knoweth all truth ... do themselves suffer from the sin of pride, as if knowledge of holy things resembled the goods of a man of business...." But Father had said something more, important, and it would not now come to mind.

"A promise to thyself is binding, unless a better wisdom----"

No, that was later, when Ben was ten years old and had been told to search his heart for any call to a particular life-work....

In the other room: "The broth was from a turkey Plum shot for us, Mr. Williams. He couldn't swallow the meat, I made a broth in the room of it. I know he got strength of it."

And Mr. Williams, melodious: "Goody Cory, I have prayed that this affliction might bring you and your good husband to a better understanding of the Christian's necessities. Oh, how advantageous gracious supplications are! God accounts forgetting his mercies a forgetting himself--no time more fit for praise than a time of trial. Why, can't you see this visitation must be God's means of bringing you and Goodman Cory and----"

"There was _hominy_ in it!" An ecclesiastical sigh followed that wail, and the rapid, harsher sighs of Reuben fighting to live.

But what else had his father said? Was it before they went outdoors?--in Ben's memory they were already in the yard, the house door closed. "No rain tomorrow." A breeze was blowing off the river. Joseph Cory had shown his son the inviolate shining of Polaris. "That star tells sailors where the north is, Ben. It never changes."

"Why, don't they alway know that?"

"Compasses sometimes fail. Nothing distracts Polaris."

Later he carried Ben up to bed and sat by him in the dark a while, speaking of a book of voyages by one Hakluyt, promising he would try to secure a copy and they would read it together. And he wrote of it afterward to Uncle John, who sent it as a gift with Ben's name in his own hand. Now it would be smoke.

In the Springfield house, boards squeaked upstairs--probably an attic bedroom for Jonas Lloyd and his sad wife. A rooster somewhere woke with the abrupt foolishness of his kind and crowed four times. Jesse Plum would say that was a sign somebody would give you money in four days, or maybe four changes of the moon.

"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 glass 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 pass, 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.