Wilderness of Spring. Edgar Pangborn
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as dammit even when the spring's past. And he's not in the best health—says so here, further on."
Ben noticed Reuben's face drooping in resignation. Ru would know, as Ben did, that even if Uncle John were invited he probably could not come. The untamed roads were lonely; an old man on horseback could die swiftly from an arrow or bullet out of the brush.... Ben supposed he ought to take up a candle and persuade Reuben to bed. At fourteen Ben was expected to assume many of a man's responsibilities, not least of them the jumpy task of riding herd on his brother, who would be twelve in May.
Ben stood tall for his age, his slimness toughened by farm and other work to wiry flexibility. He could split wood nearly as well as his father, mend shoes better than Jesse Plum, manage the big kettles for his mother's candlemaking. But he could search his face in a mirror for signs of maturity and find maddeningly few. It remained a mild, large-eyed boy's face, high at the forehead, the jaw square but rounded at the chin. Father's craggy nose had character; Father was said to resemble Great-grandfather Stephen Cory, the sailor.
Legend placed Stephen Cory aboard Lord Howard's flagship when the Armada came against England in 1588. It just might have been true, for he was past middle life when he gave up the wild universe of the sea and begat Ben's grandfather Matthew Cory, and he was in his salt-encrusted seventies when he died in 1643 in the little new town of Boston. Whether the myth was true or false, Stephen Cory lived gaudily in Ben's fancy, strutting the quarterdeck, thrusting a beaky face like Joseph Cory's to the leaping spray and the enormous winds.
But Ben Cory in these prosaic modern times had grown resigned to a nose that stayed straight and small like his mother's, and his mouth was wide and full like hers—not a mouth for sternness, said the mirror. If Ben glared commandingly at the glass, somebody inside him hooted with merriment. His voice had changed but could still crack; the down on his face did not yet need shaving, being light in color.
"I never heard," said Joseph Cory, "that the Abenaki had any better stomach for winter campaigns than any other damned Inj'ans."
Adna Cory bit off a thread. "Septembers, Octobers, after they have their own corn harvested, then they come." Adna Pownal Cory would have been thinking of many past times when summer was fading but no dead leaves lay fallen to rustle warnings of approach. "A September, was it not, when they attacked the Beldings? Poor Sam! Thou wast six that year, Benjamin, and all warrior with no mind to be hustled out of the way—remember?"
"Yes, Mother, I do." A September Sabbath. The Beldings had gone to bring their corn from the outer fields before the service, when Indians ambushed the wagon, raging briefly into the village and away.
The Corys were not members of the church. Joseph Cory had been brought up in the congregation at Springfield, but when he came to Deerfield with his bride in 1688 he had declined either to join or to explain his failure to do so. Adna Cory was a member of the Anglican communion, which had been permitted to exist in Massachusetts for several years. On many Sundays and Lecture Days, in defense against public opinion, the family went to the meeting-house, the boys rigidly enduring the rhymed Psalms and the tedium of Mr. John Williams, who tended to preach in a sort of febrile blank verse.
They had stayed at home on the morning the Beldings were ruined. Ben remembered the explosion of Sabbath quiet into screams and shots, Father snatching the flintlock from its deerhorn rack and Mother gone very white, hurrying himself and four-year-old Reuben up to the garret. Ben was no warrior then—Adna Cory's fantasy developed that later, maybe from Ben's insistence on crowding in front of Reuben because he hoped to see what was going on.
For the Beldings help came too late—the mother and three children killed, the father and two other children taken captive to Canada, another child wounded and left for dead. Later Ben watched a soldier carrying in nine-year-old Sam Belding, who had revived and hidden in the swamp. The thin legs dangled; Sam's head rolled against the soldier's jacket, a bloody mess. Sam lived. Ben at six had understood it adequately: we, and the Others. The village could be furious but not astonished. Sam Belding's head became a commonplace, like any pitiable thing seen long enough for the seeing mind to grow its own scar.
"Now I think of it," Joseph Cory said, "there may have been Abenaki with the French who raided Schenectady fourteen years ago." He left the table to sit near the fire, long-limbed and rangy, tired from a day at the woodpile and at mending harness. He adjusted a log on the flames and yawned, smiling at his cavernous noise, rubbing his palms up over his forehead; a clean and sober man, still young. Ben grew bemused with a fancy that his father's face had become translucent to some other fire behind the hawk-nosed profile, untidy sandy hair, pointed chin, friendly thin mouth, speculative gray eyes. "Those poor fools at Schenectady! That you don't remember, Ben. The meeting voted our palisade as soon as word came from Schenectady—early March, you but a few weeks old. I was an angry man that year as well as proud." His glance at his wife invited sharing of other memories; Adna Cory lifted a dark eyebrow and blushed a little, not quite smiling. "We all labored beyond ourselves to build that stockade, Ben, chopping frozen ground. Had cause—they were caught asleep at Schenectady, those Dutchmen. Men at Albany warned 'em of danger, but they were carrying on some factional quarrel with the people at Albany, and to show how lightly they held any word from that source they put up snowman sentinels. Marry come up!—and went to bed, so the Inj'ans and French walked in through the open gates. Snowmen! They that were butchered in bed were the fortunate. I'll never understand my fellow men. Babes and women cut open and burned alive...."
The Abenaki, Ben knew, had not changed. Climbing out there with Reuben the other day, he had seen the snow, high and hard-crusted against the stockade walls. Beyond the window clouds would be still rushing in their silence. Ben heard his mother saying in distress: "So long ago, Joseph! Let it be."
"Oh, Adna, I do rattle on.... I hear Captain Wells is not content about our palisade. It will stand, so we have men behind it, not snowmen. And I hear the common talk that Dudley should have done better by us. I think he did what he could. What's one minikin village in all the Massachusetts?—but you can't ask the village to see it so, it a'n't human. Dudley's politics and religion cause them to damn him for all else. Should caterpillars ravage the corn again it will be Dudley's fault, same as the poor man keepeth the butter from coming in the chum and is to blame if Goody What's-'er-name hath a flux."
"I pray our Father we never need the stockade." Adna Cory's voice held a drawling note of fatigue or drowsiness, not responding to her husband's labored mirth. She studied Ben; the one long glance, he knew, would tell her whether he needed buttons sewn on or holes mended, whether his face and hands wanted washing, whether his supper had been sufficient, whether he was likely to remember about hearing and prompting Reuben in prayers at bedtime. The glance gave Ben a passing mark and moved on to embrace Reuben. "Mm—sitting there like Mumchance that was hanged for saying nothing! Sleep got thee, Ru? Eyes drawing sand?"
Reuben smiled angelically and stretched, his thin face reflecting her own—small nose, high forehead, pointed ears. He bore an even more emphatic resemblance to Ben, his eyes a darker gray. The ocean must be gray like that, Ben supposed, the gray Atlantic that his father had once glimpsed and never forgotten—speaking of it sometimes like a man who has promised himself to revisit a mystery if the demands of daily existence ever allow it.
Ben knew that a vulnerable quality in Reuben troubled their father. It was easy to wound Reuben. Ben had done it more than once, without intent and with regret in the same moment. No doubt Joseph Cory prayed the boy would grow stronger armor with increase of manhood.
Reuben Cory watched his tall brother lift a candle in its pewter sconce and trim a blob of wax with his thumbnail. Ben's hand, firm below the flame and golden, brought Reuben the amazement of a miracle, a thing never seen before. A familiar knife-scar on the forefinger—even that was new, though Reuben recalled quite well how Ben had got it ignobly a year ago by losing his patience when Jesse Plum was showing him how to whittle a maple stick. A text from the prescribed Scriptural reading sounded in Reuben's mind, as happened so often when he was startled, delighted or disturbed: I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. But it seemed to the boy that something here was false. The thought might be dutiful and correct, yet was he actually praising the Lord for having made Ben beautiful? Why, hardly. Rather