Wilderness of Spring. Edgar Pangborn
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insistence he searched his heart, that he was more of a mind to praise Ben for being himself—which was heresy, and of course absurd. Uncle John's letter must be to blame.
The marvel of Ben's hand moved out of the concentrated light. Reuben rose, aware that Ben wished him to come along without a fuss. The letter, lying open as his father had left it on the table, pulled at him. His mother would not be pleased to have him study it. In spite of that, in spite of his own uneasiness, his eyes probed swiftly at it, and hungrily. Mr. Kenny had used a brownish ink; light slanting from a new angle as Ben moved the candle transfigured the writing to iridescent gold: It is a sorrie thing that a Man should refrayne from speaking his Minde.... He hath his Light, so let mee live by mine owne. Reuben's eyes snatched a few lines further on, words his father had not read aloud: Nor no man, by threat of Damnation nor Promiss of Paradise, shall ever betray me into the Folly of hating my Naybor, whether in the name of Princes who are but Men or in the name of a God I knowe not.
Reuben turned away clumsily, shocked and confused. It was clear why his father had read no more aloud. His mother might have offered no comment at all; but.... Ben was regarding him kindly, perhaps puzzled, across the hot flower of the candle. "Come on, Ru——" and Ben's voice cracked woefully, baritone to treble and back to a rumble.
Looking then at none of them, Reuben could feel certain lines of force: their mother's tender amusement at the cracking of Ben's voice, and Ben's helpless annoyance at that amusement, and from the other seat by the fireplace a quiet contemplation neither amused nor much concerned with judgment. And here at the center of the lines of force, here within himself, a wonder much like a pain just below the ribs, that anyone so admired and respected as Uncle John could be such a tremendous heretic. A God I know not?—that shook the ground. And Reuben was certain that, for the present at least, he could not speak to his father about that fretful thing under the ribs.
Nor even to Ben.
Ben noticed that Reuben was making less snickering circumstance than usual of diving under the covers in the chill of the garret. Both had wriggled into dark security before Ben remembered that Ru had not said prayers at all—for him almost unprecedented—nor had Ben himself done so. Uneasily Ben decided to let it go this once. Reuben had lapsed into heavy stillness and would certainly resent a jab in the back. As for himself, he could pray silently in bed: Father and Mother both said so.
So far as Ben knew, Reuben was sleeping as well as ever these nights, starting dutifully on his own side buried to the nose, but later twitching in sleep, flinging himself about—frequently plagued, Ben knew, by terrifying dreams. Often, when he was well down in sleep, his arm would arrive on Ben's chest with a hard impatient flop; then, usually, quiet. Ben could not remove the arm without waking him, which might bring on an hour's talking-spell. Ben enjoyed those, but on these February nights Ben wanted to sleep, and an unfamiliar difficulty in it was annoying him like a sore tooth.
Was he a coward, that he should die a little whenever some obscure night noise resembled distant shouts or gunfire? What was bravery anyway, and why could you never be certain you possessed it?
Had he stumbled into sin without knowing it? He could uncover no kernel of serious iniquity. All winter he had been rigidly good, because (Father said, Mother said) his brother looked up to him and needed the example of virtue. Yet they ought to know—Mother surely did—that Reuben was the nearer to grace.
No angel of course. Ru's normally loving temper could be submerged in sullen withdrawal or red-faced wrath. The brothers had quarreled a few times; only a few, since for Ben the experience was too shattering, turning the natural world upside down in loss and destruction. Nowadays Ben thought he knew how to read the danger signs and head off an explosion.
It could not be sin that held him wakeful. More likely fear—listening for the town watch to become a voice instead of a crunch of boots. Ben had fallen into the habit of noting that squeak of leather on snow, then straying into some waking dream in which a stern Ben Cory with a thinner mouth played a heroic part or died interestingly.
He could enter other waking dreams, the only region where a warm personification of desire is unfailingly obliging, never giggles secretly with other girls, never snuffles from a cold in the head or talks back. More than a year ago Ben had suffered a three months' obsession with a tangible human being named Judith. He saw it now as a childish aberration of the far past—the girl's father was the tithingman; one must draw the line somewhere. He had seen Judith hardly at all this winter, being no longer obliged to attend the little Deerfield school; when he did glimpse her he was heart-free. But no flesh-and-blood creature had superseded her, and often in the waking dreams his lively collaborator looked like Judith, as she said and did those shameless things which were saved (he hoped) from sinfulness by the covering assumption: We'd be married, of course, before we did anything like that, or that. Ben had spoken to the tangible Judith perhaps a dozen times during his obsession, as the occasions of school made it flat-out necessary; to Judith of the dreams he spoke at length, wittily, memorably, relishing her praise, her sharing of all his views, as she whispered under his ear in the dark and Ben could imagine he knew the sliding of a silken thigh and searching fingers.
Dreams of sleep followed no such intelligent direction. Ben experienced few of them, for usually his sleep was profound. The wench who did once recently delight him in one of these bore no resemblance to Judith or anyone. Ben had managed to glimpse little more of her than a pert earlobe and tumbling hair. The agony of climax had not even ended when he woke with wet loins and the exasperation of not quite remembering. Better and worse than waking dreams; worse because waking demolished them as full sunshine kills a rainbow, and better because they left him in something like temporary peace as no waking fantasy ever did.
Aware of the near warmth of Reuben, of Father and Mother sleeping downstairs, and beyond the snow-burdened roof the hard great glitter of February night, Ben could also discover aloneness, a cool splendor of thought wide-ranging, since a mind free of daytime bounds need recognize few others, sometimes none at all.
Did Heaven and Hell fill everything beyond the earth? Well, how could they? Something else must include them, if only emptiness.
At the ancient game of contemplating time, Ben found no great alarm in staring down either direction of forever, while the brain refused to conceive an end or a beginning, but too much of this wearied him like an effort to grasp air in the hand. He could not follow those speculations without coming to something like a blank wall. Possibly God put it there; possibly if God put the wall there men should stay away from it.
On such cold nights, while Ben wrestled not too urgently with eternity, the house might achieve a transitory perfection of silence. Then a contracting beam would set off a snap like gunshot. It could be real gunshot; after thin worry of listening Ben would know it was not. He might hear his father downstairs sigh and turn over in the four-poster that would not quite accommodate his long legs. Down in the fireplace an ember might pop in the banked-up ash—like a knocking, like floorboards disturbed by an otherwise noiseless footfall. Out in the shadows a village dog might bark, and Ranger in the shed boom back at him. Sometimes the gray cat Bonny, who liked to come smokefooting in and curl on the boys' bed, would take to snoring lightly. If it was a night when Jesse Plum's narrow ruddy nose was troubling him, Jesse in his lean-to might imitate anything from a waterfall to a hog-killing. Or Ben would hear the hollow baritone of an owl, the lamenting of a wolf, the nearly human scream of a mountain cat. But true silence also might arrive, and it would seem to Ben that if he could himself be silent as the dark, permitting no least sound of breath, there might come to him another moment of revelation such as he had once known—he could not quite recall the time—when he had dropped on his back in the grass, and looking up, had discovered the brilliant life of new birch leaves between him and the immortal blue of spring.
Reuben was wakeful too, but sought to conceal it by lying motionless even after his back began to itch, since the desire for talk was at present not in him. For a while he was both hurt and relieved that Ben had not reminded him to pray. But terror was latent in this; his mind winced away from it and sought the consolation of a decision: as soon as Ben should fall asleep—and Ben usually snored a little—he would get up and stand by the window and atone for the omission by offering up a