Reuben knew Jesse Plum's history in a general way. The old man had arrived from England as an indentured servant some time in the early 1670's, a long-jawed hulk with certain fixed ideas, one of which was that nobody loved him any more than you could put in your eye and see never the worse. After his first term of servitude he had drifted to Springfield and cemented himself to Grandfather Matthew Cory's family with the suctorial power of the meek. Reuben knew that in the same year when his father and mother were married and came to Deerfield, Grandfather Cory died, and after his death Grandmother Rachel Cory had no place for a godless sot; her son at Deerfield casually inherited Jesse, and Jesse did nobly, working for his keep and a trifle over, aware that Goodman Joseph Cory could seldom be stern toward anyone but himself.
Jesse's thin nose, wedged between gently wandering milky blue eyes, possessed an intuition for alcohol, as a good bloodhound's nose will hold him firm on the trail. Jesse never rebelled nor complained. His mention of the Pain in his Back was simply a special kind of breathing with words, his muscle the sort of unlovely boot-leather that can always beat out one more day's wear. He tended to be somewhere else at plowing-time, and Reuben had seen him approach overt emotion in the presence of a woodpile, but he never failed at harvest—Jesse was doing his best and said so himself. A neighbor, Benoni Stebbins, observing Jesse's slowly receding back, once declared in Reuben's hearing that some men are born tired—the charitable heart can only hope they'll find time for enough rest before Judgment.
Jesse talked most colorfully when resting; Jesse was a man of memories. In youth he had known the Great Plague of 1665 and the fire that laid London flat the following year; of these he almost never spoke, but he loved to croak on by the hour with less sorrowful recollections of the motherland.
The Indian Meco must have met inquiries about his true name with a bubble and purr of Algonkian syllables inconvenient for English tongues. Reuben had almost forgotten him until tonight, and calculated in the dark: that was four years ago, the day they brought in a lion. Reuben could then find Meco's image—scrawnily tall, gnarled, bald, the softer wrinkles of his eroded face fallen in from a bulging forehead and stupendous hooked nose. Meco wore a cast-off English bodice as a favorite breechclout. A Pocumtuck, he was believed to have claimed in his bruised English. If that was true he had reason for a desolate old age: the Mohawks almost annihilated that nation in 1664, and the remnant was further cut down in King Philip's War of 1675-'76 against the English. Not too small a war—Joseph Cory remembered it as a background thunder of his own childhood. The Indians burned Springfield; at Deerfield an innocent small stream earned the name of Bloody Brook and bore it still. The war ended when Sachem Metacomet of the Wampanoags, called King Philip, was betrayed by one of his own people and shot, and most of the survivors of his tribe were sold by the irritated Saints of Massachusetts into West Indian slavery.
Meco lived and foraged God knew where—somewhere in the highlands beyond the Pocumtuck River. At least Reuben had always seen him appear from that direction, an undecipherable message out of the region of sundown and west wind.
The Day of the Lion—midsummer of four years past, so Ben had been ten and Reuben a little past eight: the year the century turned. Jesse Plum vanished before sunrise; by afternoon the household grew convinced he had wandered off with Meco. The two satisfied each other in conversation, an affair of huge parturient silences, a drink, a further scanning of horizons—all this a genuine mental mining rewarded in the end by the substantial nugget of a grunt.
When the family sat at supper one of the Hoyt boys danced in, expanded with joy, announcing: "They killed a catamount!" The youth was swooping on when Joseph Cory asked: "Boy—who did? When, pray, and how, may a man arise to inquire?"
"Well, they killed a catamount," said the younger Hermes, and fled, not wishing to miss any more of the triumph which was entering the north gate of the stockade, collecting startled admirers. A progress of two, Jesse Plum and Meco, bearing on a pole between them the corpse of a mountain cat. They were both drunk as David's sow. Respectfully they dumped the tawny ruin in the dooryard.
"In the hills," Jesse Plum declaimed. "Yah!" He waved (Goodman Cory's) gun approximately east, toward the Pocumtuck Range. "Now he'll slay no more cattle." He set the gun down with care. "Why, he might've attackted the boys, then I couldn't never 've forgave myself, no never." Jesse lifted knotty hands defying all powers that could threaten the Cory children, and Meco began a stately shuffle, perhaps the tentative offer of a victory dance, but found himself in the wrong mood. Smiling at everyone, Jesse explained: "'S the Lord's guidance."
Father asked: "There's been cattle killed?"
Jesse was immediately hurt and sulky. "Not never again by this beast—heart-shot he be." He nodded where he thought Meco was probably standing. "Good man—whoreson good man there."
Reuben could remember seeing and hearing all that through a doorway partially filled by his mother's grace; he could remember squeezing in beside her, her arm dropping on his shoulder, her finger twisting in his hair, which he still wore quite long in those days. He could remember her bubbling with suppressed laughter. Ben was already outside, standing slim beside Father, contemplating Jesse's performance with adult gravity.
The carcass lay at some distance, and a damp east wind was blowing toward the river, but even from the first that lion had not looked right. Bloated and not bloody; flies were settling. "Oh!" Mother said—"thankful heart! It hath a—a little stink."
Meco was not as drunk as Jesse. He spread dark fingers in resignation. "Big stink," he amended, and strode off into rainy twilight, leaving Jesse to salvage what he might of glory.
So far as Reuben recalled, Meco never came back. After he had gone—but now at twelve Reuben could not bring the rest easily to mind.
Father had not found it so amusing. Jesse must have been obliged to bury the carrion and spend sober hours longing for invisibility. In following days, no doubt, whenever Jesse joined a gathering, say at the ordinary or leaning on a fence or discussing a bottle behind a shed, someone would make a soft faraway mention of catamounts, and Jesse would be surrounded by that shattering New England laughter which is performed without moving a muscle of the face or emitting any sound of any kind.
Then, within the obscurity of this last night of February, Reuben did remember more. Shame had stirred within him for Jesse Plum, who had always owned the status of a friend, old but accessible and a spinner of tales. Jesse knew everything, Reuben had once supposed—wild secret things, winds and weather signs, the enigma of women's flesh and one's own, charms against disaster, skin-prickling histories of what witches might do to cause it, and endless gaudy tales of England in the days of King Charles. If you could believe Jesse Plum—Reuben had, once—his youth before the Plague would have terrified Marlborough and made a stallion blush. Jesse could tell of monsters too—basilisk, mandrake, unicorn, sea serpent. Jesse liked to hint murkily that once during the miserable Atlantic passage to the colonies he had glimpsed a Something rising from the bowels of the deep, and never quite got around to saying what it was. He could explain the simpler stories written by furred feet in the snow, by iron bear-claws high on a tree trunk. From a blur and a spot of blood he could make you see a mouse becoming a midnight dinner for an owl, and then set your spine wriggling with a hint that maybe it was not exactly an owl but like one. For a long time—long anyway to Reuben Cory—the brothers had settled many private arguments by: "We can ask Jesse."
Drunk or no, it had not been right that a tall grown man, an old man, should act the clown. It had not felt right to watch Jesse with the dead lion when his sweating grayish face turned lost and vague and crumpled in a stupid chuckle of apology.
And then as Meco stalked