Ben Cory dwelt in a natural multiplicity of worlds. He could be active in the world of Deerfield's daily occasions: the reasonable labors on his father's farm grant; the school remembered from last year, where Ru's offhand brilliance at the piddling studies was now making him disliked, and Ben no longer there to prevent the occasional bloody nose or comfort him after a pedagogic birching; the not-friendly church; the clumsy kindness of some boys and girls of the village, and the mindless, furtively obscene cruelty of others; nearer to him sometimes than any of these, the quiet land itself in the flowing of the seasons, the smells of summer morning and of the milky breath of cattle, the open fields and marshes, the frame of low hills and the all-surrounding presence of maple and beech and oak and pine, the wilderness.
Ben knew the unique world his mother's presence created, where without much discomfort he was on his good behavior. With another sort of good behavior he could enjoy the world of being-with-Father, one often lit with unexpected mirth and kindness.
He possessed a sense of the outer world: an important Massachusetts, a half-mythical Canada inhabited hatefully by the Others, a New York not very real, an England thought of as Home—in a perfunctory way because of the ocean that made England, for a Deerfield boy, only slightly nearer than the moon. From his father Ben gained some clear perception of the war, the giants France and England raging over old hates and new advantages under two sick and stubborn sovereigns, Queen Anne of England and the doddering Sun King Louis XIV of France—yet the ocean itself was more actual to Ben than England or the war, for Ben's own father had seen it once on a boyhood visit to Dorchester. He said, if your ear lay close on the pillow at night, the murmuring you heard then was not unlike the moaning of breakers on sand, and why shouldn't a boy (said Joseph Cory) send himself to sleep by listening? The sound was eternal, Joseph Cory said—somewhere, always, ocean was breaking on the sand.
North of Deerfield the greater wilderness was a world inviting no one, a forest too old for imagining: green rounded hills secret in distance, swamps, valleys obscure, streams of unknown sources. That belonged to the bear and mountain lion, to the deer with midnight eyes and the comic grandeur of moose; to the rabbit—bouncing bread and butter of the wilderness—and the fox and weasel who followed him; to the down-footed lynx and quiet-sliding rattlesnake. Hunters, trappers and fur-traders knew something of that land, and had for nearly a hundred years.
The Abenaki knew everything about it—green depths of spring and balsam-pungent air, ardent stillness of forest summer afternoon, autumn explosions of gold and scarlet, and all the ways for men on an errand of killing to travel through it in silence when the ground was white and the evergreens bowed down and the northern lights a wavering of madness between them and the February moon.
Ben was welcome in yet another world as no one else was: a world that existed only when Reuben willed it.
Ru's talking-spells began when he was about six and able to find hidden hens' nests in the shed, to the sharp-faced ladies' continuing indignation. At that time the Corys still maintained the yellow-necked rooster brought as a youth from Springfield (senile and resembling Louis XIV in other ways but named Sir Pudden) who believed himself master of the shed and hated Jesse Plum's boots. He and Ranger and Bonny knew all about the nests. Ranger avoided them from a rigid sense of honor, with only a pensive lift of the white eyebrows in his black face. Sir Pudden stood about in glamorous attitudes—second nature if you have twelve wives, all of them cloth-heads. Bonny entered the shed in those days on a moral tiptoe, never certain whether the armed truce with Sir Pudden was still in force. Sir Pudden, to Reuben's extreme sorrow, regretfully became soup in the year 1699. Even sorrow was grist for Ru's talk-mill.
Bemused by the chickens' personalities, Reuben elaborated names for all of them—Martha, Patience, Hoobah, Binega, many others. Every new batch of fluff-balls drove him to a dither of vicarious maternity. At night he kept Ben awake with flowing tales in which these names acquired quasi-human characters who could range up and down in a special world with horizons of Reuben's choosing.
In the conventionally documented world nobody ever chopped William Stoughton into small red gobbets. That vinegar-blooded Saint, deputy governor during the witchcraft frenzy of 1692 and again later, died in 1701, but not in the small red gobbets Duchess Hoobah made of him in one of Reuben's narratives. The conventionally documented Stoughton would not have been interested to learn how an obscure Joseph Cory, remembering 1692, had loathed him out loud in the presence of wide-eared children. It didn't matter. The past of one, or two, or two thousand years, the fluid present, the future that can exist only in myth, all came to focus in Reuben's here-and-now, in the theme and variations of a small clean mouth chirping in the dark.
Ben seldom suppressed the talk. He liked to offer details of adult wisdom, or new words that Reuben would roll with relish on the tongue. The stories gained in sophistication, especially during the last three or four years, when the boy had developed a taste for listening to Jesse Plum. Princesses appeared; decapitations were limited to villains, wizards and Frenchmen. Allegory too: the tales no longer rambled but were innervated by unifying purpose, and Ben knew rather plainly that he was receiving gifts from a mind altogether separate and unlike his own. Ru also acquired some tact, and awareness of the times when Ben preferred to sleep.
If he itched with questions, though, and found Ben reluctant to answer, Ru might take advantage of his smaller size, punch and prod, try to smother Ben with the covers or nag after the forbidden tickle-spot at the edge of the ribs. He could hurt if he gripped a handful of hair, but he generally managed to stop short of open war. Ben imagined, sometimes with uneasiness, that his brother could study his mind, feel with his nerves, control him as a small man controls a big horse with wit alone. After such assaults, secondary eruptions would demonstrate that the little wretch was still awake—pinches, pokes, muffled war whoops, prohibited words: original sin taking its own time to simmer down.
Nowadays Ru's stories would be delivered sotto voce, lest Father shout up telling the boys to go to sleep. The hushed story-teller's voice illuminated the inner world, making of the night a sheltering room. Ben would be more aware of his brother than if darkness had not hidden him—the warmth, the harmless small-boy smell of him, above all the voice and its comic or startling or grandiose inventions....
Ben sighed in the exasperation of insomnia, and slid out of bed to stand barefoot in the cold, saying a proper prayer in an undertone. His mother preferred to kneel, but admitted it was wise to conform to surrounding custom lest one forget in a public place. Puritans did not kneel, regarding it as a mark of popery. Faintly relieved, Ben walked to the garret window to glance into the winter night, wondering if a dark moving thing he saw was that it ought to be. Yes—the watch, on his rounds. Ben could make out the black stem line of a jutting flintlock. The shadowy important man marched along the northern limit of the stockade, passing out of sight to Ben's left behind the meeting-house.
"Ben, what ails thee?—can't sleep?"
"Restless." Ben stumbled back into bed shivering, squirming down away from the cold. "Go back to sleep—sorry I disturbed thee." It must be after midnight, Ben thought, and all well. But as he tried to settle himself, inviting sleep with a better conscience, the snow outside the palisade, pressed high against the logs, nagged at him like the thought of a broken lock on a back door.
Chapter Two
Ben surged up on a stiff arm, listening. The uproar had been in the shed, he thought. Maybe Ranger had broken his rope and run out. Now Ben could hear only the bumping sickly turbulence of his own heart. In a dream he had been flying;