The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  * * * *

  John Kenny’s woodland had never been surveyed; somewhere it blended into crown-grant timberland or unclaimed wilderness. His house stood beyond the natural limits of Roxbury—he liked that—on a rolling rise of ground south of the road to Cambridge. From his back pasture, Reuben Cory had heard him say, you could keep under forest cover all the way to Providence, and maybe he’d do it some time, the old man said, if ever the Saints came a-snapping too close at his heels. John Kenny might have started saying that twenty or thirty years ago when it wasn’t entirely a jest.

  From the window of the room upstairs that he shared with Ben, Reuben stared eastward beyond the Dorchester road, across open land and marsh and water, to the low hills of Dorchester Neck two miles away, gray and brown yet alive with a subdued radiance under the afternoon sun of April. Beyond those harmless hills moved the sunrises, and the stern Atlantic that seemed to be tugging at his brother’s heart and giving him no rest.

  Driven by his own dark unease of spring, by some dread of human voices and the wrong questions they ask, by shame at the ungracious whim that had prompted him to stay home—after all, if he was not going in to watch the return of Artemis, sighted yesterday playing games off the Cape with a contrary wind, then he had no proper excuse for this half-holiday from study—driven above all by a need for the April day as it might come to him lonely in a golden calm at the edge of wilderness, Reuben slipped downstairs light as a cat, out past the black wet ground of the kitchen garden and down a long slope into the south pasture, then on toward soft-spoken hemlocks.

  Reuben had discovered a bodily sureness in these solitary journeys, a trust in his own senses, and a puzzled, reaching love for the life of the unhuman world. Sometimes he stole out of the house at night, with owl and fox and whippoorwill, if the moon was shining to help him; Ben slept sweetly never knowing that. Ben often came with him into the daytime woodland, but to stroll out here with Ben belonged to another category of experience. The world of I-am-alone cannot share an orbit with other planets, as the world and Reuben-self that existed in Ben’s presence could exist nowhere else.

  He would never be tall like Ben, nor quite as strong. At fifteen that no longer troubled him. His own hard wiry thinness was sufficient; it would carry him, he supposed, wherever he cared to go.

  At the lower end of the pasture he climbed a stile into the spicy-smelling hush. A wood road continued on the other side; Reuben soon abandoned it, following landmarks that brought him to one of his better-loved havens, where Ben had often loafed with him.

  Over a huge flat-topped boulder a spruce towered to sixty feet, the droop of branches enclosing the rock; one could imagine the hide of a gray monster lurking in the green. The boughs slanted steeply, creating a room with a granite floor and walls of gold-flecked shadow, a gentle and a secret place—old; the spruce must have been already old in the time of King Philip’s War. A midget brook passed here. It had gouged a pool at the outer end of the granite block, not deep even in the time of spring rains, but reflections of the spruce gave it an ocean infinity of green.

  Wander a few yards down the brook and you owned another world, where the water widened to larger ponds, supporting patches of feather-topped marsh grass here and there. Maples on firmer ground bordered this damp clearing, which by itself became many worlds in the flow of the seasons—the world of deep summer, for example, when you could watch mating dances of the small green dragonflies that never come near houses.

  Reuben climbed silently into the sanctuary under the spruce and lay out on the rock to stare into the pool refreshed by the rains of April. He invited to his ears all least disturbances of the enclosing silence—a weak murmur upstream where the trifling water hurried over pebbles, a breath of motion in the needles of the spruce, a bluejay’s complaint softened by distance, a cow lowing more than a mile away; a greater mystery, the beat of his own heart in the rib-cage pressed against rock, not quite pain. He saw the face of himself the stranger in the water below, and shut his eyes. When the flesh is quiet, he thought, the mind is also. Why? I alway knew that. The quiet is brief.

  Why?…

  Because (I think) everything is part of a journey. I am never, I was never still. Perhaps there is no stillness except in death.

  Human sounds reached him, a brushing of last year’s grass in that clearing downstream, a vague cough. Reuben sat up, annoyed and puzzled.

  It could not be anyone with the privilege of bidding him to cease idling. Uncle John was in Boston with Ben. The tutor was sulking in his room—it hurt Mr. Hibbs that a boy granted a half-holiday should elect to spend it as he pleased, and anyway Mr. Gideon Hibbs was not at home in any forest outside the Eclogues of Virgil. Uncle John’s gardener and handy man Rob Grimes was accounted for too—Reuben had heard his axe in the woodshed.

  If some poacher or Indian were fooling about the back land, Uncle John would wish to know. Reuben slipped from the rock with no sound, and wormed a gradual way through the brush. Someone sneezed. Poachers try not to sneeze; prowling Indians just don’t; still Reuben maintained his caution because of a wild-animal pleasure in it. Having stolen by degrees to the edge of the clearing, he observed the stout bowed back and lightly fringed bald head of a man kneeling by a shallow pond, parting the dead grass to stare down into the water. Surely not a poacher examining a trap; the man was familiar somehow.

  Reuben identified him, but doubtfully. Acting on an impulse of gentle wickedness, he slid out from the bushes and sat cross-legged with his chin in his hands, all as quietly as a mouse crossing a heap of flour.

  Rising at last from his peculiar inspection of the pond water, the man sneezed again. He turned unknowing, and jumped delightfully. He said “God bless me!” and closed his large mouth two or three times while a slow chuckle shook him from fringed head to dingy shoes—a memorably ugly man pitted with smallpox scars from a button chin to a bulging forehead. His clothes were snuff-stained; respectable once, now a second best suited to the woods. His little dark eyes gleamed mirthful and sad, intent. A ribbony nose ended in a flared tip with a double knob. Reuben marveled that having known this face at his bedside, and that not long ago, he could have been confused in remembering it.

  “I’m sorry, sir—didn’t go for to startle you, Mr. Welland.”

  “Oh, didn’t you!”

  “It was the wig.”

  “The wig, sir? Oh, you mean the absence of my wig. I’m in a manner disguised. I understand your synecdoche, or do I mean hypallage?”

  “Metonymy,” said Reuben.

  “Brrr!” said Amadeus Welland. “Mm-yas, of course, ’tis the spotted child, the younger one. How’s your brother, Mr. Cory?”

  “Well,” said Reuben, and laughed happily for no plain reason.

  Sighing and grunting as the elderly do, the little man sat on the ground, not too ungracefully in spite of stooped plumpness and a modest melon of potbelly. His darkened snuff-stained hands were firm, not very wrinkled; he might be less ancient than he seemed. “Ah, the wig! The structure! I employ it, you understand, for medical purposes. Wondrous therapeutic—I dare venture you and your brother were so frightened by it that you were forced to recover in spite of the worst my simples could do. Yet plainly no one in his right mind could dwell in such a thing, let alone go for a walk in the woods.”

  “I can see that, sir.”

  “You can, ha? I bought it in Newport,” said Mr. Welland dreamily. “Ten years ago. The moths have been at it a little since then; at that time there were more ribbons in it, and I was younger myself. It doth own one other function beside the medical. Not exactly duplicity nor artifice—let us say, concealment. As a scholar, Mr. Cory, you’ll discover how a man of learning must often hide in the bushes, not only from the ignorant, sir, but even more from the almost-wise. Now a man of medicine, if he hath also some pretension to scholarship, is much exposed, sir, much exp
osed to the winds of mischance, and so must even carry his own dem’d shrubbery about with him, and that’s what I do. Honestly, Reuben, a’n’t it a hell of a wig?”

  * * * *

  “Oh, Mr. Kenny!” said Faith Jenks. “Brier roses? I’ll rest content with that till you say a prettier.” She studied Ben with silent laughter.

  Laughing of course at the pimples. For a year Ben’s face had been lightly tormented. Huge wrists jutted; his nose was too small, his mouth too big, the devil with all of it. Since she chose to laugh, Ben hated her; thus occupied, he discovered as one caught in the embrace of ocean that he was in love.

  Maybe she had not been laughing. Her own small dainty mouth showed no obvious quirk. Not brier roses. Damask roses, remembered—remembered—

  In a dooryard garden at Deerfield.

  Why, they would be blooming still! The village burned, and many died, but not the secret life under the snow. She planted them.… At the first urgency of summer sun they would have waked, spreading over scorched fallen timbers in the desolate ground to spill the sweetness from their clear June faces. For the first time Ben thought: I must go back—some day. I must learn whether that is true.

  The blue of Faith’s coat and dress conspired with the bay and the blue of heaven to make her eyes deeper than any sky of April. She stood taller than Mr. Kenny, a woman grown, full-breasted, poised, maybe no older than Ben in years but in command of all she said and did. His quick glance told him she was in the habit of biting her right thumbnail, and he rebuked himself for noticing it—merely such a flaw as a goddess needs if she’s to wear the semblance of common clay.

  “Your mother’s well, my dear?”

  “Ay, Mr. Kenny, but not well enough to be out in this changeable weather. She wished to come but I prevailed on her. Poor Mother is so readily distracted!”

  “I know. Ah, forgive me!—Mistress Faith Jenks, Mr. Benjamin Cory, my grand-nephew, more a son. Hoy, and Charity—how’s my lady Charity?” This to a brief, blunt block of child who made some breathy noise. Faith was holding out her hand. Ben knew he could not kiss it (as Ru could have done) nor speak at all without sounding like a crow.

  She had pity, letting his fingers know the electric softness and taking her hand away. Ben confronted the glare of my lady Charity. About thirteen, grim with crippling shyness, Charity tilted her square face back in a blue bonnet that reflected her sister’s in everything but grace. A freckled paw jerked out and dropped before Ben could grasp it, clenching its tiny companion. “’D do,” she said, and examined her shoe-tips in a cold quiet of despair.

  A third strange face watched Ben—still, brown, impersonal; a Negro girl, therefore a servant, probably a slave, but with no beaten, cringing air such as Ben had noticed in the slaves of Pastor Williams at Deerfield or in the few he had glimpsed in Boston and Roxbury. Her slenderness was clad Puritan-fashion in white and gray, somehow not subdued by the radiance of Faith. She stood apart, unconcerned as the lady Artemis. Charity had taken a few awkward backward steps until the brown girl’s long-fingered hand dropped on her shoulder and there remained. Dark eyes moved on to contemplate the open daylight and blue water, disturbing Ben with the sense of a quiet alien and strong.

  “Indeed,” Faith was saying, “I’ve heard of you, Mr. Cory, and hoped we might meet sooner. We don’t go about much, with my father so much away at sea. You was of Deerfield, I think?”

  “Yes.” Why, that was no croak! “I feel it to be long ago.”

  She smiled compassionately; everyone knew the story of Deerfield. “’Deed you and your brother are men of mystery. I fear your noses are buried in big old long books from a day’s end to the next.”

  Mr. Kenny sighed and intervened. “True, Faith, their tutor and I, we make ’em toil like galley slaves. Harvard in the autumn—the both of ’em, I’m proud to say. Might have entered last year, but I wished ’em better prepared, Mr. Leverett of Harvard concurring, seeing they had no classics in childhood.” Ben squirmed; it sounded as though having no classics in childhood was rather like being born with one leg.

  “Your brother isn’t in Boston today to see the Artemis?”

  “No, Mistress Faith, he—well.…”

  “Mr. Reuben,” said Uncle John too lightly, “was of a mind to go walking in the woods.”

  “Ah, the pretty thing!” Faith exclaimed, and Ben gave her credit for divine tactfulness. “Mr. Kenny, why is the bowsprit slanted so low to the water? I never saw the like on another vessel, no never.”

  “A whim of mine, my dear. I meddled with the builders. But your father hath told me the thought’s good—larger spread of jib, and a stronger angle against the tension of the stays. Yet when I wanted it so I merely thought ’twould make a handsomer line to the eye. Mph!—so peradventure art is good for something?”

  “Sir.…” The lonely blue-eyed man had come lightly from the end of the wharf, his hat held to his breast with no attempt to hide its shabbiness. His shoes were cracked and stained. A rip in the green coat was mended with large seaman’s stitches, evidence that no woman tended him, that his feline neatness was his own achievement. He bowed, as Mr. Kenny’s wizened mask watched courteously down the nose. “I fear I intrude—is it I’m addressing the owner of the ketch?”

  “I am her owner, sir.”

  “I’ve not seen a fairer craft in my seafaring years, and they some twenty or more in all manner of vessels, all manner of places too betwixt here and the Indies, that’ll be the eastern Indies—Molucca, Ceylon.…”

  His voice was baritone, resonant and sweet, a power stirring in it like a drumbeat felt in the marrow. A plangent overtone rang in every word. A lifting inflection suggested the speaker loved his words, reluctant to put a period to them. Ben had never heard that in New England speech—once, maybe, in that lost time when Uncle Zebina Pownal came out of nowhere to sing for them.

  “Ay, she’s fair,” said Mr. Kenny, admitting the obvious.

  “And if it’s you that oversaw the designing, as (forgive my rudeness) I thought I overheard you say, then may I be shaking your hand?”

  Mr. Kenny held it out impulsively, defenses down. Ben saw in his great-uncle what he thought of as the “Artemis look”—love me, love my ketch. Pushing aside a transient alarm, Ben himself gave way to one of his gusty moments of allegiance. This blue-eyed man must be admirable and wise. His pale quiet, the odd way his face took little share in the ardor of his voice—why, merely the reasonable caution of a man who must have voyaged everywhere and seen everything on the everlasting seas. One would do well to listen when he spoke, and remember.

  “I am John Kenny of Roxbury, sir. The ketch is the Artemis, Peter Jenks captain, her maiden voyage now ending.”

  “Artemis! O the fair true name for such a lady! Daniel Shawn, sir, your humble servant.” No man’s servant, and Ben knew it. Presented to the elder daughter of Peter Jenks, captain, Mr. Shawn kissed her fingers, and Ben writhed, not in jealousy but at his own incompetence: that was how it ought to be done, and Faith was clearly pleased. “Artemis!—what other name would be possible?” said Mr. Shawn, and grew intent on brushing his coat lapel, asking casually in the same breath: “Doth she carry letters of marque, Mr. Kenny?”

  “That she don’t,” said John Kenny rather blankly. “Armed she is—you can see the la’board falconet from here—but no letters of marque, sir. I’ve not a word to say against the privateersmen, in these years of war when the French do beset us so, but for my ships I’ll have no part of it, having made mine own small fortune in the hard way, Mr. Shawn—refraining, let us say, from the thought of easy prizes because I know mine own share of human frailty, and proposing so to continue.”

  “For which I honor you, sir,” said Mr. Shawn, and having brushed the lapel to his satisfaction and smiled with wonderful sweetness, he changed the subject. “I’ve heard of your father, Mistress Jenks,
the way I suppose most seaman have in this part of the world, and he noble as any captain under sail, now that’s no lie.”

  Faith blushed, overwhelmed; her right hand wandered to her mouth. Mr. Kenny was visibly wondering whether to steer Charity into another social ordeal. Charity leaned against the brown girl, observing Artemis to the exclusion of all else on earth, particularly Benjamin Cory. Faith turned to Ben, astoundingly, swaying so near that her face under the ribboned calash must tilt up to look at him. She clutched the bonnet, though it was well tied. “Pray allow me to tack into the lee of you, Mr. Cory, to shelter my silly bonnet—your shoulders are broad enough.”

  Later in white nights Ben thought: She said that, and to me.…

  Later also Ben found it hard to recall anything else said by Faith or himself—small talk, surely—in those moments of nearness while Artemis, clear of the harbor shipping, moved down on them tranquilly, a great wind-begotten dream realizing herself in the here-and-now.

  A round bulky man held a rope at the bow of Artemis. Below him a face cruelly pure and calm, carved from apple-wood a year ago by an old artist of Dorchester who was nearly blind, stared into a world of many homelands. In the momentary enclosing silence, Ben saw a flash of startled recognition between that stout man in the bow and Daniel Shawn; since both looked away immediately, Ben dismissed it as a vagary of his own imagination, or none of his business. The stout man was unknown to Ben, perhaps one of the replacements signed on at Kingston; a greasy, unrevealing face. Ben heard a flurry of shouts from men aboard and men on the dock who knew each other. He also found a face he knew, and waved—the mate, yellow-haired Jan Dyckman, who had visited at Roxbury, brick-solid and big, a shy and gentle soul ashore, moving with a warm confidence in all the ways of his Lutheran God. But Jan did not see Ben’s wave or had no time for it, taut at the starboard rail and watching simultaneously every inch of remaining canvas, every ripple between Artemis and the wharf.