“Monday? Why, Uncle John’s Artemis came home from her maiden voyage that day, and a prettier vessel you never—”
“Oh, bother old Artemis! And ha’ done with talk of the sea too—ask Mr. John, what’s it ever done but make widows, and empty graves in the God’s acre?”
Reuben said to his empty plate: “The tale goes, it may have been filled by the tears of Chronos who was before all the gods.”
* * * *
“Ha?—oh, your talk, Master Reuben. But only look at Ben boy there a-blushing! Bound to happen—I knowed it, I knowed it, I know all the signs of what makes the world go ’round, and who should know ’em better? O Ben, oh dearie me, soon you’ll be a-moping about with a long face, there’ll be a wringin’ of hands, you’ll go sighing with the springtime in your loins and no living with you at all. Ben dear! Tell Kate. Is she fair, Ben? Is she kind?”
“Now, Kate, truly!”
He will go where I cannot go. Three years past he told me something of his dreams, but I dream never that way, never.
“Why, Ben, not a word! Mumchance. But I know, for a’n’t I alway said it was love ’t makes the world go ’round? Oh dearie me, they do grow to be men before there’s time a spider should build her web over the cradle where they was rocked.”
“Can’t help it, Kate, the way you stuff Reuben and me with sausage and kindness, we’re bound to get big and bad and greasy.”
Where he goeth I cannot go, and he will be much loved, as he ought to be, but I … I think that I.…
“Phoo, didn’t I marry for love me own self, the more fool me for not listening to wiser heads, however and moreover I don’t regret it nor won’t to my dying day, though it was a whoreson hard thing to learn the cull was na’ but a file, dearie.”
“A file, Kate?”
He said: A man of learning must often hide…even more from the almost-wise. He said: You and I ought to be friends.
“Nay, Ben, it’s right you shouldn’t know the word, it’s only London-town cant and means a common cutpurse, that’s all he was, him and his fair talk to me about an inheritance, washed down you might say with the kissing and the sweet looks and the tumbling—marry, could I say no to the likes of him, and meself as hot and limber as a March hare, could I? Well, rest him quiet, he danced for it at Tyburn.”
“Oh, I remember. You’ve spoke of it before, but I’d forgotten the word. Kate, you shouldn’t let those old memories rise up and trouble you—not here, and the old country so far away.”
It’s back from the Cambridge road (he said nothing about coming to visit him), the cottage with green-painted shutters. Something discourteous the way I ran, but he did say.…
“Ay, it’s far. Repent?—phoo! nor they wouldn’t’ve got him, never, only he drunk hisself blind in a tavern and talked, so you see, dearie, it was the rum that ruint him, and never took a strap to me neither except he was in the drink, and that only once or twice. Repent?—why, didn’t he spit on the foot of the gallows tree and cock his head at the sky to see a shower coming, and didn’t he say to the ordinary: ‘Ha’ done canting and go to hanging, man, can’t you see it’s coming on to rain and must I catch a quinsy for King Charles’ sake, God bless him?’”
“Maybe he repented later, Kate—I mean in the last moment when there was no way to say the words.”
How much he must know! Why not medicine? Nay, think of it, Ru Cory, why not? WHY NOT?
“Not him. Why, didn’t he wave a purse that he’d h’isted from the ordinary’s own pocket, that he had—waved it and throwed it to the crowd and cried: ‘Here, culls, drink me a remembrancer!’ That he did, anyway so a friend told me that was there and seen it all, the which I couldn’t be meself, being in childbed on his account—died, the little thing, and best maybe seeing it’d’ve had no father, and then me for the colonies, I suppose it was a long time ago.”
“Well.…”
But if I am—if there be some evil, some mark of evil to make others recoil as from a leper—but it can’t be so, it can’t. Would that man know (could I ask him?) why so often I—why—why—
“But do you know, dearie, I had another friend in the crowd that day to see him die, and she told me the tale different, I can’t understand how it could be so different, how that my Jem was leaden-faced, and fought the rope, nor spoke nothing at all but some mumbling about former times, and how his life should be an example—example, with a pox! That wasn’t never his way of talk, but—but maybe he did and all. No purse for the crowd, she said, nothing like that.”
“I don’t think it happened that way, Kate.”
Could I kill a wolf again if there was need? I think I could.
“’Deed she said there was but few present to watch it, and the officers in haste to be done with it because the rain was already falling—I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“Kate, from what you say of him, I’m certain it was the way the other friend told you, that he met it bravely, and threw the purse too, not for impudence but only so to hold himself a man to the end.”
How long it is now since I was child enough to cry out: God help me!
Chapter Three
The builder had intended a storeroom off the kitchen, with no heat and one narrow window, where Gideon Hibbs in these days wrestled with Ben and Reuben across the rackety battlefield of the classics. When the boys came to Roxbury John Kenny, in a genial phase of turning things upside down, had hired a mason to build a fireplace in this austere chamber, and had purchased a magisterial new desk and high-backed chair for Mr. Hibbs. Then with his own hands he fetched from the attic two small old desks, trusting only Ben to help him worry them downstairs, and grew dreamy at the marred and squeaky things, chuckling over jokes superseded forty-odd years before.
In the house of the Reverend Mr. Elias Kenny of Boston, these desks had sustained the squirmings of John Kenny and his brother George, whose young hands left a network of schoolboy carvings now black with age. The satiny pine held room for Reuben and Ben to add a number of their own: arrows, circles, cabalistic squiggles; on Ben’s a rising sun with a questioning eyebrow, on Reuben’s a portrait of Mr. Eccles that did scant justice to his second-best ear.
One other chair stood at the rear of the schoolroom, sacred to occasions when Uncle John strolled in to listen, owl-tufts cocked like secondary ears alert for a false quantity. At such times Mr. Hibbs became grave and slow-spoken. Hibbs was not an obsequious man: he merely found it important to satisfy Mr. John Kenny of Roxbury. It was at one of those times that Reuben witnessed Uncle John’s discovery of the new carvings, a pale crinkled hand descending to the desk, groping at B—R newly incised. Reuben saw only the hand, fearing to look up lest he find Uncle John sad or annoyed. After all the desk was a chip of history; having served John Kenny when he was a boy of twelve, it must have been made at least as early as 1649, and from a pine tree that would have sprung up in the wilderness before the planting of Plymouth Colony. The blue-veined hand lingered feather-light, restless like that of a blind man encountering something formidably new in the pattern of the known. Then it rose and passed gently through Reuben’s hair, and the door of the schoolroom closed.
This Thursday morning spring was assailing the house with lazy reminders, a ripple of breeze at the window Mr. Hibbs had sternly closed, a muted hammering from the shed where Rob Grimes was mending a chicken coop at great leisure; earlier Reuben had heard the lonesome Sundayish clamor of the meeting-house bell nearly a mile away, warning that Thursday was Lecture Day, when decent citizens take thought for their souls.
“Very well, Reuben.” Mr. Hibbs sniffed. “Lines twenty-one and twenty-two, and pray note that you are not to stress the caesura in line twenty-two, seeing there is no break in the thought.”
“quid fuit, ut tutas agitaret Daedalus alas,
Icarus immensas.…”
“What’s the matt
er? Are you considering, Mr. Cory, whether the caesura be intended by the poet to indicate a pause for daydreaming?”
“Icarus immensas nomine signet aquas.”
“You have the quantities correct, and may now construe.”
“‘Why should Daedalus have—’”
“‘Should’? ‘Should’? I see no subjunctive, Mr. Cory.”
“I was construing freely, sir.”
“Why?”
“I thought it sounded smoother so, in English.”
“Fiddle! Fuit, not being subjunctive, cannot be so translated.”
“‘Why was it that Daedalus safely moved his wings—’”
“Mr. Cory, one light fugitive moment if you please. Concerning the word tutas: is this an adverb?”
“No, sir.”
“If Ovid had wished an adverb he would have written—?”
“Tuto, sir.”
“Yet he used this strange word tutas, which is—?”
“An adjective, sir. Tutas, -a, -um, meaning ‘safe.’”
“Light breaks.” Mr. Hibbs filled his clay pipe, deliberately maddening his tortured nose. “The source, incidentally, of a dreadful English word, ‘tutor’—I suppose from some woeful misguided conceit to the effect that a tutor can hold his charges in safety, Master Reuben, from the perils of error—wharrmphsh!—within and without. An adjective, then, and plural, I presume. The case, Mr. Cory?”
“Objective, Mr. Hibbs.”
“Could it by any remote chance agree with—hm—”
“It agrees with alas, sir.”
“Oh! How we do see eye to eye at times! Tutas alas. I could even imagine it meant ‘safe wings,’ ‘uninjured wings,’ something like that, if an adverb had not gone flying past my aging benighted head. Now concerning this word agitaret. Did I hear you translate it as ‘moved’?”
“I did, sir.”
“Had you considered the word ‘agitate’?—excellent, I should have thought, and taken direct from the mother Latin.”
“I did, sir, but the present-day meaning seemed unsatisfactory.”
“Why?”
Reuben discovered he had pulled down his underlip. Mr. Hibbs had striven for three years to break him of the habit, but Reuben, as now, was often unaware he had done it until it was too late. He let it back gently without the usual comforting pop. “To me,” Reuben said, “the word ‘agitate’ suggested fluttering. I might translate: ‘Why was it that Daedalus fluttered safe wings?’” He glanced up, honestly feeling as apologetic as a puppy caught in flagrante with a ravished shoe. “To me, sir, Daedalus was no butterfly.”
Ben knocked his Ovid on the floor and scrambled after it. Reuben guessed he was trying to divert the lightning, but Mr. Hibbs paid the uproar no heed at all, staring at Reuben with a twitching nose. You could never quite predict Gideon Hibbs: the next moment might be hell, or sudden sunshine, or merely another sneeze.
It was sunshine. Mr. Hibbs relaxed, a wrestler overcome, and laughed, a large generous bray. “You have a point, Reuben. Oh yes!” He fumbled for a kerchief and blew the inflamed organ mightily. “Well, but I’m not content with so flat a word as ‘moved.’ Benjamin? Considering the wriggles you perform at your desk (and I declare only a young backside could endure it) you ought to be able to offer some word conveying the sense of a sustained and powerful motion.”
Shining with relief, Ben said: “‘Plied’?”
“Why, excellent!” Mr. Hibbs tensed in astonishment. “‘Why was it Daedalus plied uninjured wings?’—mph, comes out in English as iambic pentameter, bless me if it doesn’t. Satisfactory, Reuben?”
“Yes, sir, I like that. ‘Why was it Daedalus plied uninjured wings, but Icarus marks with his name the enormous waves?’”
Out of a suspended hush, Mr. Hibbs sighed. “Benjamin, proceed. If possible, without butterflies. Let us leave the butterflies to Reuben.”
Reuben thought with care: He means no harm by that, none at all.… His eyes idly compelled the carved B—R to grow immense and blurred, and he listened to Ben’s voice:
“nempe quod hic alte, demissius ille volabat;
nam pennas ambo non habuere suas.”
“Quantities correct, Benjamin. Construe.”
“‘Surely it was because Icarus flew high, and Daedalus lower; for both wore wings that were not their own.’”
“Eh, Benjamin, doing uncommon well today. High time of course—I am not prepared to consider this the millennium.” Mr. Hibbs could seldom bear to leave a compliment undiluted. “Well, gentlemen, I suggest to you, these particular lines are something more than an exercise in grammar and prosody. I think, no more of the Tristia today. Your grammars if you please—this afternoon it shall be Cicero of course.”
“Sir”—startled, Reuben saw his brother rising, not quite knocking over his little desk—“sir, may I ask a favor?”
Mr. Hibbs’ lank features froze, but not completely. “Yes, my boy?”
“Last night, sir, I wrote out a translation of the lines in De Finibus that you assigned us for this afternoon. I—wished to know if I could do so without aid. I mean, sir—Ru hath helped me often at other times, being swifter at these things, so I—so I didn’t tell him of it. And if it be satisfactory, Mr. Hibbs, may I go to Boston this afternoon?”
Mr. Hibbs stared at the paper Ben handed him, like a man hit by a chunk of firewood. “Done without aid, ha?”
“It was, sir. I even waited till Ru was asleep, for fear I’d give up and ask him for help after all.”
Reuben gazed deeply into the swirling black midgets that had been the text of Ovid; he instructed himself: It doesn’t matter. It does not matter. Seeing that he will go—
“No objection,” Mr. Hibbs was saying vacantly—“no objection to the two of you helping each other: I expect it and you profit by it, but I can see, I understand, Benjamin, I—uh—commend your industry and the sentiment that must have prompted it.” His voice trailed away under the threat of another sneeze, and Reuben knew that he must speak.
“It’s quite true, Mr. Hibbs. I knew nothing of it till just now.” Was that good enough? Did I snarl, or squeak?…
“Of course. This translation is—not bad, Benjamin. Some errors, but nothing that cannot be caught up—uh—tomorrow. I’m assuming your great-uncle hath nothing against it, or you would mention it, being”—the sneeze arrived and passed on—“being an honorable boy. Yes, you may have the afternoon. No precedent, of course.”
“I understand that, sir, and thank you.”
There was grammar, there was logic, there were Greek verbs, there was in the air a warm premonition of luncheon. Mr. Hibbs tucked his books under his arm and marched upstairs, where he would allow himself a five-minute meditation before the meal. He was willing to explain this exercise without embarrassment. It was not the same as prayer, but a contemplation of nothing, a device for clearing his mind of trivia in the hope of perceiving a moment of truth.… “Ru, why don’t you come too? You could easy catch up the work if he gives you the afternoon, and he would—for all his barking you know you can twist him any way you please.”
“No, bub,” said Reuben lightly—but he was afraid to look up from his desk at the puzzled kindness he knew he would see. “There’ll be a tag end of the afternoon when Pontifex hath done his worst, and I—wish to do something else.”
“Something else?”
“Oh, I—nothing too important.”
Ben looked hurt. “About the Cicero—haven’t I leaned on thee too much, Ru? I never did think to wound thee, doing that.”
“I’m not wounded! I”—careful, Ru Cory!—“I commend your industry.”
“Ru!”
“I’m sorry. About this afternoon—you remember Mr. Welland?”
“Welland? Oh, the doctor?”
“Yes, I—he knows so much—I met him by chance the other day, when you was in Boston—”
It was no use. What had seemed clear a little while ago, a lamp in a parting of the mist, was now once more submerged in fog, and Reuben lost his way in a tangle of half-exasperated words, trying to reassure Ben that a wish to see Mr. Welland had nothing whatever to do with being ill.
* * * *
Older and neater than neighboring houses, the Jenks house was shielded from them by a coach house, and on the other side by a small fenced-in garden. Such aloofness would not save it if flames like those of 1679 or ’91 ever raged into this western quarter of the city, where many still owned the forbidden wood-framed chimneys and hoped for the best. Fires in the past had usually started near the docks. That might be the reason why Captain Jenks wished to keep the breadth of the town between him and the ships that were his daily bread.
Approaching the house, Ben had been sharply aware of second-floor windows, feeling eyes in a way remarkably like fright if only it weren’t absurd to be frightened at calling on a girl. Now he held back his hand from the knocker, studying the garden with unstable dignity, suppressing a hope that nobody was at home. He admired the grape arbor, enlivened already by a white and brown of buds, and noted here and there the brave glow of daffodils. Flagstone walks suggested a trust in permanence.
He remembered other doorways, how they had stood between him and the unknown. Three years ago one had opened, himself and Reuben standing in rags on the threshold and unable to speak at all to the face with owl-tufts, for John Kenny had answered the door himself, looking down his nose. “To what have I the honor—oh, my soul! Your mother’s look, the both of you—come in out of the cold!” Not until hours later, when they were washed and fed and settled in the room where they now lived, did John Kenny speak of his sister’s letter announcing their tragic death in the jaws of the beast, a passing hard example of the infinite wisdom of God. He had answered the letter, he said, with the proper sentiments. Very much later, weeks later, Mr. Kenny’s own conscience moved him to write another letter even more stately, explaining that the boys appeared to be abundantly alive and would remain with him until of man’s years. This letter was never answered by Rachel Cory; after three years, it seemed unlikely that it ever would be. That doorway had opened on years of change, as all years are, but Ben held a private notion that the century really turned then, in March of 1704: for himself and Reuben an end to flame and trouble except for whatever stirred within—and this only natural, since any boy or man is a volcano with a thin crust and knows it.
The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 78
