The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  And will again. She thought: How else could it be, after all? Certainly he would go again, and many times again. And it might be that God would bring him safe through tempest and calm and war, but no daughter of Peter Jenks would dare to predict safe harbor, least of all perhaps for anyone so loved, since the Lord is a jealous God. There could be that final time when even Ben would not come home; his place would be empty, and so then—and so—as if one of those fleecy tranquil clouds over in the blue clean east were advancing on her for her dubious entertainment, Charity observed the beginning of a daydream. It was nothing in her mind, as yet; it could become the familiar indulgence, if she wished: herself receiving the news of her widowhood and bearing it as best she might, maybe accepting the Romish faith so to join a nunnery, or—much better!—going out among the Indians—(why not? Did not John Eliot do so?)—to heal their sick and bind up their wounds and teach them, becoming gray and old in this dispensation of decent mercies until such time as God was willing to—Hey! Misty dreams for silly maids. I don’t want you—go away!… Well, it was partly Ben’s fault for falling silent so long, when there was so much more to tell; Reuben’s too—Reuben sitting there radiantly quiet, and skimming a pebble out beyond the line of foam whenever a wave spent itself whispering at the open side of their sanctuary. Why dream now, when the one dream (so unlike all the others!) had amazed and somewhat frightened her by coming true? It might have been well enough in the long year past to dream. Not now. Anyway not of widowhood—when he ha’n’t even asked me!—but his eyes inquire of many things this afternoon—and other such matters far-off and cold and surely unwelcome. It might have been well enough, once, to dwell in that labyrinthine refuge of fantasy; and certain treasures brought back from the labyrinth might be saved—as for instance the created moment when his face would turn to her gravely astonished in discovery, and he would say: ‘Why, Mistress Charity, you’re no longer an awkward child at all’—or something like that—something.… But why flee from the present even for an instant? Was he not close in the here-and-now? A very tall stranger who was not a stranger; vastly older, a whole year older, the mobile miracle of his face transformed by the bitter dissonance of the great scar still livid and not quite healed, that angled across his high forehead and then ran from his cheekbone to the edge of his jaw. Mouth and eyes were spared. He could look far and curiously, as he always had, and deep. His smile was—almost the same. Surely it would be altogether the same when the scar was fully healed: probably now the torn muscles pained him when his mouth widened; and maybe he felt less often in a mood for smiling since his homecoming and the death of John Kenny. While a part of her irresolutely wondered whether that mouth had ever kissed a woman—it must have—her eyes searched and pondered the multiple planes and shadows of his quiet face, beholding it in many ways. It was the face of Ben Cory, with much in it of the Ben Cory who was, but even more for a while it was a challenge and a problem. What if I undertake what I could never do before? Why could I never draw his face when he was gone?… God knows I remembered it. Or did I truly? Did it not float before me in the dark and come between me and the sunlight of winter? The shadow in the hollow of his cheek was deeper than she remembered it—well, he was thinner; bad food and not much of it, she supposed; still he grew on it and found strength in it. The hairline above his ear was a simpler curve than she recalled. And why, why had she never noticed that the tops of his ears were slightly pointed?—very slightly, not like Reuben’s, but still he did have that comical faunlike point. Her fingers itched for a pencil but lay still, and she looked away to the ever-moving green, and white, and unfathomable blue, the lashing hurry of spent water up along the sand, the unceasing rise and fall. I must have been blind. She closed her eyes, seeing much. Well, it ought to be three-quarter face, the chin up a little, intentness without a smile-like so.…

  “‘O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out

  Against the wreckful siege of battering days?…

  “Reuben, you know too much. Won’t you tell the rest, Ben? So many things—tell me more about my father, and—all the rest. Will you not?”

  “I will try.… She was far over to starboard, running from the squall, until we got the tops’l furled. Dummy and Ledyard saw to that—or better say your father did, for it was his voice, not mine, that made them jump to it, and I to the helm, so to lash it and then go back to your father for what little I could do. So much happened, and all in a moment. All that I spent minutes in telling—why, I don’t suppose more than one minute passed from the time the squall struck to the time I was unlocking the irons. Then much less than a minute, and I was lashing the helm, Dummy and Ledyard aloft—in that bit of time Manuel died. Ledyard had broken French Jack’s leg with a capstan bar when Jack came up through the hatch. Tom Ball shot poor Joey Mills, and Ledyard grappled with Ball, beat the wind out of him I guess—a man’s work. When the squall hit us, only an instant after Jack shot your father, Jack was washed overboard, and Ledyard—helped Ball to follow him, I believe. All that I didn’t see; Ledyard told me later. I saw Manuel die. It was while I was at the helm, and she settling steady as you please on that starboard tack. Poor soul, he’d stayed at the masthead through it all, and clung to it through the first stroke of the storm, and now was trying to come down, and it wasn’t wind or rain that made him fall, but his own sudden shaking—or maybe he thought Dummy was coming to get him, but I don’t believe that. He fell clear of the side, sank and never rose, and Artemis swept on by the empty waters where I could see nothing of him.… Shawn was not washed over. His dead hand had gripped the rail. Later I had much trouble freeing it so to give him a decent sea-burial; and maybe that was when I truly said him a farewell, and his hand so unwilling to let her go.”

  “Don’t alway be turning me the right side of your face. I tell you it does not trouble me.”

  “The scar would trouble most girls, Charity. Well, so I lashed the helm and went back to the Captain, who was losing blood at a fearful rate, and then I was a frantic time scrabbling in the locker for a cord to bind the leg and stop the flow. I was obliged to pull the cord with all my power before it would stop. The bullet had completely shattered the bone. I don’t think a surgeon could have set it. He said so himself, and commanded me to cut the leg away below the break.”

  “The blood was not flowing but spurting?”

  “Ay, Ru. Could anything have been done?”

  “Not that I know of, under those conditions. Not with the anterior tibial artery spouting and the bone shattered. You were fortunate he lived beyond that day. You did as he ordered?”

  “I did, and he lived twenty days. I asked him if I might not bring him rum from the cabin before I cut it, and he thundered at me, No, in God’s name no, and thrust my knife back in my hand, and I cut as quickly and cleanly as I might. Then he thanked me, and bade me help him up the companion ladder to the quarterdeck. There he remained for all of our homeward voyage, by the helm to give me guidance—and the same a fair passage with no dirty weather except a little off the Bermudas, nothing bad. He took the tiller himself at times, to relieve me, during the first days. On the fourth day, I think it was, we could see the wound had begun to mortify, and later he was sometimes out of his wits and rambling, but he would alway come clear of that and tell me once more how he would live until we came into harbor—seeing that nothing except his word stood between me and Copp’s Hill. He wrote an account of it all and signed it with a great flourish—that was a quiet and a sunny day—but he feared that would not be enough. Determined he was to speak that word for Dummy and me, and he did so. Charity, I had never thought your father a compassionate man, but—we learn, sometimes.”

  “He—I don’t know. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Perhaps he changed, as it seems we all do.… My clothes were washed overside, by the way. I came into Boston harbor and to Uncle John’s house wearing a suit of Shawn’s garments too small for me.”


  “Yes, little brother, they were too small for you, now that’s no lie.”

  “Don’t ever laugh at him!”

  “I was never farther from laughing. You killed your wolf.…”

  “Ben, what of Ledyard? He did not come home with you.”

  “Nay, Charity, he did not. Ledyard, who felt so great a dread of hanging—oh, it happened in the night, Charity, and the quiet, when we’d come clear of that bad weather off the Bermudas and were sailing free under a fair southeasterly and hoping to raise the Cape in a day or two. Your father was sleeping in the fever of his sickness. Dummy came to me in the dark, whimpering and pointing. He took the helm while I went forward, half knowing what I was to find, but I was a long time finding it. Ledyard had climbed out on the bowsprit with a length of rope. The rope slipped backward after he fell, and so his face came close against the face of the white goddess. I have never seen her look so careless and so proud.”

  “For the deity of the moon that may be a way of kindness.”

  “Maybe, Reuben, maybe.…”

  Ben could remember how some such thought had stirred in his own mind there in the moonless shadow—not altogether moonless, since the white goddess had taken starlight to her face and was delicately shining, aloof, indifferent, as Ben leaned out and cut the rope and gave the spent body to the sea, and the sea accepted it with the careless whisper of an enfolding wave. He had gone back then to the quarterdeck, where the Captain had waked in a remission of the fever, and told him of it. “She’s taken better men,” said Captain Jenks, and shrugged and groaned. “All the same I never thought he had it in him.” That was all Captain Jenks ever said of Matthew Ledyard. Ben in the undemanding hours of the days that followed could yet inquire: Where is the way where light dwelleth? And where does the self end and the universe begin? But it was plain—more than ever plain in this calm place where land and ocean met and the war between them was only the joyful-tragic music of breakers on firm sand—plain that he must ask those questions again and many times again: of Reuben, of Charity, of others not yet known, most often of himself, and would discover many answers, until the unimaginable time when all questions arrived at silence as they had for John Kenny. Answers bearing illumination seemed closer in this place than ever before—“My garden,” said Charity when they first came here, and held up to him a pebble of many colors, flowerlike, worn smooth and round with the sea’s many thousand years.

  “Storm never continues, I notice. The sky itself can’t maintain it, nor can we. Always the calm afterward—here, Ben, or in the Spice Islands.”

  “There are storms then in the Spice Islands?”

  “Of course, Ben.…”

  “Did my father have—have aught to say of poor Ledyard?”

  “Oh, he.… Why, he prayed God deal kindly with him. And he said not a word against him when we’d entered the harbor and the men who came aboard were questioning us. True, he had little time for words, Charity, since death was on him while he spoke, and it took him, his head on my arm, before the men were ready to lower him into the boat that should have brought him ashore.… Yesterday when I went into Boston I sought out Ledyard’s widow, and told her how he aided us, and then I—a white lie, I said he was washed overboard. Your father would have approved this deception, I’m sure of it. I wish he could have lived to see you again, Charity—still it’s a marvel he could even live out the homeward voyage, he was that wasted and worn out with the sickness from his wound. But he did, and his word stood like a shield for me, so that when I gave mine own account they believed me. Charity, when he’d done speaking I asked him if I might not bring him something to drink. He laughed at me a little, saying he had not the craving. He said: ‘Do you drink to me as well as pray for me if you’re a-mind.’ That was the last he spoke.… Are you dreaming, Charity?”

  “She’s human too, you know.”

  “Oh, Ben, I was remembering how it was when they brought him home to us. Is it possible that was only three weeks ago now? And thinking of the burial, and how all the things we did—all the words spoken, ours, the minister’s, our friends’—how all that was so far from—him. Am I a terrible bad heathen, that I should have felt—well, angry at it? But mark you, Ben, I did not show it, I did not have one of my—my Times. Did I? Did I show it, Ben?”

  “Certainly not. You was a most quiet sweet mouse and opened your mouth for naught but Amen and Thine-is-the-power.”

  “Faith and Mama in tears all day, and the neighbors resenting my dry eyes, be sure of it, and good Mr. Hoskison so—marry, so important! As if motions of the hands and holy words spoken could make any difference to one who’s died and gone away. But you don’t think I’m a terrible bad heathen?”

  “You are not, but if Ben and I labor with you long enough, love, perhaps we can make you one. I have hopes.”

  “Oh, you!”

  “No, Charity, never mind the pup, you’re no heathen, or if you are, then I too. I’ve no patience with—let’s call it mummery. I saw your father die. He was a captain of men, and he died well. No words spoken over his body can add anything to that. Such words are for the living, if they wish them. No one spoke them for Daniel Shawn, and though it may be that I killed him, I loved him too.”

  And having said so much, and understood it while you said it, you will never lean on me again, the which I accept because it is right. Reuben shied another pebble beyond the running line of the water’s edge, aiming for a circle of hurrying foam, hitting it with a neat plop in the center. Good exercise for a steady hand. What he had said to Ben concerning storm and calm was banal, he reflected, but truth has a way of hiding in the blur of the commonplace and must be hunted there from time to time: no good rushing upstairs or outdoors in search of a paper that lies on the table under your nose. We do pass continually from storm to calm—every one of us, even Madam Prudence Jenks. So meet them both, in the atmosphere of doubt where honesty is—whether in fog over quicksand, or on firm-appearing ground like this under a sunny sky of June. Reuben tossed another pebble, seeing Charity smile at him ruminatively, a gust of the sea breeze lifting a lock of soft hair from her broad forehead; then her homely, snub-nosed, square-jawed face turned back to Ben and was beautiful.

  “I was thinking too, I wish I might have been with you both when Mr. Kenny died. You’ve told me little of that, indeed nothing much about your homecoming.”

  “He came on foot, Charity, and no word arrived ahead of him. We are not such important people now, you know. I was upstairs in Uncle John’s room, and Mr. Welland with me. It was late, Mr. Hibbs gone to bed, and we had almost persuaded Kate to go and rest too, but Mr. Welland had told me he half expected Uncle John to go out that night, so we sat up with him. There had been another stroke, as you know, a light one, but he was failing rapidly and most of the time seemed hardly to know us. Kate went downstairs for something, a pitcher of water I think, and I heard the front door, and she cried out something, presently weeping and laughing and calling up gibberish to us. I knew it was Ben, but I—you know, Snotnose, you really should have sent a messenger to warn us you was an inch taller and fifteen pounds heavier, in fact you’ll be obliged to work now to some purpose, or at thirty you’ll have a gut, I swear it. Mind it, Charity—he was ever too fond of cracklin’s.” Quiet, Ru Cory! This is how it was, and you can’t tell it: Ben Cory appeared in the candlelight, and Ru Cory stood like a cold image and could not move, and Amadeus Welland came to him—to Reuben because he was the one in need—and then Ben came to him also—but you can’t tell it, seeing that for all your and-so-forth intellect you cannot bring love into the compass of a few well-chosen words, so be quiet and live a while. “Well, Charity, Uncle John knew him at once, even before he knelt by the bed and said, ‘I’ve come back.’ His right hand came up and touched the scar, and he said very plainly—we all heard it: Kate, and Mr. Hibbs who’d come in rubbing his eyes and doubting
, it may be, that anything so good as Ben’s return could actually happen at the borders of philosophy—Uncle John said very plainly: ‘Thou art my son.’”

  “And he died then?”

  “No, love, somehow nature seldom accommodates our itch for the appropriate, I don’t know why. That was later in the night. Ben was exhausted, and I made him go to bed and save the story of his life for the following morning. Uncle John didn’t die then, but seemed to have fallen into a heavy sleep. We stayed with him of course. I was watching his hand, Charity”—and Amadeus’ arm over my shoulder, and his voice speaking to me now and then—“and at some time toward morning there was a kind of disturbance in his sleep, his hand closing as if it would hold fast to certain things for a while yet. Then it opened and gave it all away.”

  He needs no help except what Mr. Welland can give, still I’ll do what I may. Ben could see also the next voyage of the ketch Artemis. He would not be aboard—as Sam Tench had made clear, there was much to do, and Ben Cory the one to do it. A possible partnership with Riggs of Salem, for instance—it must be considered at least. Captain Heath would take Artemis to New York, and some good man must be found to take Heath’s place on the sloop Hebe. But next year, Ben thought, maybe he could go again on Artemis—maybe to Norfolk—maybe.… Then at some time, much later, maybe three or four good vessels fit for the passage around the Horn, even a charter from the Queen—not at all impossible, some years from now, if done in the right way. In the meanwhile—