You see, I had never followed that path. No one does. The road like the old stone house itself is haunted. Anyone who ventures there goes in peril of destruction or bewitchment. So far, I am not destroyed.
Once on the path—why, I began to run. Maybe I ran so as to yield no room in my thought to the fear that is always, like black wolf, waiting. I ran down the path through a wilderness of peace. There were the beeches, gray and kind—I like to imagine something of peace in their nearness. I know that violence might be done in the presence, in the very shadow of the beech trees, as in any other place where the human creature goes; a little corner of my mind is a garden where I lie in the sun not believing it. In their presence on that path I ran without shortness of breath, without remembering fear, and I came to the green clearing, and the house of red-gray stone. It was growing late, the sun too low to penetrate this hidden place. In shadow therefore I came to Mam Miriam’s door and pounded on the oak panel. But gossip had always said that the old woman (if she existed at all outside of Jon Kobler’s head, if he didn’t create those dazzling embroideries himself out of his own craziness and witchcraft) was bedridden and helpless. So my knocking was foolish. I turned the latch and pushed the heavy sluggish thing inward, closing it behind me, staring about half-blind in the gray light.
The house is trifling-small, as you will see if you dare come here. Only that big lower room with the fireplace where Jon cooked, the bench where he worked at his baskets, clogs, wooden beads, and this other room up here with the smaller hearth. There’s this one chair up here where I sit now (Kobler used to sit beside his love’s bed, you know) and the little table I write on, which I am sure they used drawn up beside the bed for their meals together, for the night pitcher of water she no longer needs. You will be aware now that she did exist. There’s the roll of linen cloth—Kobler must have gone all the way to Maplestock to buy that—and some half-finished table mats, pillow slips, dresser covers. There’s her embroidery hoop, the needles, the rolls of bright yarns, and thread—I never knew there were so many sizes and colors. And there she too is lying. She was; she lived; I closed her eyes.
I looked about me in that failing evening, and she called from upstairs, “Jon, what’s wrong? Why did you make such a noise at the door? You’ve been long, Jon. I’m thirsty.”
The tone of her voice was delicate, a music. I cannot tell you how it frightened me, that the voice of a crazy old woman should sound so mild and sweet. Desperately I wanted to run away, much more than I had wanted it when I stood out there at. the beginning of the path. But the thing that I will not call Conscience or God (somewhere in the Old-Time books I think it was called Virtue, but doubtless few read them)—the thing that would never let me strike a child, or stone a criminal or a mue on the green as we are expected to do in Trempa—this mad cruel-sweet thing that may be a part of love commanded me to answer her, and I called up the stairway, “Don’t be afraid. It’s not Jon, but I came to help you.” I followed my words, climbing the stairs slowly so that she could forbid me if she chose. She said no more until I had come to her.
The house was turning chill. I had hardly noticed it downstairs; up here the air was already cold, and I saw —preferring not to stare at her directly till she spoke to me—that she was holding the bedcovers high to her throat, and shivering. “I must build you a fire,” I said, and went to the hearth. Fresh wood and kindling were laid ready, a tinderbox stood on the mantel. She watched me struggle with the clumsy tool until I won my flame and set it to the twigs and scraps of waste cloth. That ancient chimney is clean—the fire caught well without smoking into the room. I warmed my hands.
“What has happened? Where is Jon?”
“He can’t come. I’m sorry.” I asked her if she was hungry, and she shook her head. “I’m Benvenuto of Trempa,” I told her. “I’m running away. I must get you some fresh water.” I hurried out with the pitcher, obliged to retreat for that moment for my own sake, because meeting her gaze, as I had briefly done, had been a glancing through midnight windows into a country where I could never go and yet might have loved to go.
Why, even with gray-eyed Andrea this had been true, and did he not once say to me, “O Benvenuto, how I would admire to walk in the country behind your eyes!”
I know: it is always true.
(But Andrea brought me amazing gifts from his secret country, and nothing in mine was withheld from him through any wish of mine. I suppose all the folk have a word for it: we knew each other’s hearts.)
I filled the pitcher at the well-pump downstairs and carried it up to her with a fresh clean cup. She drank gratefully, watching me, I think with some kind of wonder, over the rim of the cup, and she said, “You are a good boy, Benvenuto. Sit down by me now, Benvenuto.” She set the cup away on the table and patted the edge of the bed, and I sat there maybe no longer afraid of her, for her plump sad little face was kind. Her soft too-white hands, the fingers short and tapered, showed me none of that threat of grasping, clinging, snatching I have many times seen in the hands of my own breed. “So tell me, where is Jon?” When I could not get words out, I felt her trembling. “Something has happened.”
“He is dead, Mam Miriam.” She only stared. “I found him on the road, Mam Miriam, too late for me to do anything. It was a wolf.” Her hands flew up over her face. “I’m sorry—I couldn’t think of any easier way to tell it.” She was not weeping as I have heard a woman needs to do after such a blow.
At last her hands came down. One dropped on mine kindly, like the hand of an old friend. “Thus God intended it, perhaps,” she said. “I was already thinking, I may die tonight.”
“No,” I said. “No.”
“Why should I not, my dear?”
“Can’t you walk at all?”
She looked startled, even shocked, as if that question had been laid away at the back of her mind a long time since, not to be brought forth again. “One night after we came here, Jon and I, I went downstairs—Jon had gone to Trempa and was late returning—I had a candle, but a draft caught it at the head of the stairs—oh, it was a sad night, Benvenuto, and the night wind blowing. I stumbled, fell all the way. There was a miscarriage, but I could not move my legs. An hour later Jon got back and found me like that, all blood and misery. Since then I have not been able to walk. Nor to die, Benvenuto.”
“Have you prayed?” I asked her. “Have you besought God to let you walk again? Father Horan would say that you should. Father Horan says God’s grace is infinite, through the intercession of Abraham. But then— other times—he appears to deny it. Have you prayed, Mam Miriam?”
“Father Horan—that will be your village priest.” She was considering what I said, not laughing at me. “I believe he came here once some years ago, and Jon told him to go away, and he did—but no charge of witchcraft was ever brought against us.” She smiled at me, a smile of strangeness, but it warmed me. “Yes, I have prayed, Benvenuto . .. You said you were running away. Why that, my dear? And from what?”
“They would stone me. I’ve heard it muttered behind windows when I passed. The only reason they haven’t yet is that Father Horan was my friend—I thought he was, I’m sure he wanted to be, once. But I have learned he is not, he also believes me sinful.”
“Sinful?” She stroked the back of my hand, and her look was wondering. “Perhaps any sin you might have done has been atoned for by coming out of your way to help an old witch.”
“You’re not a witch!” I said. “Don’t call yourself that!”
“Why, Benvenuto! Then you do believe in witches!”
“Oh, I don’t know.” For the first time in my life I was wondering whether I did, if she in all her trouble could be so amused at the thought of them. “I don’t know,” I said, “but you’re not one. You’re good, Mam Miriam. You’re beautiful.”
“Well, Benvenuto, when I am busy with my embroideries, I sometimes feel like a good person. And in Jon’s embraces I’ve thought so, after the pleasure, in the time when there can be quie
t and a bit of thinking. Other times I’ve just lain here wondering what goodness is, and whether anyone really knows. Bless you, am I beautiful? I’m too fat, from lying here doing nothing. The wrinkles spread over my puffy flesh just the same, like frost lines coming on a windowpane, only dark, dark.” She closed her eyes and asked me, “What sin could you have done to make them after stoning you?”
“The one I most loved went away last spring—all the way to Penn, Gold help me, and I don’t even know what town. I was lonely, and full of desire too, for we had been lovers, and I’ve learned I have a great need of that, a fire in me that flares up at a breath. In Way-land’s field a few days ago, where the corn shocks are standing like golden women, I came on someone else, Eden—we had been loving friends, though not in that way. We were both lonely and hungry for loving, and so we comforted each other—and still, in spite of Father Horan, I can see no harm in it—but Eden’s people found us. Eden is younger than me—was only driven home and whipped, and will suffer no worse, I hope. Me they call monster. I ran away from Eden’s father and brother, but now all the village is muttering.”
“But surely, surely, boy and girl playing the old sweet game in an autumn cornfield—”
“Eden is a boy, Mam Miriam. The one I love, who went away, is Andrea Benedict, the eldest son of a patrician.”
She put her hand behind my neck. “Come here awhile,” she said, and drew me down to her.
“Father Horan says such passion is the Eternal Corruption. He says the people of Old Time sinned in this way, so God struck them with fire and plague until their numbers were as nothing. Then he sent Abraham to redeem us, taking away the sin of the world, so—”
“Hush,” she said, “hush. Nay—go on if you will, but I care nothing for your Father Horan.”
“And so God placed upon us, he says, the command to be fruitful and multiply until our numbers are again the millions they were in Old Time, destroying only the mues. And those who sin as I did, he says, are no better than mues, are a kind of mue, and are to be stoned in a public place and their bodies burned. After telling me that, he spoke of God’s infinite mercy, but I did not want to hear about it. I ran from him. But I know that in the earlier days of Old Time people like me were tied up in the marketplaces and burned alive, I know this from the books—it was Father Horan taught me the books, the reading—isn’t that strange?”
“Yes,” she said. She was stroking my hair, and I loved her. “Lying here useless, I’ve thought about a thousand things, Benvenuto. Most of them idle. But I do tell you that any manner of love is good if there’s kindness in it. Does anyone know you came here, Benvenuto?” She made my name so loving a sound!
“No, Mam Miriam.”
“Then you can safely stay the night. I’m frightened when the night wind blows around the eaves, if I’m alone. You can keep the fright away. It sounds like children crying, some terror pursues them or some grief is on them and there’s nothing I can do.”
“Why, to me the night wind sounds like children laughing, or the wood gods running and shouting across the top of the world.”
“Are there woodgods?”
“I don’t know. The forest’s a living place. I never feel alone there, even if I lose my way awhile.”
“Benvenuto, I think I’m hungry now. See what you can find downstairs—there’s cheese, maybe sausage, some of the little red Snow Apples, and Jon made bread—”
Her face crumpled and she caught at my hand. “Was it very bad—about Jon?”
“I think he was dead before the wolf came,” I told her. “Maybe his heart failed, or—a stroke? I’ve heard black wolf won’t attack in broad day. He must have died first in some quick way, without pain.”
“Oh, if we all could!” That cry was forced from her because her courage had gone, and I think it was only then that she really knew Jon Kobler was dead. “How could he go before me? I have been dying for ten years.”
“I won’t leave you, Mam Miriam.”
“Why, you must I won’t allow you to stay. I saw a stoning once in Sortees when I was a girl—or maybe that was when my girlhood ended. You must be gone by first light. Now, find us some little supper, Benvenuto. Before you go downstairs—that ugly thing over there, the bedpan—if you would reach it to me. God, I hate it so!—the body of this death.”
There’s nothing offensive in such services, certainly not if you love the one who needs them: we’re all bound to the flesh—even Father Horan said it. I wished to tell her so, and found no words; likely she read my thought.
Downstairs everything had been left in order. Jon Kobler must have been a careful, sober man. While I was busy building a fire to cook the sausage, arranging this and that on the tray Jon must have used, I felt him all around us in the work of his hands—the baskets, the beads, the furniture, the very shutters at the windows. Those were all part of a man.
In some way my own works shall live after me. This letter I am finishing is part of a man. Read it so.
When I took up the tray, Mam Miriam smiled at it, and at me. She would not talk during our meal about our troubles. She spoke of her young years at Sortees, and that is when I came to leam those things I wrote down for you about the governor’s mansion, the strange people she used to see who came from far off, even two or three hundred miles away; about the archer, the elopement, all that. And I learned much else that I have not written down, about the world that I shall presently go and look upon in my own time.
We had two candles at our supper table. Afterward, and the night wind was rising, she asked me to blow out one and set the other behind a screen; so all night long we had the dark, but it was not so dark we could not see each other’s faces. We talked on awhile; I told her more about Andrea. She slept some hours. The night wind calling and crying through the trees and over the rooftop did not waken her, but she woke when for a moment I took my hand away from hers. I returned it, and she slept again.
And once I think she felt some pain, or maybe it was grief that made her stir and moan. The wind had hushed, speaking only of trifling illusions; no other sound except some dog barking in Trempa village, and an owl. I said, “I’ll stay with you, Mam Miriam.”
“You cannot.”
“Then I’ll take you with me.”
“How could that be?”
“I’ll carry you. I’ll steal a horse and carriage.”
“Dear fool!”
“No, I mean it. There must be a way.”
“Yes,” she said, “and I’ll dream of it awhile.” And I think she did sleep again. I did, I know; then morning was touching the silence of our windows.
The daylight was on her face, and I blew out the candle, and I told her, “Mam Miriam, I’ll make you walk. I believe you can, and you know it too.” She stared up at me, not answering, not angry. “You are good. I think you’ve made me believe in God again, and so I’ve been praying that God should help you walk.”
“Have I not prayed?”
“Come!” I said, and took her hands and lifted her in the bed. “Come now, and I’ll make you walk.”
“I will do what I can,” she said. “Set my feet on the floor, Benvenuto, and I will try to lift myself.”
This I did. She was breathing hard. She said I was not to lift her, she must do it herself. “There’s money in the drawer of that table,” she said, and I was puzzled that she should speak of it now when she ought to be summoning all her forces to rise and walk. “And a few jewels brought from Sortees, we never sold them. Put them in your pocket, Benvenuto. I want to see you do that, to be sure you have them.” I did as she said— never mind what I found in the drawer, since you have only my word for it that I did not rob her.
When I turned back to her, she was truly struggling to rise. I could see her legs tensing with life, and I believed we had won, even that God had answered a prayer, a thing I had never known to happen. A blood vessel was throbbing fiercely at her temple, her face had gone red, her eyes were wild with anger at her weakness.
“I thank you, Benvenuto,” she said, and her face was not red any more but white, her lips bluish. She was collapsing. I got her back on the bed Jon Kobler made, and that was the end of it.
I will go into the world and find my way, I will not die by my own hand, I will regret no act of love. If it may be, I will find Andrea, and if he wishes, we may travel into new places, the greater oceans, the wilderness where the sun goes down. Wherever I go I shall be free and shameless; take heed of me. I care nothing for your envy, your anger, your fear that simulates contempt. The God you invented has nothing to say to me; but I hear my friend say that any manner of love is good if there’s kindness in it. Take heed of me. I am the night wind and the quiet morning light: take heed of me.
Universe 5 - [Anthology] Page 11
