The Long Tomorrow

by Leigh Douglass Brackett

2

  That nervous pricking in his middle was all that kept Len awake at first, after he had rolled up for the night under the family wagon. The outside air was chilly, the blanket was warm, he was comfortaby full of supper, and it had been a long day. His eyelids would droop and things would get dim and far away, all washed over with a pleasant darkness. Then pung! would go that particular nerve, warning him, and he would tense up again, remembering Esau and the preaching.

  After a while he began to hear things. Ma and Pa snored in the wagon overhead, and the fairgrounds were dark except for burned-out coals of the fires. They should have been quiet. But they were not. Horses moved and harness jingled. He heard a light cart go with a break and a rattle, and way off somewhere a heavy wagon groaned on its way, the team snorting as they pulled. The strange people, the non-Mennonites like the gingery trader in his buckskin clothes, had all left just after sundown, heading for the preaching place. But these were other people going, people who did not want to be seen. Len stopped being sleepy. He listened to the unseen hoofs and the stealthy wheels, and he began to wish that he had not agreed to go.

  He sat up cross-legged under the wagon bed, the blanket pulled around his shoulders. Esau had not come yet. Len stared across at Uncle David’s wagon, hoping maybe Esau had gone to sleep himself. It was a long way, and cold and dark, and they would get caught sure. Besides that, he had felt guilty all through supper, not wanting to look straight at Pa. It was the first time he had, deliberately and of choice, disobeyed his father, and he knew the guilt must show all over his face. But Pa hadn’t noticed it, and somehow that made Len feel worse instead of better. It meant Pa trusted him so much that he never bothered to look for it.

  There was a stir in the shadows under Uncle David’s wagon, and it was Esau, coming quietly on all fours.

  I’ll tell him, thought Len. I’ll say I won’t go.

  Esau crept closer. He grinned, and his eyes shone bright in the glow of the banked-up fire. He put his head close to Len’s and whispered, “They’re all asleep. Roll your blanket up like you were still in it, just in case.”

  I won’t go, thought Len. But the words never came out of his mouth. He rolled up his blanket and slid away after Esau, into the night. And right away, as soon as he was out of sight of the wagon, he was glad. The darkness was full of motion, of a going and a secret excitement, and he was going too. The taste of wickedness was sweet in his mouth, and the stars had never looked so bright.

  They went carefully until they came to an open lane, and then they began to run. A high-wheeled cart raced by them, the horse stepping high and fast, and Esau panted, “Come on, come on!” He laughed, and Len laughed, running. In a few minutes they were out of the fairgrounds and on the main road, deep in dust from three rainless weeks. Dust hung in the air, roiled up by the passing wheels and roiled again before it could settle. A team of horses loomed up in it, huge and ghostly, shaking foam off their bits. They were pulling a wagon with an open tilt, and the man who drove them looked like a blacksmith, with thick arms and a short blond beard. There was a stout red-cheeked woman beside him. She had a rag tied over her head instead of a bonnet and her skirts blew out on the wind. From under the tied-up edge of the tilt there looked a row of little heads, all yellow as corn silk. Esau ran fast beside the wagon, shouting, with Len pounding along behind him. The man pulled down his horses and squinted at them. The woman looked too, and they both laughed.

  “Lookit ’em,” the man said. “Little flat-hats. Where you goin’ without your mama, little flat-hats?”

  “We’re going to the preaching,” Esau said, mad about the flat-hat and madder still about the little, but not mad enough to lose the chance of a lift. “May we ride with you?”

  “Why not?” said the man, and laughed again. He said some stuff about Gentiles and Samaritans that Len did not quite understand, and some more about listening to a Word, and then he told them to get in, that they were late already. The horses had not stopped all this time, and Len and Esau were floundering in the roadside briers, keeping up. They scrambled in over the tailboard and lay gasping on the straw that was there, and the man yelled to the horses and they were off again, banging and bumping and the dust flying up through the cracks in the floor boards. The straw was dusty. There was a big dog in it, and seven kids, all staring at Len and Esau with round-eyed hostility. They stared back and then the oldest boy pointed and said, “Looka the funny hats.” They all laughed. Esau asked, “What’s it to you?” and the boy said, “This’s our wagon, that’s what’s it to me, and if you don’t like it you can get out.” They went on making fun of their clothes, and Len glowered, thinking that they didn’t have much room to talk. They were all seven barefoot and had no hats at all, though they looked thrifty enough, and clean. He didn’t say anything back though, and neither did Esau. Three or four miles was a long way to walk at night.

  The dog was friendly. He licked their faces all over and sat on them impartially, all the way to the preaching ground. And Len wondered if the woman on the wagon seat would get down on the ground and roll, and if the man would roll with her. He thought how silly they would look, and giggled, and suddenly he was not mad at the yellow-haired kids any more.

  The wagon came in finally among many others in a very large open field that sloped down toward a little river, running maybe twenty feet wide now with the dry weather, and low between its banks. Len thought there must be as many people as there had been at the fair, only they were all crowded together, the rigs jammed in a rough circle at the back and everybody gathered in the center, sitting on the ground. One flatbed wagon, with the horses unhitched, was pulled close to the riverbank. Everybody was facing it, and a man was standing on it, in the light of a huge bonfire. He was a young man, tall and big-chested. His black beard came down almost to his waist, shiny as a crow’s breast in the spring, and he kept shaking it as he moved around, tossing his head and shouting. His voice was high and piercing, and it did not come in a continuous flow of words. It came in short sharp pieces that stabbed the air, each one, clear to the farthest rows before the next one was flung out. It was a minute before Len realized the man was preaching. He was used to a different way of it in Sabbath meeting, when Pa or Uncle David or anybody could get up and speak to God, or about Him. They always did it quietly, with their hands folded.

  He had been staring out over the side of the wagon. Now, before the wheels had fairly stopped turning, Esau punched him and said, “Come on.” He jumped out over the tailboard. Len followed him. The man called something after them about the Word, and all seven of the kids made faces. Len said politely, “Thank you for the ride.” Then he ran after Esau.

  From here the preaching man looked small and far away, and Len couldn’t hear much of what he said. Esau whispered, “I think we can get right up close, but don’t make any noise.” Len nodded. They scuttled around behind the parked rigs, and Len noticed that there were others who seemed to want to remain out of sight. They hung back on the edges of the crowd, in among the wagons, and Len could see them only as dark shapes silhouetted against the firelight. Some of them had taken their hats off, but the cut of their clothes and hair still gave them away. They were of Len’s own people. He knew how they felt. He had a shyness himself about being seen.

  As he and Esau worked their way down toward the river, the voice of the preaching man grew louder. There was something strident about it, and stirring, like the scream of an angry stallion. His words came clearer.

  “—went a-whoring after strange gods. You know that, my friends. Your own parents have told you, your own old grannies and your aged grandpas have confessed it, how that the hearts of the people were full of wickedness and blasphemies, and lust—”

  Len’s skin pricked with excitement. He followed Esau in and out through a confusion of wheels and horses’ legs, holding his breath. And finally they were where they could see out from the shelter of a good black shadow between the wheels of a cart, and the preacher was only a few yards awa
y.

  “They lusted, my brethren. They lusted after everything strange, and new, and unnatural. And Satan saw that they did and he blinded their eyes, the heavenly eyes of the soul, so that they were like foolish children, crying after the luxuries and the soul-rotting pleasures. And they forgot God.”

  A moaning and a rocking swept over the people who sat on the ground. Len caught hold of a wheel spoke in each hand and thrust his face between them.

  The preaching man sprang to the very edge of the wagon. The night wind shook out his beard and his long black hair, and behind him the fire burned and shot up smoke and sparks, and the preaching man’s eyes burned too, huge and black. He flung his arm out straight, pointing at the people, and said in a curious harsh whisper that carried like a cry, “They forgot God!”

  Again the rocking and the moaning. It was louder this time. Len’s heart had begun to pound.

  “Yes, my brethren. They forgot. But did God forget? No, I tell you, He did not forget! He watched them. He saw their iniquities. He saw how the Devil had hold on them, and He saw that they liked it—yes, my friends, they liked old Satan the Betrayer, and they would not leave his ways for the ways of God. And why? Because Satan’s ways were easy and smooth, and there was always some new luxury just around the next bend in the downward path.”

  Len became conscious of Esau, crouched beside him in the dust. He was staring at the preaching man, and his eyes glittered. His mouth was open wide. Len’s pulses hammered. The voice of the preaching man seemed to flick him like a whip on nerves he had never known he had before. He forgot about Esau. He hung to his wheelspokes and thought hungrily, Go on, go on!

  “And so what did God do, when He saw His children had turned from Him? You know what He did, my brethren! You know!”

  Moan and rock, and the moaning became a low strange howl.

  “He said, ‘They have sinned! They have sinned against My laws, and against My prophets, who warned them even in old Jerusalem against the luxuries of Egypt and of Babylon! And they have exalted themselves in their pride. They have climbed up into the heavens which are My throne, and they have rent open the earth which is My footstool, and they have loosed the sacred fire which lies at the very heart of things, and which only I, the Lord Jehovah, should dare to touch.’ And God said, ‘Even so, I am merciful. Let them be cleansed of their sin.’ ”

  The howling rose louder, and all across the open field there was a tossing of arms and a writhing of heads.

  “Let them be cleansed!” cried the preaching man. His body was strained up, quivering, and the sparks shot up past him. “God said it, and they were cleansed, my brethren! With their own sins they were chastised. They were burned with the fires of their own making, yea, and the proud towers vanished in the blazing of the wrath of God! And with fire and famine and thirst and fear they were driven from their cities, from the places of iniquity and lust, even our own fathers and our fathers’ fathers, who had sinned, and the places of iniquity were made not, even as Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  Somewhere across the crowd a woman screamed and fell backward, beating her head against the earth. Len never noticed.

  The voice of the preaching man sank down again to that harsh far-carrying whisper.

  “And so we were spared of God’s mercy, to find His way and follow it.”

  “Hallelujah,” screamed the crowd. “Hallelujah!” The preaching man held up his hands. The crowd quieted. Len held his breath, waiting. His eyes were fixed on the black burning eyes of the man on the wagon. He saw them narrow down, until they looked like the eyes of a cat just ready to spring, only they were the wrong color.

  “But,” said the preaching man, “Satan is still with us.”

  The rows of people jerked forward with a feral yelp, held down and under by the hands of the preacher.

  “He wants us back. He remembers what it was like, the Devil does, when he had all those soft fair women to serve him, and all the rich men, and the cities all shining with lights to be his shrines! He remembers, and he wants them back! So he sends his emissaries among us—oh, you wouldn’t know them from your own God-fearing folk, my brethren, with their meek ways and sober garments! But they go about secretly proselyting, tempting our boys and young men, dangling the forbidden serpent’s fruit in front of them, and on the brow of every one of them is the mark of the beast—the mark of Bartorstown!”

  Len pricked his ears up higher at that. He had heard the name of Bartorstown just once before, from Granma, and he remembered it because of the way Pa had shut her up. The crowd yowled, and some of them got up on their feet. Esau pressed up closer against Len, and he was quivering all over. “Ain’t this something?” he whispered. “Ain’t this something!”

  The preaching man looked all around. He didn’t quiet the people this time, he let them quiet down of themselves, out of their eagerness to hear what he had to say next. And Len sensed something new in the air. He did not know what it was, but it excited him so he wanted to scream and leap up and down, and at the same time it made him uneasy. It was something these people understood, they and the preaching man together.

  “Now,” said the man on the wagon, quietly, “there are some sects, all God-fearing folk, I’m not saying they don’t try, that think it’s enough to say to one of these emissaries of Satan, Go, leave our community, and don’t come back. Now maybe they just don’t understand that what they’re really saying is, Go and corrupt somebody else, we’ll keep our own house clean!” A sharp downward wave of his hands stifled a cry from the people as though he had shoved a cork in their mouths. “No, my friends. That is not our way. We think of our neighbor as ourself. We honor the government law that says there shall be no more cities. And we honor the Word of God, who saith that if our right eye offend us we must pluck it out, and if our right hand offend us we must cut it off, and that the righteous can have no part with evil men, no, not if they be our own brothers or fathers or sons!”

  A noise went up from the people now that turned Len hot all over and closed up his throat and made his eyeballs prick. Somebody threw wood on the bonfire. It roared up a torrent of sparks and a yellow glaring of flame, and there were people rolling on the ground now, men and women both, clawing up the dirt with their fingers and screaming. Their eyes were all white, and it was not funny. And over the crowd and the firelight went the voice of the preaching man, howling shrill and mighty like a great animal in the night.

  “If there be evil among you, cast it forth!”

  A lank boy with the beard just sprouting on his chin leaped up. He pointed. He cried out, “I accuse him!” and the froth ran wet in the corners of his mouth.

  There was a sudden violent surge in one place. A man had sprung up and tried to run, and others caught him. Their shoulders heaved and their legs danced, and the people around them hunkered out of the way, pushing and tugging at them. They dragged the man back finally, and Len got a clear look at him. It was the ginger-haired trader William Soames. But his face was different now, pale and still and awful.

  The preaching man yelled something about root and branch. He was crouched on the edge of the wagon now, his hands high in the air. They began to strip the trader. They tore the stout leather shirt off his back and they ripped the buckskin breeches from his legs, exposing him white and stark. He wore soft boots on his feet and one of these came off, and the other they forgot and left on him. Then they drew back away from him, so that he was all alone in the middle of an open space. Somebody threw a stone.

  It hit Soames on the mouth. He reeled over a little and put up his arms, but another stone came, and another, and stick and clods of earth, and his white skin was all blotched and streaked. He turned this way and that, falling, stumbling, doubling up, trying to find a way out, trying to ward off the blows. His mouth was open and his teeth showed with the blood running over them and down into his beard, but Len couldn’t hear whether he cried out or not because of the noise the crowd was making, a gasping screeching greedy obscene gabble, and the s
tones kept hitting him. Then the whole mob began to move toward the river, driving him. He came close past the cart, past the shadow where Len was watching through the spokes, and Len saw clearly into his eyes. The men came after him, their boots striking heavy on the dusty ground, and the women came too, with their hair flying and the stones in their hands. Soames fell down the bank into the shallow river. The men and women went after him and covered him the way flies cover a piece of offal after a butchering, and their hands rose and fell.

  Len turned his head and looked at Esau. He was crying, and his face was white. Esau had his arms folded tight across his middle, and his body was bent over them. His eyes were huge and staring. Suddenly he turned and rushed away on all fours under the cart. Len bolted after him, scrambling, crabwise, with the air dark and whirling around him. All he could think about was the pecans Soames had given him. He turned sick and stopped to vomit, with a terrible icy coldness on him. The crowd still screamed by the riverbank. When he straightened up, Esau was gone in the shadows.

  In a panic he fled between the carts and the wagons. He kept saying, “Esau! Esau!” but there was no answer, or if there was he couldn’t hear it for the voice of murder in his ears. He shot out blindly into an open space, and there was a tall looming figure there that stretched out long arms and caught him.

  “Len,” it said. “Len Colter.”

  It was Mr. Hostetter. Len felt his knees give. It got very black and quiet, and he heard Esau’s voice, and then Mr. Hostetter’s, but far and tiny, like voices carried by the wind on a heavy day. Then he was in a wagon, huge and full of unfamiliar smells, and Mr. Hostetter was boosting Esau in after him. Esau looked like a ghost. Len said, “You said it would be fun.”

  And Esau said, “I didn’t know they ever—” He hiccuped and sat down beside Len, his head on his knees.

  “Stay put,” said Mr. Hostetter. “I have to get something.”

  He went away. Len raised up and watched, his eyes drawn toward the fire glare and the wailing, sobbing, shrieking mob that wavered to and fro crying that they were saved. Glory glory, hallelujah, the wages of sin are death, hallelujah!