On the Kentucky side of the river, just opposite, there was a place called Shadwell. Shadwell was much smaller than Refuge and much newer, but it was swelling out so fast that even Len and Esau could see the difference in the year or so they had been there. The people of Refuge did not care much for Shadwell, which had only happened because traders had begun to come up out of the South with sugar and blackstrap and cotton and tobacco, drawn by the commerce of the Refuge markets. A couple of temporary sheds had gone up, and a ferry dock, and a cabin or two, and before anybody realized it there was a village, with wharves and warehouses of its own, and a name, and a growing population. And Refuge, already as large as a town was permitted by law to be, sat sourly by and watched the overplus of trade it could not handle flow into Shadwell.
There were few Amish or Mennonites in Refuge. The people mostly belonged to the Church of Holy Thankfulness, and were called Kellerites after the James P. Keller who founded the sect. Len and Esau had found that there were few Mennonites anywhere in the settlements that lived by commerce rather than by agriculture. And since they were excommunicate themselves, with no wish to be traced back to Piper’s Run, they had long ago discarded the distinctive dress of their childhood faith for the nondescript homespuns of the river towns. They wore their hair short and their chins naked, because it was the custom among the Kellerites for a man to remain clean-shaven until he married, when he was expected to grow the beard that distinguished him more plainly than any removable ring. They went every Sunday to the Church of Holy Thankfulness, and joined in the regular daily devotions of the family they boarded with, and sometimes they forgot that they had ever been anything but Kellerites.
Sometimes, Len thought, they even forgot why they were here and what they were looking for. And he would make himself remember the night when he had waited for Esau on the point above the Pymatuning, and everything that had gone before to bring him there, and it was easy enough to remember the physical things, the chill air and the smell of leaves, the beating, and the way Pa’s face had looked as he lifted the strap and brought it whistling down. But the other part of it, the way he had felt inside, was harder to call to mind. Sometimes he could do it only with a real effort. Other times he could not do it at all. And at still other times—and these were the worst—the way he had felt about leaving home and finding Bartorstown seemed to him childish and absurd. He would see home and family so clearly that it was a physical pain in him, and he would think, I threw them all away for a name, a voice in the air, and here I am, a wanderer, and where is Bartorstown? He had found out that time can be a traitor and that thoughts are like mountaintops, a different shape on every side, changing as you move away.
Time had played him another trick, too. It had made him grow up and given him a lot of brand-new things to worry about.
Including the yellow-haired girl.
It was an evening in mid-June, hot and sultry, with the sunset swallowed up in the blackness of an oncoming storm. The two candles on the table burned straight up, with no quiver of air from the open windows to trouble them. Len sat with his hands folded and his head bent, looking down into the remains of a milk pudding. Esau sat on his right, in the same attitude. The yellow-haired girl sat across from them. Her name was Amity Taylor. Her father was saying grace after meat, sitting at the head of the table, and at the foot, her mother listened reverently.
“—didst stretch out the garment of Thy mercy to shelter us in the day of Destruction—”
Amity glanced up from under the shadows of her brows in the candlelight, looking first at Len and then at Esau.
“—our thanks for the limitless abundance of Thy blessing—”
Len felt the girl’s eyes on him. His skin was thin and sensitive to that touch, so that without even looking up he knew what she was doing. His heart began to thump. He felt hot. Esau’s hands were in his line of vision, folded between Esau’s knees. He saw them move and tighten, and he knew that Amity had looked at Esau too, and he got even hotter, thinking about the garden and the shadowy place under the rose arbor. Wouldn’t Judge Taylor ever shut up? The Amen came at last, muffled in the louder voice of thunder. Hurry, thought Len. Hurry with the dishes or there won’t be any walking in the garden. Not for anybody. He jumped up, scraping his chair back over the bare floor. Esau jumped up too, and he and Len went to picking up plates off the table so fast they jostled each other. On the other side of the candlelight, Amity slowly stacked the cups, and smiled.
Mrs. Taylor went out, carrying two serving dishes into the kitchen. At the hall door, the judge seemed on the point of going to his study, as he always did immediately after the final grace. Esau turned suddenly and gave Len a covert glare of anger, and whispered, “Stay out of this.”
Amity walked toward the kitchen door, balancing the stack of cups in her two hands. Her yellow hair hung down her back in a thick braid. She wore a dress of gray cotton, high in the neck and long in the skirt, but it did not look on her at all the way a similar dress did on her mother. She had a wonderful way of walking. It made Len’s heart come up in his throat every time he saw it. He glared back at Esau and started after her with his own load of plates, making long strides to get ahead. And Judge Taylor said quietly from the hall door, “Len—come into the study when you’ve put those down. They can get along without you for one washing.”
Len stopped. He gave Taylor a startled and apprehensive look, and said, “Yes, sir.” Taylor nodded and left the room. Len glanced briefly at Esau, who was openly upset.
“What does he want?” asked Esau.
“How should I know?”
“Listen. Listen, have you been up to anything?”
Amity went slowly through the swinging door, with her skirt moving gracefully around her ankles. Len flushed.
“No more’n you have, Esau,” he said angrily. He went after Amity and put his pile of dishes down on the sink board. Amity began to roll her sleeves up. She said to her mother, “Len can’t help tonight. Daddy wants him.”
Reba Taylor turned from the stove, where a pot of wash water simmered over the coals. She had a mild, pleasant, rather vacuous face, and Len had marked her long ago as one of the incurious ones. Life had passed over her so easily.
“Dear, dear,” she said. “Surely you haven’t done anything wrong, Len?”
“I hope not, ma’am.”
“I’ll bet you,” said Amity, “that it’s about Mike Dulinsky and his warehouse.”
“Mr. Dulinsky,” said Reba Taylor sharply, “and get about your dishes, young lady. They’re your concern. Run along, Len. Very likely the judge only wants to give you some advice, and you could do worse than listen to it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Len, and went out, across the dining room and into the hall and along that to the study, wondering all the way whether he had been seen kissing Amity in the garden, or whether it was about the Dulinsky business, or what. He had often gone to the judge’s study, and he had often talked with him, about books and the past and the future and sometimes even the present, but he had never been called in before.
The study door was open. Taylor said, “Come in, Len.” He was sitting behind his big desk in the angle of the windows. They faced the west, and the sky beyond them was dull black as though it had been wiped all over with soot. The trees looked sickly and colorless, and the river lay at one side like a strip of lead. Taylor had been sitting there looking out, with an unlighted candle and an unopened book beside him. He was rather a small man, with smooth cheeks and a high forehead. His hair and beard were always neatly trimmed, his linen was fresh every day, and his dark plain suit was cut from the finest cloth that came into the Refuge market. Len liked him. He had books and read them and encouraged other people to read them, and he was not afraid of knowledge, though he never made a parade of having any more than he needed in his profession. “Don’t call undue attention to yourself,” he often told Len, “and you will avoid a great deal of trouble.”
Now he told Len to come
in and shut the door. “I’m afraid we’re going to have a really serious talk, and I wanted you here alone because I want you to be free to think and make your decisions without any—well, any other influences.”
“You don’t think much of Esau, do you?” asked Len, sitting down where the judge had set a chair from him.
“No,” said Taylor, “but that is neither here nor there. Except that I’ll say further that I do think a great deal of you. And now we’ll leave personalities alone. Len, you work for Mike Dulinsky.”
“Yes, sir,” said Len, and began to bristle up a bit, defensively. So that was it.
“Are you going to continue working for him?”
Len hesitated only a short second before he said again, “Yes, sir.”
Taylor thought, looking out at the black sky and the ugly dusk. A beautiful forked blaze ran down the clouds. Len counted slowly, and when he reached seven there was a roll of thunder. “It’s still quite a ways off,” he said.
“Yes, but we’ll catch it. When they come from that direction, we always do. You’ve done a lot of reading this last year, Len. Have you learned anything from it?”
Len ran his eye lovingly over the shelves. It was too dark to see titles, but he knew the books by their size and place and he had read an awful lot of them.
“I hope so,” he said.
“Then apply what you’ve learned. It isn’t any good to you shut up inside your head in a separate cupboard. Do you remember Socrates?”
“Yes.”
“He was a greater and a wiser man than you or I will ever be, but that didn’t save him when he ran too hard against the whole body of law and public belief.”
Lightning flashed again, and this time the interval was shorter. The wind began to blow, tossing the branches of the trees around and riffling the blank surface of the river. Distant figures labored on the wharves to make fast the moorings of the barges, or to hustle bales and sacks under cover. Landward, between the trees, the whitewashed or weathered-silver houses of Refuge glimmered in the last wan light from overhead.
“Why do you want to hasten the day?” asked Taylor quietly. “You’ll never live to see it, and neither will your children, nor your grandchildren. Why, Len?”
“Why what?” asked Len, now blankly confused, and then he gasped as Taylor answered him, “Why do you want to bring back the cities?”
Len was silent, peering into the gloom that had suddenly deepened until Taylor was no more than a shadow four feet away.
“They were dying even before the Destruction,” said Taylor. “Megalopolis, drowned in its own sewage, choked with its own waste gases, smothered and crushed by its own population. ‘City’ sounds like a musical word to your ear, but what do you really know about them?”
They had been over this ground before. “Gran used to say—”
“That she was a little girl then, and little girls would hardly see the dirt, the ugliness, the crowded poverty, the vice. The cities were sucking all the life of the country into themselves and destroying it. Men were no longer individuals, but units in a vast machine, all cut to one pattern, with the same tastes and ideas, the same mass-produced education that did not educate but only pasted a veneet of catchwords over ignorance. Why do you want to bring that back?”
An old argument, but applied in a totally unexpected way. Len stammered, “I haven’t been thinking about cities one way or the other. And I don’t see what Mr. Dulinsky’s new warehouse has to do with them.”
“Len, if you’re not honest with yourself, life will never be honest with you. A stupid man could say that he didn’t see and be honest, but not you. Unless you’re still too much of a child to think beyond the immediate fact.”
“I’m old enough to get married,” said Len hotly, “and that ought to be old enough for anything.”
“Quite,” said Taylor. “Quite. Here comes the rain, Len. Help me with the windows.” They shut them, and Taylor lit the candle. The room was now unbearably close and hot. “What a pity,” he said, “that the windows always have to be closed just when the cool wind starts to blow. Yes, you’re old enough to get married, and I think Amity has a thought or two in that direction herself. It’s a possibility I want you to consider.”
Len’s heart began to pound, the way it always did when Amity was involved. He felt wildly excited, and at the same time it was as though a trap had been set before his feet. He sat down again, and the rain thrashed on the windows like hail.
Taylor said slowly, “Refuge is a good town just the way it stands. You could have a good life here. I can take you off the docks and make a lawyer out of you, and in time you’d be an important man. You would have leisure for study, and all the wisdom of the world in there in those books. And there’s Amity. Those are the things I can give you. What does Dulinsky offer?”
Len shook his head. “I do my work, and he pays me. That’s all.”
“You know he’s breaking the law.”
“It’s a silly law. One warehouse more or less—”
“One warehouse more, in this case, violates the Thirtieth Amendment, which is the most basic law of this land. It won’t be overlooked.”
“But it isn’t fair. Nobody here in Refuge wants to see Shadwell spring up and take a lot of business away because there aren’t enough warehouses and wharves and shelters on this side to take care of all the trade.”
“One more warehouse,” said Taylor, pointedly repeating Len’s words, “and then more wharves to serve it, and more housing for the traders, and pretty soon you’ll need another warehouse still, and that is the way in which cities are born. Len, has Dulinsky ever mentioned Bartorstown to you?”
Len’s heart, which had been beating so hard for Amity, now stopped in sudden fear. He shivered and said, with perfect truthfulness, “No, sir. Never.”
“I just wondered. It seems the kind of a thing a Bartorstown man might do. But then I’ve known Mike since we were boys together, and I can’t remember any possible influence—no, I suppose not. But that may not save him, Len, and it may not save you.”
Len said carefully, “I don’t think I understand.”
“You and Esau are strangers. People will accept you as long as you don’t run counter to their ways, but if you do, look out.” He leaned his elbows on the desk and looked at Len. “You haven’t been altogether truthful about yourself.”
“I haven’t told any lies.”
“That isn’t always necessary. Anyway, I can pretty well guess. You’re a country boy. I would lay odds that you were New Mennonite. And you ran away from home. Why?”
“I guess,” said Len, choosing his words as a man on the edge of a pitfall chooses his steps, “that it was because Pa and me couldn’t agree on how much was right for me to know.”
“Thus far,” said Taylor thoughtfully, “and no farther. That has always been a difficult line to draw. Each sect must decide for itself, and to a certain degree, so must every man. Have you found your limit, Len?”
“Not yet.”
“Find it,” Taylor said, “before you go too far.”
They sat for a moment in silence. The rain poured and a lightning bolt came down so close that it made an audible hissing before it hit. The resultant thunder shook the house like an explosion.
“Do you understand,” asked Taylor, “why the Thirtieth Amendment was passed?”
“So there wouldn’t be any more cities.”
“Yes, but do you comprehend the reasoning behind that interdiction? I was brought up in a certain body of belief, and in public I wouldn’t dream of contradicting any part of it, but here in private I can say that I do not believe that God directed the cities to be destroyed because they were sinful. I’ve read too much history. The enemy bombed the big key cities because they were excellent targets, centers of population, centers of manufacture and distribution, without which the country would be like a man with his head cut off. And it worked out just that way. The enormously complex system of supply broke down, the citi
es that were not bombed had to be abandoned because they were not only dangerous but useless, and everyone was thrown back on the simple basics of survival, chiefly the search for food.
“The men who framed the new laws were determined that that should not happen again. They had the people dispersed now, and they were going to keep them that way, close to their source of supply and offering no more easy targets to a potential enemy. So they passed the Thirtieth Amendment. It was a wise law. It suited the people. They had just had a fearful object lesson in what kind of deathtraps the cities could be. They didn’t want any more of them, and gradually that became an article of faith. The country has been healthy and prosperous under the Thirtieth Amendment, Len. Leave it alone.”
“Maybe you’re right,” said Len, scowling at the candle flame. “But when Mr. Dulinsky says how the country has really started to grow again and shouldn’t be stopped by outgrown laws, I think he’s right, too.”
“Don’t let him fool you. He’s not worried about the country. He’s a man who owns four warehouses and wants to own five and is sore because the law says he can’t do it.”
The judge stood up.
“You’ll have to decide what’s right in your own mind. But I want to make one thing clear to you. I have my wife and my daughter and myself to think about. If you go on with Dulinsky you’ll have to leave my house. No more walks with Amity. No more books. And I warn you, if I am called upon to judge you, judge you I will.”
The Long Tomorrow Page 8
