faced about, feeling the sun of March, seeing on the backward trail nothing familiar, only a rising faraway smoke. That must have been Deerfield. Nearby, the quiet world of snow was lightly patterned with tracks of forest life; no wind at all now to disturb the shadowy trees and undergrowth. Ben knew his brother was nearly sane, already ashamed of the words just spoken. Jesse had halted, swaying and mumbling in his cold nakedness, looking back. "I loved her, Reuben. Now save thy breath for walking."
More time unmeasurable passed in the dreary plodding. Small shadows down the trail became large, large shadows became men—angry men from Hatfield, some of them soldiers. A blunt-faced sergeant of militia shouted to Ben: "They still there, boy?"
"Yes," Ben wheezed—"I think so."
The sergeant paused, seeing Jesse's side. "You're bad hurt."
Someone tossed a jacket over Jesse. The sergeant offered a leather flask and Jesse grabbed his arm, muttering uneasily: "Water?"
"Water of Jamaica."
"God magnify you!" Jesse drank. "Don't know you—'d pray for you was I a'ready in Hell."
The sergeant jerked his head at the north. "How many?"
"Jesus, I don't know. Killed one Inj'an with my axe." Jesse said that in startled thoughtfulness as if just remembering. "My own gun got me—peddler sold it me for a musket, bloody grape-shot it is now, might've killed me deader'n a son of a bitch." The sergeant ran on to the head of the column. "A'n't left you much," Jesse apologized, and discovered the flask still in his hand. "Why, he's gone and left me it, in the name of God."
"Come on, Jesse—he meant to. Come on!"
"I will, Ben. But do you boys walk on ahead—it be'n't right a thing so ugly as me should walk naked in the sun, the Lord never intended it."
Some others of the column called to them, words sounding kind, passing over Ben like a slightly warming breeze.
A vague time later—the column was gone and Ben was trying to ignore a stitch in the side—Jesse's voice rose and fell in a fitful rambling; the old man sang a little, too. "If I knowed that man's name I could pray for him. The race is not alway to him that can the swiftest run—call that a Psa'm, they do, no music in 'em, Church of England myself, if so be it makes any difference when a man's a sinner and lost and bound to Hell. I know what I'll do, I'll say to the Lord Jesus, that man who gave me a drink on the Hatfield road the first day of March, that's what I'll say, mark it, Ben, and pity but the dear Lord'd understand, you would think—Benjamin? Won't he? I'll say, that man who gave me a drink on the first bloody day of March, right about there on the Hatfield road, do you see, and will that do fair enough, Benjamin?"
"Of course, Jesse."
"You're a sweet soul, Benjamin, to gi' me that out of the good learning you got. I call that an act of kindness to an old fart that's wallowed in ignorance and sin all his days, I won't forget it, I could kiss your foot. I used to could sing, Benjamin. At Mother Gilly's house they'd use to ask me to sing, every smock there would ask me—her house was in Stepney, not far from the Mile End Road. 'Brave Benbow lost his legs'—that's a song I picked up from a chapman come by your father's house, Benjamin, I think it was last year. 'Brave Benbow'—oh, bugger me blind if I a'n't forgot it, anyway there was better songs in the days of King Charles that won't come again, needn't to think they will, boy. That's all past, that is...."
Ben's hand had relaxed. Reuben broke free and plunged blindly ahead to drop face down in the snow, not rising.
Here the road curved near the frozen expanse of the Connecticut. Distant in the south smoke threaded into the clouds, the smoke of decent fires—Hatfield village, warmth and safety. Ben raised Reuben's limply protesting body, brushing white smears from his face and collar. Jesse stood by, trying to drink from an empty flask. "Ru, brother——"
"I can't go on, nor I will not."
"You must."
"I cursed you."
"What? That?—you know that was nothing."
"I'm rotten with sin. I let it happen. I did nothing. And yesterday she chided me for using an ugly word, and I went out into the shed and I—and——"
"That's nothing."
"You say that. I befouled myself. I didn't pray last night. So I'm to die in sin and be damned forever."
"No. No...."
Jesse mumbled: "God-damn flask's empty." Ben's eyes were compelled to follow the motion of a brown thing soaring up from Jesse's long arm, flying, descending to the river ice and skidding off to lie still, a dot of darkness. "Don't know m' own bloody strength," said Jesse Plum, and chuckled in apology.
"Reuben, thou art no more in sin than any child of Adam."
"I let it happen. He came out of the dark. I let it happen."
"Reuben, get up on your feet!" As Reuben answered that angry shout with nothing but a sick stare, Ben searched in desperation for anything at all that might reach the boy's mind, and could find nothing, thwarted by the barrier that rises or seems to rise between one self and another, and so cried out unthinkingly: "For my sake then! Because I need thee and love thee."
Reuben Cory clung to the power of a fantasy. The snow before him, through which his feet could now drive with amazing patience and force, was not really level but a stairway. Level it was—flat level, drearily flat and white and cold—but his mind by quiet assertion made of it a stairway: because a level may indicate infinity, but a stairway, any stairway, must come to an end. Let it be a thousand miles or a thousand years away, a stairway must come to an end, for the mind refused to imagine one that went up forever, to no goal. Therefore each step was a rising, something gained toward the summit where Ben stood waiting to tell him he had done well.
By fantasy the universe might stand divided, into a region endurable and an outer region. To the outer region one must return, soon, and Reuben knew it.
From within the region of illusion that he knew to be illusion, Reuben grew aware, and more comfortably, that old Jesse Plum was still rambling on, and singing.
"Brave Benbow lost his legs, by chain-shot, by chain-shot...."
Reuben no longer resented the croaking sound as a hateful intrusion. The old man meant no harm, and was drunk. Ben had refused to abandon him, and Ben always knew best.
"Says Kirby unto Wade: 'We will run, we will run.'
Says Kirby unto Wade: 'We will run.
For I value no disgrace, nor the losing of my place,
But the enemy I won't face, nor his gun, nor his gun....'"
Peacefully, almost unobserved, the boundary between the two regions dissolved. The snow was flat. For a few moments Reuben's mind was completely engaged in an effort to understand how they had got away from the house. The axe—came—down.... Then what? Out of this blank two remote voices spoke with needle sharpness: "Goodm'n Cory?" "They've shot him, Jesse." Maybe after that he had fainted. But now, to the deepest privacy of his mind, Reuben could state: That home was not; that he would be twelve in May; that his mother and father were dead; that he was walking on flat snow
