Wilderness of Spring

High clouds drove across the dark toward abiding calm. Ben Cory watched them rolling under west wind down a winter sky, until his father's voice drew him back into the pool of firelight and candleshine. The moment's alarm of loneliness lingered, another occasion when the self disturbed by the not-self desires the assurance of boundaries. Where does the self end and the universe begin? Ben knew the inquiry to be a corridor where many doors open on darkness but not all.

Most of the days of that February had been whitely brilliant, the nights heavy with malignant doubts of wartime. Outside Deerfield's palisade, where one did not go alone, Ben at fourteen could never forget the enemy, the Others. Indians and French--or say danger itself, a thing of the mind harsh as an arrow in the flesh. In the cave of darkness that was the garret at bedtime, with Reuben's breath tickling his shoulder, the thought of the Others often entered behind Ben Cory's eyes. If sleep refused him his parents' talk might be recalled, and that sense of the Others, the quiet-footed, would become a commentary like secret laughter. They could laugh, those bronze people of the wilderness; they could laugh and cry, as wolves do.

On this evening of the twenty-ninth of February, 1704, snow was drifted mightily against Deerfield's palisade, crusted and frozen over. All winter the village had shivered to warnings: the French might try it. Governor Dudley sent reinforcements as generously as other commitments of a scared Massachusetts would allow; then the waiting, and the snow.

Ben's father had recently received a letter from Great-uncle John Kenny of Roxbury. As he discussed it that evening with Ben's mother, the boys could listen. From an Englishman who escaped Port Royal and reached Boston, Mr. Kenny had learned the French were friendlier than ever with the Abenaki tribes of Acadia. Joseph Cory read aloud: "I am moved to wonder whether we may ever know a time when the good works of men shall be no longer set at naught by embroilments of faction and credo, or by maneuvering of states and principalities. It is a sorry thing that a man should refrain from speaking his mind, overborne by the righteous who forget it was said: Be not righteous overmuch: Ecclesiastes vii; 16. I hate no man for that he believeth in other fashion than I do, be he Anabaptist, Quaker, Papist, I care nothing. He hath his light, so let me live by mine own."

Ben's mother was sewing, in her favorite small chair by the fireplace, the day's work never quite ended, candlelight mild on her dark face and her fingers that hurried because she was troubled. "Truly, Joseph, he displayeth much pride."

"Is it wrong, Adna, a man should be proud? Brave too--nay, reckless, seeing the letter might have fallen in the wrong hands."

"But--to make himself, as it were, judge of all things...."

Ben glanced at the enigma of his younger brother's face, wondering which view Reuben would share.

Hesitantly Adna Cory said: "You've spoke, times, of inviting Mr. Kenny here. I'd be pleased of course. In the spring, perhaps, before such time as you'll be too busied with the plowing and all?"

Joseph Cory sighed. Ben's parents often left much unsaid, the silences a communication not always excluding himself and Reuben. Neither now mentioned the smallness of the house, the cramping difficulties of living on a raw frontier. Even by frontier standards the house was meager--two rooms downstairs and the lean-to where old Jesse Plum dwelt in frowsty security; upstairs the garret and that was all. Ben knew his mother's family was or had been wealthy; so was Grandmother Cory in Springfield. But Joseph Cory was proud, with a sharp-cornered aversion to owing anyone anything.

The land spread generously fruitful here at the edge of wilderness; good times ought to bloom in this village if ever an end came to the alarms and imperatives of war. Under that stress it suffered the bleakness of a place often forgotten, where a handful of garrison soldiers tried to hold themselves ready for disaster, nourishing scant patience for Deerfield and not loved there. They cleaned their dark tools and cursed the weather, the Indians, the French, the pay or lack of it, above all their own foolishness in joining the militia.

Ben's mother and father were surely wondering in silence how the house could provide for such a guest as John Kenny, Grandmother Cory's elder brother, a fabulous merchant-importer, owner of ships and warehouses of the fat Boston trade. To Ben, Uncle John was a figure of learning, wealth and magnificence moving seven or eight feet tall in a haze of legend, mythical as Dudley or the Mathers or Queen Anne. Ben had heard his father call Uncle John slight and frail--a stiff breeze would blow him away; Ben's mind noted the information, his heart not accepting it at all. Joseph Cory said at last: "Well, Adna, he's sixty-seven. I suppose he seldom leaves Roxbury, especially now when all's uncertain. I hear the Boston road is fair as far as Hadley, but they mean for good riders, young men. Up from Hadley 'tis what you remember, love, muddy as dammit even when the spring's past. And he's not in the best health--says so here, further on."

Ben noticed Reuben's face drooping in resignation. Ru would know, as Ben did, that even if Uncle John were invited he probably could not come. The untamed roads were lonely; an old man on horseback could die swiftly from an arrow or bullet out of the brush.... Ben supposed he ought to take up a candle and persuade Reuben to bed. At fourteen Ben was expected to assume many of a man's responsibilities, not least of them the jumpy task of riding herd on his brother, who would be twelve in May.

Ben stood tall for his age, his slimness toughened by farm and other work to wiry flexibility. He could split wood nearly as well as his father, mend shoes better than Jesse Plum, manage the big kettles for his mother's candlemaking. But he could search his face in a mirror for signs of maturity and find maddeningly few. It remained a mild, large-eyed boy's face, high at the forehead, the jaw square but rounded at the chin. Father's craggy nose had character; Father was said to resemble Great-grandfather Stephen Cory, the sailor.

Legend placed Stephen Cory aboard Lord Howard's flagship when the Armada came against England in 1588. It just might have been true, for he was past middle life when he gave up the wild universe of the sea and begat Ben's grandfather Matthew Cory, and he was in his salt-encrusted seventies when he died in 1643 in the little new town of Boston. Whether the myth was true or false, Stephen Cory lived gaudily in Ben's fancy, strutting the quarterdeck, thrusting a beaky face like Joseph Cory's to the leaping spray and the enormous winds.

But Ben Cory in these prosaic modern times had grown resigned to a nose that stayed straight and small like his mother's, and his mouth was wide and full like hers--not a mouth for sternness, said the mirror. If Ben glared commandingly at the glass, somebody inside him hooted with merriment. His voice had changed but could still crack; the down on his face did not yet need shaving, being light in color.

"I never heard," said Joseph Cory, "that the Abenaki had any better stomach for winter campaigns than any other damned Inj'ans."

Adna Cory bit off a thread. "Septembers, Octobers, after they have their own corn harvested, then they come." Adna Pownal Cory would have been thinking of many past times when summer was fading but no dead leaves lay fallen to rustle warnings of approach. "A September, was it not, when they attacked the Beldings? Poor Sam! Thou wast six that year, Benjamin, and all warrior with no mind to be hustled out of the way--remember?"

"Yes, Mother, I do." A September Sabbath. The Beldings had gone to bring their corn from the outer fields before the service, when Indians ambushed the wagon, raging briefly into the village and away.

The Corys were not members of the church. Joseph Cory had been brought up in the congregation at Springfield, but when he came to Deerfield with his bride in 1688 he had declined either to join or to explain his failure to do so. Adna Cory was a member of the Anglican communion, which had been permitted to exist in Massachusetts for several years. On many Sundays and Lecture Days, in defense against public opinion, the family went to the meeting-house, the boys rigidly enduring the rhymed Psalms and the tedium of Mr. John Williams, who tended to preach in a sort of febrile blank verse.

They had stayed at home on the morning the Beldings were ruined. Ben remembered the explosion of Sabbath quiet into screams and shots, Father snatching the flintlock from its deerhorn rack and Mother gone very white, hurrying himself and four-year-old Reuben up to the garret. Ben was no warrior then--Adna Cory's fantasy developed that later, maybe from Ben's insistence on crowding in front of Reuben because he hoped to see what was going on.

For the Beldings help came too late--the mother and three children killed, the father and two other children taken captive to Canada, another child wounded and left for dead. Later Ben watched a soldier carrying in nine-year-old Sam Belding, who had revived and hidden in the swamp. The thin legs dangled; Sam's head rolled against the soldier's jacket, a bloody mess. Sam lived. Ben at six had understood it adequately: we, and the Others. The village could be furious but not astonished. Sam Belding's head became a commonplace, like any pitiable thing seen long enough for the seeing mind to grow its own scar.