Peter Loon (10 page)

The men surrounding the table had grown increasingly distressed as this conversation progressed, and two or three men gasped to hear Parson Leach spoken to in this manner–all the more so since several of them had taken Nathan Barrow's vision and his continued revelations to heart.

Then Zachariah Leach said, with renewed humor, “I would rather think that you and I both, Mr. Barrow, will have opportunity to quibble in paradise.” This was said with such real good feeling, and it was such a surprise, that several at the table chuckled softly. “The Lord is a powerful deity, Mr. Barrow,” said Parson Leach with the sound of summing up, “and I warrant his plans are big enough for you and me and a great deal more.”

Mr. Tillage made an appearance, then, with a tray full of mugs and tankards and his feet hurrying beneath him; and he appeared to have ambivalent feelings about such a debate in his tavern, between Nathan Barrow and a paying customer. It was an opportune moment for Barrow, however, and he left the table for his own against the wall, where it must have been a good deal cooler. Nora went with him and Peter and Parson Leach were each startled, not to say alarmed, to see her sit close beside the man with the sort of attention toward him that a wife might display if she were very young–which Nora was–and very reticent.

The tavern keeper followed Barrow to his table and laid down a tankard before the man.

“That is your daughter, Mr. Tillage?” said Parson Leach, when the taverner had returned.

“Nora? Yes, Mr. Leach, she is.” Tillage was serving the clergyman without looking at him very directly.

“Are she and Mr. Barrow married?” asked the preacher.

“Not a bit, sir,” said Tillage.

“Intended, then?”

“No, Mr. Leach, she's only under his wing, so to speak. His tutelage in God, as he calls it.”

“I'm sure he does,” said the parson quietly. All eyes glanced toward the other table. Barrow was watching them. Nora was staring into the middle distances. She looked, to Peter, resigned, and perhaps even content.

Tillage looked determined about something, of a sudden, but only about not answering further questions it seemed, for when he had finished serving the other men he turned and left the room without another word.

PETER'S HEAD FAILED HIM FOR A WHILE AND HE DOZED WITH HIS
wounded scalp throbbing from the exertions of the day.

The conversation had steered from the White Indians and events down in New Milford. With Barrow in the room no one seemed comfortable with the subject, and other matters came to roost which proved convivial because of Parson Leach's determination that it should not be otherwise and despite Barrow's occasional stare.

Peter roused himself easily enough, however, when an early supper was served. He had rarely eaten so well, and the ale made his head swim. More men had come into the tavern by that time and, amidst the noise, a carefully modulated conversation could return to previous concerns. The business of John Trueman, the harried land agent, was gone over again and further opinions expounded whether the business would serve to incite one side or the other, and who would most regret it.

Parson Leach was circumspect with his opinions, though he did not look happy whenever the tale of the unfortunate John Trueman was related, and he even winced when some new detail concerning the man's brutal treatment was recalled.

“You went to war yourself, once, Mr. Leach,” said one older gentleman.

“Yes, I did, Mr. Flint,” agreed the preacher. “And that was soldier to soldier, as a rule. But I was a young man then, and it would be strange indeed if my views did not change–not to say moderate–with age and experience.”

“Then you regret your part,” suggested Mr. Flint.

“I believe I would do the same today as I did at twenty, and certainly I have no regrets about our new republic, God bless it. But I might also wish that particular ends could be achieved with less blood and more charity.”

“There was little charity at the end of a British musket,” said another respectable fellow.

“I know it for a fact myself, sir,” said the preacher. “But a hungry man may dream of a table such as this. And a lonely man may dream of his wife or his sweetheart. And a man who has known war–and do you disagree?–might dream of settling his disputes in peace.”

Mr. Flint and the other older fellow did not find fault with these speculations.

Peter began to drift again, his head on his arms, and then suddenly he was conscious that Parson Leach was not at the table, and that those sitting about, smoking their pipes and drinking their ale had allowed him to sleep peacefully by dint of ignoring him.

Peter rose unsteadily, looked to Barrow's table and saw that he and Nora were gone as well. Outside the tavern, in the light of late afternoon, Peter breathed the sharp October air, and tried to rouse his clouded brain. Mars was not at his post by the porch, and Peter was concerned that Parson Leach had pressed on without him.

“Under his wing,” he heard someone say, from around the corner of the tavern. “She's under something of his, to be sure.”

“He is, to be sure, a
lay
preacher,” said another amid the chuckles.

Peter moved a little further into the tavern yard and found the younger men that he and Parson Leach had met when they first arrived; they were standing in a group at the side of the tavern, watching something down by the lake, he thought, but they turned when he hove into view and hailed him brightly enough.

“The parson went to visit friends, he said to tell you,” called one of the young men.

“Thank you.”

“He said, you should wait around here, if you like, and you could share his room tonight.”

Peter nodded. “Have any of you heard of Obed Winslow?” he asked, without hardly thinking about it first.

The young men looked to one another, each with his own frown of concentration.

“Is he the fellow down to Newcastle,” said one of the young men, “tried to swim his horse across the river last spring and drowned?”

“I don't know,” said Peter, a little shocked.

“That was Winthrop, was his name,” said another. “He didn't drown.”

“The horse got away from him,” said a third, and still another young buck declared that the whole business had turned on a wager. Two or three of the fellows continued to look every now and then toward the water, as if something of interest might come in to view. Peter thought on what they had been saying before they saw him, and some barely conscious mix of curiosity and longing drew him along the dirt street, past the young men and around the dogleg to the northern border of the lake.

There was a clear path to the shore, past someone's garden and a small, mowed field. A boat was pulled up on the grassy slope above the water, and another two little skiffs stood on a narrow wedge of sand, their moorings beside them in full sight. The summer had been dry, and the lake was low; it was a pebbly stretch, no more than thirty or forty feet long, and Peter seemed to have it all to himself.

He half clambered down the short section of steep bank and crunched with his moccasins on the gravel beach. There was a breeze, with enough room to play over Great Bay and drive up the hint of whitecaps. Peter heard a crow laugh harshly to his right and watched as the bird swooped down to the beach and bounced stiff legs across the pebbles to a broken clamshell which it turned over and studied.

From the black of the crow, the corner of his eye was taken by a white presence against the bank. Nora Tillage sat with her back to the grass and her shoes on the gravel. She wore the same white shift, but had a throw of some sort over her shoulders. Her bonnet was pulled further down the sides of her head, but her hair, careless as before, moved in the breeze. If he had wondered before what it was about her slight frame that bespoke so strongly of the feminine, he wondered now how the haphazard movement of her hair in the breeze could affect him so.

He was a little speechless, surprised to see her and affected by the sense of fragility about her. She looked back at him, at least as surprised, and perhaps a little concerned that he had purposely sought her out.

“I didn't see you there,” said Peter, without otherwise greeting her.

She was hunched a little against the breeze, though the sun was on her. It was a sharp-sighted day when the dry fall air carried a view to the eye in perfect articulation. Peter was somehow amazed by the white of her dress, which had only seemed pale and even drab in the dimness of the tavern, as he was taken by the grass and the sky and the reflective water. Nora Tillage's narrow hands were folded on her knees. She appeared to sway back and forth just slightly, almost as if she were in a rocking chair. Her face showed concern and even interest, but she said, though almost more to herself than to Peter, “I'm not supposed to talk with you,” and when these words had died in the air she quickly said, “I think.”

“I'm sorry,” he said, which might have meant–and probably did mean–several things. He gathered himself to return the way he had come, when she spoke again.

“Are you with Parson Leach?”

Peter considered this. “I am, yes, I think.”

“I like him,” she said. “I heard him preach once. It was about a man who climbed a tree to see Jesus.”

Peter didn't know the story, but he stood half-turned toward her, his head turned the rest of the way, cocked slightly–not unlike one of those birds that Crispin Moss had called on the road, or the crow that was watching them. Peter nodded, indicating his interest in what she said.

“He was a tax-collector, I think,” said Nora. She was looking past him, out over the surface of the lake. Peter had some moments to look at her directly and began to see the imperfections–that is the humanness–in her face, none of which diminished her attractiveness to him. “We went to hear Mr. Barrow preach three weeks ago,” she said. “Papa was
struck
. He fell right down and hit his head on the floor of Mr. Buelly's front room. And when he told us what he'd seen, Mr. Barrow said he been touched by Christ, for Jesus took Mr. Barrow to see Heaven and so Mr. Barrow knows what it looks like. He said Papa'd seen just a peep of it. He said Papa would never have to trouble about doing wrong again.”

Peter took this in slowly. “Did you see anything?” he asked.

“No.”

Anyone watching from another shore would hardly know they were talking, they looked so separate, but the young men outside the tavern, if they could see Peter standing, could never see Nora hunched low against the bank.

“He told Papa that I'd never have to trouble about doing wrong, even if I wasn't struck, if he took me under his wing. He said Papa would have lots of things in Heaven, because you're supposed to give up your sons and daughters.”

Peter squinted one eye and looked down at a speckled rock at his feet.