Peter Loon (29 page)

Parson Leach answered her with all the ease in the world. “I may have dissuaded some gentlemen from getting him killed in an attempt to break the jail.”

“Gentlemen, I'm sure!” she said. “That's something, anyway. And who is
this
high-handed fellow?” she asked, considering Peter sightlessly.

“This is my friend, Peter Loon,” said the parson, “and you're not to convert him.”

“So the devil says!”

The younger Mrs. Gray turned from the plank table where she had been laying out bowls and said crossly, “What is it to be, then?”

“Perhaps you should tell me,” said the parson. “I only know that he was taken to Wiscasset, but neither how or why. Where
we've
been, discussion has shed more heat than light.”

Peter was standing by the door, feeling as out of place as he had in the Clayden's kitchen; he did, in fact, feel so very out of place, partly because of having
been
in the Clayden's kitchen. He looked down at his clothes then–the fine attire of the younger Captain Clayden–and met the curious stares of two small children, a boy and a girl, who stood on either side of him. Their faces were glum and dirty. The little boy showed the same marks of disease that speckled Elspeth's cheek. Peter was reminded of his little brother Amos and he smiled at the boy.

“I told Sam to go with them, when they drove John Trueman out,” the mother was saying bitterly, “and maybe he'll wish he had, when all is said and done, as he'd have reason to be where he is now. I told him to garb up and take his gun, if he had to, but he'd have none of it.”

“Been talking to you!” said the ancient Mrs. Gray to the parson. “I told him he lacked sand and he preached moderation to his own mother!”

The parson seemed unaware of, or at least unconcerned with, the triangle he occupied–the grandmother at the hearth, the mother at the table, and the daughter–her arms crossed and her face grim–by the curtain that hid the single bedroom. A voice came from behind the curtain, and Peter remembered that Elspeth had spoken of a sister who was ill.

“He is a temperate fellow, is Sam Gray,” said Parson Leach, as if he were praising a congregant after church.

“Moderate never does, I say,” pronounced the elderly woman.

“Perhaps one of you good women should have taken up a gun and gone yourselves.”

“Don't think I wouldn't have,” said Elspeth's mother, and her manner left no room for wry response. “The men assemble for their drunken meetings, and ramble off on their hunts when things are hard, and when things are harder still, they get it into their heads there's treasure in the woods and half lose a harvest digging up rocks and bones.”

“There
is
treasure in the woods,” said the older Mrs. Gray, almost to herself, as she rocked by the fire.

“I have no more than the house to talk with,” continued her daughter-in-law, “and rarely see another like myself from month to month. And when there's sickness or we come up half starved to the end of winter, it's me that bears the hardness of it. It's woman knows the first injustice.”

“Yes,” said Parson Leach. “I know it's true. Adam took the rule and Eve took the curse for breaking it. Woman knows the first injustice, but it's the children know the worst.”

“That's blasphemous talk!” said the elderly woman, delighted. “There
is
treasure in the woods,” she repeated. “Edward Bailey saw it in the pit he dug, but his son sneezed and it whisked away. That was fifteen years agone.”

“You speak of drunkenness,” said the parson to the younger Mrs. Gray, “but I was always of the opinion that Sam was as temperate toward drink as he was toward the use of violence.”

Mrs. Gray recommenced her business at the table.

“And I remember–three years ago, wasn't it?–” he continued, “when half the settlement was up on the Dresden line, digging for treasure, and Sam was clearing the acres across the river.”

There was nothing replied to this.

“I expect,” he added, as if only by the way, “that Sam was sharpening an axe or getting some sleep while the White Indians were out putting sticks to John Trueman.”

“Perhaps he should have been gone with them, instead of hovering about here!” said the wife with audible vehemence. She was weeping suddenly and she went to the pot over the fire and stirred it as if
it
had made her angry. The entire business seemed contradictory to Peter.

“Ah, well,” said the grandmother, softly now. “He's never raised a hand to any of us, has he? We must take the good with the bad, you know.”

Peter wondered if his father and Samuel Gray were a bit alike.

“You still haven't told me why he was arrested,” said the parson.

“Charles Trail,” said Elspeth, her arms still crossed before her. “He has his eye on this bottom land, now it's cleared and plowed, and a cabin and barn are raised.”

“Surrounded him and the little boy and girl, up in the high field,” said the elderly woman, nodding in her chair by the fire. “Set upon them, and put him in chains, so the children said.”

“Charles Trail? The man who led the sheriff up here?” said the parson.

“Yes,” said Elspeth, “
and
John Trueman, his cousin.”

“The sheriff might have suspected . . .” began the clergyman, but the very silence that greeted this thought cut it short as well.

Supper began as a fairly silent affair. It was a late hour for farm life, and though the children had eaten, they sat down as well and watched the guests avidly, and listened to the parson's talk, which was pointedly meant to entertain. The elderly Mrs. Gray stayed by the fire and fell asleep.

The fare was plain pork and potatoes and beans, and Peter felt he was back home again. He tucked in with some appetite, despite the discomfort that he sensed hovering over the table. Twice he found Elspeth watching him, and after the parson regaled them with the tale of Nora Tillage's rescue–told in such a way that Peter seemed to have accomplished the business entirely on his own–Elspeth's stare came more often and became more insistent. Peter tried his best to deflect the parson's hero-making, but managed only to sound modest.

There were five living children to the Gray family, besides Elspeth, and besides the sister in the room behind the curtain, they were much younger than she; an influenza had raged through New Milford some years ago and taken several other brothers and a sister between. After supper, when Elspeth led the guests out to the barn, Peter saw the shadows of wooden crosses in the little yard on the slope above and behind the house.

The barn was dark and close with stacks of hay on two floors and the remnant heat of the day. There were two cows and a goat that stirred when the parson and Peter followed Elspeth inside. Peter found Beam's saddle and untied his father's hat and coat.

“I want you to stay with the Grays tomorrow, Peter,” said Parson Leach. He glanced from the young man to Elspeth Gray when he said this. Something flashed in Elspeth's eyes, and Peter looked ready to speak, but the clergyman added, “They could, perhaps, use an extra hand while Mr. Gray is gone,” which seemed to arrest any discussion on the matter. “I'll be back, the day after, or the day after that, perhaps, and we will go looking for your uncle.”

Peter had expected to go with the parson on the morrow, not because he thought of himself as part of the discord in New Milford, but because he felt far from home and separate from his entire life and Parson Leach was his only landmark–steady, if yet unfamiliar. Peter thought he
might
say something, but a yawn overtook him.

“There's a place in the corner over there,” said Elspeth, holding her lantern up and pointing. “And there's the loft, where you've slept before, I think, Mr. Leach.”

The parson was already crossing to the rude ladder pegged to the end of the loft. Peter heard him yawn, as well, then the man muttered a good night blessing and climbed into the shadows.

Elspeth stood and watched Peter, as if she required something from him. He thanked her, for perhaps the fifth time, for supper and the place to sleep, but this did not appear to satisfy her expectations. She looked away from him, after a moment. Peter thought he could hear the parson's breath, rumbling in sleep above them. “Will you go with Mr. Leach to Wiscasset?” she asked.

Peter was startled. “He's told me not to,” he said, and looked as if he might have heard wrong–either the parson's directive or her question. He hadn't thought of going to Wiscasset, really, where Elspeth's father was in jail; his imagination had taken him no further than New Milford. “I don't know that he's
going to
Wiscasset,” he said, hardly moving his lips.

She looked at him some more, and particularly at the scar on his head, as if it indicated more than his words. She said “Good night,” and Peter scrambled into the corner before the only light was gone with her.

In the complete darkness of the barn he was conscious of the heat rising from the hay, the sound of the parson's soft snore above him, and the movement of the animals in the stables close by. A bird of some sort called mournfully. A fly was buzzing. Peter patted down a mound of straw, sneezed at the dust he raised, and made himself as comfortable as possible–more so than at home, actually, where he shared a short trundle bed with his brother, though less so than his single night at the Clayden's. He used his father's coat and hat for a pillow.

He woke and was conscious of a soft light in the barn. He barely opened his eyes, watching from beneath his lashes as Elspeth Gray stood over him with the lantern. She was dressed in her nightclothes; her bonnet was off and her hair spilled over her shoulders. Peter did his best to feign sleep. He watched her till he feared the lamplight would catch a telltale reflection in his slitted eyes. The blemish on her cheek was invisible in the lantern-glow, and if her form was hidden behind the loose gown she wore, the cut of her shoulders and the length of her neck were all that were needed to mark her as a woman.

Peter imagined that if he opened his eyes and stood up, she might kiss him, or that if he simply put his arms out, she would lay down beside him. He was a farm boy and had some notion about the merging of male and female. The thought was pleasing and frightening at once; then the recollection of Nora Tillage, trembling beneath him, shaking into a helpless fit, gripped his heart, and he closed his eyes and wished Elspeth Gray away from him.

Later, perhaps after he had slept again, he opened his eyes in the dark, wondering if he had dreamed her.

ELSPETH GRAY WAS WALKING FROM THE HOUSE WHEN PETER CAME
out of the barn. “You're not going with him to Wiscasset, if you don't catch him up,” she said, contrary to everything discussed the night before. It was barely light out, and an ash colored mist rose off the river in the pre-dawn; nothing else moved besides them–not a crow called or a twig of brush shifted. Peter had known mornings like this, when a conscious body might seem to be stirring separately from the air and life around it.