Peter Loon (7 page)

“My hostess of yesterday boiled them hard for travel,” he explained, before tossing one each to his companions. “No more than is called for, as it happens.”

Cutts and Moss had waited for Peter to sit down before settling themselves opposite him; they were a little chary of his contribution to the table as well, till Parson Leach broke into a “Northern Spy” with a wet snap. It was a tart apple, with yellow spots where the sun had rarely touched it, but it was firm to the tooth and its skin was tough and handsome. Cutts and Moss watched the clergyman relish its sour qualities and savor its juices as he chewed. Absently, Crispin Moss peeled and ate his egg.

Parson Leach reflected their attention with his own wry amusement. “It's a rare country can make an apple like that,” he said.

The woodsmen didn't know how rare the country was, but in October, with the weather still mild and the harvest about the scattered farms and the game on the move through the surrounding wilderness, they did not readily argue with him.

“My grandfather planted the slip those apples grew from,” said Peter with some pleasure. “It's almost this broad, now.” He held his hands apart.

“ ‘
For thus saith the Lord of hosts
' ” quoted the preacher,
“ ‘After the glory hath he sent me unto the nations which spoiled you;for he that toucheth you touchetk the apple of his eye?' ”
He did not look directly at Manasseh Cutts, but some share of his study was pointedly fixed upon the man.

Manasseh was thinking hard, but only said, “Zechariah,” and there was a smallish sound of defeat in his voice.

“Yes, Zechariah,” said the parson. “But I cannot tell you chapter and verse,” he admitted happily enough. “Your people were of the old church,” he added simply.

“I don't take much from them,” admitted Manasseh, “but the memory of old men sparring text.”

The tall clergyman nodded. It was the Puritan reputation that no one could better play the contest of
“Chapter and Verse.”

Crispin Moss had finished his egg and was partway through the apple Peter had given him before he stopped and peered at the fruit doubtfully. He looked at Peter with a frown of concentration, then his face lightened into a philosophical smile and he took another bite. Manasseh Cutts watched all this with some interest, but he elected, for the moment, to slip his own apple into a pocket.

The preacher stirred up the coals and raised some flames with wood that he had gathered the evening before; then the victuals were put on sticks and roasted over the fire with a great deal of snapping and appetizing smells.

The day was in full flourish and the sun over the trees across the river had nudged the late crickets into song, soft at first, and few, and never more than a person might imagine he could count. They heard ducks overhead, though they couldn't sight them.

They each, in turn, left this interesting distraction to consider the fire and the meats again, and with some degree of caution, Manasseh said “You're not of the Congregation, preaching on a horse.”

“I have ties to no particular creed, these days,” said Parson Leach amiably.

“There are a deal too many of them, I dare say,” returned the old woodsman.

“The Congregationalists despair of a man who cannot himself
read
chapter and verse,” said the preacher, seemingly in agreement, “and the backwoods fellow and the lay-preacher have no use for anyone who hasn't been struck by God like lightning.”

This talk was a little beyond Peter's grasp. His mother, who had always displayed little patience with the struggle between proprietors and settlers, and therefore with their respective religions, had kept her family away from church for the most part, though Peter's father had read to them from the Bible on Sundays and taught Peter and his siblings to read some from it themselves.

“You
peddle
books,” said the old man, which was not offered as an accusation as much as it was evidence that Zachariah Leach might be more Congregationalist than otherwise.

Peter was surprised that a preacher peddled anything.

“A man might be struck by lightning
and
read a book, as far as I know,” said the parson. “A chapter or two of Izaak Walton supplied you those eggs, and more besides.”

“I don't know him,” said the old man with a frown.

Again the parson quoted, but from another source.
“ ‘Angling is something like poetry, men are to be born so.'
I recently brought some books to George Swain up to Winslow. He has lately taken up angling himself and needed instruction.” The name Winslow, though in reference to a settlement, pricked at Peter's ears.

“This George Swain must be a Great Man, or a land agent, if he has leisure to mull over books or fish for sport,” said Manasseh Cutts. Parson Leach laughed, which was mysterious to Peter, and Manasseh quickly added, “I take no sides in the matter, and neither does Crispin,” but he had perhaps revealed his prejudice.

“Don't you?” said Parson Leach, still with his odd humor. “I dare say I sin in taking sides against whomever I talk to. The Great Men may have the law on their sides and the settlers may have justice, which is what I told George Swain and he scowled at me as neatly as you.”

As a matter of principle, Manasseh did not leave off his scowl, but the light of something more agreeable touched the corners of his mouth; indeed, it seemed that he had met a man of similar independence, which surprised him in a preacher. “Ah, well,” he said, “I fish, when I do fish, to fill my stomach, but it's not a poor way to pass the morning.”

Peter had never met anyone like Parson Leach, unless it were his mother Rosemund Loon herself; there seemed almost an intemperate amount of jest in the man, and Peter could imagine that the parson did take pleasure in battling both sides of a quarrel. “I'm looking for a man named Winslow,” said Peter, before he knew he was going to say it. “Obed Winslow,” he added when their attention turned to him. “I'm told he's an uncle of mine.”

“There
was
an Obed Winslow,” said Crispin Moss, which were almost his first words since they gathered near the fire, “up at Bryant's Ridge, near where I was raised.” He gathered in the thread of his memory. “But that was back when I was half your age,” he finished.

“I don't think my family has seen him for some years,” said Peter hopefully, and he told them how his father had died, and how he came to be looking for a man he had never even heard of the day before.

“Ah,” said Crispin as something new occurred to him. “It was probably another man. Maybe it wasn't
Obed
Winslow.” He made a show of turning the meats in the fire.

“Maybe I should go there,” said Peter. “Where's Bryant's Ridge?”

“Northeast,” said Manasseh.

“He's dead now, at any rate,” said Crispin quickly, but glancing up at Peter, he could see clearly enough that this Winslow's story was called for. “This fellow,” he continued, “I don't know that it was
Obed
Winslow, after all–but he took leave of a young girl without her consent, or even her father's, I guess, because they ran him down and I can't remember if he was shot on the chase or caught and hung afterwards. It was a while ago. I was a lad myself, as I say, and I was only told about it.”

Peter looked uncertain. “My mother pointed down this way, toward Patricktown, when she showed me where he went.”

“She pointed, did she?” said Manasseh Cutts.

“If you came down from Great Pond, you've already passed Patricktown,” said Parson Leach.

“Have I?”

“The Balltown line is only half a mile or so down river,” said Manasseh.

“I know Patricktown somewhat,” said the preacher, “but haven't heard of any Winslows there.”

“It seems my mother would have heard of him, if he was just the next settlement over,” offered Peter.

“It does seem. Where are you fellows toting that buck?”

“Just across the river, near to Plymouth Gore,” said the older man. “Crispin has family there, who'll take us in if we have venison to offer.”

“We will have to carry it over the water, but Mars will pull it the rest of the way.”

The woodsmen, particular Manasseh, still considered Peter with some wariness, but they had grown used to the preacher. They nodded, though they shot questioning looks toward Peter.

“Peter Loon,” said Parson Leach. “You come along with Mars and me. I know as many folk as anyone you're liable to meet in such an accident, and we'll spread inquiries regarding this uncle of yours. I would just as soon discover that he hadn't been hanged, or shot, or hadn't known some poor girl unlawfully–and I can't bare to miss the end of a tale, once it's started.”

Again, Peter was aware of that odd humor in the preacher's words. He hadn't any other place to go, however, if there weren't any Winslows to be had in Patricktown. He'd considered turning around and going home for his father's burial, which might have been prudent; but he was troubled a little to face his mother with no more to tell her than a rumor. She had been so very strange. He'd walked further than he would have guessed, too, and the adventurous sense of being so far from home kindled something in him; or perhaps it was the revivifying smell of liver and sweetbread smoking over the fire.

They would be awake now, his family. Amos would ask their mother where Peter had got to. Perhaps he would fear that Peter had died like their father. There came that clutch at Peter's insides again. He looked up from the flames at the parson and realized that the man had seen something dark briefly span his face.

“ARE THOSE YOUR WARES?” MANASSEH CUTTS ASKED PARSON LEACH,
when the preacher lifted his heavy saddlebags over the horse's back.

“They are. Do you read?”

“Enough,” said the old man.

Now that Peter thought of it, there
had
been a tinker, once, who preached when called on; the man had passed through when Peter was nine or ten years old; but Peter had never known a preacher who peddled goods, and besides that, the thought of owning books other than the family Bible or the odd copy of
Pilgrim's Progress
was a strange one to the young man. Apparently Parson Leach had recently sold a book about fishing to someone named George Swain. The notion that someone would write a book about such a simple pursuit was stranger still. Perhaps he had misunderstood. Christ, he knew, had called his disciples “fishers of men,” and Peter believed, as they walked back to the river, that this must be the subject of the book in question.

They brought saplings and pine boughs out of the woods and beneath the oak, the carcass of the buck hung, they put together a litter. The preacher was clever at this and Crispin remarked that he learned a knot or two watching him.

“Learned them myself, on shipboard,” was all the preacher said in reply.