Continuum 1, page 19
part #1 of Continuum Series
On the second and third days Malachi stayed most of the time in the rear, knowing that to all of them, even to the Preacher and Jesse, he must seem monstrously old. But the rear was a good vantage point. He could see whatever happened. He could watch Jesse’s dark head, and know at least who his new friends were, and read whatever was told by the set of the boy’s shoulders. And sometimes Jesse dropped back to walk with him; though in a too exalted, precarious way, Jesse did seem happy, and full of a natural interest in the new country.
Reading history, Malachi had noted that throughout most of the past the counsel of the old had been valued, even sought for; it was not until the 20th Century that old people were declared obsolete and swept under the rug; and the 20th Century itself was now merely one more lump in the record.
On the third night out the company reached the settlement of Shorum, where the ferry sails for Ticonderoga now and then if the captain considers it worth his while. He has been known to stir his stumps for one old woman with her cat in a basket who wanted to get over to Chilson Landing and see a new grandchild; and once he made the mayor of Shorum wait a week on account of a few cross words. About transporting two hundred kids from here to nowhere to found the New Jerusalem, he was not pleased, pointing out that it would take four trips, two days’ work considering the tides, and even with four trips the crowding would be somewhat much. “We are patient,” said Preacher Abraham, “and used to material difficulties.”
“It’ll cost you a dime a head,” said Captain Gibbleson.
“Dependence on money is the death of the spirit. What can you buy with it?” asked the Preacher. “The old system’s gone, Captain.”
“State gov’ment says the old coinage is still money. Naturally I wouldn’t take no paper.”
“I’ve hardly been aware you had a state government.”
Very much the wrong thing to say. Malachi intervened deprecatingly: “We sort of invoke it, Preacher. Some claim to’ve seen it.” But his wink at the Captain did not restore the peace.
“Got no money,” said Captain Gibbleson, “you can swim.”
Andrew took over. “Captain, I see you have quite a miscellaneous log pile, there along the bank.”
“Ayah, driftwood, some of it” Captain chewed on his plug and eyed him unhopefulfy; the plug smelled as if it had been sold him by Mr. Goudy. “You wouldn’t believe what high water fetches in sometimes. Got a whole cabin one day, with a dead man in it. Blowed up like a punkin he was, you should’ve seen.”
“I offer you two alternatives,” said Andrew. “We will stack that wood for you, and split any that’s worth splitting, in return for our passage. Or, overriding your wishes as it were, we will simply take whatever wood we need to build a raft” Behind Andrew’s back the disciple Simon explained further by sticking out his tongue.
“Why, you’d drown,” said Captain Gibbleson, chewing. “Like bugs. I can’t have that on my conscience. Stack the Goddamn wood and it’s a deal.” Later, hunkered on the pier and watching Andrew oversee the labor, he confided to Malachi: “Sometimes I almost half-way like a man that don’t mind being a damn fool.” His back turned to the Crusaders, Malachi slipped him five bucks in 1984 quarters.
The gray-blue reach of the Hudson Sea proved not unkind. Preacher Abraham and Andrew went with the first group on the ferry, a flat-bottomed barge with a crude square sail. Her name was Pug, after Gibbleson’s third wife, and he claimed she was too squat and wide to turn over — in a hurricane she might go straight up or straight down, but she wouldn’t tip. Jude was in charge of the group that would go on the fourth sailing; Jesse lingered for the transparent reason that this group included Philippa. Malachi observed that he won no profit from it beyond a staring and a few choked attempts at conversation. Philippa, Malachi thought, was managing Jesse’s compulsive adoration rather well. Malachi had also seen the look that Philippa had for Andrew only: an ancient story, one who loves and one who is loved; maybe a constant in the human pattern, the exceptions shining only for a most fortunate few. But it seemed to Malachi that Philippa might be not without the rudiments of compassion. Before Shorum, Jesse had brought her to Malachi, saying with glazed casualness: “This is Philippa.”
“How do you do?” said Malachi. The freckles were appealing.
“We are sure to do well in the Lord’s grace,” said Philippa.
Now Malachi, loafing in the stern with Captain Gibbleson (almost a friend), watched the clumsiness and grace of youth. The scow crept torpidly across a placid sea toward a gray excrescence of rock on a hillside; there’s water all around it now, a few people and goats inhabit the island, and it is still overlooked by that mountain which General Burgoyne’s artillery found so convenient once upon a time. Malachi heard Jesse offering some news, up forward: “They restored the old fort in 1909 —” What’s he done, memorized the Britannica? — “but it probably isn’t true that Ethan Allen demanded its surrender in the name of the Great Jehovah and the continental Congress.” Except for a passing uneasiness Philippa looked quite blank.
Then up on the wharf and goodbye to Gibbleson, and on into the perilous world of Adirondack Island. There would be nearly a hundred miles of it as the trail winds from Ticonderoga to Fonda, following the roads of the old time whenever they seem practical. Nature is trying not unsuccessfully to heal those scars. The busy vine spreads across with sucker rootlets, the innocent seed reaches down through any crack in the dreary concrete or asphalt and is sustained.
Already at many places the easiest route will be a new earthen road with no decaying metal hulks or broken slabs of rubbish. (But the automobile corpses that held their shape so persistently, when overgrown with cool Virginia creeper are of benefit to rabbits, weasels, ground-birds, and such folk, who know how to make honest use of them.) In this Adirondack Island country you are better off with a guide, if you find one you can trust.
There is for instance the matter of bandits and large wild animals. If one of the outlaw or savage groups does come after you on those burr-shaggy mountain ponies, bent on loot or women or violence for its own sake, the guide isn’t much help, and whatever happens will be soon over; but the guide is expected to know the latest rumors about those devils, and find you the safest routes. Guiding is an honorable profession, at least in theory. A guide must know the animals too, and steer you right if you need to hunt. Some of them of course are no damn good.
A long day’s march from Fort Ti brought the Crusaders to Brant Lake, and they camped beside it. Here in the morning a guide offered his services, a small brown smiling man in the skimpy G-string of a savage. (We already begin to hear something of the Cayugas in the central part of what used to be New York; they are a difficult people, with old grievances rooted deep.) He wore a more civilized belt above his hips to hold a steel hunting knife, and he carried at his shoulder a quiver of brass-tipped arrows and a short bow unpleasing to Preacher Abraham. Andrew tried the man with sign-language and grunts, transmitting the message that he apparently wanted no money in return for showing them a safe way southward, but just their company as far as Moha Water and a roll of the linsey cloth their tunics were cut from.
“The knife and bow will be his living, Preacher,” said Malachi. “No one has taught him any better.”
Preacher Abraham sighed and said: “I know. Grace does not come unsought, nor overnight unless the Lord wills.” Then he looked deep in the guide’s squirrely brown eyes and inquired in simple English whether he believed in God. The guide nodded with solemn reverence.
A few hours later, when the brown man had led them down a wood-road that became a pleasant sun-speckled green trail, Malachi ranged ahead to walk beside him. Jesse came too, evidently wanting just then to reestablish closeness. Speaking too softly for those behind to hear, Malachi asked the guide whether he believed in Satan and the ideological solidarity of the capitalist class. The little man nodded again several times, delightedly.
Jesse smiled too, but the smile wiped itself out. “Malachi,” he said, “why do people always make such a tremendous thing about words?”
Malachi worried over it for him, and presently said: “They are clumsy, and often unnecessary. But I think they may be the best means we have for probing certain kinds of darkness. As for communication, Jesse, we might survive for a while without it, but I’m not sure the survival would be worth having. Words weren’t invented only to conceal thoughts as the old wheeze has it. They create thoughts, give thoughts, and are thoughts. People live by honest words and die by the other kind.”
Frowning and still bothered, Jesse said after a while: “Yes, I guess that makes sense.”
There was no denying the guide’s usefulness. When they camped beside the Sacandaga River he found early mushrooms for them and showed them edible marsh plants, so that the grim diet of cornmeal mush and potatoes and soggy wheat cakes could be a little varied. It puzzled Malachi that he should have apparently known the Crusader’s vegetarian principles without being told, but no one commented on it. At the music of Taps the little guide bowed his face to the ground.
All the following day he led his charges along firm earth through a region of brackish swamp where the Sacandaga once comfortably paralleled a 20th Century road. Dark country here, too close to that outrageous great tidal pocket of the Hudson Sea. Mists float unexpected through the more open reaches of the woods. It is quiet. No snowmobiles nor snarling chain saws nor bulldozer flatbeds shuddering uphill. Wind sometimes or the other sounds of storm, or of a deer dying to feed panther or wolf or brown tiger. You may hear a coyote desolately howling, or a loon in the marsh. No transistors.
On the morning of the ninth day after leaving Melton Village, an inquiry from Andrew about Fonda drew from the guide the gestured response that the place was two sleeps away, meaning perhaps anywhere from twenty-five to forty miles. The black flies that day were a torment. The Crusaders marched four abreast, a cloud of needling misery all about them. It was one of the old highways, in fair condition. Forest stood oppressively deep on either side; imagination provided glimpses of motion in the heavy green, hints of pathways not to be followed. But the march was bringing them into open country, and shortly after the second rest of the morning — scant rest it was with the tiny black demons whining and settling, nothing to do but slap and suffer — they came out into it.
The deep woods lay a few hundred yards behind them when Malachi saw another road up ahead, a simple line of reddish dirt emerging from thick tree cover and snaking down a long slope to meet their highway. The guide flung up his hand. The company halted as Andrew dutifully repeated the motion, and stood raggedly, slapping at the flies, two hundred children wondering, murmuring. Preacher Abraham called out: “What is it? What’s the matter?” Andrew shook his head don’t-know.
The guide was running forward bent over as one might do to evade a stone or arrow from behind; in his stooping haste Malachi saw a thing turned suddenly feral and vicious. At the end of his long rush he flung up his arms and sent to that wooden summit a sharp yell, the word “Here!” His mission achieved, he crouched then, smiling and ugly, holding an arrow leveled toward Andrew as the horsemen plunged out from under the trees.
Andrew shouted: “Scatter! Back to the woods!” Malachi shouted it too, and he saw Andrew crumple and fall, the guide’s arrow in his chest. Jude had already snatched up Dinah in his arms and was running with her. John too shrilled at the company: “To the woods! Hide!”
Too many of the children were slow to grasp it, and stood in a sick daze until the Preacher added his urgent voice. Then they began to go, stragglingly and late, staring over their shoulders, maybe not quite believing any of it until they saw Lucia snatched up and flung across a pony’s back, and John leaping at the rider’s leg, falling back with blood spurting from his throat.
The riders were not more than a dozen, and strangely silent except for a gurgle of excited laughter. Naked but for loin-rags and moccasins, they rode bareback as if they had spent half their lives that way, and they were men of any breed, all breeds. They did not trouble to draw their small bows, seeing (or knowing in advance) that the victims were unarmed — their servant might do as he pleased. They wanted women, but young girls would do very well. They rode their fiery little horses in and out among the fleeing, now terrified children, and picked them off as they chose, each man as soon as he had secured his captive riding back up the long hill. It was over in minutes. Europe’s 5th Century would have been proud of them.
Malachi looked at the knife in his hand. He could have used it, if there had been time, and anything in reach. Maybe the sight of it was what had made the riders circle clear of him and Jesse. Philippa had been with them when the storm went by; now she had run to where Andrew was lying and flung herself down. Malachi saw the last rider disappear up the hill and into the woods, and behind him scampered the busy small figure of their smiling guide.
The Preacher was saying: “Resist not evil. This was the word of Christ: Love your enemies, bless them that curse you.” Was the Preacher counseling himself? The disciple John was dead, Lucia and eleven others gone; Andrew whom he had called his right hand could no longer serve or hear him, though Philippa with her clutching hands and crying voice was trying to make him live.
“For he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth the rain on the just and the unjust.”
“Philippa.” Malachi knelt by her. “You must come away.”
“Come away,” said Jesse. “Come away, Philippa.”
“Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.”
Philippa rose and brushed past them. She stood before Preacher Abraham and said: “You did this.”
“Forgive me then,” said the Preacher.
Philippa stared at Andrew”s blood on her hands. “We were going to marry, in the New Jerusalem.” She turned her face to the woods, and Malachi felt Jesse tense with readiness to run after her, bring her back from that suicide. She took a few sleepwalking steps that way and halted, looking about her, saying: “But I have no place to go.”
“Philippa,” said the Preacher, “there is the New Jerusalem.”
She did not answer.
They carried the bodies of Andrew and John down the road, and made a burial place in the open country; that wooded hilltop stood vague in the north. The day was still, no sounds but those of peace, and the Preacher spoke to them. “I will go to Nuber,” he said, “and preach there the founding of the New Jerusalem as I am commanded to do by my Father which is in Heaven. I will wear on my breast this image of the conquered wheel, and I will testify.”
Malachi wondered: Does he know who he is, in his own mind at least and in the minds of many of us? Would he have us know?
“But I am weak in the vessel of the flesh, and do not always see my way clearly, and at times I may have been deceived and unwise.”
Well, Christ would not have said that.
“It may be, my children, that it is not for us to build that city, in Nuber or anywhere, by the labor or our hands, though I still hope it will be so. Therefore I do release from the vows any of you who for any reason no longer hear the call of God to follow me. There are other ways you may serve his purpose, many honorable ways. From our beloved disciple Andrew, I learned more about the sorry kingdom of Nuber than I have told you. Perhaps I understand why it is that God plainly directs me to that place, but I will not try to explain it. Nuber is a city of the damned, a place of greed and cruelty, smallness of the spirit, evildoing and blindness. So it may be that I go there to my death, and God’s purpose in this may not be understood for a long time to come. I will demand nothing of you that is not freely given, and so God be with you.”
He said no more that day, and he did not preach at Fonda.
Sympathy and friendliness were strong in that lonely village, but cooled somewhat at Malachi’s suggestion of an armed search party to rescue the ravished girls. He was talking to the mayor of the town, and the good man said nothing about resisting not evil, but pointed out that those bloody bandits would now be fifty or a hundred miles away in their own kind of country, by trails nobody knew. They were a familiar plague; it had happened before. Who could deal with it except the kind of police force no town nowadays can support? Be reasonable, man. Shortly thereafter the townfolk took up a collection to pay for the transport of Abraham’s Army over Moha Water.
Here a maternally minded citizen intervened, protesting the exposure of these children to the perils of such a journey. Others before her had felt it, but this was a sensible woman with tact. She talked long and amiably with the Preacher while the two ferry captains were waiting on the tide, and then with his permission spoke to the children, praising their devotion, their hope of the New Jerusalem (a hope she shared), adding almost like an afterthought that if any of them felt unequal to the task, or wanted more time to think about it, why, she and some of her neighbors were prepared to give them shelter, or help for a journey back home if that was what they wanted.
Sitting on the pier with Malachi, Jesse heard him murmur: “Bravo!” But he noticed the old man was gazing at the Preacher, not at this good Samaritan who looked as if she wanted to cuddle the whole company in her lap. “We ought to stay with him, Malachi?” And Jesse studied the Preacher, trying to find what Malachi had been observing with surprise and respect.
“This woman is blessed,” said Preacher Abraham. “Again I say, you who wish to remain with her are released from your vows.” And when he asked for a sign from those who elected to leave him, more than half the company raised their hands, Philippa among them.
“He believes it,” said Malachi, “even to the cup that will not pass. Yes, I think I ought to stay with him, Jesse, in what time he has left before death or disillusion. I have heard about Nuber too. Once or twice he has found it possible to talk with me. But you yourself are first with me: that is how I’ve always loved you.”
