PETER LOON HAD LISTENED ATTENTIVELY TO THE TALK AND ARGUment in the kitchen of the Star and Sturgeon, but he hadn’t had time to consider what it all meant. Manasseh Cutts followed Parson Leach, Elspeth Gray, and Peter into the tavern room where several heads came up and Crispin Moss greeted them cheerily from a nearby table. More than the gentlemanly appearance of the parson and Peter, the presence of a young woman drew its own particular attention from some, but Elspeth kept herself wrapped in her shawl, as in armor, and her head up in that same commanding posture. Peter noticed that she was considering him with particular interest, and without thinking he lifted his hand to the scar on his forehead.
“Did Mr. Barrow ride off to Wiscasset, then?” asked Parson Leach of Mr. Moss, with more irony perhaps than was evident to the big woodsman.
“He couldn’t find any men, but one, who was sober enough to sit a horse,” said Crispin Moss.
“A shame,” said the parson, and Peter thought he might be half in earnest. “He might have saved us a deal of trouble.”
“Barrow?” said Miss Gray. “You wouldn’t send that man after my father, would you?”
“No, I don’t suppose I would.”
Peter considered the opinions advanced in the kitchen and the men (and woman) who had offered them. Mr. Pelligue seemed a steady fellow in search of a commander, while Mr. Kendall and Mr. Brine seemed contrary sides of a coin–of the same weight, but opposing views. Joshua Cargin was a gun waiting to go off, but Miss Gray, who seemed to be looking for just such a man, had been unimpressed by him. Nathan Barrow was himself off somewhere, having his visions or exhorting men to wild behavior. Mr. Cutts and Mr. Moss were of less opinion, it seemed, though more ready than some to act, Peter thought, if called upon.
“We’re going to the Gray farm, north of town,” said Parson Leach to the woodsmen. “Perhaps I can cull some sense from all the nonsense. The ladies Gray may have more intuition than these gentlemen possess in their present state.” He indicated those who were flopped about the perimeters of the tavern room; their numbers had grown in the short while that Peter and the parson had been in the kitchen. Noise continued to jar the night, however, and through the tiny-paned windows at the front of the tavern, the light of the bonfire wavered. “Anyone can tell you where the Grays live, if something happens that I should know about.”
Manasseh Cutts and Crispin Moss accepted these subtle orders placidly. “We’re glad you’ve come,” said the older woodsman.
Parson Leach did not look so sure himself. He followed Elspeth Gray into the tavern yard and he and Peter went to the stable to retrieve Mars and Beam. “Did you walk in?” asked the parson of the young woman.
“Yes, I did,” she answered, “and it is a good thing, as my temper had time to cool.”
“Very right, of course,” said Parson Leach, and he gave Peter an odd expression when Elspeth turned away.
“You may take my horse, if you like,” Peter said quietly to the young woman.
“I will ride with you,” she said, and she indicated with a wave of the hand that he should mount before her; then she reached up and let him pull her behind him. Beam fidgeted for a moment, then relaxed beneath the extra weight. Peter did not relax very much himself, particularly when Miss Gray locked her arms about his middle and for the sake of a secure seat pressed herself against him. He thought that for a plain farm girl she smelled very interesting–that is of more than cows and dust–and whenever she spoke on the ride to her family’s farm he could feel her voice resonate against his shoulder.
It occurred to Peter after they had ridden a mile or so that she reminded him of Emily Clayden, if Emily Clayden had been older and made a little bitter with life. It was Miss Gray’s directness that both daunted and intrigued him, and if she did not otherwise look like Emily, her eyes were similar to those of the young Newcastle girl–pale blue, direct, and comely.
They rode two or three miles along a path that was marked only by the passage of other horses and rows of stumps. The moon was riding high by now, and Peter fell to wondering about Peter Klaggerfell and his dog Pownal, and had they finished their meal and pressed on toward New Milford beneath this very moon? The trail rose and fell among alternate acres of forest, cleared land, and fallen trees. Quartz veins in granite hillsides glowed, and somewhere in the blue shadows of a pine wood a wild creature coughed. The Gray farm was first sighted from one of these rocky knolls, and it was a pretty enough situation as seen in the halflight, tucked against the opposing hill by the narrow reaches of the Sheepscott River.
Miss Gray dropped down from Beam’s back without warning and strode the rest of the way, keeping a brisk pace down the slope. She led them through a gate, then showed them the easiest place to ford the stream. Lantern light fell across the yard when the door to the cabin opened. A woman’s silhouette appeared there.
“El?” came a voice akin to, but older than Miss Gray’s. “That you? You didn’t bring your father, did you.” This last was couched in assertion rather than query. “Who is that, then?” she asked, hearing, perhaps, rather than seeing the horses and the extra bodies.
“It’s Mr. Leach, Ma, and a friend.”
“Mother Gray,” called Elspeth’s mother into the cabin. “Zachariah is here to argue with you.”
“God bless the sinner!” Peter heard coming from within.
Two or three other, smaller forms filled the doorway behind the mother, and Mrs. Gray–that is Mrs. Gray the younger–shooed her children aside so that, once Mars and Beam were tethered, the parson and Peter could follow Elspeth in.
“We killed a pig about a week ago, so there’s something on the table,” promised the mother. She turned her back on the guests as she went to the hearth, barely showing interest in who the parson’s friend might be.
The cabin was not as old, nor as large, as the one Peter had been raised in. The barn behind the cabin was large, however, and evidenced the labor of the surrounding community. It hovered darkly over the cabin as Peter stepped inside the Gray home. An ancient woman sat by the hearth, toothless and sightless, by Peter’s guess, but indicating great curiosity by the posture of her head, which was craned up, as if she were considering the weather.
“Go out and take those horses to the barn,” said the mother to a small boy, who immediately jumped to the task. “And give them hay and water!” she shouted after him. She looked at Peter, glancing from his clothes to the scar on his head, before turning back inside.
“Zachariah, you awful heathen!” declared the elderly woman when they entered the cabin. “Have you come finally to confess all your devil-notions?”
“I come to offer you truth and beauty, Mrs. Gray,” said the parson happily. “I’ve come to court you, as always.”
The woman made a noise to indicate her disgust. “You think just because these eyes can’t read, you’ll overwhelm me with your high talk. But Elspeth here can read, and she tends me my Bible every day. Elspeth? You’re there, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Gran.”
“Tell him you can read as ever as your old Gran could.”
“He knows that Gran.”
“He might forget. Don’t let him get ahead of you, that’s all. He talks high, but ‘devil, get thee behind!’ ”
Peter was sure that he had entered a perpetual state of astonishment, and that this treatment of Parson Leach was just one in a series of ongoing surprises. The parson however seemed unaffected, and spent this harangue in inspecting the pot that steamed by the hearth.
“What have you done for my son, Zachariah?” asked the old woman, and the use of the parson’s christian name seemed at odds with her previous abuse.
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.
