Peter Loon Page 4

  “You’ve saved yourself the hire of a leech, at any rate,” said the horseman, and this time he smiled broadly, as from some private humor. “Now hold that tight and see if the bleeding will stop.” He pressed the handkerchief to the wound and placed Peter’s hand atop it.

  The older woodsman had a way of squinting his eyes when someone spoke, as if he could squeeze his concentration of mind into his ears; Peter thought he must be a little deaf. “It was all of an accident,” said the gray-haired man. “We didn’t know he was there.”

  “Peter won’t hold it against you,” said the tall horseman simply.

  “You know my name,” said Peter, when the man stood.

  “You called it out loud enough,” said the man.

  “I did,” agreed Peter. He had forgotten.

  “My name is Zachariah Leach,” said the horseman, and here the reason for his previous humor was revealed. He reached his hand over the dead buck.

  The gray-haired man took the offered hand carefully. “I’ve heard the name,” he said. “Are you the saddle preacher?”

  “I testify to the Grace of God and seldom the same place two days in succession. Praise him that made us and the new republic! We can bind up a litter for the deer, and for some sweetbreads and liver,” and here Zachariah Leach nodded to his horse, “I’ll talk Mars into lugging that buck wherever you want it.”

  5

  How Peter Fell in with Parson Leach

  THE GRAY-HAIRED WOODSMAN WAS MANASSEH CUTTS AND THE LARGER, younger man was Crispin Moss. They retrieved their kits, and one of them had a rope with which to hang the buck from the oak. Once they had dressed and strung the carcass, they followed Parson Leach over the hill to his banked coals at the edge of the trees to the west. The parson might have owned the woods, he was so like a gracious host–inviting them into a shallow depression where he had camped the night before. A thick bedroll and two heavy saddlebags lay as bed and pillow between the fire and the trunk of an old pine. Leaning against the tree was an old firing piece and a powder horn.

  The woodsmen brought the buck’s liver and sweetbread and soon these were crackling over a lively fire. Still holding the cloth to his head, Peter produced, with his free hand, the hard biscuits and apples from his pack. The parson went to a nearby stream to refresh his bottle, and when he returned, he surprised them with four brown eggs from one of his bags.

  “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 amou
nt 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.

  6

  Of the March to Plymouth Gore, and of the Place They Went Instead

  “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.

  They tied the litter behind Mars on the way to the river, but took it themselves, one to a corner, as they crossed the stepping stones to the eastern shore in careful measures. Mars forded the river without command from Parson Leach, and shook the water from his sides before trotting friskily before the woods like a colt.

  Soon they had the litter hitched to him again, and they entered the road that Peter had come out on; but half a mile or so along this track they turned east onto a path he had not seen in the predawn.

  Parson Leach was content to walk; his stride was longer than even Peter’s, who was a tall boy, and consequently the clergyman found his gait interrupted frequently as he and Mars paused to wait for their fellow travelers.

  A breeze tugged at the bright hardwoods in the little valleys and the thickly needled pines and firs along the stonier ridges, and the fallish chatter of stay-in-winter birds filled the branchy acres. The smaller rills ran quietly or not at all after a thirsty summer, and the low places, where marshy conditions often hindered a traveler’s progress, were hardly spongy.

  “This Walton who writes about fish,” said Crispin Moss, not long after they passed near one of these sun-dried beds, “is he a man you know, that you peddle his book?”

  “Not at all,” said the preacher. “He lived and loved in England, and died a hundred years ago and more.” Parson Leach needed little encouragement, it seemed, regarding his books, and as they walked he fished a copy of the Compleat Angler from one of Mars’s saddlebags. He produced a pair of spectacles from a pocket in his cloak and he wrapped the ends of these around his ears so that they sat on his prominent nose. Soon he was regaling them with a lively debate upon the relative merits of fishing, hunting, and falconry as defended, in turn, by Piscator, Venator, and Auceps. And he passed the book around when he came to an illustration of one or the other of these fellows at their occupation.

  Peter and the woodsmen were, at first, a little puzzled by the discourse, but soon Cutts and Moss were expressing their opinions alongside the dialogue with various grunts and wordless exclamations. When the hunter in the book said (and this in the preacher’s rich tones) “And now let us go to an honest ale-house, where we may have a cup of barley-wine, and sing Old Rose…” Manasseh actually laughed.

  “There’s a hunter’s head for you!” he said. “The tavern at the end of the chase! I think I like this Venator better than your fisherman, Parson, though I wouldn’t know a barley-wine and would be satisfied with hot rum or even brown ale.” Then he surprised them by singing several verses of Old Rose in a very passable voice.

  Parson Leach returned the book to its saddlebag when the prospect of a small pond opened up before them; Traveler’s Pond, Manasseh called it. They heard ducks again, and Peter thought, for a time, that the woodsmen would veer from thei
r path and try their luck at more hunting. Parson Leach looked to have thoughts on roast duck, as well. They peered out from a natural blind, over the leaf-littered surface of the water, and Peter caught sight of a muskrat leaving his arrowlike wake across the pond to pierce a crowd of lily-pads.

  They did not linger, however; instead, they crossed south of the pond over Brann Brook and skirted this and a smaller pond, as they followed a deer path east and a little south. At a further extremity of the same brook, they crossed again, and at the top of a short, granity knoll they took a bearing on Haskell Hill about a mile away, then continued through a close wood, more or less in that direction. Mars balked once or twice and there was nothing for it but that Cutts and Moss must widen the trail for him.

  “He’s not a battering ram, after all,” concurred Parson Leach, who lent a hand in beating down the underbrush.

  Peter had never seen or heard of a battering ram, but could easily imagine a large, broad-horned goat. Fortunately, they came to another wood path about halfway to Haskell Hill and such a creature’s good office was rendered unnecessary.

  About mid-morning they stopped on a hill, where the recent windfall of an old scratch pine had opened a bit of sky and let sunlight onto a patch of ground, which was thick and soft with needles. Mars dragged the litter a few yards away, where some moss took his fancy. They had water and Peter passed around the last of his hard biscuits. He was just tasting one himself, when it occurred to him that his father had cooked them and that he would never taste anything from his father’s hand in this life again. His heart was suddenly leaden and his breath came with difficulty.