The Long Tomorrow

Glasser or Mr. Clute or Mr. Fenway. You are to ask your parents to do the same. Do you understand that?”

Yes, Mr. Harkness.

“Let us pray. Oh God, Who knowest all things, forgive the erring child, or man, as it may be, who has broken Thy commandment against theft. Turn his soul toward righteousness that he may return that which is not his, and make him patient of chastisement—”

Len took a chance on his way home and made a circle down through the woods, running most of the way to make up for the extra distance. The sun had melted some of the icy armor on the trees, but it was still bright enough to hurt the eyes, and the footing was treacherous. He was blown and weary by the time he got to the hollow tree.

There were three books in it, wrapped up in canvas beside the radio, dry and safe. The covers and the paper inside fascinated him with faded colors for the eye and unfamiliar textures for the touch. They had an indefinable something in common with the radio.

One was a dark green book called

Elementary Physics

. One was thin and brownish, with a long title:

Radioactivity and Nucleonics: An Introduction

. The third was fat and gray, and its name was

History of the United States

. The words of the first two meant nothing to Len, except that he recognized the

Radio

part. He turned the pages, hastily, with shaking fingers, trying to take it all in at one glance and seeing nothing but a blur of print and pictures and curious line drawings. Here and there on the pages someone had marked and written in the margins, “Monday, test,” or “To here,” or “Write paper on La. Purchase.”

Len felt a hunger and a craving he had not known before, because nothing had ever aroused them. They were up in his head, and they were so strong they made it ache. He wanted to read. He wanted to take the books and wrap himself around them and absorb them to the last word and picture. He knew perfectly well what his duty was. He did not do it. He folded the canvas around the books again and replaced them carefully in the hollow tree. Then he ran back on the circuitous route home, and his mind was spinning all the way with stratagems to deceive Pa and make guilty trips to the woods appear innocent. His conscience made a single peep, no louder than a day- old chick, and then was still.

5

Esau was almost in tears. He flung down the book he was holding and said furiously, “I don’t know what the words mean, so what good does it do me? I just took a big risk for nothing!”

He had been over and over the book on physics and the one on radioactivity they had laid aside because it didn’t seem to have anything to do with radios, and anyway they could not make head or tail of what it was about. But the book on physics—another puzzling misuse of a word that had almost caused Esau to pass it by in his search through Mr. Nordholt’s library—did have a part in it about radio. They had scowled and mumbled over it until the queer-shaped and unpronounceable words were stamped on their brains and they could have drawn diagrams of waves and circuits, triodes and oscillators in their sleep, without in the least understanding what they were.

Len picked the book up from between his feet, where it had landed and brushed the dirt from its cover. Then he looked inside it and shook his head. He said sadly:

“It doesn’t tell you how to make voices come out.”

“No. It doesn’t tell what the knobs and the spool are for, either.” Esau turned the radio gloomily between his hands. One of the knobs they knew made it noisy or quiet—alive or dead, Len thought of it unconsciously. But the others remained a mystery. By making the noise very soft and holding the radio against their ears they had learned that the sound came out of one of the openings. What the other two were for was also a mystery. No one of the three looked like its mates, so it was logical to guess that they were for three different purposes. Len was pretty sure that one of them was to let heat out, like the ventilators in the hayloft, because you could feel it get warm if you held your hand over it for a while. But that still left one, and the enigmatic spool of metal thread. He reached out and took the radio from Esau, just liking the feel of it between his hands, a kind of humming quiver it had like a blade of swamp grass in the wind.

“Mr. Hostetter must know how it works,” he said.

They were sure in their hearts that Mr. Hostetter, like Mr. Soames, was from Bartorstown.

Esau nodded. “But we don’t dare ask him.”

“No.”

Len turned the radio over and over, fingering the knobs, the spool, the openings. A chill wind rattled the bare branches overhead. There was ice in the Pymatuning, and the fallen log he sat on was bitter underneath him.

“I just wonder,” he said slowly.

“Wonder what?”

“Well, if they talk back and forth with these radios, they wouldn’t do it much in the daytime, would they? I mean, people might hear them. If it was me, I’d wait until night, when everybody would be asleep.”

“Well, it ain’t you,” said Esau crossly. But he thought about it and gradually he got excited. “I’ll bet that’s right. I’ll bet that’s just exactly right! We only fooled with it in the daytime, and naturally they wouldn’t talk then. Can you see Mr. Hostetter doing it up in the town square, with everybody swarming around and a dozen kids hanging on every wheel?”

He got up and began to pace up and down, blowing on his cold fingers. “We’ll have to make plans, Len. We’ll have to get away at night.”

“Yes,” said Len eagerly, and then was sorry he had spoken. That was not going to be so easy.

“Coon hunt,” said Esau.

“No. My brother’d want to go. Maybe Pa, too.”

Possum hunt was the same thing, and jacklighting deer was no better.

“Well, keep thinking.” Esau began to put the books and the radio away. “I got to get back.”

“Me, too.” Len looked regretfully at the fat gray history, wishing he could take it with them. Esau had picked it up on impulse because it had pictures of machines in it. It was hard going and full of strange names and a lot he did not understand, but it tormented him all the time he was reading it, wondering what was coming on the next page. “Maybe it’d be best just to watch a chance and slip away alone, whichever one of us can, and not try to come together.”

“No, sir! I stole it, and I stole the books, and nobody’s going to hear a voice without me there!”

He looked so savage that Len said all right.

Esau made sure everything was safe and stepped back. He looked at the hollow tree, scowling. “Not much use to come back here any more till then. And we’ll be sugarin’ off ’fore long, and there’s lambing, and then —”

With a mature depth of bitterness that startled Len, Esau said, “Always something, always some reason why you can’t know or learn or do! I’m sick of it. And I’m damned if I’m going to spend my whole life that way, shoveling dung and pulling cow tits!”

Len walked home alone, pondering deeply on those words. He could feel something growing in him, and he knew it was growing in Esau, too. It frightened him. He didn’t want it to grow. But he knew that if it stopped growing he would be partly dead, not physically, but like cows or sheep, who eat the grass but do not care what makes it grow.

That was the end of January. In February there and all over the countryside men and boys went with taps and spiles and buckets to the maple trees. The smoke from the sugarbush blew out on the wind, the first banner of oncoming spring. The last deep snow came and melted off again. There was a period of alternating freeze and thaw that made Pa worry about the winter wheat heaving out of the ground. The wind blew chill from the northwest, and it seemed as though it would never get warm again. The first lamb came bleating into the world. And as Esau had said, there was no spare time for anything.