“Don’t worry.” His jaw thrust out, stubborn, bristling with a growing beard. “They ain’t going to take us back. I told you, the hand of the Lord is over us. He’ll keep us safe.”
Piper’s Run and the hand of God. Those were the burden of the first days. There was a mist over the world, obscuring everything but a vision of home and a straight path to it. He could see the fields very green with the sun on them, the crooked apple trees with their old black trunks drowned in blossom, the barn and the dooryard, still, waiting, in a warm and golden peace. And there was a path, and his feet were on it, and nothing could stop him.
But there were obstacles. There were mountains, gullies, rocks, cold, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, pain. And it came to him that before he could reach that haven of peace there was a penance to be done. He had to pay for the wrong he had done in leaving it. That was fair enough. He had expected it. He suffered gladly and never noticed the look of doubt and amazement that came into Joan’s eyes, shading gradually toward contempt.
The ecstasy of abasement and repentance stayed with him until one day he fell and hurt his knee against a rock, and the pain was pain merely, with no holiness about it. The world rocked around him and fell sharply into place with all the mist cleared out of it. He was hungry and cold and tired. The mountains were high and the prairies wide. Piper’s Run was a thousand miles away. His knee hurt like the very devil, and an old growling rebellion rose up in him to say, All right, I’ve done my penance. Now that’s enough.
That was the end of the first phase. Joan began to look at him like she used to. “For a while there,” she said, “you weren’t much better than a New Ishmaelite, and I began to get scared.”
He muttered something about repentance being good for the soul, and shut her up. But secretly her words stung him and made him feel ashamed. Because they were more than partly true.
But he still had to get back to Piper’s Run. Only now he realized that the path to it was very long and hard just as the path away from it had been, and that no mystical power was going to get him there. He was going to have to walk it on his own two feet.
“But once we get there,” he would say, “we’ll be safe. The Bartorstown men can’t touch us there. If they denounced us they’d denounce themselves. We’ll be safe.”
Safe in the fields and the seasons, safe in the not-thinking, not-wanting. A contented mind and a thankful heart. Pa said those were the greatest blessings. He was right. Piper’s Run is where I lost them. Piper’s Run is where I will find them again.
Only when I think now of Piper’s Run I see it tiny and far off, and there is a lovely light on it like the light of a spring evening, but I can’t bring it close. When I think of Ma and Pa and Brother James and Baby Esther I can’t see them clearly, and their faces are all blurred.
I can see myself, all right, running with Esau across a pasture at night, kneeling in the barn straw with Pa’s strap coming down hard on my shoulders. I can see myself as I was then. But when I try to see myself as I will be, a grown man but a part of it again, I can’t.
I try to see Joan wearing the white cap and the humility, but I can’t see that, either.
Yet I have to get back. I have to find what I had there that I’ve never had since I left it. I have to find certainty.
I have to find peace.
Then one evening just at sundown Len saw the man driving a trader’s wagon with a team of big horses. He crossed a green swell of the prairie, showing briefly on the skyline, and was gone so quickly that Len was not sure he had really seen him. Joan was on her knees making a fire. He made her put it out, and that night they walked a long way by moonlight before he would stop again.
They fell in with a band of hunters—this was safe because the Bartorstown men. did not go with the hunters, and Joan made doubly sure. They told a tale of New Ishmaelites to account for their condition, and the hunters shook their heads and spat.
“Them murdering devils,” one of them said. “I’m a believing man myself”—and he looked warily at the sky—“but killing just ain’t no way to serve the Lord.”
And yet you would kill us if you knew, thought Len, to serve the Lord. And he nagged Joan, who had never needed to guard her tongue so rigidly, until she was afraid to speak her name.
“Is it all like this?” she whispered to him, in the privacy of their blankets at night. “Are they all like wolves ready to tear you?”
“About Bartorstown they are. Never tell where you came from, never give them a hint so they could even guess.”
The hunters passed them on to some freighters, joining up at a rendezvous point to go south and east with a load of furs and smelted copper. Joan made sure there were no Bartorstown men among them. She kept her tongue tightly between her teeth, looking with doubtful eyes at the tiny sun-baked towns they stopped in, the lonely ranches they passed.
“It’ll be different in Piper’s Run, won’t it, Len?”
“Yes, it’ll be different.”
Kinder, greener, more fruitful, yes. But in other ways no, not different. Not different at all.
What is it that lies on the whole land, in the dusty streets and the slow beat of the horse hoofs, in the faces of the people?
But Piper’s Run is home.
On a clear midnight he thought he saw a solitary wagon tilt far off, glimmering under the moon. He took Joan and they scurried eastward alone, over river beds drying white in the summer sun, working their way from ranch to ranch, settlement to settlement
“What do people
The blazing days went by. The long hard miles unrolled. The vision of Piper’s Run faded, little by little, no matter how he clung to it, until it was so faint he could hardly see it. He had been going a long time on momentum, and now that was running out. And the man on the wagon hounded him all through the summer days, plodding relentlessly out of the vast horizon, out of the wind and the prairie dust. Len’s going became more of a running from than a running to. He never saw the face of the man. He could not even be sure it was the same wagon. But it followed him. And he knew.
In September, in a little glaring town lost in a gray-green sea of bear grass and shinnery on the Texas border, he sat down to wait.
“You fool,” Joan told him despairingly, “it isn’t him. It’s only your guilty conscience makes you think so.”
“It’s him. You know it.”
“Why should it be? Even if it is someone from there—”
“I can tell when you’re lying, Joan. Don’t.”
“All right! It is him, of course it’s him. He was responsible for you. He was sworn for you to Sherman. What do you think?”
She glared at him, her thin brown hands curled into fists, her eyes flashing.
“You’re going to let him take you back, Len Colter? Aren’t you a man yet, for all that beard? Get on your feet. Let’s go.”
“No.” Len shook his head. “I never realized he was sworn.”
“He won’t be alone. There’ll be others with him.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“You are going to let him take you.” Her voice was shrill, breaking like a child’s. “He’s not going to take me. I’m going on.”
He spoke to her in a tone he had never used before. “You’ll stay by me, Joan.”
She stared at him, startled, and then came a look of doubt, a stirring of some dark apprehension.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s what I got to decide.” His face had grown stony and hard, impassive as flint. “Two things I’m sure of. I ain’t going to run. And I won’t be taken.”
She stayed by him, quiet, frightened of she knew not what.
Len waited.
Two days. He has not come yet, but he will. He was sworn for me.
Two days to think, to stand waiting on the battlefield. Esau never fought this battle, nor Brother James.
