It hummed and whispered softly to itself.
Awed and more than a little scared, Len asked, “What is it?”
“You know the thing Gran talks about sometimes? Where the voices come out of the air?”
“Teevee? But that was big, and it had pictures.”
“No,” said Esau. “I mean the other thing that just had voices.”
Len drew in a long unsteady breath and let it go again in a quivering “Oh-h!” He reached out a finger and touched the humming box, very lightly, just to be sure it was really there. He said, “A radio?”
Esau rested it on his knees and held it firm with one hand. The other shot out and caught Len by the front of his shirt. His face had such a fierceness in it that Len did not try to break away or fight back. Anyway, he was afraid to struggle, lest the radio get broken.
“If you tell anybody,” said Esau, “I’ll kill you. I swear I’ll kill you.”
He looked as though he meant it, and Len did not blame him. He said, “I won’t, Esau. Honest, swear-on- the-Book.” His eyes were drawn back to the wonderful, terrifying, magical thing in Esau’s lap. “Where’d you get it? Does it work? Can you really hear voices from it?” He hunkered down until his chin was almost resting on Esau’s thigh.
Esau’s hand withdrew from Len’s shirt and went back to stroke the smooth wooden surface of the box. At this close range Len could see that it had worn places on it around the knobs, made by the rubbing of fingers, and that one corner was chipped. These intimate things made it suddenly real. Someone had owned it and used it for a long time.
“I stole it,” Esau said. “It belonged to Soames, the trader.”
The familiar nerve tightened and twanged in Len’s middle. He grew back a little and looked up at Esau and then all around, as though he expected stones to come flying at them out of the thorn-apple clump.
“How did
“You remember when Mr. Hostetter put us in the wagon, he went to get something?”
“Yes, he got a box out of Soames’s wagon—oh!”
“It was in the box. There was some other stuff, too, books I think, and little things, but it was dark and I didn’t dare make any noise. I could
Len shook his head, more in amazement than reproach. “And all the time we thought you were fainted. What made you do it, Esau? I mean, how did you know there was anything in the box?”
“Well, Soames was from Bartorstown, wasn’t he?”
“That’s what they said at the preaching. But—”
Len broke off short as a corollary truth dawned on him, shining with a great light. He looked at the radio. “He was from Bartorstown. And there is a Bartorstown. It’s real.”
“When I saw Hostetter coming back with that box, I just had to look inside it. Coins or anything like that I wouldn’t touch, but this—” Esau caressed the radio, turning it gently in his hands. “Look at those knobs, and the way this part here is done. You couldn’t do that by hand in any village smithy, Len. It must have been machined. The way it’s all put together, and inside—” He squinted in through the grilled openings, trying to catch the light so it would reflect on what was beyond them. “Inside there’s the strangest things.” He put it down again. “I didn’t know what it was at first. I only felt what it was like. I had to have it.”
Len got up slowly. He walked over to the edge of the bank and looked down at the clear brown water, low and slack and half covered over with red and gold leaves. Esau said nervously, “What’s the matter? If you think you’re going to tell, I’ll say you stole it with me. I’ll say—”
“I ain’t going to tell,” said Len angrily. “You’ve had the thing all this time and never told me, and I can keep a secret as good as you.”
Esau said, “I was afraid to. You’re young, Lennie, and used to minding your pa.” He added with some truth, “Anyway, we’ve hardly seen each other since the preaching.”
“It don’t matter,” Len said. It did matter, of course, and he felt hurt and indignant that Esau had not trusted him, but he was not going to let Esau know that. “I was just thinking.”
“What?”
“Well, Mr. Hostetter knew Soames. He went to the preaching to try and help him, and then he took the box out of Soames’s wagon. Maybe—”
“Yes,” said Esau. “I thought of that. Maybe Mr. Hostetter is from Bartorstown, too, and not from Pennsylvania at all.”
Great vistas of terrifying and wonderful possibility were opened up in Len’s mind. He stood there on the bank of the Pymatuning, while the gold and scarlet leaves came down and the crows laughed their harsh derisive laughter, and the horizons widened and shone around him until he was dizzy with them. Then he remembered why he was here, or rather why it was that Pa had sent him into the fields and woods to meditate, and how he had made peace with God and the world just such a little time before, and how good it had felt. And now it was all gone again.
He turned around. “Can you hear voices with it?”
“I haven’t yet,” said Esau. “But I’m going to keep on till I do.”
They tried that afternoon, cautiously turning one knob and then another. Esau had turned one too far, or Len would never have heard it. They had not the remotest idea how a radio worked or what the knobs and openings and the spool of thin wire were for. They could only experiment, and all they got was the now-familiar crackle and hiss and squeal. But even that was a thing of wonder. It was a sound never heard before, full of mystery and a sense of great unseen spaces, and it was made by a machine. They did not leave it until the sun was so low that they were afraid to stay any longer. Then Esau hid the radio carefully in a hollow tree, wrapping it first in a bit of canvas and making sure that the main knob was turned clear around till it clicked and there was no more sound, lest the hum and crackles should attract the attention of some chance hunter or fisherman.
That hollow tree became the pivot of Len’s days, and it was the most exciting and wildly frustrating thing imaginable. Now that he had a reason for going, it seemed almost impossible to find time and excuses for going to the woods. The weather turned cold and nasty, with rain and sleet and then snow. The stock had to be put in the barn, and after that there was not much time to do anything but feed, water, and clean up after a great houseful of animals. There was milking, and the hen house to see to, and then there was helping Ma with the churning and carrying stovewood, and such, around the house.
After morning chores, when it was still hardly light, he tramped the mile and a half to the village over roads that were one day deep in mud and frozen hard as iron the next, with yesterday’s ruts immortalized in ice. On the west side of the village square, beyond the smithy but not so far as the cobblers’ shop, was the house of Mr. Nordholt, the schoolmaster, and there, with the other young of Piper’s Run, Len struggled with his sums and his letters, his reading and his Bible history until noon, when he was turned loose to walk home again. After that there were other things. Len often felt that he had more to do than Pa and brother James put together.
Brother James was nineteen and arranging to marry the oldest daughter of Mr. Spofford, the miller. He was a lot like Pa, square and strong and quiet, proud of his fine new beard in spite of the fact that it was nearly pink. When the weather was right, Len went with him and Pa to the wood lot, or around to mend fence or clear hedgerows, and sometimes they would go hunting, both for meat and for skins, because nothing was ever wasted or thrown away. There were deer, and coon, and possum, and woodchuck at the right time of the year, and squirrel, and rumors of bear in the wilder parts of the Pennsylvania hills that might be expected to drift west into Ohio and sometimes if the winter was very bad they would hear rumors of wolves up north beyond the lakes. There were foxes to keep out of the henroost, and rats to keep out of the corn, and rabbits out of the young orchard. And every evening there was milking again, and the windup chores, and then dinner and bed. It did not leave much time for the radio.
And yet waking or sleeping it was never out of his mind. Two things were linked with it, a memory and a dream. The memory was the death of Soames. Time had transfigured him until he was taller and more noble and splendid than any ginger-haired trader had ever been, and the firelight on him had merged into the glory of martyrdom. The dream was of Bartorstown. It was pieced together out of Gran’s stories, and bits of sermons, and descriptions of heaven. It had big white buildings that went high up in the air, and it was full of colors and sounds, and people strangely dressed, and it blazed with light, and in it there was every kind of thing that Gran had told
