“Praise his name! And you was guided to us too, the way we’ll all help you to quit and never cuss no more. So what happened then?”

“Then he — died.”

“You was actu’ly present at the holy passing on?”

“Ayah. He blessed me, told me again where to dig, and then died — uh — in my arms.” I gazed off into the deep woods, sober and brave, and did a gulp. After all, it was the first time I’d ever killed a hermit. “So — so then I fixed up a hardscrabble grave for him, and—” I stopped, suddenly sick, remembering the rain and a true happening. But presently — in such a thing the mind sometimes appears to use no time at all — I felt that the soldier (who lived now in me and nowhere else) would be pleased to laugh along with me in there behind my eyes at my damnfool hermit, and why not? So I was able to go on with hardly a break: “Took what I found there and came away, was all.”

I showed them my horn then, but dared not blow it so near the road. Jed and Vilet were too much in awe of it to touch it, but Sam held it in his hands, and said after a while: “A young man could make music with that.”

Later while we were eating, I asked: “In the battalion-not your company but the men who’d’ve been in that fight I saw this morning — do you remember a jo, maybe seventeen or so, dark hair, gray eyes, real soft-spoken?”

“Maybe ten-twenty such,” Sam said, and Jed mumbled something to the same effect. “Don’t know his name?”

“No. Found him after the fighting was over, and we talked some. Nothing I could do for him.”

Vilet asked: “He was hurt bad? Died?”

“Ayah. I never learned his name.”

“Did he die in the Church?” Jed asked.

“We didn’t talk about religion.” Jed looked sad and shocked; I didn’t understand at once. “I never did learn his name.”

“Jackson,” Sam said, and tossed me another chunk of venison, not saying anything just then that would make a demand on me. Later, when night had closed down and Sam and I were taking the first watch, I did understand what Jed had meant by his question, and childhood teaching was another burden of darkness.

A member of the Holy Murcan Church must make in his dying moments what the priests call a confession of faith, if he can speak at all, or he goes to hell forever. Should he forget because of pain or sickness, others present must remind him. I had been taught that much, like all children; why had it never entered my head when the soldier was dying? I had doubts, true, including doubts about hell, but — what if there was a hell? Everyone else took it for granted…

Sam and I had a small fire going, and the wall of the ravine at our backs. Even with Sam near me, I had hated to see Jed and Vilet disappear in the little brush lean-to we’d flung together, though I knew they were no further off and probably not asleep. I began to see my gray-eyed friend twisting in the tar-pits, the brain boiling in his skull as Father Clance had so lovingly described; and he was crying out to me: “Why didn’t you help?”

In marshy ground somewhere the low thunder of frogs was so continuous it had become a part of silence; the peepers were shrilling, and the big owls sounding off from time to time. When the moon rose at last it was reddened by a haze we had noticed at sundown, perhaps the smoke from distant occasions of war. Then I found myself up to my ears and over my head in the question: How does anyone know?

Who ever went down to the seventh level of hell and saw them hanging up adulterers by the scrotum, so that Father Clance, rolling his eyes and sweating and sighing, could later explain for us just how it was done? How did he know?

In lesser matters, hadn’t I seen people win satisfaction and power over others just from knowing or pretending to know what those others didn’t? Merciful winds, hadn’t I just worked that same kind of swindle with my damned hermit?

Could anyone prove to me that the whole hell-andheaven thing wasn’t one big fraud? I may have started at that or fidgeted. Sam’s whisper came: “What’s the matter?”

The moon had shifted to whiteness, and his face was clear. I knew he wouldn’t harm me or be angry, but I was still timid with my question: “Sam, be there people that don’t believe in hell?”

“Jackson, you sure that’s the question you want to ask? I got no wisdom on such things.”

Of course, a question wasn’t the thing; it was only a way of keeping myself off the griddle and putting him on it. “I mean, Sam, I kindly don’t believe in it myself no more.”

“Seen plenty hell on earth,” he said after a while. “But that wa’n’t what you meant.”

“No.”

“Well, the Church kind — I’ve noticed the only ones that act like they want to believe it are the ones that see ’emselves safe-elected for heaven. Take old Jed theah, he don’t get no bang out’n hell. Believes all right, but kindly arranges with himself not to think about it. Doubts, Jackson?”

“Ayah.”

He was silent long enough to make me a little afraid again. “Me, I guess I’ve always had ’em… You a’n’t scared I might talk to a priest?”

“How do you know I wouldn’t?”

“I b’lieve I just know it, Jackson. Anyhow if I was you, sooner’n eat my heart out thinking that ’ere soldier’s frying account of words that didn’t get said, why, I’d undertake to wonder if the priests didn’t invent the whole damned shibundle.”

So he trusted me that much, and I could no longer have any doubt that Sam and I were both tremendous heretics and no help for it. I remember thinking: If they was to burn Sam they got to burn me along-with. And wishing I could say something like that aloud. But then it occurred to me that since he evidently knew so many of my thoughts without even trying, he wouldn’t be likely to miss that one.

13

What I’ve so far written about happened in a few days of mid-March. By mid-June we were only a few miles further on, for we found a place so pleasant that we holed up there for three months. Sam’s head-wound finished healing there, after a troublesome infection. We loafed, and I struggled through the first stages of learning to play my golden horn. We talked long, and made a thousand plans, and I was growing up.

The place was a cool deep cliffside cave something like the one I had on North Mountain, but this one was low in the rock wall, fourteen feet above level ground. We had no view of distances from it, but looked into lowland forest as into a vast and quiet room. Shade from the mid-day sun, and no settlement near enough to trouble us. To study the surrounding country all we needed to do was climb a nearby sentinel pine and look away. From that height I never caught sight of man except wisps of smoke from a little lonesome village six miles east of us. The Northeast Road was two miles the other side of that village, and the name of the village we never learned. It wasn’t Wilton Village — we’d slipped by that before we happened on our cave.

The only access to our hideaway was a drooping oak branch — difficult for Jed — and the only resident we had to disturb was a fat porcupine whom we hit on the head and ate because that was simpler than educating him not to come back and snuggle up to us where we were asleep.

For two weeks Sam was in bad shape from the infection, feverish and tormented by headaches. Jed cared for him wonderfully, better at it than Vilet or me, and even let Sam cuss all he liked. Vilet and I were the food-winners while Sam was sick, and Vilet searched out wild plants to make some healing mixtures for him. Her mother had been a mountain yarb-woman in southern Katskil, Vilet said, and a midwife too. She was full of stories about the old woman, and told them best when Jed wasn’t around. Sam was pretty patient with her yarb mixtures, but after a while he did get a look when he saw her coming like a man who thinks that the next tree to go over in the storm will take the roof along with it. Then toward the end of his bad time, when she’d landed him with a potion which she admitted herself would prob’ly hoist the hide off a bear and him running, Sam said: “Jackson, it a’n’t that I mind having my gizzard hit by lightning all twistyways, and I suppose I could get used to the feelin’ I’m about to give birth to a three-horned giasticutus — what I can’t no-way endure, Jackson, is the trompling.”