Leigh Brackett - The Long Tomorrow

The Ishmaelites came. Whether they were the same ones that had come last fall or another band he did not know, but they were gaunter and more starved-looking, more ragged and suffering than he would have believed people could be and live. They begged powder and shot, and Sherman threw in a keg of salt beef, for the sake of the children. They took it. Joan watched them start their slow staggering march back up to the pass before evening, with her hand clasped tight in Len’s, and she whispered, “Pray for a dark night.”

“It’s already answered,” he said, looking at the sky. “We’ll have rain. Maybe snow, if it keeps getting colder.”

“Anything, just so it’s dark.”

And now the house fulfilled its purpose, giving up the things it had hidden for them safely, the food, the water bags, the blanket packs, the two coarse sheets rubbed with ashes and artfully torn. Len wrote some painful words to Hostetter. “I won’t ever tell about Bartorstown, I owe you that. I am sorry. Forgive me, but I got to go back.” He left the paper on the table in the front room. They blew out the candles early, knowing they would not be disturbed.

But now Joan’s courage failed her and she sat shivering on the edge of the bed, thinking what would happen if they were seen and caught.

“Nobody’ll see us,” Len said. “Nobody.”

He believed that. He was not afraid. It was as though some secret word had been given him that he was beyond harm until he got back to Piper’s Run.

“We better go now, Len.”

“Wait. They’re weak and carrying the young ones. We can catch them easy. Wait till we’re sure.”

Dark, full night, and a drifting rain. Len’s muscles drew tight and his heart pounded. Now it is time, he thought. Now I take her hand and we go.

The road to the pass is steep and winding. There is no one behind us. The rain pours down, and now it is sleet. Now the sleet has turned to snow. The Lord has stretched out his garment to hide us. Hurry. Hurry to the pass, over the steep road and the freezing mud.

“Len, I’ve got to rest.”

“Not yet. Give me your hand again. Now—”

Into the black gut of the pass, with the snow falling and the winter’s drifts still piled high where the sun can’t reach. Now we can rest a minute, only a minute.

“Len, this looks like it might be a spring blizzard. It could close the pass again before morning.”

“Good. Then they can’t follow us.”

“But we’ll freeze to death. Hadn’t we better turn back?”

“Haven’t you any faith? Can’t you see this is being done for us? Come on!”

On and up, across the saddleback and down the other side, going fast, much faster than the slow mule teams with the loaded wagons. Past the camping place, and onto the rocky slope beyond. There is a sound of singing on the wind.

“There. You hear that? Where’s those sheets?”

I will put on the garment of repentance. The Ishmaelites have no wagons. They have no cattle to break their legs among the stones. They march all night, away from the haunts of iniquity and back to the clean desert where they do their lifelong penance for the sins of man. I have a penance too. I will do it when it is sent upon me.

Close now, but not too close, in the night and the falling snow. They sing and moan as they go along, into the lower pass, all straggled out in a ragged line. If they look back they will only see two Ishmaelites, two of their own band.

They do not look back. Their eyes are on God.

Down through the winding cut in the rock, and back there in Bartorstown in the monitor room someone is sitting. Not Jones, this isn’t his time, but someone. Someone watching the little lights blinking on the board. Someone thinking, There go the crazy Ishmaelites back to the desert. Someone yawning, and lighting a pipe, waiting for Jones to come so he can go home.

Someone with a button close under his fingers, ready to use.

He does not use it.

It is dawn. The Ishmaelites have disappeared in the wind and the blowing snow.

Joan. Joan, get up. Joan look, we’re out of the pass.

We’re free.

Praise the Lord, who has delivered us from Bartorstown.

It was a spring blizzard. They survived it, crouched in a hole of the rock like two wild things sheltering together for warmth. It stopped the high pass and covered their tracks, and afterward they fled south along the broken line of the foothills, watchful, furtive, ready to hide at the slightest sign of human life other than their own.

“They’ll hunt for us.”

“I left a letter. I swore—”

“They’ll hunt for us. You know that.”

“I reckon they’d have to. Yes.”

He remembered the radios, and how the Bartorstown men had kept track of two runaway boys, a long time ago.

“We’ll have to be careful, Len. Awfully careful.”

“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.