And the Winners Are...
Carolyn Korsmeyer
1st Place,
International Category
CHAPTER 3
For six weeks the
stranger had lain feverish in the upstairs room at the Gray farm, muttering incoherently
and occupying the bed while young Tom slept on the trundle. At first the boy enjoyed his
mysterious visitor and strutted about the school yard, boasting to his friends about the
courage required to sleep adjacent to a madman. The charm of his situation soon wore thin,
however, as he was awakened frequently during the night by ejaculations of delirious
foreign babble. Alas, the poor man could not be sent away in this condition. He became the
charge of the Grays by virtue of happenstance, since he who discovers a fellow man in need
assumes a mantle of responsibility, however inadvertently. Though never before the most
sociable of households, the Gray farm became a hub of visitations from the kind and the
curious, bearing gifts of foods, remedies, and speculation.
The schoolmaster, a transplant from Minnesota, thought he
detected the cadence of Swedish in the sick man’s ravings, but his forays into the
tongue of his father elicited only a reply in baffling German. The Reverend Hurley,
sensing the miracle of speaking in tongues-indeed of braying at unprecedented length in
tongues-read to him in his best pulpit voice from the Book of Acts:
"And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush
of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared
to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all
filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them
utterance!"
But after an indignant stare the stranger uttered an
effusion of barely recognizable Latin and fell back in a swoon.
As his fever diminished the stranger settled into English
of a stilted sort. He became acquainted with his hosts and expressed his gratitude for
their hospitality, but he could not recollect his own name and was helpless to introduce
himself to them. "Qui suis-je?" he murmured to himself at night, staring
mournfully from the narrow window and irritating Tom to distraction. Eventually, he came
to be known simply as "Babel" and was accepted as a peculiar but harmless
newcomer to Deer Lick.
Poor Mary, once hopeful betrothed-to-be, felt herself
ill-used. In the first aftermath of her heartbreak she sneaked off frequently to meet
Hugh, to steal kisses behind the tool shop, to lean against him as he fixed the iron bands
around the barrels in his father’s workshop. She held his hand-when it was unoccupied
with staves-and harbored defiant visions of marrying against her father’s wishes.
"You’re a brave lass, Mary," declared Hugh,
"and I love you even more for it."
This stalwart man had never comprehended her father’s
opposition, for the sweat of his own labor had earned him quite enough to support a wife,
he thought, even without the expectations from his father’s eventual demise. In his
simple way he was overjoyed that Mary still seemed ready to cleave to him in matrimonial
union. Whenever Hugh showed signs of proposing a marriage founded only on love and his own
industry, however, a certain reluctance overcame his beloved, for in truth she was enough
of her father’s daughter to find the idea of marriage somewhat dimmed by the
prospective loss of her uncle’s money. Hugh, she began to notice, was a slow man,
massive as a bull. In contrast, the wasted frame of Mr. Babel possessed a pretty delicacy:
his sunken eyes glowed with fever and mystery, and the curve of his lips, cracked and sore
as they were, suggested a gentle breeding as foreign to Deer Lick as the man himself.
As for John Grey, he was awash in consternation. At night
he lay awake following paths of calculation that looped and tangled in grievous confusion.
His estranged brother Dave lay at the center of his fulminations, just as he had for the
past twelve years. Why had Dave changed his will? Why now? No affection for Mary had
prompted his bequest, John was sure. Indeed at times his suspicion grew so stout that he
wondered if there was really a new will at all or just a story spread to arouse vain
hopes. Yet even the distant possibility of all that money falling to his daughter kept
John firm in his opposition to her marriage. In truth, Dave had wreaked his revenge more
cannily than perhaps even he realized, for John was as fixed on his hatred of his brother
as he was on obtaining his money. It may be hard to forgive and forget, but forgiving
requires a degree of forgetting, and obsession is a kind of punishment for the sin of
failure to forgive.
"So he thinks he can fool me with his promise for
Mary," John thought over and over. "So he thinks I won’t see through his
plot. He reckons to kill me with suspicion, he does, but I’ll fix his wagon. He
won’t cut me short again, the way he did with the farm, when all I needed was a small
loan, and he treated me like I was a stranger and not his own flesh and blood, and now he
dangles before my daughter all his money, only to be snatched away again..." Thus
roiled John’s hot thoughts, and so focused was he on unraveling the intentions of his
brother that he quite lost sight of those who lived under his own roof.
He might have confided in his wife had he been a better
man, but he retreated instead into bitter silence. In response, Sarah proved herself to be
his match and not a better woman. After the first blast of her husband’s angry
decision, Sarah sighed gustily and drooped her shoulders, ready with her plaint on behalf
of Hugh and young love and future grandchildren. But as John paid no heed to these
subtleties she straightened up again and lapsed into sullen resentment. John was holding
the entire household hostage to his anger, she felt, he and that odd Mr. Babel. For Mary
could not marry, Tom could not sleep, and she herself was left to minister to the sick
with her food and medicaments and the good resources of her garden. Her acrimony grew as
she cooked and cleaned and prepared the herbals for Babel’s recovery, especially the
lily of the valley infusion that Culpeper touted for memory. Would that his memory would
return, and he would figure out where he belonged! Anywhere but here. After a lifetime of
meekness, Sarah was discovering she had a backbone that few would have discerned before,
but it was a thorny and unpracticed scaffolding built on bitterness. Her life had looked
to be on the brink of easing, what with Mary’s plans with Hugh and her husband’s
recollecting how to smile again. And now it was all ruined. She ceased to speak to her
husband except over the dinner table. And when he failed to notice her silence she began
in her mind to parallel the thoughts that churned about in his, and to envision
Mary’s legacy in terms of her own domestic projects. She surveyed the house and
imagined improving changes: Fresh glazing in the windows, she considered, for they rattled
something fierce. A new hearth rug...
As Babel recovered he proved to be an affable if somewhat
addled conversationalist, quite adept with his hands. He untangled skeins of wool, fixed
small kitchen appliances, and repaid his imposition on young Tom by instructing him in
mathematics. Neat columns of numbers soon covered the margins of Tom’s school work.
Babel stared at the marks from his own pen, discovering himself to have been a man of
learning and facility, for surely he wrote an educated hand. True to his new name he kept
up a continuous, pleasant patter, while probing his hidden capacities, figuring that he
might infer from what he could do some facts about who he had been. But if fragments of
the past returned, he kept them to himself. Babel, whoever he might be, was evidently a
man who at some time had learned caution.
The weather warmed, and Mary introduced him to the paths
down to the river, now sweet with spring flowers just beginning to peek from beneath their
new leaves. In the clearing by the water they rested in the warming grass, the breeze
ruffling her hair and stirring the ribbons around her throat. She gazed at him, and he
gazed back, a bit perplexed that this country girl should be examining him so closely; but
her eyes were pretty, and here in the open air he sometimes felt a sharp stir of memory.
It came with the wind, which caressed his cheek most teasingly. Birds wheeled far above in
the firmament, and as the sky darkened towards evening and the clouds gathered around the
setting rays, he left the river with his eyes fastened quizzically on the heavens.
"You seem stronger today," encouraged Mary.
"Ever so much better than before. And your color is returning. Perhaps your memory
will return soon too. "
Babel uttered a rather belated "yes," then
collecting himself and remembering his manners, (these, at least, he could remember), he
added gallantly, "I shall certainly not forget pleasant afternoons such as
this." Mary smiled and took his arm.
Far away at the continent’s edge at a spot quite
remote from Babel’s inquiring gaze, a receding sphere lifted in the thermals and
began its long waft northward, and the three remaining members of the North American
Weather Balloon Team carried on their mission. They had made good speed in the last
months, especially after the sudden windstorm that had jettisoned some of their loosely
fastened ballast. What a pity that it had also blown away that poor fellow who had claimed
he could draw maps, but what could they have done? No sense in going back for the remains,
for he was likely to have been pulped in the fall. No one grieved greatly, for he had been
a late addition, hasty even, and but for his persuasive tongue and nimble fingers he would
have been left behind. They had dutifully estimated the coordinates of his fall just in
case there were next of kin to be informed, but the figures were only approximate, for
they were not sure how far off course they were and the cloud cover had been thick.
It was of an evening shortly thereafter that John Gray
spied Babel and his daughter returning hand in hand from the river. At first he thought he
had caught her out with Hugh, and he made ready to vent paternal anger at this blatant
flouting of his edict. But as they grew nearer he realized that the man was not robust
enough to be Hugh. The glow of happiness surrounding Mary quite outshown Babel’s
perpetual air of bewilderment, and Gray, as a rule not a prescient man, suddenly foresaw a
new request for his blessings. He was thrown into a fresh welter of blundering
calculation: if Mary should wed Babel, would she still inherit? Or would Dave disapprove
of a foreigner in the family and change his will again? Would there be enough money to
sustain a women with an incompetent babbler of a husband, and can a woman even marry a man
without a name? No thought of his daughter’s happiness complicated his figuring, but
it was just as well, for he was sufficiently stymied by the difficulty of reading his
brother’s mind. Sarah called him twice for dinner and finally gave up, for curse any
man whose stomach doesn’t command its own needs. Well past dark John Gray stood like
an ancient tree dead to the world around but so stubbornly rooted that no one considers it
worth the effort of removing.
If hatred in the heart of man inevitably led to murder,
Deer Lick would boast fewer citizens today. Sarah’s resentment festered and grew, and
the prospect of widow’s weeds began to seem rather attractive. Mary, wrapped in
growing love, became quite careless of the hurt she was causing Hugh, whose suspicions
were aroused as Babel’s health restored his natural handsomeness. Darkness entered
that good man’s heart, and Hugh pondered ways and means of ridding Deer Lick of the
stranger. As for John, so pulled was he by the contingencies of Dave’s decisions that
he became quite paralyzed, sending off impotent sparks in all directions so that no one
escaped his ire. If Dave can be imagined to be chuckling with wicked glee at all the
consternation he had wrought, one would complete the picture of a family where hate had
overshadowed love.
But hate can be a passive emotion, exercised quite
thoroughly in the imagination. John Gray was proof of that. In his case hate rendered him
incapable of any action whatsoever. It takes more than hate to kill; it takes need, and
cunning, and a clear end in sight. So long as John tried to read his brother’s mind
he was innocent of ever gaining a clear sight of anything at all, though he seethed like a
kettle boiling over and alarmed his fellow citizens as he slouched through town on his
weekly errands.
"There’s a man fixing for trouble," they
speculated.
"Dave, you’d better watch out," said the
intimates of that sanguine citizen.
But Dave, with the condescension that elder siblings rarely
outgrow, scoffed at such warnings. "John was born feckless and he’ll die
bootless, and long before I will!" he declared. Besides, his conscience was clear. He
had reinstated Mary Gray as his legatee, the money would stay in the family, and if his
gesture of friendship had been misunderstood, that was hardly on his head.
It was the Reverend Hurley who attempted to sprinkle oil on
these troubled waters, as was only his Christian duty. "Mr. Gray," he admonished
each man, "All you need do is extend your hand in friendship. No family should be so
divided." Dave readily expressed his willingness, though his sincerity might be
suspect, for he realized his brother would never accept the gesture. As for John, he said
nothing at all in response to the good Reverend’s offices, but stood in fulminating
silence until the clergyman turned away.
"I can speak to a tree more easily than to you these
days, John. If you can’t bring yourself to care enough for your family to bend that
stiff neck of yours, you ought to mind your immortal soul!" No more could he do, and
Hurley strode away to prepare for his Sunday sermon, on which occasion he would preach
from the first letter of John: "He who says he is in the light and hates his brother
is in the darkness still."
As if a broker of conciliation, that very afternoon Mr.
Babel met Dave Gray on Deer Lick’s main thoroughfare. Clusters of Wednesday shoppers,
Sarah Gray among them, witnessed the meeting from across the street, and their gossip
dwindled as they collectively but vainly strained to hear the two men speak.
Had they been nearer, they would have overheard an
unremarkable exchange:
Dave: "Why, I do believe you must be the Mr. Babel of
whom I’ve heard so much."
Babel: "Indeed, Sir. But I have not the pleasure of
your acquaintance."
Charmed by the diffident manners of Babel, Dave introduced
himself, mentioning casually his relation to Babel’s host quite as if nothing was
amiss within the family. The conversation continued with standard pleasantries and
slightly awkward gaps in speech, as Babel hunted for the appropriate word and Dave
wondered where the devil the fellow learned to talk so strange. But from across the street
the two appeared deep in confidences. Sarah was filled with new and potent thoughts.
"John," she said later to her husband, breaking
long silence, "John, it is foolish to carry a grudge so long. Mind what the Reverend
has said and make your peace with Dave."
John did not reply, though his eyes turned upon her in
mournful reproach.
"Is this infusion doing you any good at all, Mr.
Babel?" she asked her visitor as she served him his afternoon tonic.
"You know, I do believe that it is starting to have an
effect," said Mr. Babel tentatively. "In fact just this morning I awoke and was
quite sure that..."
Sarah looked at him expectantly. "Yes, Mr.
Babel?"
"That, well, I believe that, I have an idea that I
might be named... Pierre." This revelation was uttered with a slanted look that Sarah
missed, as for her own reasons she had averted her face.
"Just Pierre? That’s French, isn’t it?"
"Perhaps, Jean-Pierre. That would sound better with
Babel, would it not? This is perhaps me: Jean-Pierre Babel."
And as Jean-Pierre Babel, or J.P. as he popularly came to
be known, Mr. Babel began to court Mary in earnest as well as to cultivate in his modest
manner the acquaintance of Dave Gray. Deer Lick rejoiced that the poor man’s memory
was returning. And Babel himself had come to a private conclusion: he was not a man either
to return to his own past or to settle for the quiet outpost of Deer Lick. It didn’t
require much memory to recall that he didn’t like living in small backwater towns,
and in his own subtler way he had adopted John Gray’s interest in the problematical
inheritance. He had gained patience as well as health during his long convalescence. Dave
Gray was old, even older than John. How long could a man live in a place like this?
Surely, not very much longer; and Babel had time. Yes, whoever J.P. Babel had been before,
now he was a patient man.
The same could not be said of Mary. Life with her parents
was becoming intolerable, and Hugh was now quite a pest, alarming even, as he was wont to
appear before her suddenly when she ventured out alone and to stick persistently by her
side declaring his affection. She preferred action to biding time. Thus it transpired,
from Babel’s patience and Mary’s impatience, that one rainy weekend they hitched
up the horses and traveled by buckboard over the nearby state line and into Arkansas,
where it was well-known that a justice of the peace could easily be found who was somewhat
less attentive to the legal details required of marriage than were the sterner officials
of Missouri. By Monday, Mary and Babel were man and wife.
Neither John nor Sarah was pleased. In fact had either been
capable of full voice rather than silent seething at this point in their travails there
would have been an uproar. They stood shoulder to shoulder as they faced their daughter in
outraged disbelief, of one mind for the first time in months, and in unison quite helpless
to alter the outcome. The deed was done. It might not even be entirely legal, despite the
paper with the embossed seal that Mary showed. However, as Mary had craftily surmised, the
scandal of dissolving the marriage, leaving the girl’s virtue in question, was worse
than putting up with a union of dubious standing. John again fell to calculating
Dave’s response, and his countenance settled back into its dark, abiding glare. But
Sarah fixed her attention elsewhere: much as she loved her daughter, she did not
overestimate her attractions and was suspicious of Babel’s motives in marrying so
suddenly. John was not the only one whose thoughts dwelt on money.
Mary and Babel did not move away from the farm immediately,
but rather occupied the upstairs room together while Tom retreated to Mary’s former
alcove below. A strong man now, or as strong as he ever was likely to be, Babel took to
spending his afternoons in town, where often he might be spied entering the offices of
Dave Gray, who had unexpectedly moved his place of business to the main street and was
prospering even more than before. Neighbors who noticed this were careful not to mention
it to John, as was Babel himself.
Babel’s conversation with Sarah was not so
constrained. "You know Mother Sarah," he mentioned one day, "Mr. Dave Gray
has taken some of your remarkable infusion, and he reports that he believes it is helping
his memory as well as it is mine. He adds and subtracts with greater speed than before and
can recollect scenes from his childhood that he had entirely forgotten." Babel looked
at her carefully with these words, which had been only slightly embellished. The feud was
wearying him, and if a sip or two of the lily brew were enough to mend a fence, it was
well worth the nasty taste.
"Indeed, has he?" said Sarah after a pause.
"Well then, J. P., you must take him a fresh batch soon."
And she went into the garden that very evening, for
everyone knows that herbs are best harvested after the sun has set. She dug the lily roots
from beneath the low, curving leaves, and after the night was dark enough she added a bit
from the stems and leaves of a taller plant that grew nearby, one in full and robust
flower crested with bell-like blossoms with spotted throats. She was not herself a woman
of action. But she had lived for decades with a difficult man, and she recognized how
action may be taken indirectly by implanting ideas in others. And Sarah was a gardener;
she knew that one must cast seeds in many directions so that some may take root.
Hugh, ablaze with grief and fury since he discovered his
beloved was the wife of another, strode to the place he had learned that Babel would be:
Dave’s office. The dark street was deserted at this time of night, but a lamp still
burned in the window there. Tonight Babel worked late for his new uncle by marriage.
"It is to escape the dismal air of evening at the Gray
farm," Sarah had confided. "The poor man can’t bear the silence of his
father-in-law and prefers to return late when only Mary is awake. Ah Hugh, if you could
only know what it is like there now..."
Sarah was a good woman, thought Hugh, but he could not
match her sympathetic heart. Babel was a scheming hypocrite. A wife-stealer, a liar, a
bogus, conniving foreigner who had snatched away Hugh’s rightful love. The town of
Deer Lick, the state of Missouri, and the green earth itself would be a cleaner place when
Babel had gone, and if it had to be by Hugh’s own hand, then God have mercy on his
soul.
So lost in thought was he that Hugh strode with a heavy
tread, which belatedly he softened as he neared Dave’s office, feeling his way along
the wall in the deep shadow of the building. Behind the curtained glass he saw the light
go out, and there was a peculiar bumping noise within, almost as though the lamp had
fallen to the floor. Footsteps-halting, dragging footsteps-drew near the door. Hugh raised
his shovel high to bring it down on the head of the man who would emerge: a heavy shovel
with a sharp edge, more than sufficient to crack the crown of a delicate weakling like
Babel. The muscles of his powerful shoulders tensed and Hugh’s eyes dimmed with hot
tears as he prepared to strike. The door opened, and he commenced the dreadful swing. But
the man who staggered from the door was already falling, doubling over, clutching his
throat as he pitched forward, and he escaped Hugh’s shovel by a hair’s breadth.
The shovel’s terrible arc missed its target and brought its murderous trajectory full
round to land on Hugh’s own kneecap.
The shocking blow sent Hugh’s remaining wits reeling,
and he fell to the ground himself, dizzy from the pain in his broken knee. Gradually,
through his own gasps and groans, he became aware of approaching steps, and a pair of
cracked and muddy boots appeared before his tearing eyes.
"Hugh?" said John Gray’s voice. "Is
that you? What have you done to yourself?"
Hugh’s scattered senses returned just in time to
realize that what he had done to himself was pale in comparison to what he had barely not
done to Babel. His painful position on the ground obviously required explanation, and his
thoughts assembled with unaccustomed alacrity.
"Tripped over my own shovel like a fool," he
gasped. "And fell. But I’m not the only one. Look just there."
John raised his lantern and pushed back the slide. A beam
of light fell across the features of the fallen man. At the sight thus illumined Hugh
uttered a terrible groan. He could scarcely believe his eyes, for there lay before him
someone altogether different from the man he had aimed to kill. Sprawled in the cooling
dust of the dark street was not Babel at all but the contorted form of Dave Gray. Dave
Gray not smiling and dapper as he had been that morning, but with a twisted stare and a
trickle of froth dribbling from the corner of his mouth.
Imagine Hugh: a would-be murderer whose victim had escaped
him, whose weapon had turned itself upon him, and who was just righteous enough in what
remained of his soul to recognize with dawning horror and relief that he had escaped the
bitterest fruit of revenge- success.
Imagine John Gray, coming to see his brother after long
years, though whether in reconciliation or revenge he had not yet decided. In his heart
were the lines he had repeated over and over: "Dave, it’s time brothers spoke
again." But in his pocket was the hunting knife he had carried into the woods that
morning.
"Dave," he whispered, a terrible, ragged sound.
"Dave." He dropped heavily to the ground beside his brother. "Ah, Dave,
have you cut me short again?"
Hugh limped into the street and called weakly: "Help!
Call the doctor! Mr. Dave Gray has been struck with apoplexy." But it was he who
required the ministrations of Dr. Edgerton, for Dave Gray was beyond earthly help.
The balloon trip was delayed by months, and the carefully
recorded coordinates that had marked the spot where M. Du Fresnoy, gambler late of
Marseilles and debtor extraordinaire, had tumbled to his death became quite
blotched by weather and other mishaps. Thus it happened that a belated search party
scoured the Iowa prairies all summer for the body of the fallen man, while on a river boat
far from Deer Lick Mr. Babel embarked for St. Louis with his wealthy bride.
Sarah and John Gray settled back into silent domesticity.
He spent his remaining years ruminating of an evening over his brother’s last night
and their aborted meeting, imagining what might have been but for that sudden and
appalling death. On especially dark nights he took out the Bible and read from the first
letter of John: "Any one who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no
murderer has eternal life abiding in him." He wondered: could it be that Dave, dying
before the words of conciliation had been uttered, had wreaked a final revenge and
deprived his brother of the promise of heaven? "Ah, Dave," he whispered,
"Dave, have you cut me out again?"
Occasionally Hugh visited them. He could not shed the guilt
for the murder he had committed in his heart, and he sometimes wished to ease his burden
and speak of it to John. But the words never formed, and he rested his hands on his stout
cane and stared wordlessly into the fire while John read and sighed.
Sarah had her own reasons for silence, remembering the long
glance that Babel had given her that evening when he had returned unexpectedly early from
town. A long, challenging look, accompanied by the dissonant background of his usual
patter. She trusted that he and Mary would not feel the urge to return to Deer Lick with
great frequency. Her house was tranquil again, and domestic order reigned. Mary had been
generous with her legacy. But in a sort of superstitious penance, Sarah never replaced the
glazing in the windows, and when the wind was high it rattled the glass and shivered the
curtains just as it had the night that Babel had fallen into their lives. A certain corner
of her garden she allowed to go to seed, and nature reclaimed the evil and the good that
grew there.