The Long Tomorrow

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.

29

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.