The Long Tomorrow

“Of yesterday,” said Mr. Hostetter. “Of tomorrow.” Suddenly, with astounding fury, he cursed them. Len stared at him, open-mouthed. Hostetter shut his jaws tight in the middle of a word and shook his head. Len could feel him tremble all over. When he spoke again his voice was normal, or almost.

“Stick with your own people, Len. You won’t find any better.”

Len murmured, “Yes, sir.” Nobody spoke after that. The wagon rocked along and the motion made Len drowsy, not a good drowsiness of sleep, but the sickish kind that comes with exhaustion. Esau was very quiet in the back. Finally the team slowed to a walk, and Len saw that they were back in the fairgrounds.

“Where’s your wagon?” asked Hostetter, and Len told him. When they came in sight of it, the fire was built up again and Pa and Uncle David were standing beside it. They looked grim and angry, and when the boys got down they did not say a word, except to thank Hostetter for bringing them back. Len looked at Pa. He wanted to get down on his knees and say, “Father, I have sinned.” But all he could do was to stand there and begin to sob and shake again.

“What happened?” asked Pa.

Hostetter told him, in four words. “There was a stoning.”

Pa looked at Esau and Uncle David, and then he looked at Len and sighed. “Only once in a long time do they really do such a thing, but this had to be the time. The boys were forbidden, but they would go, and so they had to see it.” He said to Len, “Hush, boy. Hush now, it’s all over.” He pushed him, not ungently, toward the wagon. “Go on, Lennie, you get into your blanket and go to sleep.”

Len crept under the wagon and rolled the blanket around him and lay there. A weak, dark feeling came over him, and the world began to slip away, carrying with it the memory of Soames’s dying face. Through the canvas he heard Mr. Hostetter saying, “I tried to warn the man this afternoon that the fanatics were whispering about him. I followed him there tonight, to get him to come away. But I was too late, there was nothing I could do.”

Uncle David asked, “Was he guilty?”

“Of proselyting? You know better than that. The men of Bartorstown don’t proselyte.”

“Then he was from Bartorstown?”

“Soames came from Virginia. I knew him as a trader, and a fellow man.”

“Guilty or not,” Pa said heavily, “it’s an unchristian thing. And blasphemous. But as long as there are crazed or crafty leaders to play on old fears, a mob like that will turn cruel.”

“All of us,” answered Hostetter, “have our old fears.”

He climbed up on the seat again and drove away. But Len never heard the end of his going.

3

Three weeks had gone by, lacking a day or two, and in Piper’s Run it was October, and a Sabbath afternoon. Len sat alone on the side stoop.

After a while the door behind him opened, and he knew from the scuffling footsteps and the thump of the cane that it was Gran coming out. She clamped one bony, amazingly strong hand on his wrist and clambered down two steps and then sat, folding up stiffly like a dry twig when you bend it.

“Thank you, thank you,” said Gran, and began arranging her several layers of skirts around her ankles.

“Do you want a rag for under you?” asked Len. “Or do you want your shawl?”

“No, it’s warm in the sun.”

Len sat down again, beside her. With his brows pulled together and his mouth pulled down, he looked nearly as old as Gran and much more solemn. She peered at him closely, and he began to feel uncomfortable, knowing that he had been sought out.

“You’re mighty broody these days, Lennie.”

“I guess so.”

“You ain’t sulking, are you? I hate a sulker.”

“No, Gran. I’m not sulking.”

“Your pa was right to punish you. You disobeyed him, and you know now he forbid you for your own good.”

Len nodded. “I know.”

Pa had not delivered the expected beating. In fact, he had been gentler than Len would have dreamed possible. He had spoken very seriously about what Len had done and what he had seen, and he had finished with the statement that Len was not to go to the fair next year at all, and perhaps not the year after, unless he had been able to prove by then that he could be trusted. Len considered that Pa had been mighty decent. Uncle David had licked Esau to the last inch of his skin. And since at this moment Len did not feel that he ever wanted to see the fair again, being denied it was no hardship.

He said so, and Gran smiled her toothless ancient smile and patted his knee. “You’ll feel different a year from now. That’s when it’ll hurt.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, if you’re not sulking, there’s something else the matter with you. What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Lennie, I’ve had a lot to do with boys, and I know no natural healthy boy should mope around like you do. And on a day like this, even if it is the Sabbath.” She looked up at the deep blue sky and sniffed the golden air, and then she looked at the woods that encircled the farmstead, seeing them not as groups of individual trees but as a glorious blur of colors she had almost forgotten the names for. She sighed, half in pleasure, half in regret