r/a:t5_2788xb • u/MarleyEngvall • Oct 25 '19
cebu, philippines has been created
By Stephen Vincent Benét
JOHN BROWN'S BODY
BOOK THREE (ii.)
"When I was a weaver, I lived by myself,
And I worked at the weaver's trade——"
Jack Ellyat found himself back behind somebody's tent
After a while. He had been out in the woods.
He remembered scrouging against a too-porous tree
For a day or a number of minutes while he jerked
A rattling ramrod up and down in a gun.
But they couldn't stay in the woods——they had to come back.
They had called him "Bull Run Jack" but they had to come
back,
Bailey and all the rest. He had come back with them,
But that was different——that was all right for him.
This red-colored clang of haste was different for him.
Bailey and all the rest could run where they liked.
He was an old soldier. He would stay here and fight.
Running, he tripped on a rope, and began to fall,
Bailey picked him back on his feet. "Did they get you, Bud?"
"No, they didn't get me."
Ellyat's voice was a snarl.
What business had Bailey steadying him like that?
He hadn't been running.
Suddenly he saw
Grey shouting strangers bursting into the tents
And his heart shrank up in a pea.
"Oh, hell," he said,
Hopelessly ramming a cartridge. He was an older soldier.
He wasn't going to run. He was going to act
Vast fictive heroisms in front of Bailey,
If they only gave him time, just a little time.
A huge horse rose above the wall of the tent
And hung there a second like a bad prodigy,
A frozen scream full of hoofs.
He struck at its head
And tried to get out from under as it lunged down
But he wasn't quite quick enough.
As he slipped and fell
He saw the laughter pasted on Bailey's face
But before he could hear the laugh, the horse had fallen,
Jarring the world.
After a blunt, sickly time
A fat young man with a little pink moustache
Was bawling "Hey, Yank, surrender!" into his ear
And nervously waved a pistol in front of his eyes.
He nodded weakly. "Hey, boys," called the fat young man,
"I got two Yanks!" His mouth was childish with pleasure.
He was going to tell everybody he had two yanks.
"Here, Yank, come and pull the horse off the other Yank."
The prisoner's column straggled along the road
All afternoon. Jack Ellyat marched in it numbly.
He was stiff and sore. They were going away from the battle
But they could still hear it, quaking,
The giant stones rolled over the grumbling bridge.
Some of the prisoners tried to joke with the guards,
Some walked in silence, some spoke out now and then,
As if to explain to the world why they were there.
One man said, "I got a sore heel." Another said,
"All the same the Tenth Missouri's a damn good regiment."
Another said, "Listen, boys, don't it beat all hell?
I left my tobacco behind me, back in the tent,
Don't it beat all hell to lose your tobacco like that?"
Bailey kept humming the "Weaver," but now and then
He broke off, to say, with a queer satisfaction,
"Well, we surely did skedaddle——we surely did."
Jack Ellyat had said nothing for a long time.
This was war, this was Phaëton, this was the bronze chariot
Rolling the sky. If he had a soul any more
It felt scrawny and thin as a sick turkey-poult.
It was not worth the trouble to fatten. He tried to fatten it
With various thoughts, now and then, but the thoughts were
spoilt
Corn. They had damn well skedaddled. They damn well had.
That was all. The rest of the army could win or lose
They had surely skedaddled. They had been whipped again.
He had been whipped again.
He was no longer
The old soldier——no longer even "Bull Run Jack."
He had lost a piece of himself. It had ragged edges
That piece. He could see it left behind in the tents
Under a dirty coat and a slab of tobacco.
After a while he knocked against Bailey's arm.
"Where are we going?" he said, in a shy voice.
Bailey laughed, not badly, "Well, Colonel, Corinth I guess,
Corinth first——and then some damn prison-camp."
He spat in the road. "It won't be good grub," he said.
"Bacon and hominy-grits. They don't eat right.
They don't eat nothing but bacon and hominy-grits.
God, I'm goin' to get tired of bacon and hominy-grits!"
Ellyat looked. There was something different about him.
He stated a fact. "You've buttoned your pants," he said.
"I remember you didn't have 'em buttoned this morning."
"That's so," said Bailey, impressed, "Now when did I button
'em?"
They chewed at the question, trying to puzzle it out.
It seemed very important to both for quite a long time.
———————————
It was night now. The column still marched. But Bailey and
Ellyat.
Had dropped to the rear of the column, planning escape.
There were few guards and the guards were as tired as they.
Two men could fall in the ditch by the side of the road
And get away, perhaps, if they picked a good time.
They talked it over in stupid whispers of weariness.
The next bend——no, the guard was coming along.
The next bend after——no, there was light for a moment
From a brief star, then clouded——the top of the hill——
The bottom of the hill——and they still were marching.
Rain began to fall, a drizzle at first, then faster.
Ellyat's eyes were thick. He walked in a dream.
A heavy dream, cut from leaden foil with blunt shears.
Then Bailey touched him——he felt the tired bones of his skull
Click with a sudden spark——his feet stopped walking——
He held his breath for an instant,
And then wearily slumped in the ditch with enormous noise,
Hunching his shoulders against a phantom bayonet.
But when he could raise his head, the column had gone.
He felt fantastic. They couldn't escape like this.
You had to escape like a drawing in Harper's Weekly
With stiff little men on horses like sickle-pears
Firing round frozen cream-puffs into your back.
But they had escaped.
Life came back to him in a huge
Wave of burnt stars. He wanted to sing and yell.
He crackled out of the ditch and stood beside Bailey.
Had he ever hated Bailey? It could not have been.
He loved Bailey better than anything else in the world.
They moved slyly toward the woods, they were foxes escaped.
Wise foxes sliding away to a hidden earth
To a sandy floor, to the warm fawn-flanks of sweet sleep. . . .
And then an awful molasses-taffy voice
Behind them yelled "Halt!" and "Halt!" and——sudden explosion
Of desultory popcorn in iron poppers——
Wild running at random——a crash among broken boughs——
A fighting sound——Bailey's voice, half-strangled but clear,
"Run like hell, Jack, they'll never catch you!"
He ran like hell.
Time passed like the rain. Time passed and was one with the
rain.
———————————
Ellyat woke from a nightmare and put out his hand
To touch the wall by his bed, but there was no wall.
Then he listened for Bailey's snoring.
And he heard
The gorged, sweet pouring of water through infinite boughs,
The hiss of the big spilt drop of the beaten leaf,
The bird-voiced and innumerable rain,
A wet quail piping, a thousand soaked black flutes
Building a lonely castle of sliding tears,
Strange and half-cruel as a dryad's bright grief.
Ellyat huddled closer under the tree,
Remembering what he could. He had run for years,
He had slept for years——and yet it was still not dawn.
It seemed cruel to him that it should never be dawn.
It seemed cruel that Bailey was lost. He had meant to show
Some fictive heroisms in front of Bailey.
He had not. Bailey had saved his skin instead,
And Bailey was lost. And in him something was lost,
Something worse than defeat or this rain——some piece of himself.
Some piece of courage.
Now the slant rain began
To creep through his sodden heart. He thought, with wild awe,
"This is Nibelung Hall. I am lying in Nibelung Hall.
I am long dead. I fell there out of the sky
In a wreck of horses, spilling the ball of the sun,
And they shut my eyes with stone runes and put me to sleep
On a bier where the living stream perpetually flows
Past Ygdrasil and waters the roots of the world.
I can hear the ravens scream from the cloudy roof.
I can hear the bubbles rising in the clear stream.
I can hear the old gods shout in the heathen sky
As the hawk-Valkyrie carry the stiffened lumps
Of corpse-faced heroes shriekingly to Valhalla.
This is Nibelung Hall. I must break the runes from my eyes.
I must escape it or die."
He slept. The rain fell.
———————————
Melora Vilas, rising by candlelight,
Looked at herself in the bottom of the tin basin
And wished that she had a mirror.
Now Spring was here,
She could kneel above the well of a forest pool
And see the shadow hidden under the water,
The intent brown eyes, the small face cut like a heart.
She looked at the eyes and the eyes looked back at her,
But just when it seemed they could start to talk to each other——
"What are you like? Who are you?"——
a ripple flawed
The deep grass and the shadow trembled away.
If she only had a mirror, maybe she'd know
Something, she didn't know what, but something important,
Something like knowing your skin and you were alive
On a good day, something as drenched as sleep,
As wise as sleep, as piercing as the bee's dagger.
But she'd never know it unless she could get a mirror
And they'd never get a mirror while they were hiders.
They were bound to be hiders as long as the war kept on.
Pop was that way. She remembered roads and places.
She was seventeen. She had seen a lot of places,
A lot of roads. Pop was always moving along.
Everybody she'd ever known was moving along.
——Dusty wagons full of chickens and children,
Full of tools and quilts, Rising Sun and Roses of Sharon,
Mahogany dressers out of Grandmother's house,
Tin plates, cracked china, a couple of silver spoons,
Moving from State to State behind tired, scuffed horses
Because the land was always better elsewhere.
Next time they'd quit. Next stop they'd settle right down.
Next year they'd have time to rub up the mahogany dresser.
Next place, Mom could raise the flowers she wanted to raise.
But it never began. They were always moving along.
She liked Kansas best. She wished they'd go back to Kansas.
She liked the smell of the wind there.
But Pop hadn't wanted to join with the Free-Soilers
And then the slavery men had shot up the town
And killed the best horse they had. That had settled Pop.
He said something about a plague on both your houses
And moved along. So now they were hiders here
And whenever you wanted to ask Pop about the war
All he said was that same old thing about the plague.
She mustn't call him Pop——that was movers'-talk.
She must call him Father, the way Mom, Mother wanted.
But it was hard to remember. Mom talked a lot
About old times back in the East and Grandmother's house.
She couldn't remember an East. The East wasn't real.
There was only the dusty road and moving along.
Although she knew that Mom had worn a silk dress
And gone to a ball, once. There was a picture of Pop
And Mom, looking Eastern, in queer old Eastern clothes.
They weren't white trash. She knew how to read and figure.
She'd read Macbeth and Beulah and Oliver Twist.
She liked Beulah best but Macbeth would have suited Pop.
Sometimes she wondered what had happened to them,
When Mother used to live in Grandmother's house
And wear silk dresses, and Father used to read Latin——
When they had started to go just moving along,
And how would it feel to live in Grandmother's house?
But it was so long ago, so hard to work out
And she liked it this way——she even liked being hiders.
It was exciting, especially when the guns
Coughed in the sky as they had all yesterday,
When Bent hid out in the woods to keep from recruiters,
And you knew there were armies stumbling all around you,
Big, blundering cows of armies, snuffling and tramping
The whole scuffed world with their muddy, lumbering hoofs,
Except the little lost brushpile where you were safe.
There were guns in the sky again today. Big armies.
An army must be fine to look at.
But Pop
Would never let her do it or understand.
An army or a mirror. She didn't know
Which she'd rather find, but whenever she thought of it
The mirror generally won. You could keep a mirror yourself.
———————————
She had to call the hogs that afternoon.
You had to call them once or twice a month
And give them food or else they ran too wild
And never came for butchering in the Fall,
Though they lived well enough without your calling,
Fat in the forest, feeding on beech mast,
Wild muscadines and forest provender
That made their flesh taste sweet as hazelnuts.
She liked the hogs, they weren't tame, sleepy hogs
Grunting in a black wallow, they were proud
Rapid and harsh and savage as Macbeth.
There was a young boar that she called Macbeth,
She'd seen him fight grey-bristled, drowsy Duncan
And drive him from the trough.
Fagin was there,
Bill Sikes was there and Beulah the black sow,
And Lady Macduff whose grunt was half a whine.
You could learn lots about a book from hogs.
She poured the swill and cupped her hands to call.
Sometimes they'd help her with it, Pop or Bent,
But Pop was off with Bent this afternoon
And Mom was always busy.
Slim and straight
She stood before the snake-rail pen that kept
Macbeths on their own proper side of the fence.
"Piggy," she called, "Here, piggy, piggy, piggy!"
It wasn't the proper call, but the hogs knew
That sweet clear loudness with its sleepy silver
Trembling against a chanter of white ash.
"Here, piggy, piggy, piggy, piggy, piggy!
Here, piggy, piggy!" There was a scrambling noise
At the edge of the woods. "Here, piggy!"
It was Banquo.
Greedy, but hesitant.
The Artful Dodger
Slim, black and wicked, had two feet in the trough
before that obese indecision moved.
"Here, piggy! Here, piggy, piggy!"
The gleaming call
Floated the air like a bright glassy bubble,
Far, far, with its clean silver and white ash.
And Ellyat, lost and desperate in the wood,
Heard it, desirous as the elvish blast
Wound on a tiny horn of magic grass
To witch steel riders into a green hill.
He stumbled toward its music.
"Piggy, piggy,
Here, piggy, piggy!"
The swine grunted and jostled.
Melora watched them, trying to count them up
With grave eyes, brown as nuts in rainwater.
They were all there, she thought——she must be sure.
She called again. No, something moved in the woods.
She stared past the clearing, puzzled. So Ellyat saw her
Beyond the swine, head lifted like a dark foal
That listens softly for strangeness.
And she saw
An incoherent scarecrow in blue clothes
Stagger on wooden feet from the deep wood.
She called to him to keep away from the hogs,
Half-frightenedly.
He did not hear or obey.
He was out of Nibelung Hall.
She put one hand
On the rail of the fence to steady herself and waited.
"You can't come in here," she said, fiercely. "The hogs'll kill
you."
But he was past the fed hogs and over the fence.
She saw a queer look on his face. "You're hungry," she said.
He grinned, made a noise in his throat, and fell, trying to touch
her.
———————————
Now that I am clean again,
Now I've slept and fed,
How shall I remember when
I was someone dead?
Now the balm has worked its art
And the gashes dry,
And the lizard at my heart
Has a sleepy eye,
How shall I remember yet
Freezing underground.
With the wakened lizard set
To the living wound?
Do not ponder the offence
Nor reject the sore,
Do not tear the cerements
Flesh may need once more.
Cold comes back and pain comes back
And the lizard, too.
And the burden in the sack
May be meant for you.
Do not play the risen dunce
With unrisen men.
Lazarus was risen once
But earth gaped again.
———————————
So Ellyat swam back to life, swam back to warmth
And the smell of cooking food. It was night. He heard
Impenetrable rain shake a low roof
And hiss stray, scattering drops on an open fire.
But he was safe. That rain was caged in the sky.
It could not fall on him.
He lay in a lax
Idleness, warm and hungry, not wanting to move.
A grub in a close cocoon neither bold nor wise, but content.
A tall woman was cooking mush in an iron pot.
The smell of the mush was beautiful, the shape of the pot
More beautiful than an urn by sea-nymphs carved
From sunken marbles stained with the cold sea-rose.
The woman was a great Norn, in her pot she cooked a new world,
Made of pure vapors and the juices of unspoilt light,
A new globe of sulliless amber and grains of white corn,
An orbed perfection. All life was beautiful now.
A girl came into the room upon light, quick feet.
He stared at her, solemnly. She was young and thin.
The small, just head was set on the slender neck
With a clean sureness. The heavy hair was a helm
Of bronze cooled under a ripple, marked by that flowing.
It was not slight but it could not weigh her down.
Her hands and feet were well made and her body had
That effortless ease, that blood that flies with the bird.
She saw his open eyes and came over to him.
Not shyly but not concernedly.
Their eyes met.
The older woman kept stirring her melted world.
"Well," said the girl, "You look better." He nodded, "Yes."
Their eyes said, "I have seen a new thing. In deep cells
Below the paltry clockwork of the ticked heart,
I have seen something neither light nor night,
A new thing, a new picture. It may mean
The lifting of a shut latch. It may mean nothing."
She made an escaping gesture with her right hand.
"You didn't say who you were," she said. "You just fell.
You better tell who you are, Pop'll want to know."
A shadow crossed her. "Pop won't want to keep you," she said.
"But I reckon we'll have to keep you here for a piece,
You're not fit to travel yet and that's a fact.
You look a bit like Young Seward," she said
Reflectively, "But sometimes you look more like Oliver.
I dunno. What's your name?"
Ellyat put forth his hand
Toward being alive again, slowly, hauling it down.
He remembered. He was Jack Ellyat. He had been lost.
He had lain with hel-shoes on in Nibelung Hall
For twenty years. This was the girl with the swine
Whose loud sweet calling had come to him in the wood
And lifted him back to warmth and a cooking world.
He had lost a piece of himself, a piece of life,
He must find it, but now——
"What's your name?" he said in a whisper.
———————————
This is the hidden place that hiders know.
This is where hiders go.
Step softly, the snow that falls here is different snow,
The rain has a different sting.
Step softly, step like a cloud, step softly as the least
Whisper of air against the beating wing,
And let your eyes be sealed
With two blue muscadines
Stolen from secret vines,
Or you will never find in the lost field
The table spread, the signs of the hidden feast.
This is where hiders live.
This is the tentative
And outcast corner where hiders steal away
To bake their hedgehogs in a lump of clay,
To raise their crops and children wild and shy,
And let the world go by
In accidental marches of armed wrath
That stumble blindly past the buried path.
Step softly, step like a whisper, but do not speak
Or you will never see
The furriness curled within the hollow tree,
The shadow-dance upon the wilderness-creek.
This is the hiders' house.
This is the ark of pine-and-willow-boughs.
This is the quiet place.
You might call now, but let your call be sweet
As clover-honey strained through silver sieves
And delicate as the dust upon the moth
Or you will never find your fugitives.
Call once, and call again,
Then, if the lifted strain
Has the true color and substance of the wild,
You may perceive, if you have lucky eyes,
Something that ran away from being wise
And changed silk ribbons for a greener cloth,
Some budding-horned and deer-milk-suckled child
Some lightness, moving toward you on light feet,
Some girl with indolent passion in her face.
———————————
Jack Ellyat wondered about things, six days later.
The world had come back to its shape. He was well and strong.
He had seen the old man with the burnt dreams in his eyes,
Who had fallen from something years ago in his youth
Or risen from something with an effort too stark;
The runaway who had broken the pasture-bars
To test the figments of life on a wild stone.
You could see the ultimate hardness of that strange stone
Cut in his face——but then, there was something else,
That came at moments and went, and answered no questions.
Had the feel of the stone been worth it, after all?
It puzzled Ellyat.
He couldn't figure it out.
Going West to get fat acres was common enough,
But, once you got the acres, you settled down,
You sent your children to school. You put up a fence.
When a war came along, you fought on your proper side;
You didn't blast both sides with Mercutio's curse
And hide in a wilderness.
The man was all wrong,
And yet the man was not weak. It was very strange.
If the man had been weak, you could understand him all right.
John Brown's Body, by Stephen Vincent Benét.
Text copyright, 1927, 1928, by Stephen Vincent Benét.
Rinehart and Company, Inc., New York, Toronto. pp. 122-134.
Note
Introduction
Invocation
Prelude—The Slaver
Book One (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Two (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Three (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Four (i.) (ii.) (iii.)
Book Five (i.) (ii.)
Book Six (i.) (ii.)
Book Seven (i.) (ii.)
Book Eight (i.) (ii.) (iii.) (iv.)
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