Chapter 6: The Box in the Beam

The Box in the Beam

The iron had the night in it. Duncan knew that without touching it; the door had stood open half the evening and the cold had gone into the metal and stayed. His brother’s fingers were closed over the latch, white at the knuckles, and did not move off it. The blade hung down along his shin with the point near the boards. The coat lay over his arm.

Their father had said it once and did not say it twice.

Duncan kept his eyes on the table and saw the two of them anyway, the way a man sees a thing without looking at it. His father sat at the head with one hand flat on the wood beside the lamp. Gareth stood at the door with his back half turned to the room. The lamp had burned low, and the thin ring of light over the stone bench was the brightest thing in the room, and neither of them looked at it.

Then Gareth spoke. He spoke to the door.

“He has eaten off this table since he could hold a spoon.”

Duncan waited. There was more, and it came.

“There is nothing said in this house that he has not carried out and sold. Not a day, not an hour, and he will not start tonight.”

The third one came slower.

“And there is not one of us he would lose an hour’s sleep over.”

He set that one down the way a man sets a full cup on a table. Three parts, and the last one heaviest.

“Say the word,” Gareth said. “That’s all I’m asking for. I’m not going to sit here a month wondering what he saw. I want it so it doesn’t matter what he saw.”

His father did not give him the word.

He did not give him anything else, either. He sat the way he had been sitting since they came in from the fields. In Duncan’s experience his father answered everything: a man asked him a question and got a reason back, and the reason was usually short, and usually had to do with money or weather or who had done a job badly. This time nothing came. The lamp made its small noise. Corwin was still on his feet at the far side of the table, and had been since the moon came through the roof.

“And if it was the little one,” his father said.

Gareth turned his head.

“If he heard what he heard tonight, and tomorrow he took it out that door and put it in the ear of the first man in the village who would buy him a drink, would you do it to him as well?”

Duncan thought about the door. Corin was on the other side of it, sitting on the boards with his back against the wall, because that was where their father had put him, and Gareth would have to walk past him to get out.

Gareth said, “There is nothing like that in this house.”

He said it flat and quick, the way he would say the roof needed work.

Then nobody said anything.

The wick had grown a long black head on it. Nobody had touched the lamp in some time. The dog had not made a sound all night, and Duncan had not thought about it at supper, and he thought about it now.

He looked at the wick, because it was a thing to look at. He had heard the words go by, all three of them and the answer too, and he could hear the shape of a sentence and know when it was built right. Two winters at the schoolmaster’s with his brothers, and Master Hobbs reading the sentences out of the book, and the two of them had come home with the sound of it in their mouths, and Duncan had come home with nothing but the sound. He could not build one himself. If he opened his mouth in that room he would put the wrong word in it, and Gareth would turn his head and look at him the way he looked at a tool that was the wrong size — not loud, not angry, just measuring — and Duncan would rather have sat there the whole night without speaking than be looked at like that.

Then his brother’s hand came off the latch.

Gareth laid the blade down on the end of the table, past their father’s end, flat, with the edge away from him. He did not hang the coat up. It stayed over his arm. He went back to the wall and stood there with his hands empty.

And then his father stood up, and Duncan stopped thinking about sentences.

He put both hands on the near edge of the table and moved it, half an inch, no more, until the leg that had been standing on the uneven board came down flat on the floor. The wood scraped once. Duncan had heard that sound every day of his life.

Then his father set one boot up on the tabletop, on the boards where the bowls went, and put his weight on it and stood.

He reached up over his head into the dark under the ridge beam, and dust came down.

It came down slow through the lamplight and through the moonlight both, and there was a good deal of it, and Duncan understood that nobody had touched that part of the beam in a long time.

His father’s hand came out of the dark with a box.

He stepped down and put the box on the table and sat in front of it, and his breath was steady and his hands were steady. He was not a young man. Duncan had thought about that before, how the work had got into his father’s back and into his hands, and he thought about it now, and then stopped, because his father put his thumb on the hasp and turned it.

“Some of it,” his father said, “you can know.”

He looked at the three of them, one at a time. Corwin at the far side of the table. Gareth against the wall with the coat over his arm. Duncan, who looked back, because there was nowhere else to look.

“I left this house when I was thirteen,” he said. “I went up the Old Alder Road as far as Amberford, and I had nothing in my hands and nowhere to be, and when men came down that road putting names on a list, I put mine on it.”

His thumb moved on the edge of the box. The dust was still coming down out of the dark over the beam, one fleck at a time, and none of them moved to brush it off.

“The general was Rourke. Hard man. He had a fellow whipped for taking a hen out of a farmer’s yard, and the next morning he ate out of the same pot the rest of us ate out of, and slept on the ground when we slept on the ground. He did it on purpose, so that when he pointed, we would go. He taught us the Woadfolk drill. Every man in that camp learned it, and it is all over the country now, wherever men have soldiered. Easy to learn, hard to do. A man who has it is quick on his feet and slow to go down. I have watched men at it since I was a boy, and I never once saw one of them do a thing a man could not do.”

“When I came home,” his father said, “I had my letters. I wrote the drill out on a stick of oak so it would not go out of this family. You have all trained on it since you could stand up, and not one of you has ever gotten anything out of it.”

He let that sit on the table with them.

“That is one thing,” he said, and did not go on.

Then he lifted the lid.

The lid went back on its hinge and stood up at an angle. The lamp was low. Gareth came off the wall and the three of them leaned in, and Duncan looked.

A stick of oak lay on top, darker than oak ought to be, dark from hands. Under it, a paper folded in four, the creases gone soft from being folded and unfolded and folded again, and across the paper a set of marks in dark red, running from one side of it to the other. They were not letters. They were not any drawing Duncan had seen, either, and they were not a child’s marks. Under the paper, silver cut up small, and four or five glass beads, and under that some odds and ends at the bottom of the box that he could not make out in that light.

Nobody said anything over it.

His father’s hand stayed on the edge of the box and did not close it.

Duncan looked at the open box, and at the lamp burning low beside it, and at the long blade lying flat on the table where his brother had left it, and last at the stone bench under the hole in the roof, where the pale ring hung above the glass, a finger’s width, and had not gone out.