Then, within the obscurity of this last night of February, Reuben did remember more. Shame had stirred within him for Jesse Plum, who had always owned the status of a friend, old but accessible and a spinner of tales. Jesse knew everything, Reuben had once supposed--wild secret things, winds and weather signs, the enigma of women's flesh and one's own, charms against disaster, skin-prickling histories of what witches might do to cause it, and endless gaudy tales of England in the days of King Charles. If you could believe Jesse Plum--Reuben had, once--his youth before the Plague would have terrified Marlborough and made a stallion blush. Jesse could tell of monsters too--basilisk, mandrake, unicorn, sea serpent. Jesse liked to hint murkily that once during the miserable Atlantic passage to the colonies he had glimpsed a Something rising from the bowels of the deep, and never quite got around to saying what it was. He could explain the simpler stories written by furred feet in the snow, by iron bear-claws high on a tree trunk. From a blur and a spot of blood he could make you see a mouse becoming a midnight dinner for an owl, and then set your spine wriggling with a hint that maybe it was not exactly an owl but like one. For a long time--long anyway to Reuben Cory--the brothers had settled many private arguments by: "We can ask Jesse." Drunk or no, it had not been right that a tall grown man, an old man, should act the clown. It had not felt right to watch Jesse with the dead lion when his sweating grayish face turned lost and vague and crumpled in a stupid chuckle of apology. And then as Meco stalked away, Ben had looked around, not smiling but startled, awed--clearly aware, as Reuben was, of an astonished sharing. The Day of the Lion was perhaps the first day when Reuben understood that Ben was a person too. Before that, an image worshipped, slightly feared, not consciously loved. Afterward, a separate self, a brightly visible human being with gray eyes. On that rainy evening four years ago, Reuben now remembered, he had soon looked away from Ben's warm stare, not quite able to bear it, and had resolved in secret: I'll never quarrel with him again. The resolution had been broken of course, once or twice.... * * * * *