At another time came the marvel of Uncle Zebina Pownal, in black curls, who plumped down on all fours claiming to be a moose so the boys could ride him--a tame moose, he said, but amoosing; possibly Reuben's first pun, for the boy nearly strangled getting it down. Uncle Zebina sang, music of England; he had gone there, and heard the new inventions of Henry Purcell, who died young. Father was obliged to warn Uncle Zebina that the Deerfield neighbors would think ill of such music. "We must not interfere with their sadness, to be sure," said Uncle Zebina, and for the remainder of his visit he made the music a sweet conspiracy, humming softly and shielding his big red mouth with a comic hand. But those were Deerfield memories and clouded with a strangeness. In 1702, the year of King William's death and Queen Anne's accession, when war broke out again, the bearded patriarch Enos Pownal, Mother's grandfather, had pulled up stakes in wrath at Springfield sold his fine house to some lowborn Dutchman from Albany, and sailed for the West Indies with most of the tribe. Enos died at sea, but the tribe went on, Mercy and Zebina and a flock of others, to settle at Kingston. Ben's mother occasionally received letters from them that left her brilliant-eyed. Even at fourteen Ben had never heard the whole story of that very Pownal-like upheaval; it carried overtones of religion and politics, and suppressed echoes of the word "smuggling." No use--the woman now at evening prayers would take on no reality for Ben, as the Benjamin Cory four years old was an infinity removed. Yet he found it astonishingly easy to bring up recollection from the age of six of Reuben's four-year-old self, a wild passionate atom submerged in serious illness every few months, a being who must somehow be shielded, not hurt.... He thought of the journey just ended, the brown oxen slopping on dreamily through the mush of a thaw that had come on a benign breeze out of the south, the pearls falling from bare oak and dark-clothed pine to make gray periods in the white. He saw again Jesse Plum snoring, shaken about but no part of him awake except one hand that clung with a life of its own to the rail of the cart; he felt again Reuben huddled against him, speaking hardly a word in all the hours of the journey. The driver walking with the team had been a deaf-mute servant of the Hatfield ordinary, beyond communication in a hushed universe of his own. Across the river from Springfield the oxen had refused to venture on the ice. At Ben's prodding Jesse Plum had waked, his mind still shrinking within the rags of sleep, and the mute had swung the cart about for home. Somewhere in that passage, Ben recalled, he had glimpsed a flash of life--a wintering jay, clean as a fragment of sky, lighting on a branch to scold the human thing. The cart crawled on; gazing back, Ben had been able to see the bird rise into the wider blue, in airy departure not wholly lost.