Davy

11

I remember the rain. Not long after my friend was dead, it slackened to a dull beating on the earth. I could not hope to scratch a grave in the tree roots and wet clay. In any case I have never liked the thought of burying the dead, unless it might be done as they do in Penn, marking the place with nothing but a grapevine, and taking the wineharvest in later years with no sense of trespass or disrespect. If that can’t be, maybe burning is best. Does it matter? — all the world’s a graveyard, a procreants’ bed, and a cradle.

I slipped away from the road into the bushes, sure now that there’d be no pursuit by men and dogs. In the dripping woods, however, I still moved softly. I was guessing my northeast direction accurately, for I had been on my way more than an hour when, off to my right where it ought to be, I heard a racket of hoofs galloping on wet road-mud, swelling loud, dying away into little taps like the noise a child can make by flipping a stick along a picket fence. A dispatch rider, probably, bound for Skoar. After that I heard only the diminishing sober discourse of the rain.

I grew hungry, but wanted a fire for my hen — raw chicken is discouraging. The morning was spent by the time I located a good spot. An oak had blown over against a slope years before, its root cluster jutting out aslant and catching a gradual drift of leaves, thus creating a roof of sorts. From the pocket of earth where roots had once grown, rains had dug out a drainage gully. I grubbed under the surface of the forest floor and found tindery stuff to start a blaze in the shelter of that overhang. Soon the fire was comforting me while my hen browned on a green ash spit. I hung my shirt and loin-rag on an oak-root near the warmth, and squatted naked letting the harmless rain sluice off my back. For a while, except to keep track of my cooking hen, I can’t have been thinking at all. Rain lulls you out of alertness like someone talking on and on, explaining too much.

The men came quletly. I was aware of them only an instant before the thin one said: “Don’t pull that knife, Jackson. We don’t mean you no ha’m.” His voice was firm but weary, like his long face under a bloody dark green rag.

“Don’t be scared,” said the other man, a moon-faced giant. “Matter-fact I been called by the blessed Abraham not to do no hurt to no man, also—”

The thin man said: “Hold up the mill, will you, whiles I talk to the boy? Jackson, the dang thing of it is, we’d like a snip of that ’ere, bein’ stinkin’ hungry is all.”

He was about fifty, gray and quiet. The rag on his head gave the hollows under his smoky blue eyes a greenish tinge. Long grooves bracketed his mouth and nose. His dark green shirt lacked a section where his head bandage must have been torn out; a hunting knife at his belt very much like mine appeared to be his only weapon. His belt was broad like a sash, with fold-over parts that would be useful for carrying small things. His lean legs sticking out of a shabby green loin-rag were dark and bunchy as bundles of harness leather.

The other man also wore the wreck of a Katskil army uniform; some kind of belt and rope-soled sandals. He carried a sword in a sheath of brass, a worthless thing in the woods. Both had at their belts long and rather flat canteens made of bronze that would have held about a quart.

Stupid as you can get, I said: “Where you from?”

The thin man gave me a good smile, dry and friendly. “Points south, Jackson. Will you share the meat with a man that fit your country yesterday and got a hole in his head, and a big old Jo that looks fit to scare the children but don’t want to fight no more?”

“Kay,” I said. They weren’t crowding me; I almost wanted to share it. “Yesterday? Be’n’t you from that fight down the road by Skoar?”

“Nay. When was it?”

“Couple-three hours gone. I was up a tree.”

“Couldn’t think of a finer place with a fuckin’ war goin’ on.”

“You Katskils done an ambush and got beat off.”

He slapped his leg, mixed satisfaction and disgust. “God damn, I prophesied it. Could’ve told the brass, that’s what you get for splitting the b’talion. Comes to me though, the meat-heads never asked me.” He squatted on his heels beside me, giving my hen the gloomiest gaze any chicken ever got and no fault of its own. The moon-face jo stood apart, watching me. “I feel bad about this, Jackson, If’n it was just me and my large friend standin’ over theah in the rain so bungfull of the milk of human kindness a man can’t see where he’d squeeze in no more nourishment noway—”

“Now, Sam,” said the big man. “Now, Sam—”

But Sam liked to talk, and went on regardless, in his slow-drawly Katskil voice, amusement and sadness ex changing places the way clouds play games with the sun: “If it was only him and me and you, Jackson, we might make out, but the dad-gandered almighty thing of it is, we got one other mouth to consider which’s got itself a bumped knee but still suffers if it don’t eat good. You think that ’ere little-ass bird could do a fourway split?”

“Well, sure,” I said — “two leg-hunks and two halfbosoms and ever’body arise from the God-damn table a mite hungry is good for you as the fella says — where’s the fourth?”

“Off into the brush a piece.”

“See like I told you, Sam? Boy’s got an open nature full of divine grace and things. What’s y’ name, Red?”

“Davy.”

“Davy what?”

“Just Davy. Orphanage. Bonded out at nine.”

“Now we got no wish to betrouble you, but maybe you a’n’t bound back wheah you come from?”

Sam said :”That’s his business, Jackson.”

“I know,” said the moon-faced man. “I a’n’t pushin’ the boy for no answer, but it’s a fair question.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. “I’m on the run, ayah.”

“Nor I don’t blame you,” says Moon-face. “Noticed that ’ere gray ballock-rag hangin’ there right away, and what I’ve hearn about the way they’ll always do the dirty on a b.s. in Moha, it’s a national disgrace. You keep y’ chin up, boy, and trust in God. That’s the way to live, understand? Just keep y’ chin up and y’ bowels open, and trust in God.”

“You let him snow you, Jackson, you’ll start thinkin’ they don’t treat bond-servants like shit in Katskil too.”

“Sam, Sam Loomis, some-way I got to break you of that ’ere cussin’ and blasphemin’. A’n’t no fitten type talk for a young boy to hear.” Sam just looked at me; I felt he was laughing up a storm inside of him and nobody’d ever know it except himself and me. The big jo went ofl kindly: “Now, boy Davy, you mustn’t think I’m claimin’ I a’n’t no sinner no more, that’d be an awful vanity, though I do claim a lot of stuff’s been purified out’n me like a refiner’s fire and things, but anyway — my name’s Jedro Sever, call me Jed if you want, we’re all democraticals here I hope, and sinner though I be I fear God and go by his holy laws, and right now I says unto you lo, I says, bond-servant or no, you be just as much a man and citizen in the sight of God as I be, y’ hear?”

More casual, Sam asked: “Things got tough?”

“You could say so.” Then somehow I was blurting it right out: “An awful accident happened. I killed a man accidental, but nobody’d ever believe it was so, anyhow not the policers.” I suppose I might have held it in if I hadn’t taken them for deserters, on the run as I was and not concerned about Moha laws.

Jedro Sever said: “A’n’t no such of a thing as an accident in the sight of God, Davy. You mean, it happened without you intending it. God’s got his great and glorious reasons that a’n’t for such as us to look into. If’n you be truthful about it not being intended, why, no sin theah.”

Sam was looking into me with a cool thoughtfulness I’d never seen in anyone, man or women. I don’t know how long it was before he let me off that hook — my hen was well browned, smelling just right, and the rain had slackened to a mere drizzle. “I’m taking your word,” Sam said at last. “Don’t never make me sorry I done it.”

“I will not,” I said. And I don’t think I ever did. The confidence between Sam and me was a part of my life that was never spoiled. In the times that followed I often lost patience with him, and he with me, but — suppose I say it this way: we never gave up on each other. “Ayah,” I said, “I run off, and I’d be a sure thing for hanging was I caught and took back to Skoar. Kindly avoid hanging whenever I can see my way to it, that’s how I am.”

“Whenever,” said Jed, unhappy. “Look, boy, if you was ever once—”

“Joke, Jackson. Boy’s yoking.”

“Oh, I get it.” Jed laughed uncomfortably, the way you might if you accidentally interrupted someone taking a leak. “You know the country round heah, boy Davy?”

“Never come thisaway this far before. We’re near the Northeast Road. Skoar’s off west, five-six miles.”

Sam said: “I was through these pa’ts yeahs ago, in peacetime — Humber Town, Skoar, Seneca, Chengo.”

“Katskil border’s a few miles south,” I said.

“Ayah,” said Jed, “but we be’n’t bound thataway. Understand, in the sight of God we be’n’t deserters. Me, I labor in the vineyard like on a mission, and old Sam Loomis theah, why, he a’n’t no sinful man ay-tall, spite of his bad talk. One day God’s grace is going to bust onto him like a refiner’s fire and things. I mean he merely lost his outfit in a scrimmage like anyone might. Same outfit I was with — I left sooner, beth’ called by the good Lord.”

“Ayah,” Sam said. “I lost track of my comp’ny in the woods after a little trouble yesterday, up the road ten mile. What the A’my does with deserters, Jackson — I mean with people it thinks is deserters — well, what they do, they string ’em to a tree for bow and arrow practise, and then so’t of leave ’em. Saves a burial detail. Got my head busted and was knocked out a while, comp’ny gone when I come to, I don’t blame ’em for thinking I was a deader, but I don’t believe I got the patience to explain it all, was I to see ’em again. One comp’ny was detached from the b’talion, idea was to make a little show up the road, delay you Mohas and make you think it was all we had in the area. Then the main b’talion hiding down thisaway could clobber you. Cute idea.”

“The Mohas a’n’t no army of mine. Got no country.”

“Know what you mean,” said Sam, watching me. “I’m a loner by trade… Well, them no’th Moha apple-knockers, excuse the expression, came along nine hours late, after whoring it up around Humber Town likely, so after they brushed us off they squatted down to camp for the night. I should know, having damn nigh walked into ’em in the dark. Must’ve been rested and happy by the time the b’talion jumped ’em this mo’ning. We didn’t do too good?”

“Not too. Mohas was too many. Two to one or more.”

“Boy’s a gentleman,” said Sam, and rested his wounded head on his knees. “Ayah, the brass gets fanciful and the men get dead.” I’d spotted Sam Loomis for a woodsman; he had my habit of quick side-glances. He wouldn’t be caught unready by the unexpected stir of a branch or slither of questing life along the ground. Jed might be; his eyes did not look alert. Baldness had thinned even Jed’s eyebrows to pale wisps; it gave him the look of a great startled baby. “ Jackson , that little-ass bird’s near done.” As I took it away from the flame he added: “Maybe better slip on y’ bullock-rag, account that other’n off in the brush — I just damn-all f’got to mention it — well, see, she happens to be a female woman.” Then glancing up at Jed Sever’s disapproving mass, he said: “Moves around real peart for a young boy, don’t he?”

When I had my rags on Jed called off thinly into the wet woods: “Oh, Vilet!”

“Don’t fret,” Sam said to me under his breath — “I wouldn’t done it to you only she’s broad in the mind as well as in the beam.”

Limping out of a nearby thicket, the woman said: “I hearn that, Sam.” She gave him the small half of a grin, and the rest of us a challenging stare from under thick brows black as ink. Her dark green linsey smock left her knees bare, and the left one was bruised but not badly. She was anywhere in the thirties, a short slab-sided bigmuscled wench with no waist to speak of, but someway you didn’t miss it. Even with the slight limp she had a solid animal grace and sureness. She didn’t like being wet as a mushrat. “I did oughta ream y’ out, Sam, talking thataway about a tender blossom like me, hunnert and thirty pounds and all of it wildcat.”

“A’n’t she the sha’p little thing?” said Jed, and I saw he’d gone all mush-mind and lover-dreamy.

“Ayah,” she sighed — “sha’p as an old shovel beat out onto the rocks ten-twenty yeahs.” She slipped off a shoulder-sack something like mine, and tried to wring some of the water from her smock and pull it clear of her crotch and meaty thighs. “You men be lucky, them Goddamn loose shirts and stuff.”

“Vilet!” No longer dreamy, Jed spoke like a stern grandfather. “None of that cussing! We been into that.”

“Aw, Jed!” Her look at him was cocky, affectionate, submissive too. “You’d cuss, I bet, if n you couldn’t tell y’ clo’es from y’ hide.”

“No I wouldn’t.” He stared her down, solemn as a church. “And ‘hide’ — that a’n’t a nice word neither.”

“Aw, Jed!” She squeezed water from her black hair. It was short, and shaggy as if she’d hacked it off with a knife, the way soldiers do if there’s no barber in the outfit. She dropped into a squat beside me and gave my leg a ringing slap with a square brown paw. “Your name’s Davy, ha? Hiya, Davy, and how they hangin’, lover-pup?”

“Vilet dear,” says Jed, mighty patient, “we been into all that. No more cussing, no more lewd talk.”

“Aw, Jed, I’m sorry, anyhow I didn’t mean it like lewd, just friendly.” Her eyes, dark greenish gray with a hint of golden flecks, were uncommonly lovely, set in the frame of her beefy homeliness, violets in rough ground. “I mean, Jed, things keep slippin’ my mind and poppin’ out.” She pulled her wet smock out from her big breasts and winked at me, head turned so that Jed wouldn’t see it, but she meant her words too; she wasn’t fighting him. “You gotta be patient, Jed, you gotta leave me come unto Abraham kind of a gradual sort of a way, like I gotta creep before I walk, see?”

“I know, Vilet. I know, dear.”

I cut the hen as fairly as I could and passed it around, and was about to start gnawing when Jed dipped his head and mumbled through a grace, mercifully short. Sam and I began eating right afterward, but Jed said: “Vilet, I was listenin’ whiles I prayed, nor I didn’t hear you none.”

It’s a fact: among the true religioners, if a priest is present, people keep quiet while he says the grace right, but if there’s no priest everyone is expected to say it at the same time, leaving it up to God to analyze the uproar and sort out the faithful from the hippy critics. Of course, Jed hadn’t heard Sam or me either, but our souls evidently weren’t his concern, or else he felt they were too much of a job for him. Vilet’s soul was different. She said: “Aw, Jed, I was just — I mean, I thank thee, 0 Lord, for this my daily bread and—”

“No, dear. Bread means real bread, so then if it’s chicken it’s best you say chicken, understand?”

“For this my — Jed, chicken don’t come daily.”

“Oh — well, kay, you can leave out the daily.”

“For this my chicken and command—”

“Commend.”

“Commend myself to thy service in Abraham’s beloved name — kay?”

“Kay,” said Jed.

After the meal Vilet limped off to hunt up more firewood. I wished that while she was busy I could ask who she was and how she came to be with us, but Jed had been observing the luck-charm at my neck, and asked me about it.

I said: “It’s just a puny old luck-charm.”

“Nay, boy Davy, it’s a truth-maker. I seen one just like it at Kingstone, belonged to an old wise-woman. This is the spitn-image of it, bound to have the same power. Nobody can look on it and tell a lie — fact. Le’ me hold it a minute and show you. Now, look this little man or this little woman right in the face and see if you be able to lie.”

Deadpanning, I said: “The moon shines black.”

“How about that?” said Vilet, dumping an armload of dead sticks. “How about that, Jed o’ boy o’ boy?”

“Why, I got him.” Jed laughed, pleased. “Other side of the moon’s got to be black, or we’d see the shine of it reflected onto the curtain of night, big white patch moving the way the moon does, stands to reason. But all’s we see is the holes prepared in the curtain to let through the light of heaven, and a few of them dots that move different, so they must be little chips, sparkiers like, that God took off of the moon to brighten things up. See?”

Drowsily admiring, Sam murmured: “Bugger me blind!”

“Sam, I got to ask you not to use them foul expressions in the presence of a pure-minded boy and a misfortunate woman-soul that’s trying to find her way into the kingdom of ev’lasting righteousness, more b’ token I won’t put up with no more sack-religion, I purely won’t.”

Sam told him he was sorry, in a way that suggested he was used to saying it, and more or less meaning it every time. Good people like Jed would find things dull, I guess, if they couldn’t arrange to get hurt fairly often. As for the luck-charm — well, Jed was much older than me, fortyplus, and a hell of a lot bigger as well as full of divine grace. I did think if 1 took another try at making extra work for the shovels I wouldn’t be stopped by any dab of clay. But Jed was so proud and happy to have taught me something useful and surprising, I hadn’t the heart to spoil it. Maybe I couldn’t have anyway. Whatever mahooha I offered, he could have produced some gentle explanation to prove I hadn’t told a lie-working it along easy and patient, pushing and crowding Lady Truth around and around the bush till sooner or later the mis’ble old wench had to come crawling out where he wanted her, whimpering and yattering, legs asprawl and vine-leaves a-twitching in her poor scragged-up hair. “Well,” I said, “I never did know it had no such power. It was give’ me when I was born, and people have talked me considerable guck since them days, nothing no-way stopping ’em.”

“You just never caught on to the way of usin’ it,” he said. He still held the image facing me, and asked me as if casually: “It was a true-for-sure accident, that thing you told about?”

Sam Loomis stood up tall and said: “Hellfire and damnation! We take his word and then go doubting it?”

Behind me I could hear Vilet quit breathing. Jed might be forty pounds heavier, but Sam wasn’t anyone you’d try to take, head-wound or no. Jed said at last, mighty soft: “I meant no ha’m, Sam. If my words done ha’m, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t ask my pa’don. Ask his’n.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “No harm done.”

“I do ask y’ pa’don, boy Davy.” Nobody could have asked it more nicely, either.

“It’s all right,” I said. “It don’t matter.”

As Jed smiled and gave me back the clay image, I noticed his hand was unsteady, and I felt, in one of those indescribable flashes which resemble knowledge, that he was not afraid of Sam at all, but of himself. He asked, maybe just for the sake of speaking: “Was you bound anywheah special when we come onto you, boy Davy?”

“Levannon’s where I want to go.”

“Why — them’s no better’n heretics over yonder.”

Sam asked: “You ever bejasus been theah?”

“Sure I have and wouldn’t go again at all.”

“Got to cross Levannon if you and Vilet be goin’ to Vairmant like you say.”

“Ayah,” Jed sighed, “but just to cross it.”

They were still edgy. I said: “I dunno — all’s I ever beam of Levannon was hear-tell.”

“Some pa’ts may be respectable,” Jed allowed. “But them quackpots! Snatch y’ sleeve, bend y’ ear. You hear the Church figgers if the quackpot religioners all drift into Levannon that makes it nicer for the rest of us, but I dunno, it don’t seem right. Grammites, Franklinites, that’s what religious liberty has brung ’em to in Levannon. No better’n a sink-hole of atheism.”

I said: “Never hearn tell of Franklinites.”

“Nay? Oh, they busted away from the New Romans in Conicut — New Romans are strong theah, you know. The Mother Church tol’ates ’em so long as they don’t go building meeting-places and stuff — I mean, you got to have religious liberty within reason, just so it don’t lead to heresy and things. Franklinites — well, I dunno…”

Sam said: “Franklinite a’gument sta’ted up about St. Franklin’s name not being Benjamin and the durn gold standard not being wropped around him when he was buried but around some other educated saint of the same name. My wife’s mother knowed all about it, and she’d testify on the subject till a man dropped dead. One of ’em carried lightning into his umbreller, I disremember which one.”

“The Benjamin one,” said Jed, all friendly again. “Anyhow them Franklinites did stir up a terrible commotion in Conicut, disgraceful — riots, what-not, finally made like persecuted and petitioned Mother Church to let ’em do an exodus or like that into Levannon, which she done it, and theah they be to this day. Awful thing.”

“Wife’s mother was a Grammite. Good woman according to her lights.”

“Didn’t go for to hurt y’ feelings, Sam.”

“Didn’t. According to her lights I said. But when it come to my wife, why, I said to her, ‘Jackson,’ I said, ‘you can be a Grammite like your respected maternal pair’nt and prophesy the end of the world till your own ass flies up,’ I said, ‘and bites this ’ere left one,’ I said, ‘or you can be my good wife, but you can’t do both, Jackson,’ I said, ‘account I a’n’t about to put up with it.’ Homed it out’n her too, so’t of.”

“Why,” said Vilet, “you mean old billy ram!”

“Naw, Jackson baby, that a’n’t meanness, that’s just good sense, that is. All’s I mean, she was a lickin’ good church-woman ever after, real saint, never had a mite of trouble with her that day fo’th. About religion, I mean. Did have a few other faults such as talky-talking fit to wear the han’le off a solid silver thundermug, which is why I j’ined the A’my so to get a smidgin of peace and quiet, but a real saint, understand, no trouble with her at all, no sir. Not about religion.”

“Amen,” says Vilet, and glanced up quick at Jed to make sure she’d said the right thing.