Davy

12

We spent the early afternoon in that place, drying out, getting acquainted. I again said something about Levannon and the great ships, the thirty-ton outriggers that dare to sail to the ports of Nuin by the northern route. And Jed Sever was troubled again, though not this time about religion.

“The sea’s a devil’s life, boy Davy. I know — I had a taste of it. Signed on with a fishing fleet out of Kingstone, at seventeen. I was big as I am now — too big to listen to my Da, that was the sin of it — but when I got back by the grace of God ’n’ Abraham I weighed no more’n a hund’d and twenty pounds. We sailed south beyond the Black Rock Islands, wheah the Hudson Sea opens out into the big water — oh, Mother Cara have pity, that’s a lonesome place, the Black Rocks! They say a great city stood theah in Old Time, and that’s ha’d to understand. As for the big water beyond, oh, it’s a hund’d thousand mile of nothing, boy Davy, nothing at all. We was gone seven months, op’rating from a camp wheah we smoked the fish, a mis’ble empty spit of land, sand dunes, dab or two of low hills, no shelter if’n the wind’s wrong. Long Island it’s called, pa’t of Levannon and they’s a few small villages at the western end within sight of the Black Rocks; any nation’s free to use the eastern end — sand — seldom a living thing except the gulls. Men get to hating each other, such ventures. Twenty-five of us at the beginning, mostly sinners. Five dead, one murdered in a brawl, and mind you, the comp’ny expects to lose that many, expects it. We never saw a new face only when the comp’ny’s freight vessel brung firewood and took back the smoked cod and mackle. And on our saiings — ah, sometimes we was a couple-three hours full out of sight of land! That’s an awful thing. You be in God’s hand, amen, still it’s a terr’ble test of y’ faith. Can’t do it ay-tall without a compass, some call it a lodestone. Comp’ny owned one that was made in Old Time, and we had three men in the crew considered fit to han’le it and keep watch lest God should weary of holding the little iron true to the no’th for our sakes out of his ev’lasting mercy.”

Vilet sighed. “Hoy, I bet them three was the real panjandrums of the outfit, wasn’t they?”

“You don’t understand these things, woman. Man’s han’ling a holy object, y’ own life depending on it, stands to reason you treat him respectful. Ayah, boy Davy, that’s the blind side of nothing when you’re out of sight of land. You work in skiffs, maybe six-seven hours labor with the big nets, and mustn’t leave the main outrigger out of sight for that’s wheah the compass is — come a sudden fog or a great wide wind, what then? — needn’t ask. And when the last net comes in, then it’s fight y’ way back over the cruel water to make camp, get the fish smoked before they spile. To this day I can’t abide the stink of fish, any fish, couldn’t if I was sta’ving. It’s a judgment onto me for a sinful youth. The sea’s not for men, boy Davy. Le’ me tell you — when I came home at last, sick and punied-out though I was I had me a woman-hunger fit to drive a man hag-wild, and — well, I won’t go into that now, but on my first night back in Kingstone I succumbed to the urging of the evil one, and I got robbed, ever’ penny of my seven months’ pay. A judgment.”

Sam said to the fire: “You claim God would gut a man just for heavin’ it into a chunk of nooky?”

“Language! Nay, why was I robbed, if it wa’n’t a judgment? Answer me that! Ah, Sam, I pray for the time when scoffing will pass from you. You harken to me, boy Davy: at sea you be a slave, no other word. A devil’s life. Work, work, work till you drop, then comes the old chief’s boot in y’ ribs, and sea-law says he’s got the right. I wish ever’ vessel ever built was to the bottom of the deep this day moment. I do. You listen to me: it stands to reason, if’n God meant men to float he’d’ve give us fins.”

We got moving soon after that, to look for a location where we might spend the night in better safety. I learned a few things from Sam as I walked with him, out of hearing of Jed and Vilet. Jed, he told me, was short-sighted, objects twenty feet away from him not much more than a blur, and he was sensitive about it, regarding it as another punishment dealt out to him by the Lord. I couldn’t see Jed as any kind of sinner, let alone a big one, but Jed firmly believed the Lord had it in for him — testing him to be sure and maybe friendly at heart, but tough all the same, never giving him a break without taking away something else or reminding him of the Day of Judgment. The poor Jo could hardly turn his head to spit or square off by a tree-trunk to take a leak, without the Lord’s jolting him up about something he’d done wrong ten days ago, or ten years. Unfair, I thought, and unreasonable-but if that was the way Jed and God wanted it, Sam and I weren’t about to butt in with our ten cents worth of suggestions.

In Old Time it was possible to help people with poor vision, by grinding glass into lenses that let them see almost normally. Another lost art, gone down the drain of ignorance in the Years of Confusion; recovered, however, and brought with us to the island.

At Old City, in the underground workshops adjoining the Heretics’ secret library, there’s been a man at work some thirty years on problems of lens-making; he stifi is, if he’s alive and undiscovered by the victorious legions of God. Arn Bronstein was his name originally, but he elected to adopt the first name Baruch after reading the life of an Old-Time philosopher who also inflamed his eyes grinding lenses, and who built a curious bridge of reasoning to carry him a remarkable distance beyond the bumbling Christianity and Judaism of his day. Our Baruch could have sailed with us; it was his own decision not to. When Dion was trying to persuade him to join the group who would sail with the Morning Star if we should lose the battle for Old City, he said: “No, I will stay where there’s enough civilization, never mind its quality, so that a man can achieve obscurity.” “Obscurity’s all very well,” said Dion — “do you want the obscurity of grinding spectacles for people who can’t wear them without being burned for witchcraft?” Not answering that, having very likely not listened to it, Baruch asked: “And what facilities do you provide for contemplation aboard your — hoo, your beautiful Morning Star?” He asked that, crouching in the doorway of his musty workshop and blinking pink angry eyes at Dion as if he hated him; crying and swearing, Dion called him a fool, which appeared to gratify him.

Baruch was past fifty when the rebellion began. He said his manuscripts and optical gear made a load too heavy to carry, and he would have no one else burdened with it if you please. I remember him so, in the doorway, stoopshouldered, shrunken, tortured eyes winking and watering, garments haphazard rags although he had money for good clothes, saying this and plainly meaning instead that he would not trust others, heedless ham-handed blunderers, to carry a load so precious. Then — ready to reject instantly any show of affection — he gave Dion a small book bound by himself, painfully handwritten by himself, a labor of pure love. It contains everything that Baruch knew and could tell of lens-making, so that granted the brains and patience (we have them) we can duplicate the practical part of the work at any time.

Many times since that day of retreat it has disturbed me to think of a lens-maker afflicted with something like blindness; of a man with a love for humanity who can’t stand the sight, sound, touch of human beings near him. I can imagine nothing more ridiculous or insulting than “feeling sorry” for Baruch; I suppose his rejection of communication is the thing that wounds.

We killed a stag that afternoon. I saw him in a clump of birches and let fly my arrow for a neck shot. He went down and Sam was beside him at once, the knife swift and merciful in the throat. Jed was generously admiring. Vilet watched us, me cocky and proud, Sam still-faced with his reddened knife waiting for the carcass to bleed out, and I saw a waking of lust in her, her eyes dilated, lips a little swollen. If Jed had not been there, present but not really sharing the heart of the excitement, I could imagine her inviting Sam to spread her on the ground. There was that in her smoldering gaze at him — and at me, who after all had shot the arrow. But Jed was there, and in a few minutes we were busy cutting what meat we could carry, the heated moment gone.

We camped for that night in a ravine that must have been a good ten miles from Skoar, but still fairly near the Northeast Road — once or twice we heard horsemen. We made a temporary fireplace of rocks for cooking, below the rim of the ravine, where the blaze could not be seen from the road. When Jed and Vilet took their turn at gathering wood, leaving Sam and me alone, he answered a question before I spoke it: “A camp-follower they call ’em, Jackson. Means she’s been whorin’ it for a living, puttin’ out for any Jo in the comp’ny that had a dollar. She’s good at it, too — I been in there a few times, never a dull moment. She was doing all right — the men treated her nice, got her food free, no pimp or modom riding her, chance to save up her cash for a rainy day. Every comp’ny’s got one-I dunno how ’tis in the Moha army. Our boys always make a real doll out’n the comp’ny whore. It’s natural — only female thing they got to love, and so on… Well, old Jed he kindly got religion, or he’d always had it, but I mean it so’t of rifted up on him, anyway he decided God didn’t wish him to stay in the A’my when there was a war on and a real chance he might be expected to hurt somebody. And it seems God told him to take Vilet along on his way out. He says it was God.”

“So who else would talk thataway?”

Sam gave me one of his long cool stares, checked on the distance of Jed and Vilet off in the brush, and went on with the story: “It come to a head yesterday after we holed up near the road waiting for the Mohas. I blundered onto Jed and her in the bushes, supposed they was just fixing up for a quick piece, but it wasn’t that. Jed he was lit up with the holy spirit or whatever, asked me to stick around and bear witness. He was explaining to Vilet how God wants her to give up the sinful life and love the Lord, along with him who’s intending to lead hencefo’th a life of mercy and purity. Damn, he’s already so gentle and goodhearted and mush-headed you wouldn’t think there was room in him for enough sin to stuff a pisswilly walnut, but he don’t think so. Got a conscience like a bull bison, that man, stompin’ on him all the time. Well, looked to me like Vilet got a bang-up conversion, and when old Jed cut loose with this ’ere repent-leave-all-and-foller-me, why, bedam if she didn’t, she did bedam… Jed he wanted I should come along too. I didn’t estimate I was no-way called. He allowed they’d stay close by for a day or two and pray for me, and if’n I changed my mind I could sneak away from the outfit and make screek-owl noises three at a time till they j’ined up with me. Kay, S’s I, and they took off. Dunno how they ever got by our sentries, him that clumsy with his poor eyesight, but Vilet’s sharp in the woods, got him by some-way. Hadn’t no intention of going with ’em, Jackson — I’m a loner by trade-but then I got my head hurt in that skirmish and the comp’ny took off without me. Real lost for a while. Damn nigh blundered into the Mohas like I told you. Bypassed ’em and come on down along the road — wrong way too, didn’t realize I was headed for Skoar till daylight. Did the screekowl thing a few times not expecting anything, but Vilet heard and answered, and we got connected. Know a rema’kable thing? — they got it fixed they’ll go all the way to Vairmant and cut a fa’m out’n the wilderness which shall be lo, a temple in the lorn waste land and like that. A’n’t bound thataway myself but bless ’em, s’s I, hope they do.”

“I notice you be calling ’em Jed and Vilet instead of Jackson .”

“Oh, that. Wa’n’t speakin’ to ’em direct.”

“I see. Like hell I see.”

Sam put his hand on my head and pushed down — not hard, but I was sitting on the ground the next moment. He rumpled my thatch; all I could do about that was laugh and feel good. “ Jackson ,” he said, “if you wasn’t a big serious brain just like me I wouldn’t betrouble myself to explain it. You see, in this world a man’s got to piss up some kind of a whirlwind or nobody knows he’s there. Now, me bein’ mean, ugly, common’s an old dry bullturd in an upland medder, if I didn’t do something a mite extra-onery — well, tell me, an old dry bull-turd, what does it do?”

“Just kindly sets there onto the grass.”

“That’s right! That’s prezactly what it does. You never knowed a bull-turd, anyway not an old dry one, to get up on its hind legs and call people Jackson as if it didn’t know their right names, nor you never will. So now I’ve answered your question fair and honest, what the hell you got into that sack? Been achin’ about it all afternoon.”

I might have told him the full story then about my golden horn — I did months later, when we happened to be alone-but Jed and Vilet were coming back. It wasn’t for them somehow — there was all the trouble of explaining why I hadn’t killed the mue, other difficulties. Jed heard Sam’s question, however, and when he saw me reluctant and unhappy he gave me a little talk about how since the Lord had thrown us together we must try to be all for one and one for all, which meant sharing everything and not having secrets from each other. So it would be spiritually good for me to tell about what I had in my sack, not that he supposed for one minute it was anything I didn’t ought to have, but — ayah, and meanwhile old Sam is standing off there not doing a thing to get off the hook, just minding the fire and spitting the venison on sticks to grill, and now and then casting me a blank look which might mean: Go ahead, be a bull-turd!

“Jed,” I said, “would you hold this image again, the way I can look at it whiles I talk?”

“Why, sure!” He was startled and mighty pleased. Vilet sat down by me, her chunky hand on my back. Affection was her natural way, going along with the bouncy sex though not the same thing. She liked to touch and nudge and kiss, make known her body’s warm presence without any fuss, just as at another time she might say, merely by pouting her mouth or rolling her hip, “Let’s have one!”

“Here’s the true-tale,” I said, looking at the clay image, “about how I come to kifi that man accidental.” You know, my pesky clay god-thing did bother me a bit at first. But I had meant to tell this part straight anyhow, about climbing back over the Skoar stockade and tangling with that guard. And when I continued, leaving out all mention of Emmia and saying I’d gone back over the stockade into the woods right away when I knew the guard was dead — oh, Mudf ace raised no objections.

“Poor Davy,” said Vilet, and tickled me just below my loin-rag where Jed didn’t see her hand. “Right back to the woods, huh? Didn’t you have no girl in Skoar, lover-pup?”

“Well, I did so’t of, only—”

“What you mean so’t of? I wouldn’t give the sweat off a hoppergrass’s ass for a so’t of a girl, Davy.”

“Well, I meant kind of. But le’ me tell you what happened in the woods that afternoon, before I accidental killed that jo. You people ever meet a hermit?”

“Ayah, once,” Jed said. “Hillside cave outside of Kingstone, done his artful healin’ by layin’ on of hands.”

“That’s just the kind of hermit I mean,” I said — “woodland type. i’d been goofing off, hadn’t no right to quit work that day. Anyway I found this old hermit. All he had was a grass lean-to, no cave. Hadn’t been real holy he’d been et up long before, wouldn’t you think?”

“The Lord protects his own, alley-loo. That one at Kingstone’s cave wa’n’t nothing. Kept goats in it.”

Sam asked: “Didn’t it smell some?”

“Little bit,” said Jed. “You take a hermit, he’s got to overlook some things in God’s service.”

All right, but the hell with his hermit, I had to get them interested in mine. “This’n was terrible old and strange. When I first seen him it upsottled me so I almost stepped on a big rattler. But he seen it, told me not to move and made the sign of the wheel, and lo!”

“Lo what?”

“Well, I mean it just lo slid away, no harm done. Old hermit he said it was a manifestation, account the serpent represented cussing, my greatest fault — which he couldn’t’ve knowed except by second sight, because I hadn’t done no sort of cussing there, you can believe.”

It got Jed, the way I meant it to. “Praise the Lord, that’s exactly how those things happen! You was led, you was meant to meet that holy man. Go on, son!”

“Well… He wasn’t only old, he was a-dying.”

“Oh, think of that!” says Vilet. “The poor old s — the poor old hermit!”

“Ayah. He looked that peaceful I wouldn’t’ve ever guessed, but he told me. He said: ‘I’m about to pass on, boy Davy’ — nay-nay, there’s another thing, he knowed my name like that, without my telling him. I was some flabberjastered and that’s a fact. I b’lieve it was another manifestation.”

“I do believe it was. Go on, Davy!”

“Well, he said I was the first to come by in a long time and do him a kindness, only shit — I mean goodness — I hadn’t done nothing but set by and listen. He said to dig under his lean-to, showed me where, take what I found there and keep it by me all my life. Said it was an Old-Time relic and he knowed the evil was all prayed out’n it account he’d done it himself.” I remember I was scared at the fine and healthy dimensions of that particular whifferoo — spooked enough to make my voice wobble. Jed and Vilet attributed it to reverence-if there’s a difference. “Old hermit said God had guided me to it, meant the Old-Time thing for me if’n I’d learn to you-know, quit cussing and so on.”

“Praise his name! And you was guided to us too, the way we’ll all help you to quit and never cuss no more. So what happened then?”

“Then he — died.”

“You was actu’ly present at the holy passing on?”

“Ayah. He blessed me, told me again where to dig, and then died — uh — in my arms.” I gazed off into the deep woods, sober and brave, and did a gulp. After all, it was the first time I’d ever killed a hermit. “So — so then I fixed up a hardscrabble grave for him, and—” I stopped, suddenly sick, remembering the rain and a true happening. But presently — in such a thing the mind sometimes appears to use no time at all — I felt that the soldier (who lived now in me and nowhere else) would be pleased to laugh along with me in there behind my eyes at my damnfool hermit, and why not? So I was able to go on with hardly a break: “Took what I found there and came away, was all.”

I showed them my horn then, but dared not blow it so near the road. Jed and Vilet were too much in awe of it to touch it, but Sam held it in his hands, and said after a while: “A young man could make music with that.”

Later while we were eating, I asked: “In the battalion-not your company but the men who’d’ve been in that fight I saw this morning — do you remember a jo, maybe seventeen or so, dark hair, gray eyes, real soft-spoken?”

“Maybe ten-twenty such,” Sam said, and Jed mumbled something to the same effect. “Don’t know his name?”

“No. Found him after the fighting was over, and we talked some. Nothing I could do for him.”

Vilet asked: “He was hurt bad? Died?”

“Ayah. I never learned his name.”

“Did he die in the Church?” Jed asked.

“We didn’t talk about religion.” Jed looked sad and shocked; I didn’t understand at once. “I never did learn his name.”

“Jackson,” Sam said, and tossed me another chunk of venison, not saying anything just then that would make a demand on me. Later, when night had closed down and Sam and I were taking the first watch, I did understand what Jed had meant by his question, and childhood teaching was another burden of darkness.

A member of the Holy Murcan Church must make in his dying moments what the priests call a confession of faith, if he can speak at all, or he goes to hell forever. Should he forget because of pain or sickness, others present must remind him. I had been taught that much, like all children; why had it never entered my head when the soldier was dying? I had doubts, true, including doubts about hell, but — what if there was a hell? Everyone else took it for granted…

Sam and I had a small fire going, and the wall of the ravine at our backs. Even with Sam near me, I had hated to see Jed and Vilet disappear in the little brush lean-to we’d flung together, though I knew they were no further off and probably not asleep. I began to see my gray-eyed friend twisting in the tar-pits, the brain boiling in his skull as Father Clance had so lovingly described; and he was crying out to me: “Why didn’t you help?”

In marshy ground somewhere the low thunder of frogs was so continuous it had become a part of silence; the peepers were shrilling, and the big owls sounding off from time to time. When the moon rose at last it was reddened by a haze we had noticed at sundown, perhaps the smoke from distant occasions of war. Then I found myself up to my ears and over my head in the question: How does anyone know?

Who ever went down to the seventh level of hell and saw them hanging up adulterers by the scrotum, so that Father Clance, rolling his eyes and sweating and sighing, could later explain for us just how it was done? How did he know?

In lesser matters, hadn’t I seen people win satisfaction and power over others just from knowing or pretending to know what those others didn’t? Merciful winds, hadn’t I just worked that same kind of swindle with my damned hermit?

Could anyone prove to me that the whole hell-andheaven thing wasn’t one big fraud? I may have started at that or fidgeted. Sam’s whisper came: “What’s the matter?”

The moon had shifted to whiteness, and his face was clear. I knew he wouldn’t harm me or be angry, but I was still timid with my question: “Sam, be there people that don’t believe in hell?”

“Jackson, you sure that’s the question you want to ask? I got no wisdom on such things.”

Of course, a question wasn’t the thing; it was only a way of keeping myself off the griddle and putting him on it. “I mean, Sam, I kindly don’t believe in it myself no more.”

“Seen plenty hell on earth,” he said after a while. “But that wa’n’t what you meant.”

“No.”

“Well, the Church kind — I’ve noticed the only ones that act like they want to believe it are the ones that see ’emselves safe-elected for heaven. Take old Jed theah, he don’t get no bang out’n hell. Believes all right, but kindly arranges with himself not to think about it. Doubts, Jackson?”

“Ayah.”

He was silent long enough to make me a little afraid again. “Me, I guess I’ve always had ’em… You a’n’t scared I might talk to a priest?”

“How do you know I wouldn’t?”

“I b’lieve I just know it, Jackson. Anyhow if I was you, sooner’n eat my heart out thinking that ’ere soldier’s frying account of words that didn’t get said, why, I’d undertake to wonder if the priests didn’t invent the whole damned shibundle.”

So he trusted me that much, and I could no longer have any doubt that Sam and I were both tremendous heretics and no help for it. I remember thinking: If they was to burn Sam they got to burn me along-with. And wishing I could say something like that aloud. But then it occurred to me that since he evidently knew so many of my thoughts without even trying, he wouldn’t be likely to miss that one.