Davy

13

What I’ve so far written about happened in a few days of mid-March. By mid-June we were only a few miles further on, for we found a place so pleasant that we holed up there for three months. Sam’s head-wound finished healing there, after a troublesome infection. We loafed, and I struggled through the first stages of learning to play my golden horn. We talked long, and made a thousand plans, and I was growing up.

The place was a cool deep cliffside cave something like the one I had on North Mountain, but this one was low in the rock wall, fourteen feet above level ground. We had no view of distances from it, but looked into lowland forest as into a vast and quiet room. Shade from the mid-day sun, and no settlement near enough to trouble us. To study the surrounding country all we needed to do was climb a nearby sentinel pine and look away. From that height I never caught sight of man except wisps of smoke from a little lonesome village six miles east of us. The Northeast Road was two miles the other side of that village, and the name of the village we never learned. It wasn’t Wilton Village — we’d slipped by that before we happened on our cave.

The only access to our hideaway was a drooping oak branch — difficult for Jed — and the only resident we had to disturb was a fat porcupine whom we hit on the head and ate because that was simpler than educating him not to come back and snuggle up to us where we were asleep.

For two weeks Sam was in bad shape from the infection, feverish and tormented by headaches. Jed cared for him wonderfully, better at it than Vilet or me, and even let Sam cuss all he liked. Vilet and I were the food-winners while Sam was sick, and Vilet searched out wild plants to make some healing mixtures for him. Her mother had been a mountain yarb-woman in southern Katskil, Vilet said, and a midwife too. She was full of stories about the old woman, and told them best when Jed wasn’t around. Sam was pretty patient with her yarb mixtures, but after a while he did get a look when he saw her coming like a man who thinks that the next tree to go over in the storm will take the roof along with it. Then toward the end of his bad time, when she’d landed him with a potion which she admitted herself would prob’ly hoist the hide off a bear and him running, Sam said: “Jackson, it a’n’t that I mind having my gizzard hit by lightning all twistyways, and I suppose I could get used to the feelin’ I’m about to give birth to a three-horned giasticutus — what I can’t no-way endure, Jackson, is the trompling.”

“Trompling?” says Vilet.

“Ayah. Ayah. Them microbes and box-terriers that go rushin’ along my gut tryin’ to get the hell away from your remedies. You can’t blame ’em, see, the way they set their feet down, only I can’t stand it, Jackson, and so if you please I’ll just arrange not to be sick no more.”

We have been living slightly more than a month on the island Neonarcheos. The Morning Star sailed two days ago, to search the region east of us where other islands appear on the old map. Captain Barr intends to make no more than a two-day voyage and then return. He took only eight men, enough to handle the schooner.

We are not calling Dion Governor, not yet, because he rather clearly doesn’t wish it. Still we all find it natural that important decisions — such as sending or not sending Captain Barr on this voyage-should be made mostly by Dion, and before long I think most of the colonists will want it formalized. We shall require something in the nature of a constitution, small though our group is, and written laws.

Back in Nuin and those other lands, the season will be chilling toward the winter rainy season; here we notice hardly any change. We have erected twelve simple houses; the brookside grass makes good thatch, though we must wait for heavy rains to test it. Seven of the buildings are on the knoll, spaced so that all have a view of the beach and the little bay, and one of the seven is Nickie’s and mine. There’s another on the beach, three along the creek, and Adna-Lee Jason with Ted Marsh and Dane Gregory have chosen to build their house away up on the hill where our stream originates. That’s a love-alliance that began in Old City long before we sailed; they need it as Nickie and I need our more ordinary kind of marriage, and Adna-Lee has been happy lately as I never knew her to be in the old days.

Aboard the Morning Star we all learned a little of what it must have been like to dwell in the jammed cities and suburbs of the last days of Old Time. I was just now rereading an ugly passage in the Book of John Barth: “Our statesmen periodically discover the basic purpose of war. They are, poor little gods, like farmers in a fix: if you have thirty hogs and only one small daily bucket of swill—? And so the finality, the apocalyptic unreason, the shared suicide of nuclear war is for them the most God-damned embarrassing thing. Their one time-tested population control is all spoiled.” A few paragraphs further on he remarks in passing that of course birth control had been a practical solution since the 19th century, except that the godly made rational application of it impossible even late in the 20th when the time was running out. What would he make of our present state, the reverse of the dismal population problem of his day?

I dare say no civilization ever completely dies. There’s at least the stream of physical inheritance, and perhaps some word spoken a thousand years ago can exert unrecognizable power over what you do tomorrow morning. So long as one book survives anywhere-any book, any pitiful handful of pages preserved somehow, buried, locked away in vault or cave — Old Time is not dead. But neither can any civilization return with anything of its former quality. Fragments we may reclaim, memory holds more than we know, there’s a resonance of ancient times in any talk of father to son. But the world of Old Time cannot live again as it was, nor should we dream of it.

Vilet often came along with me for hunting and fishing while Jed stayed behind to look after Sam. The first day that happened I felt an agreement between us, at first unspoken, created by occasional touches and glances, for instance when she was walking a few yards ahead of me in good forest silence, and turned to look at me over her shoulder, unsmiling. I think Vilet enjoyed being spooked by other people’s mysteries now and then, like my hermit whopmagullion, but she wasn’t one to make mysteries herself. That moment on the trail she might as well have said in words: “I could be caught with a little running.”

Work came first, and we had luck with it that day, nailing a couple of fat bunnies and then locating a good fishing pool about a mile from our cave. There was a grassy bank, sunlight, and a quiet as though no man had troubled the place for centuries. We set out fish-lines, and when she knelt on the grass to adjust hers, her arm slid around my thighs. “You’ve had a girl once or twice, I b’lieve.”

“How d’ you know?”

“Way you look at me.” The next moment she was solid on her feet and pulling her ragged smock off over her head. “Time you really learned something,” she said. “I a’n’t young nor I a’n’t purty, but I know how.” Naked with not a bit of softness (you would have thought), cocky and smiling a little and moving her hips to botber me, she was a grand piece of woman. “Off with them rags, Lover-pup,” she said, “and come take me. You’ll have to work for it.”

I worked for it, wrestling her at first with all my strength and getting no breaks at all until the struggle had warmed her up into real enjoyment. Then of a sudden she was kissing and fondling instead of fighting me off, laughing under her breath and using a few horny words I didn’t know at that time; presently her hands were gripping her knees, I was in her standing, joyfully stallionizing it with not a thought in my head to interfere. When I was spent she flung me a punch in the shoulder and then hugged me. “Lover-pup, you’re good.” What I’d had with Emmia seemed long ago and far away.

We had other times, not so very many, for there were other sides to Vilet: moods of heavy melancholy, of a kind of self-punishing despair; the religious side, that belonged to J ed and was forever shadowing the rest of her life. Often (she told me once) she dreamed that she was in the act of selling her soul to the Devil, and he in the shape of a great gray rock about to topple over and crush her. She couldn’t always be the good randy wrestling-partner when we had privacy and opportunity, but occasionally at such times she did feel like talking to me. It was a time like that, at the fishing pool again and maybe a week after our first romp, that she told me things about her relation with Jed Sever. Whenever Jed was mentioned in his absence by Sam or me, I’d notice a kind of still warning in her kind blocky face, like an animal bracing itself to defend if necessary. She’d hear nothing in criticism of him. At the fishing pool, after we got a few for supper we took a dip in the water to wash off the heat of the day, but she warned me off from playing with her and I wasn’t in form for it myself; we just sat by the pool lazing and drying off, and she said: “I got it figgered out, Davy, the mor’ls of it I mean. Not telling Jed about what we been having, it a’n’t a real sin account it might burden him with grief, and anyway I got so much sin in the past to work off, this’n’s just a little one. He’s so good, Davy, Jed is! He tells me I got to think back through earlier sins and make sure I truly repent ’em, because see, you can’t fix ’em all with one big bang-up repentance, you got to take ’em one by one, he says. So, see, I’m kindly working up to the present time but a’n’t got there yet. I mean, Sugar-piece, if I don’t commit no more’n one sin a day, or say two at the most, and then repent say three sins of past time the same day, well, I mean, after-while you get caught up like. Only it’s so’t of a heartbreak thing, times, remembering ’em all. I’ll be all right by the time we get to Vairmant. And Jed he says it’s too much to try to give up sin all to oncet, too rough,[14] the Lord never intended it like.”

I said: “Jed’s awful good, a’n’t he?”

“Oh, a saint!” And she went on about how generous he was, and thoughtful, and how he’d explained everything about the way to Abraham; when they got their little place in Vairmant they were going to have sinners in every day to hear the word, just everybody, any freeman that would come. Dear Vilet, she was out of her gloomy mood and all aglow from thinking of it, sitting there by the pool naked as a jaybird and patting my knee now and then but not trying to rouse me up because it wasn’t our day for it. “Jed, see, he’s got a great lot of sin-trouble too. ’Most every day he remembers something out’n the past that sets him back because it needs repentance. Like frinstance yesterday he recalled, when he was five, going-on six he’d just learned about fertilizer, see? So here’s his Ma’s bed of yalla nasturtiums she was so peart about, and he wanted to do something real generous, make ’em twice as big and purty right away, so he pees the hell all over ’em, specially a big old gran’daddy nasturtium that’s sticking up kindly impident — well, I mean, by the time he sees it a’n’t turning out just right it’s too late, he can’t stop till he’s emptied out.” Vilet was crying a little as well as laughing. “So the bed’s real swamped, petals fiat on the ground, and he don’t tell, it gets blamed on the dog and he dasn’t tell.”

“Oh,” I said, “that sumbitchin’ nasturtium was purely askin’ for it.”

“Ai-yah, I laughed too when he told me, and so’d he, just a mite, still it’s ser’ous, Davy, because it kindly ties in with a real sin he done when he was nine, poor jo. He done it to the little neighbor girl and his Ma caught ’em into the berry patch. The girl she just larruped on the backside and sent her home bawling, but she didn’t whip Jed. He says it’s how he knows his Ma was the greatest saint that ever lived, for all she done was weep and tell him he’d broke her heart after all she done givin’ him birth in pain and tryin’ to raise him up to something. And so ever since he a’n’t never put it into a woman, except once.”

“He what? He never?”

“Except once. That God-damn Kingstone whore he talks about, after his God-damn fishing trip… Well, anyway — anyway he’s a saint now, and all’s he ever wants me to do is take my smock off and tromple him a little and call him bad names — he says it purifies him and so it’s bound to be pleasing in the sight of God, like the whipping, only he a’n’t had me do that lately, not since we come away from the A’my.” She sighed and stopped crying. “He’s so kind, Davy! And he always knows how ’t is for me too, so sometimes he like helps me with his hand or like that, he says that’s just a little sin, and anyhow we’re both getting stronger and stronger in the Lord all the time now. Calls me his little brand from the burning, and I know that’s Book of Abraham language but you can see he means it — why, sometimes he can hold me in his arms all night long and never get a hard on, a’n’t that ma’velous?”

Those weeks in the cave were also a good time for learning a little about the playing of my horn. I gave it at least an hour of each evening, from deep twilight into full dark. In daylight there was too much danger of a stray hunter hearing and approaching unseen. After twilight not even bandits are likely to stir away from camp, in the Moha woods. I studied my horn, and I took part in our making of plans.

There was my plan about Levannon and the ships, but when I learned that even Sam was unhappy at the notion of my signing on aboard a ship, I shut my mouth about it, and though it didn’t perish it remained in silence.

There was Jed’s and Vilet’s plan about the Vairmant farm. They were sure about the sinners but they kept altering the rest of the livestock. Vilet held out one long rainy day for goats while Jed stood up for chickens, and it began in fun but he wound up bothered and ended the discussion by saying goats were too lascivious, a word Vilet didn’t know so it shut her up.

Sam, when he was well again, was more concerned about immediate plans. We wouldn’t be able to go anywhere, he pointed out, so long as we had to travel in beat-up Katskil uniforms, a smock of the same dark green, and the gray loin-rag of a Moha bond-servant. He claimed he could see two good ways of acquiring suitable garments, both dishonest, and one honest way that wouldn’t work and was fairly sure to get at least one of us jailed or hanged.

“Dishonesty,” said Jed, “is a sin, Sam, and you don’t need me to tell you so. What’s the honest way?”

“One of us go to the nearest vifiage and buy some clo’es. Got to walk in naked is all. Be had up for indecent explosion right off. I don’t recommend it.”

“I could say I lost ’em some place,” Jed suggested. It was like him to take it for granted he ought to be the one to stick his neck out and get it chopped off. “I think I could justify that to my Maker as a white lie.”

“But maybe not to the storekeeper,” said Sam. “Anyhow you don’t look like the type jo that would get deprived of his ga’ments casual-like — you be too big and important. And me, I look too mean.”

“Maybe I say I lost ’em into a whirlwind.”

“What whirlwind, Jackson ?”

“A ’maginary one. I just say it blowed down the road a piece.”

Sam sighed and looked at Vilet and she looked at me and I looked at my navel and nobody said anything.

“Well,” says Jed, “I could hang leaves around my middle and make like lost in the woods, like.”

Sam said: “I couldn’t no-way justify pickin’ innocent leaves for no such purpose.”

“Look,” I said, “it’d have to be me, account you don’t none of you talk like Moha…”

“Sam, boy,” said Vilet, “just purely for cur’osity and the sake of argument, which so’t of dishonest ways was you in mind of?”

“Might hold up a pa’ty on the road and take what we require, but Jackson theah don’t hold with vi’lence, me neither. Somebody’d get hurt or they’d run tell policer. Another way, one or two of us could shadow-foot it into some village or outlyin’ fa’m and so’t of steal something.”

“Stealing’s a sin,” said Jed, and we sat around all quiet and sad, and I blew a few notes on my horn since it was getting dark. “Anyhow,” said Jed, “I don’t understand how a person could go and steal clothes off of a person without no vi’lence. I mean you got to think about human nature, specially women and like that.”

Sam said gently: “So’t of general workin’ rule, Jackson , the way you steal clo’es, you steal ’em when there a’n’t nobody in ’em, like in a shop or onto a clo’esline.”

I said: “Why’n’t we do that and leave a dollar to make it square?”

Well, they all gazed at me in a sandbagged style, the way grown-ups will gaze at something down there that just doesn’t seem possible, and then I could see them get happier and happier, more and more mellow, till they looked like three saints bungful.l of salvation and pie.