Davy

19

After the funeral — dismal enough it was, and our Jed would have thought it finer than he deserved — Sam and I didn’t wait for the coach that might go by on Saturday, but decided to chance it on foot at least as far as Humber Town.

In East Perkunsvil after the disaster I heard virtually no talk about the tiger, and not even a sidelong mention of his possible return. The village Guide brought back his hunting party the next day — sorry, angry men they were when they heard the news — and in the afternoon men went out to cultivate the corn patches with no protection but a couple of bowmen. That night also, men were outside minding watchfires, not against tiger but just to keep the grazing creatures away from the corn. Hunters and old wives and other founts of absolute wisdom agree that unless old or sickly, a tiger will attack a particular village only once in a season, and then move on. It could even be true, though I doubt it.

The senseless, accidental quality of the event was what shook and overwhelmed me, I think. Sam stood by me; we didn’t talk much; he was just there, letting me be alone with myself in his presence. Nickie is the only other I’ve known who can do that.[20] When the funeral was over and we were on the road again, I was beginning to understand how if there is any order, meaning or purpose in the human condition, human beings must make it themselves.

We made an early morning start. On such a summer morning, a west wind running along the hills and the sun not quite risen, a freshness everywhere, a ripple of birds’ music, a glimpse of a whitetail deer slipping into the daytime secrecy of the forest, the warmth of the present and the surging life of your own blood make up the whole aspect of truth — how else could it be?

Humber Town is a busy and ambitious place, too small for a city, too large for a village — say about six or seven thousand population and, to use a quaint local expression, growing all the time. On the road Sam and I chewed over a few plans but settled nothing. I still desired Levannon, and the ships. But I had been noticing how often a plan is a scribble on the wind. Sam allowed that, to keep us going, he might look up some journeyman carpentry or mason work — he knew both trades — in Humber Town. He agreed it would be safest to move over into Levannon, if there stifi was a war going on by the time we reached Albany on the Hudson Sea. At East Perkunsvil the only war news they had was whispery rumors about a battle at Chengo in the west, and another on the Hudson coast a little north of Kingstone, barely outside Katskil territory.

Sam and I had not spoken at all of the relation that might exist between us. But as we were coming up to the gates of Huinber Town I said: “If’n you want to be my Da and I want it thataway, it maybe don’t matter if I was or wa’n’t out’n the actual seed?”

“Why, that’s about the way I had it lined up to myself, Davy,” he said. He’d been calling me Jackson as usual that morning. “We might leave it at that…”

The gate guard was happy about something, which made him show uncommonly good manners for a policer. As he let us in I heard the brisk tinkle and thrill of a mandolin somewhere. Then a drum was warming up oom-ta-ta oom-ta-ta, and a flute and a pretty sharp cornet jumped in, not quarreling at all, with the “Irish Washerwoman.” It was happening out of sight around a curve of the main street, not far away. Wherever the Washerwoman came from, and I believe it was Old Time, she’s a grand durable quail and always welcome. “There they go!” the guard said to us, and I saw his feet were interested, and so were mine. “Best damn gang ever was here. You be strangers to Humber Town?”

“I was by, yeahs ago. Sam Loomis, and this ’ere’s my boy Jackson — Jackson David Loomis. Who be they, sounding off?”

“Rumley’s Ramblers.”

“Ayah?” said Sam. “Well, that comet’s got a power into it, but he don’t blow as good as my boy…”

A small idle crowd was already lounging at the rail fence that bordered the town green, though no special show was going on and it was only mid-morning, when most of the townfolk would be at work. The musicians had drifted together and tuned up to amuse themselves, that was all. But nobody with ears and eyes would just walk by, not with Bonnie Sharpe cross-legged on the grass tickling her mandolin, and Minna Selig with her banjo, and Stud Dabney teasing his drum to funny stuff with his white head stuck out over it and his squabby body in a kind of crouch, like a snowy owl about to fly away. Little Joe Dulin was there too tweedling his flute, and big Tom Blame stood back of him — far back, following a rule of his own, for Tom always insisted he couldn’t make his cornet cough up a decent tone unless there was a plug of good tobacco stuffing a hole where a couple of teeth were long gone, which meant spitting at the end of near-about every bar; and he couldn’t spit good, he claimed, unless he was free to swing his head real liberal and fair warning to the world. Uhha, Tom was there in all his glory, as Sam and I joined the other loafers to rest our feet on the rails — Long Tom Blaine pointing his crazy comet at the sky, a man drinking music and turning his head quick as a cat to spit and drink again. Hoy, so I’m running on ahead of myself and don’t care. These were people I soon began to know and love; when I touched my pen their names came tumbling out.

The green was large and nicely designed — everything appeared spacious and rather different in Humber Town, or else I’m remembering it better than it was because that was where a good time of my life began, my time with Rumley’s Ramblers. The wagons made a neat square within the green; I saw the big randy pictures and strong colors all over the canvas tops and sides, and the well-fed heavy-muscled mules tethered out where they could find shade and space to move about without bothering anyone.

Rumley’s was a good-sized gang, with four of the large covered mule-wagons and two of the ordinary kind for hauling gear and supplies. The covered wagons — nothing like the rattletrap vans the gyppos use — are for the gang to dwell in whether they’re on the move or in camp. One long covered wagon can provide cubby-hole quarters for more than eight people with their possessions, and you won’t be too cramped so long as the clothes and things — dudery, to use the Rambler word — are properly stashed away. It’s a thing you learn, and once you do, why, it’s rather like living on shipboard and is not a bad way to live at all.

The musicians had polished off the Washerwoman by the time Sam and I got there. The girl with the mandolin was strumming aimlessly; the other had put down her banjo, and when she caught my eye and maybe Sam’s her hand went up to her black curls in that feminine hair-fixing motion which goes back to the time when (Old-Time science says) we were living in unsanitary caves and women had to pay attention to the hairdo so that the mammothbones they got hit with would bounce gracefully. Minna Selig was a charming bundle, but then so was Bonnie Sharpe. For some tinie — near six months as I remember — I could hardly focus on one without being suddenly hornswoggled by the other. They planned it that way.

The flute-player and the cornet man strolled a little way off and settled down with a deck of cards. I saw a tall broad-shouldered gray-headed woman, barefoot and dressed in a faded blue smock, come out to sit on the letdown back step of one of the big covered wagons and smoke a clay pipe in solid comfort. The white-haired drummer, the snowy owl, had quit his music too but stayed by the girls, fiat on his back with an ancient flopperoo of a farmer’s straw hat over his face and his drumsticks weighting it down in case a sudden wind should rise and find him disinclined to move. Stud Dabney was tremendous at that sort of thing: Pa Rumley called him the original God-damned inventor of peace and quiet. He devoted such enormous thought to working out new ways of being restful that it sometimes made him dreadfully tired, but he claimed this was in a good cause, and he’d keep it up b’ Jesus ’n’ Abraham, no matter if it wore him out into an early grave. He was sixty-eight.

That gray-haired woman on the wagon-steps had caught my attention about as strongly as the girls. It was her calm, I think. She’d done her morning chores and was enjoying the lazy break, but it was more than that. She spread calm around her, as other people may spread atmospheres of uneasiness or lust or whatever. Well, after I had known the lady quite a while — two years later, I think, when I was past sixteen — Mam Laura remarked to me that she thought her even disposition was partly a result of her trade of fortune-telling. “You can’t,” she said, “predict anything downright awful to the yucks, that’s obvious — bad for business even if they could take it, which they can’t. But I’ve got an old yen after truth inside me, Davy, same as your father has. So while I dream up sugartits of prophecy to happily the yucks and send ’em away imagining they amount to something, I’m thinking to myself about the actual happenings likely to come upon ’em — and upon me, merciful winds! — this side of death. It’s sobering, calming, Davy. Including the small happenings — I mean the ten million little everyday samenesses that leave you weathered after a while like an old rock, like me, like an old rock in sandy winds. Ai-yah, and after such thinking inside of me while I prophesy, I’m beat but sort of cleaned out too, peaceful, feel like acting nice to people for a change and mostly keeping my shirt on. Philosophy’s what it is, Davy — nay, and there’s another advantage of Rambler life (which I prophesy you’ll not be living all your days — you have a complicated future, love, too complicated for an old woman) and that is, a Rambler woman at my age (never mind what that is) can afford a smidgin of philosophy, the way I believe a woman can’t if she’s running the house and trying to fathom where romance went to and what in thunderuption ails her teener daughters…” She was spreading calm around her that first morning I saw her, smoking her pipe and studying everyone within her view but not seeming to.

I fidgeted against the fence rail and said: “Sam, for honest — how good do I blow that horn?”

“All I can do about music is like it. Can’t even no-way sing. You blow it, to me it sounds good.”

“’Greensleeves’, frinstance?”

The mandolin girl had a floppy lock of brown hair that tumbled over her eyes; kay, but the banjo girl had big full lips that started you thinking right away — well, “thinking” is the word I wrote there and I hate to scratch it out. The mandolin girl was still plinking a little, but mostly they were whisper-giggling together now, and I got the notion I was being analyzed.

“Ayah, ‘Greensleeves’ goes good,” Sam said. “Ramblers — well, they’re touchy people, you hear tell. Might be a wrong tell — never talked to any myself. Prideful, that’s for sure, and smart, and full of guts. Folk say they’re always ready for a fight but they never start one, and that’s good if it’s true. They take them big slow wagons into lone places no ordinary caravan woud ever go, and I’ve hearn tell of bandits tackling a Rambler outfit now and then, but never did hear of the bandits getting the best of it. Every Rambler boss got a silver token that gets him across any national boundary without no fuss, did you know that?”

“No, that a fact? Hoy, that means if we was with these people we could go smack over into Levannon, wouldn’t have to steal no boat and dodge the customs and so on?”

He caught my arm and swung me back and forth a little, so I’d keep my mouth shut while he thought. “Jackson, you been contemplating stealing a vessel for to cross the Hudson Sea and similar such-likes?”

“Oh,” I said, “maybe I done some thinking that a’n’t so big of a much. But is that a fact, Sam? They could get us across if they was a-mind to?”

“They wouldn’t do it smuggling style — lose their token if they did. I’ve hearn tell they never do that.”

“But they could maybe take us into the gang?”

He looked pretty sober, and let go my arm. “Wouldn’t be a one to say they couldn’t — you anyway. You got this music thing, and kind of a way with you.”

“Well hell, I wouldn’t go with ’em unless you did.”

He spread out his big clever hands on the fence rail, more than ever quiet and full of reflection, studying all we could see of the Ramblers’ layout. One of the plain wagons was parked, blocked up with its open rear toward the fence, near where the girls were loafing, and several large boxes stood in it; that would be the selling wagon, I knew from Rambler shows I’d seen at Skoar — they’d have a pitch going there by afternoon, with cure-all medicines and considerable junk, some of it good: I’d bought my fine Katskil knife from a Rambler trader. Another wagon, a covered one, stood facing a wide roped-off area of ground, and it had an open side; that would be the theater. “In that case,” said Sam, and I felt he was as nearly happy as either of us could be with East Perkunsvil so short a way in the past — “in that case I believe you might give it a go, Jackson, for I think I see my way clear to go along.”

“What you got in mind?”

“Terr’ble question, Jackson, always — nay, if I’m a-mind to squeeze, worm or weasel my way into some place where I a’n’t expected, I most generally do. Wait a shake.” I’d been about to clamber over the fence before my nerve gave out, but just then a new man came in sight around the wagon where the gray-haired woman was sitting, and leaned against the back step to pass the time of day with her.

He wasn’t actualy big — not as tall as Sam — but managed to seem so, partly with the help of a thick black shag of beard that grew half-way down his chest. The black tangle matching it on his head hadn’t been cut for two or three months, but I noticed the man had his vanities: his brown shirt and white loin-rag were clean and fresh, and his hairy legs wound up in a pair of moose-hide moccasins as wonderful as any I ever saw, for their gilt ornaments were nudes, and the antics he could make those golden girls perform just by wiggling his toes would have stirred up the juices of youth in the dustiest Egyptian mummy and I mean a married one.

Sam said: “I get a feeling that’s their boss-man, Jackson. Look him over. Try and imagine him getting mad about something.”

I swung myself over the fence. Once over, I felt everyone watching me — the girls, the card-players, even the white-haired man from under his straw hat, and the blackbearded boss-man whose voice was still going on in a mild rumble like a thunder-roll ten miles away. “Da,” I said — Sam smiled quickly, wincingly as if all pleasure were partly pain, and I dare say it is — “Da, I can imagine it, but I can’t no-way express it.”

“Uhha. Well, you heam tell about the hazy old fa’mer that got so nearsighted he set out to milk a bull?”

“And so then?”

“So nothing, Jackson, nothing special except they do say he a’n’t come down yet, not to this day.”

I had to go over then, or not at all. My good white loinrag helped, but crossing the immense twenty yards between me and the musicians, my knees quivered, and my hands too, as I lifted out the golden horn and let the sunlight touch it; however, the way their faces gleamed with interest and excitement at seeing the horn cleared away my jitters and left me free to be another friendly human being myself. I said: “Can I make some music with you?”

The kitten with the dangerous lock of hair on her forehead and the quail with the bedroom lips were suddenly all business and no mockery. Music was serious. Bonnie asked: “Wherever was that made? Isn’t it Old-Time?”

“Yes. I a’n’t had it long. I can only play a few airs.”

“Bass range?”

“Nay, seems best in the middle — I know there’s notes on both sides I can’t play yet.”

Somebody said: “Boy ’pears to be honest.” I’d felt all along I was being watched from under that straw hat.

The girls paid Stud no attention. “What airs do you know?” Minna Selig asked, and I learned she possessed a bedroom voice too, but right now she was all business, like Bonnie.

“Well,” I said — “well, ‘Greensleeves’ — ‘Londonderry Air’—” Minna’s soft-voiced gut-string banjo immediately sang me a few small chords, and I went wandering into “Greensleeves” with of course not the dimmest notion of what key I was using, or of harmony, or of how to adapt myself to another performer. All I had was the melody, and a natural feeling for the horn, and some guts and a whole lot of good will, and a keen ear, and a tremendous admiration for the way the neat black-haired girl sat there cross-legged with her banjo and her bedroom thighs. Then right away Bonnie’s mandolin arrived, laughing and crying silver-voiced; her big gray eyes played games with me — that didn’t distract her from the music, for she could slay a man with those things and never need to give a moment’s thought — and her racing fingers gave my playing a translucent trembling background all the way through to what I supposed was the end.

The white-haired drummer had swung his arm to beckon a friend or two. People were coming out of the wagons. The flute-player and the cornet man had given up their card-game and were just standing by, listening, thinking it over. So well was the horn responding to me, for a minute I was in danger of thinking it was my playing that drew them and not the Old-Time magic of the horn itself. When I play nowadays that may be true; it can’t have been true that day, though even sweet sharp Bonnie said later on that I did better than any ignoramus had a right to.

When I had (I thought) finished the melody, Minna’s hand pressed my arm to check any foolishness, and away went Bonnie’s mandolin shimmering and heartbreaking to find the melody on the other side of the clouds transfigured by a tempo twice as fast and dancing in the sun. Someone behind me had brought a guitar, which now was chuckling agreeably about the fun Bonnie was having up there. And Minna was intently humming three notes very close to my ear, just audible to me, and whispering: “Play those on your thing real soft when she goes to singing. Trust your ear how and when to play ’em. We’ll goof some but let’s try.”

Do you know, we didn’t goof, much? I was ready when Bonnie’s light soprano soared, and Minna unexpectedly came through with a contralto smooth as cream. Well, those girls were good and double good. They’d been making music together since they were Rambler babies, besides having a rare sort of friendship that no man could ever break up. I never knew whether they were bed-lovers. Pa Rumley was a little down on such variations, I suppose a hangover of the usual religious clobbering in childhood, so it was a question you didn’t ask. If they were, it didn’t turn them against the male half: I had both saying oh-stopdon’t stop after a while, and they were both all the more delicious for not taking me too seriously, since we were not, as people call it, in love.

When Bonnie sang a second verse of “Greensleeves” I heard something more happen along with that guitar. Intent on making my horn do what I hoped they wanted, I felt the addition only as a flowing, sustaining chordal murmur, almost remote although I knew the singers were standing quite close behind me. All our best were there — Nell Grafton and Chet Spender and handsome Billy Truro, the only tenor I ever heard of who could also play Romeo and skin mules. And for the down-in-the-cellar thunderpumping bass we had Pa Rumley himself.

Bonnie wasn’t playing while she sang, but holding her mandolin away, her other hand on my shoulder bedam — never mind, Minna had one on my knee, and some of that was to make a romantic picture for the crowd that was increasing out there in the road, but most of it was real. Bonnie somewhere had learned to sing without too much distorting the charm of her rounded, heart-shaped face — well, with nice teeth, ravishing complexion and brilliant eyes, who’d care if she did have to let the daylight in on her tonsils for some of the big notes? And by the prettiest accident, that day she was wearing a green blouse with long sleeves — you’d have thought the whole show had been planned a month in advance, and I’m sure the yucks believed it was.

When the song was done, and she’d waved and blown a kiss to the crowd, which was stomping and clapping, even a few of them snuffling — why, didn’t she grab my shirt to pull me on my feet? “C’m’ on, kid!” she said — “they love you too.”

There was a dizzying pleasure in it, not spoiled by my knowledge that most of the excitement was for Bonnie and ought to be. Yes, I liked it, and I was growing up, I wasn’t too demarbleized—

Nickie and Dion still quarrel occasionally about correcting the places where I goof the spelling. I can’t interfere much, because I did ask them to, away back when I started this book. The last time I heard them beating away at it was very recently, in fact only a few minutes ago, I can’t think why. I had dozed off in the sunshine or appeared to, and I heard Nickie ask Dion how he could be sure I hadn’t meant to write it that way. “Can’t,” he admitted, “and even if I could, why should I be elected to defend the mother tongue against the assaults of a redheaded songbird, politician, hornplayer and drunken sailor? Hasn’t she been raped by experts for centuries past counting, ever since Chaucer made such a bitched-up mess of trying to spell her, and doesn’t she still perk?”

“A heartless, mean and lazy brute,” said Nickie. “I hate you, Di-yon, the way you can’t even come to the aid of Euterpe who lieth bleeding in the dust.”

“Euterpe — who she?”

“What! You calling me a twirp?”

“No, but—”

“I ’stinctly heard you say ‘You twirp!’ ”

“Miranda — Euterpe was not the God-damn Muse of Spelling.”

“Oh, that’s right. That was Melpomene.”

“Sorry-sorry, she was the Muse of Tragedy.”

“So all right! So English spelling always was a tragedy, so what other girl could handle it, so don’t give me all that back talk or you’ll wake up Davy.”

I’d just perfected a theory of the origins of English spelling, so I woke up officially to share it with them. You see, there was this ancient gandyshank in the dawn of history who had a nagging wife and an acid stomach and chilblains, but English hadn’t been invented, which left him in the demarvelizing position of being unable to cuss. However, the people in charge of politics had passed a revelation to make the alphabet and then chopped it into sticky chunks and passed them around so there’d be enough letters for everybody; so when the old jo’s wife yakked or his feet hurt or his convictions rifted up on him, he’d snatch the alphabet chunks and heave them at the side of a cliff, the only form of cussing adapted to those early days. Centuries later some scholar with a large punkin head and very small bowels of compassion discovered the cliff and invented English right off whiz-pop just like that. But by then all the combinations a decent man would spell had washed off in the rain or the crows had et them.

Nickie asked: “How’d old Cliffbottom’s wife come to nag and yak so if English hadn’t been invented?”

Not a bit demongrelized, I told my wife: “She was slightly ahead of her time.”