Davy

20

While “Greensleeves” was still being applauded I heard the black-beard rumble at us: “Put the lid on, kids. They look ripe for Mother.” And as I was wishing I had a clue to what he meant, he said to me carelessly, pleasantly — I might have been underfoot for years and he so used to me he hardly saw me — “Stick around, Red.”

I gulped and nodded. He slouched over to that wagon that held the boxes. The banjo girl pulled me down to sit beside her again and slid a friendly arm around me. “That’s Pa Rumley,” she said. “Next time he speaks to you you say ‘Uhha, Pa.’ ’S the way he wants to hear it is all. And don’t worry, I think he likes you. I’m Minna Selig, so what’s your name, dear?”

Hoy! That was demortalizing if you like. I found out soon enough that Rambler people call each other “dear” all the time, and it doesn’t necessarily mean sweethearting, but I didn’t know it then, and she knew I didn’t. Close to my other ear, the little devil with the mandolin said: “And don’t worry, I think Minna likes you. I’m Bonnie Sharpe, so tell me your name too — dear.”

“Davy,” says I.

“Oh, we think that’s nice, don’t we, Minna?”

Yes, they really worked me over. Well, but for the girls and their mild mischief and warmth and good humor, the end of “Greensleeves” might have been the end of my courage: I might have gathered the rags of my dignity around my shoulders and fled back over the fence with no more word even to Sam about what I wanted most in the world, which was to be accepted by these people and stay with them on their travels as long as they’d have me.

Pa Rumley standing in the back of that wagon flung up his arms. “Friends, I hadn’t meant for to give you this here message of good tidings till later in the day, but you being drawed by our music — and our kids love you for the nice hand you give ’em — why, I’ll take it as a sign to speak a few words, and you pass ’em on to your dear ones. Open up that gate and gether round, for lo, I bring hope to the sick and lorn and suffering — draw nigh!”

It was a pleasant custom in practically all villages and middle-sized towns that had no bigger park, to lend the Ramblers the town green for the duration of their stay, as a camp-site and show area; townfolk wouldn’t normally intrude unless specially invited. I’d broken the rule. I think the reason why the girls said nothing about it was my natural-born goofy look, which often does wonders for me. The yucks opened the gate now at Pa Rumley’s invitation, and drifted in, shy, and with the yuck’s invariable anxiety to watch out against swindling — much good it does him. There were twenty-odd men and half again as many women gathered around the wagon, aggressively doughfaced, wanting to be convinced of something, it didn’t much matter what. I saw Sam had strolled in with them. He stayed in the rear; when he caught my eye over a flock of bonnets and broad straw hats he shook his head slightly, which I took to mean that he had something cooking I’d better not disturb.

“There you are, friends, step right close!” A man would give a lot to own a voice like Pa Rumley’s, big as a church bell but able to go soft as a little boy whispering in the dark. “This here is going to be a blessed day you’ll long remember. You seem to me like fine intelligent souls, responsible citizens, men and women who’ve kept the fear of God in their hearts and evermore prayed and done their share. That’s what I’ll say to myself whenever I think of Humber Town, and good Mayor Bunwick who let us have these fine accommodations, and done so much for us — no sir, folks, Ramblers don’t forget, never believe it if you hear they do. My friendship with your Mayor Bunwick, and the Progress Club, and the Ladies’ Murcan Temperance Union — this is a memory I’m about to cherish all my days.” As for Bunwick, the old fart certainly wasn’t there at that time in the morning, but a number of his ratty cousins undoubtedly were, to say nothing of the ladies — besides, Pa always said that if you set out to kiss an ass you might just as well kiss it good. “Now, friends, you must have seen how this world is a vale of tears and mis’ry. 0 Lord, Lord, don’t Death on his white charger go day and night raging and stomping up and down amongst our midst? — well, gentlemen hark! Why, it might be there a’n’t a one of you except the children, God bless ’em, and maybe even some of them, that a’n’t been bereavered already by the grim reaper. And sickness — yes, I’m a-mind to talk to you about the common sorrows, them that must come soon or late to one and all. They a’n’t fancy things — step in a little closer now, will you? — oh no, nobody makes up stories about ’em, nor sad songs, but I say to you a man laid low by sickness, he’s gone, folks, just as sure as a hero done to death in battle for his b’loved fatherland, amen, it’s a fact.”

He gave them time to look around at each other wise and serious and agree that it was so. “Friends, I tell you there do be some sorrows that can’t never at all be healed except in the ev’loving hand of God and by the tooth of time that heals the blows of fate and dries up the tears of the wayworn, and gently leads, and allows the grass to grow green over lo, these many wounds. But concerning the grief of common sicknesses — now there, friends, I got a message for you.

“Forty-seven years ago, in a little village in the hills of Vairmant green and far away, there lived a woman, simple, humble, Godfearing, mild, like it might’ve been any one of the lovely companions and helpmeets I see before me right now in this good town — where I got to admit I a’n’t yet beheld a member of the tender sex that a’n’t lovely to behold.” (There were just two good-looking women in that whole expanse of landscape and I was sitting between them.) “That’s a fact, no flattery, gentlemen hark! Well, this gentle woman in Vairmant of whom I speak was bereavered of her good man in her middle years, and thereafter she devoted the remainder of a long and blessed life to the healing of the sick. Even her name was humble. Evangeline Amanda Spinkton was her name, and I want you should remember that name, for it’s a name you’ll come to bless with every breath you drawr. Some do say, and I believe it, that Mother Spinkton — ah yes, so a grateful world calls her now! — had in her veins the mystic Injun blood of Old Time. That’s as may be, but there’s no doubt at all the dear angels of the Lord guided her in her lifelong endeavor, her search after them essences of healing that the Lord in his infinite wisdom and mercy has placed obscurely in the simple yarbs that do dwell in the whispering woods or the sunkissed fields or along the gently murmuring streams—”

That gives you his style anyway. Pa never let anyone else handle the pitch for Mother Spinkton; even if he was down sick in bed and too mis’ble to live he’d r’ar up out of it to take care of that. He said he reverenced her too much to let any mere God-damn crumb-bum piddlebrained assistant lay a mortal hand on her sacred hide. He claimed also that he could taste and smell a crowd with a special knack nobody else possessed — except his grandfather of course, dead going on forty years — and this knack always told him right off whether to use gently murmuring streams or dark murmuring caverns. Either one might work all right — oh sure, it would work, he’d say, and spit over the footboard between the mules if he was driving, which he liked to do — it’d work, but the g.m.s. yucks are the common type, and the dark caverns type is different, that’s all, and it’s the mark of a real artist to be able to spot that difference and govern yourself accordingly. Long Tom Blaine used to give him an argument about it when the weather was right — Tom said yucks are yucks and that’s it.

Pa Rumley blathered on, not exactly claiming that God and Abraham and all the angels had worked together showing gentle Mother Spinkton how to construct her Home Remedy, the Only Sovran Cure for All Mortal Complainders of Man or Beast — but you were sort of left of a breathing exercise-he did it because he couldn’t bear doing much more than what a musician would call a scale or a breathing exercise — he did it because he couldn’t bear to let any crowd get away from him, any time, without selling it something. After five or ten minutes more of Mother Spinkton’s character and biography, he squared away for a brisk analysis of a dozen or more diseases, and he was so tender and hopeful and horrible about it — hell, nobody could beat him at that; he’d have you locating so many simpletons[21] throughout your anatomy you simply couldn’t spare the time to die from more than half of them. He’d wind up that section with a horde of widows and orphans at the grave, which Mother Spinkton might have prevented same had they but of knowed — come one, come all! Well, it called for an effort — Mother was one whole dollar a bottle. But did she sell?

Yes.

It’s a matter of sober fact that she was a bird, and I do know, because Pa believed in her himself or appeared to, and had no more mercy on us than he had on the public. If you got sick and admitted it, you drank Mother Spinkton or faced Pa’s displeasure, and we loved him too much for that.

It was Mother’s unpredictable nature that made it impossible to get the best of her. Mother Spinkton could tear into anything at all — epizootic, measles, impotence, broken ribs, cold in the head — and if she couldn’t cure it she wouldn’t try, she’d just start up such a brush fire somewhere else in you that it didn’t matter. Dab some of her on a mortal wound and you would, naturally, want to die, but she’d keep you that interested you couldn’t manage it, for the sheer excitement of wondering how much she was going to hurt next, and where. Of course it might turn out to be an entirely different kettle of shoes of another color, but I’m trying to analyze the psychology of it.

Pa’s own belief in her was a puzzle to me, but I state it for a fact. I’ve watched him making up a fresh batch according to the secret formula he’d worked out himself, just as careful and hopeful and bright-eyed and bushytailed as an Old-Time physicist with a brand new bang. And then by danm he’d drink some. I don’t know — sowbugs, horseradish, hot peppers, raw corn likker, tar, marawan, rattlesnake’s urine, chicken’s gall-bladder and about a dozen more mysterious yarbs and animal parts, usually including goat’s testicles. Those last were hard to get unless we happened to be near the right kind of farm at the right moment, and Pa did allow they weren’t absolutely essential, but he said they gave her a distinctive Tone that he was partial to himself. Tone was important. He’d drunk her with and without that Tone, he said, and it was possible that for the yucks it didn’t really matter, because the first swallow was calculated to lift any yuck directly out of the studious frame of mind — stifi, if you cared, Tone was important. Pa Rumley liked to discuss vintages too. I never became that expert. All I could tell was that in some vintages Mother Spinkton wouldn’t much more than stink out a town hall, but in her best years she was well able to clear a ten-acre field of everything movable, including the mules.

That morning in Humber Town, when Pa had wound up his spiel and was about to start passing out bottles with Tom Blaine wrapping up and collecting coin, along comes a hardcase old rip pushing through the crowd snorting and moaning with a hand to his chest and his long scrawny face all puckered up in the wildest sort of misery, so that I had to goggle twice and swallow before convincing myself that this antique calamity was my own Da, Sam Loomis, acting half again as large as life and rarin’ to go.

“You theah! You talk of healing’? I’m comin’ forward, but there a’n’t no hope for me, not the way my mis’ry’s been ground into me by a life of sin. An, Lord, Lord, f’give a mean horr’ble old man and let ’m die, can’t you?”

“Why, friend!” Pa Rumley responded — “the Lord f’gives many a sinner. Come for’d and speak your mind!” He was a little uneasy. He told us later he wasn’t sure he’d seen Sam and me talking together, at the fence.

Sam, that old scoundrel — my Da, mind you — said: “Praise him evermore, but le’ me lay my burdens down!”

“Let the poor soul come for’d there, good people — he’s a sick man, I can see. Make room, please!” They did, maybe as much from pity as because Sam might have something catching. He did look just about finished — coughing, staggering, fetching up against the backboard of the wagon and letting Tom Blaine support him. If I hadn’t seen that head-shake signal I’d have been over there lickety-doodah, and maybe spoiled things. “Comes on me sudden sometimes,” he said, which took care of any critics who might have noticed him with me before the music, steady and hard as nails. “Real sudden!” — and with his face turned away from the crowd he sent Pa a wink.

After that you’d have thought they’d practised it for years. I whispered to the nearest ear, which happened to be Minna Selig’s: “That’s my Da.”

“Ayah? Did see you together.”

Bonnie said: “A’n’t he a pisser!”

I near-about busted with pride.

Pa Rumley was leaning down to him, a soft angelic smile slathered over what you could see of his face outside the black foam of beard. His voice was globs of maple syrup out of a jug. “Don’t despair, man — nay, and think of the joy in heaven over the one sinner that repenteth. Now then, where at is this pain?”

“Well, it’s a chest mis’ry all kind of wropped up with a zig-zag mortification.”

“Ayah, ayah. It hurts a mite cross-ways when you breathe?”

“O Lord, I mean!”

“Ayah. Now, sir, I can read a man’s heart, and I says to you lo, about this sin, it’s already near-about washed away m repentance, and all you need is to fix up the chest mis’ry so to make straight the pathway for the holy spirit and things — only you got to be careful of course.”

Tom Blame was right there with a bottle of Mother Spinkton, a look of gladness, and the father and mother of a wooden spoon. I have never understood, myself, how ordinary maple wood could hold together under the charring and shriveling effect Mother always had, but there’s nothing I can do except tell history the way it happened. Bedam if those two old hellions didn’t jaw it back and forth another five minutes, with Tom holding the spoon, before Sam would let himself be talked into swallowing some. They were taking a chance, I think: if the old lady had eaten her way through the spoon while they talked, the crowd might have lynched the pack of us.

Sam took it at last, and for a few seconds things were pretty quiet. Well, often you don’t feel anything right away except the knowledge that the world has come to an end. Sam of course had been brought up on raw corn likker and fried food and religion; all the same, I don’t believe anything in a person’s past could actually prepare him for Mother Spinkton. He got her down, and when his features sort of rejoined each other so that he was recognizable again, I thought I heard him murmur: “This happened to me!” It was all right: any yucks who overheard him probably thought he was looking at the nice kind of eternity. Then as soon as he could move, he turned his head so that the yucks might observe the glow of beatitude or whatever spreading over him, and said: “Ali, praise his name, I can breathe again!”

Well, sure, a man’s bound to feel a surrounding glory at finding himself still able to breathe after a shot of Mother Spinkton. But the yucks hadn’t tried any of her yet, so I guess they didn’t quite understand what he meant. “I was nigh unto death,” says the old rip, “but here I be!” And they all pushed in around him then, wanting to touch and fondle the man who’d been snatched from the grave, even tromple him flat in pure friendliness.

Pa Rumley hopped off the wagon. He and Tom pried Sam loose from the public; then Tom went to work selling bottles — for a few minutes he was passing them out about as fast as he could handle them — and Pa Rumley walked the sick man over to that wagon where the grayhaired woman was still sitting smoking her pipe and enjoying everything. I trailed along, and the girls stuck with me.

It’s hard to believe how much space you can find in one of those long covered wagons. The inverted-U frames supporting the canvas has cross-bars usually of hornbeam, just above head-height, and a light wicker-work platform rests on the cross-bars, making a sort of attic for storing light stuff. Those cross-bars also carry hanging partitions for the cubbyhole compartments that run along both sides of the wagon with a single-file walkway between. Up in front there’s an area without sleeping compartments, just canvas walls with usually a window on each side. For laughs, we always called that area the front room.

That was where Pa Rumley took us sow, to the front room of this wagon, which was the one with his own livingquarters. Because it was the headquarters wagon, the front room was nearly twice the size of those in the others, and had bookshelves, a thing I had never seen nor imagined. This wagon had only four sleeping spaces, two double and two single: singles for Mam Laura and old Will Moon who usually drove the mules, a double for Stud Dabney and his wife, and a double for Pa Rumley with whatever woman was sharing his bunk. Pa swept us in there — Bonnie, Minna, Sam and me. Mam Laura came in last with her clay pipe and sat cross-legged as limberly as the girls. I never heard of Ramblers owning a chair — you sat on the floor, or you lay, or sprawled, suit yourself. In that headquarters room, the whole ten-by-twelve floor was covered by a red bear pelt that was the pride of our hearts. Pa didn’t say anything until the gray-haired woman had settled herself; then he just looked at her and grunted.

She puffed her pipe till it went out, and rubbed the bowl of it against her thin nose. Studying Sam she was, and he met the stare, and I had the feeling they were exchanging messages that did them good and were none of our business. Though grayer, she was slightly the younger, I believe. At last she said: “From the no’th of Katskil, be’n’t you?”

“Ayah. A’n’t had word of the war lately.”

“Oh, that. It’ll be over in a couple-three months. Rambler life attract you, maybe?”

“Might, allowin’ for the fact I’m a loner by trade.”

“Did a good jobas a volunteer shill out there. Don’t know that I ever saw that done before.”

So’t of come over me all-a-sudden like, the way I wouldn’t want you to think my boy’s the only talented one in the family.”

“You be his Da then?”

“Ai-yah, that’s a special story,” Sam said, “nor I wouldn’t be a one to tell it without his leave.”

She looked at me then, and I felt the kindness rn her, and I told the story, finding it not hard to do. Bonnie and Minna had quieted down, anyway I guess they wouldn’t have carried on the game of dividing me down the middle directly under her eye. I told the story straight, feeling no need to change or soften it. When I was finished Sam said: “He must be my boy. He don’t lack my oneriness, you see — just a’n’t quite growed up to it yet.”

“Be you,” Mam Laura asked me, “a loner by trade?”

“Likely I must be,” I said, “the way when my Da makes that remark it rings a bell in me. But I like people.”

“So does your Da,” Mam Laura said — “did you think he didn’t, Davy? Nay, I sometimes wonder if loners aren’t the only ones who do.” I was beginning to notice how she spoke rather differently from the rest of us. I couldn’t have explained the difference at that time; I did feel that her way of using words was better than any I’d heard before, and wished for the knack of speaking that way myself. “You truly want to join up with us, Davy, the uncommon way we live that’s never a safe thing, often lonely, hard, tiresome, dangerous?”

“Yes,” I told her. “Yes!”

“Enough to suffer a little schooling in consequence?”

I had no notion what sort of schooling she meant — while I was knocking off my life story I’d already told her I knew all about how to handle mules. But I said: “Yes, I do — honest, I’d do anything!”

Pa Rumley laughed at that, gargling it in his beard, but Mam Laura aimed her smile mostly at the universe and not at me. “Hoy, Laura,” Pa said, “didn’t I keep telling you I’d raise a big old God-damn scholard for you somewheres, to. squeeze the good out’n them books that’ve been wearing down the mule-power on this wagon all these years? Maybe I’ve even raised you more’n one. Be you a man for the books, Sam Loomis?”

My father looked away through one of the little windows — honest glass they were, sewed cleverly into slots in the canvas so that no wind would dislodge them or force the rain through. For a moment or two he looked older and grayer, my father, than ever before; if there was mirth hidden in his craggy face I couldn’t find it. “That wasn’t my fortune, Pa Rumley,” he said. “I tried once to win me a little learning after my young years were long gone — nay, but it don’t matter. If the lady will teach my boy, I’ll answer for it he’ll mind the lessons and get the good of it.”

Pa Rumley got up and tapped Sam’s shoulder and nodded at me. “He blows that horn pretty good too,” he said. “Well — stick around. You’re lucky — gentlemen hark! Yes sir, it just so happens you hit me at a lucky time: I got over the shock of being born a good while ago, more b’ token I a’n’t dead yet. Best time to tackle a man, understand? — somewhere in there betwix birth and death. If the sumbitch won’t give you a decent answer then he never will.”