Davy

21

We did stick around — four years.

Pa Rumley was a sharp-minded observant man, sober; drunk, he was still a good critic of himself, unless he passed a certain point of drinking that he could not always recognize, and tumbled into a black well of despair — then he had no judgment in his darkness, and someone had to stand by and drink with him till he dropped in his tracks. Except during those very rare crises, his sadness always had around it a nimbus of mirth, just as his loudest laughter carried the overtones of grief. True for all of us, but in him it was more obvious, as though the emotional raw stuff that nature, playing safe, doles out to most of us by the teaspoonful, had been sloshed into Pa Rumley with a bucket.

Pa used to claim that he’d fought and toiled and connived to make himself boss-man of the best God-damn gang in the world for the simple reason that he was at heart a benefactor of the God-damn yuman race, which without him would likely drop dead of its own boredom and meanness and hard luck and general shitty stupidity. And it’s a fact, when you got down to cases he really didn’t seem to have a thing in the world against yumanity except that he never would pronounce the plague-take-it thing with an aitch.

He had a long, thick-bridged nose that spread at the tip into a double knob. The whole organ had been slammed into at some time in the faraway past, so that when I knew him it aimed more or less at his right shoulder. He said it was no battle that bent it, more likely somebody sat on it when he was young. He asserted that in fact he never did fight except now and then with a club, which was why he never got licked. However, when I saw him personally lay out Shag Donovan who thought he was boss of Seal Harbor, Pa used no club except the knobby side of his fist, and all two hundred pounds of Shag went softly to sleep. (I was a bit helpful in that Seal Harbor thing, being fifteen and on the quarrelsome side for a while, a temporary trait, a sort of growing pain.) Another time, I heard Pa say that his nose took that starboard slant from having to keep alert and sniffing for the righteous, who generally come up on a man from behind.

It was a good commanding nose anyway, and useful to the gang because it told of his mood: so long as it stayed red or sunset pink there was nothing much to worry about, but if it went white while Pa was still sober, the wise thing to do was to keep out of sight and hope for the best, supposing you had anything on your conscience. His eyes were important signals too, small and black and restless. Just contrary to his nose, they went bloodshot when he was on the warpath — but of course if you were near enough to notice the swollen veins you wouldn’t benefit by running.

I never knew him to clobber anyone who hadn’t, according to Pa’s lights, earned it. Anyone who did received the quick tranquillizing sensation of a tall building falling on him, and when he dug himself out from under that, always amazingly undamaged, he could do as Pa said, God damn it, or quit. In all my time with Rumley’s no one left voluntarily until I did, and when I did it was no fault of Pa or myself: I left with his friendship and good wishes. If I could ever meet him again — idle remark, with all the sea between us and no prospect that any of us will ever turn again toward our native countries — it would be an occasion for affectionate talk and some long drinks. He’d be crowding seventy, now I think of it — and yet, he seemed so durable, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the gang is still Rumley’s Ramblers, still traveling somewhere and himself stifi the law and all the prophets.

He never got rough with the women, except for the loveroughness he must have provided when he took one as a partner for a night or a week or whatever length of time suited both. Now and then I’ve heard them wailing musically from the cubby-hole in his wagon — laughing the next instant or shouting wild talk with scant breath the way a woman won’t do unless she’s truly kindled. And I’ve seen them come out of there looking mighty rumpled, but never discontented.

Pa Rumley didn’t talk about his cot-work — those who do often haven’t done it of course — but some of the women did, to me no less, after I’d been with the gang a good while and developed a habit of listening, a thing almost unheard of in the teens. Minna Selig especially, three or four years older than I, was all hell on analyzing her feelings, for some odd time-passing fun she got out of it. I recall one occasion when she couldn’t rest until she’d stacked up my performance (her word) against Pa’s, detail by detail. I liked that quail, but that was one occasion when I wished she’d shut up — after all, I’d never claimed to be that good! Bonnie Sharpe could let in the daylight on Minna’s intellect with a poke or two, but I didn’t have the knack. When Bonnie wasn’t around, Minna would go after a joke or a light remark as if it were a school problem, and everything else must wait till she’d explained it back to you and sorted Out all its unreasonable aspects. I don’t mean she was grim, she just got her kicks out of it, some way; I think the sweet kid got as much pleasure out of such operations as a dumb creep like me gets out of laughing. It was Pa Rumley’s singleness of purpose, she explained, that made him better in bed than a boy — “Not meaning for to hurt y’ feelings, Davy, it’s just something an older man learns, I guess. Pa’s like a rock, see, I mean even his face gets hard, smooth, cold almost, like he a n t hearing you no more at all, and you know you can do anything — holler, fight, struggle as much as you want, there’s no danger you’ll get away. Why, the wagon could catch afire and he wouldn’t stop till he’d have it, right there.” (I said: “You mean it’s like being screwed by a mountain?” She wasn’t listening.) “Now you, Davy, you be mostly too polite,” said that nice Rambler quail instructing an ex-yard-boy. “And this might surprise you but it’s a fact, Davy, a woman don’t like too much of that.” I says: “No?” “No,” she says — “in fact it might surprise you, but a woman don’t always mean exactly what she says — I know, it’s real surprising.” I said: “Sure enough?”

She said sure enough, and went on explaining it in the very friendliest way, I remember, while I said uhha and ayah and think-of-that-now — you know, being polite because it’s my nature — while we were hearing also the loud lazy screak of the wagon-wheels and the country sounds outside. I was seventeen at the time of that conversation, if my memory hasn’t goofed, and the countryside would have been the almost tropic splendor of southern Penn. It comes back to me with the musky sweetness of scuppernong grape in the air along with Minna’s fragrance, and I lying politely on her bunk with a leg slid conveniently under her hot and sweaty little bare brown tail, waiting (politely) until the never-hurrying wagon should provide just the right amount of jolt to swing us back into action. I knew Minna was right of course, and what she said doubtless had some effect, or I’d have heard other complaints about politeness later on, and I can’t recollect that I ever did.

Pa had never married. A Rambler boss seldom does. It’s traditional that he should remain available to soothe the restless, arbitrate quarrels, comfort the widow, instruct the young, and pacify all concerned by procedures not very convenient for a married man.

He was wondrous patient with the children, the small ones anyway; until they were seven or eight years old he scarcely tried to comb them out of his hair. There were seven when Sam and I arrived, a better showing than most gangs could make — seven children, twelve women, fifteen men, so Sam and I brought the gang total up to thirty-six. Three more children were born during my four years with Rumley’s. The oldest child was Nell Grafton’s boy Jack, ten when I first saw him; his father Rex Grafton had gone blind with cataracts near the time of Jack’s birth, and had taught himself harness-making, basketry, other skills. Jack was a handsome hellion born for trouble. Nell, that big sweet woman, mothered the whole gang and looked after her proud sharp husband in a way that sheltered his raw nerves and yet steered him away from selfpity, but her own wild boy she couldn’t control. Once or twice I tried to beat the cruel streak out of him, and that didn’t work either.

The bearing of Rambler children presents a continual problem to the Holy Murcan Church . How can the authorities be sure that all pregnancies are reported, no woman left alone after the fifth month, every birth attended by a priest, with a group that’s always on the go, in and out of the wilderness, over national boundaries without inspection, even excused from the taxes and other responsibilities that go along with settled residence and national citizenship? You’re right — they can’t. A Rambler is called — legally and with the consent of the Church because the Church can’t help it — a citizen of the world.

The Church has made sporadic efforts to take over the Ramblers, invariably catching its tail in the crack. Every now and then some enterprising prelate gives birth to an idea he thinks is new. The Archbishop of Conicut had a go at it in 318, not very long before we made a circuit of that country and then headed for southern Katskil and Penn. He decreed that every Rambler gang passing through Conicut must have a priest as one of its members. Simple, S’s he — how could they object, and why did nobody think of this before? ord got around before his law went into effect; when did, every gang had left Conicut. Outside each important border post — in Lomeda, and at Dambury in the south of Bershar, and Norrock which is Levannon’s only real southern port, and even away over at Mystic on the border of Rhode — a Rambler gang set up camp within sight of Conicut customs officers, with whom they fraternized agreeably enough, but for three months no Rambler gang set foot on Conicut soil, and no Rambler boss took the trouble to explain why.

They were polite with all visitors, but in those encampments they put on no shows that would be visible from the Conicut side. No music, for music doesn’t recognize boundaries. No selling to Conicut customers, and no passing on of news. The gangs just sat there. A three-month block was enough to rouse every town and village in the land to a dither of exasperation and protest — nay, they were still grumbling about the “Rambler Strike” months later when we passed by, and I wished we’d been in on the fun, but we were away the hell up in northern Levannon at the time. Often during the three months a few handpicked, soft-spoken priests visited the encampments and offered themselves as members — temporary members, even members with limited privileges, anything to get the gangs back in the country before the public rioted. The hopeful fathers were regretfully told that the boss just hadn’t quite made up his mind but would be happy to inform them when he did. I think now, looking on it with the historical background that Nickie and Dion have given me, that if the Church had tried to get tough with the Ramblers the thing could have caught fire in a religious war, with results totally unpredictable; but they were smart, and played it soft. Then at last the gang at Norrock — by prearrangement, and that’s a story in itself, the way the Rambler newsrunners went flickering along the back roads and dim trails from gang to gang with few the wiser — did accept a nice wee priest as a temporary member, and set forth across the country.

They’d prepared for it. That was Bill (Lardpot) Shandy’s gang. Pa Rumley knew Lardpot; he said the man did everything the way he ate, never by halves. Before they set out with the priest, the big sexy pictures on the wagons were painted over with gray — drab and sad. Wherever they stopped, as if for the usual entertainments, no music was offered, just hymns. No plays, no peep-shows. Instead of the account of news from distant places that a Rambler boss customarily provides at the start of every visit, the priest was invited to deliver a sermon. This really hurt, for as I’ve said, the Ramblers are the one source of news that the people can trust: nothing else in our timid, poverty-ridden, illiterate world takes the place of the newspapers of Old Time. In much less than three months all Conicut was bubbling with rumors — earthquakes in Katskil, atheist uprisings in Nuin, Vairmant overrun with revolutionaries, prophets and three-headed calves. That priest, poor devil — Lardpot had purposely chosen a born innocent — did actually preach a sermon, twice, the second time to a loyal hard-core group of five elderly ladies; they couldn’t hear very well, but were gratified to learn the Ramblers had abandoned their nasty ways in favor of nice family-type instruction.

A law that originates in the Church is, naturally, never going to be repealed.[22] But before Bill Shandy’s gang reached the border of Rhode, the Archbishop announced at the Cathedral in New Haven that the wretched clerk who originally transmitted the archiepiscopal message had committed an odious blunder of omission, for which he was now doing a penance that would keep him occupied for a while — here they say the Archbishop smacked his lips and smole a somewhat secular smile. What the Archbishop really said — and if he hadn’t been so busy looking after the spiritual welfare of his flock he’d have learned of the error and corrected it much sooner — what he really said was that any Rambler gang which so desires may accept a priest as a member etc. etc. Observe, please, said the Archbishop, how vast a difference may result from the presence or absence of three little words, and do try to govern yourselves accordingly, and praise the Lord, and be mindful what you say. So there was dancing in the streets. I don’t see how the best of Archbishops could get much more etcetery than that.

So, in practise, the Rambler citizens of the world live mostly by what the Church, like an uneasy schoolmistress, calls the “honor system.” This means that a Rambler boss must take over in his own person many of the functions of policer, priest and judge. He is expected to see to it that pregnancies are reported, even if the gang is likely to be a hundred miles away a few months later. He must make sure women are properly attended through the critical time. And if by chance a mue is born when the gang happens to be not within reach of a priest, the Rambler boss himself must take the knife in his own hand and be certain it penetrates the heart, and with his own eyes see the body buried under a sapling that has been bent over on itself to form the symbol of the wheel…

Rumley’s other three wagons, except the theater wagon, each had enough compartments for a maximum of twelve people without obliging anyone to sleep in the “front room,” which was thought to bring bad luck — Rambler people were full of small superstitions like that, singularly free from the large ones. Including the headquarters wagon, the top limit for the whole gang would have been forty-two. Some gangs have six wagons or even more; that’s too big. Thirty-six people, the number after Sam and I joined, was comfortable, not so big that Pa couldn’t keep track of all that went on, but big enough so that the toughest bandit outfit wouldn’t attack us — Shag Donovan’s boys weren’t bandits but town toughs, a far stupider breed.

That first day in Humber Town, after accepting us into membership Pa Rumley took off to look after this and that, and I recall Bonnie Sharpe settled down with the back of her head against Mam Laura’s knee making small music with her mandolin, which left no one but Minna to look after Sam and me.

Rambler life followed a rhythm like that, of swift and obvious shifts from tension to calm. Bonnie had clearly relished heanng my story and Mam Laura’s questions and my Da’s occasional remarks, her humorous girl’s eyes huge and gray turning from one to another of us, never missing a thing. Then I was done, and Bonnie knew that Minna would look after us if nobody else got around to it, so for Bonnie I suppose the universe comfortably narrowed down to a trifling section of the red bear-skin, the shiny mandolin strings, the light sounds of music she was making, the pleasure she took in her own healthy body and the warmth of Mam Laura’s knee. A time of tension, a time of uncomplicated quiet with music in it — I learned that rhythm too, after a while. If Nickie had not also learned it I couldn’t get along with her as I do — well, without it she’d be someone else, unrecognizable. Spare me from living with worthy souls whose bow of enthusiasm is never allowed to rest unstrung.

Minna Selig, as she took us over to one of the other wagons, was wearing under her black curls a cute frown of thoughtfulness—

It has just this moment occurred to me that some of you who may or may not exist may also actually be women. If so, you would insist on knowing what else Minna was wearing, this preoccupation with what the other quail have on being an ineradicable trait which I have never been able to beat out of a single one of you. Kay — dark cherryred blouse and sloppy linsey pants, and moccasins like what we all wore — all except Pa, that is, who would have reamed out anyone he caught imitating his gilt nudes.

Minna found places for us, just by chance (she said) in the same wagon where she and Bonnie slept. A happy chance: I kept the same compartment all the four years. Bonnie went over to another wagon when she married Joe Dulin in 319, and Sam later moved in with Mam Laura, a courtship I’ll tell about — but only a little, only the surface happenings, for that’s all I know: there was a depth to it, naturalness, inevitability, which they would not have wanted to explain if they could, and whatever I wrote about it would be no better than half-educated guesswork.

Yes, I stayed with that place Minna picked for me, making a home for myself out of a hole four feet by eight by seven, learning how to live cramped in small ways but not in large — unless you want to say that we’re all bound to be cramped in a moment of time that rarely reaches even a century, on a speck of stardust that’s been precariously spinning in nothing for a mere pitiful three or four billion years. I was also learning how few important material possessions there are that can’t be readily stowed in four-by-eight-by-seven, leaving room for yourself, and now and then for Minna.