Davy

23

We came down on Seal Harbor like a May wind; Shag Donovan and a dozen of his bully boys smacked into us like a wind out of a sewer. As I think I mentioned, three of them got rather dead, but it wasn’t much of a brawl. Four of them rushed our little theater while we were puttmg on our souped-up version of Romeo and Juliet. Minna was doing Juliet as usual; the hoodlums’ idea was to drag her off into the bushes while the camp was turned upside down. But Pa had smelled trouble, a gift that seldom failed him, and we were ready. There was a personal element in it: Pa had met Shag some years before and got the worst of it; this time he took an artist’s pleasure in cooling Shag off before things could get too serious. Two of the three who wound up dead had got as far as grabbing Minna and tearing her clothes — rape was fashionable up there, and I suppose they expected you to get used to it — so Tom Blame and Sam clubbed them maybe a bit harder than they meant to; luckily Minna wasn’t hurt. Third man who perished got caught in a rather unusual way by Mother Spinkton’s Home Remedy. He was running fast, myself behind him at the time with my knife out and blood in my eye; he was passing through the shadow of one of our supply wagons just at the moment when four of his friends toppled it over; a full case landed on his back.

In a hazy fashion, the crowd was on our side. They had to live with Donovan’s gang, however, and we didn’t, so they left the fighting to us, and helped us by stealing less than you’d expect them to while we were busy. Several bottles in that case of Mother Spinkton broke, after which our guests showed a marked disinclination to hang around — you could almost say that Mother won the war. And by the way, we included the full value of those busted bottles in the bill that Pa Rumley presented next day to the Seal Harbor Town Council no less. Don’t think they didn’t pay it. They whimpered and said they were doing it just to get rid of us before we disturbed the peace. Pa Rumley counted the silver and tied the sack to his belt without asking the obvious question. Life in Seal Harbor had its ups and downs, that was all. A small cheerful crowd followed us to the city gates and cheered us as we departed south.

Speaking of Romeo and Juliet, we always did our best by that one, although since our theater was only a curtamed opening in the side of a wagon we had to simplify it some. The balcony job for instance-the whole stage opening had to be the balcony, with Br’er Romeo operating from the ground, which was all right — good realism — so long as he remembered not to get himself tangled with a wagon-wheel in a spirited moment and set the whole damned balcony swaying and squeaking. Billy Truro, a romantical tenor type, was usually Romeo, and he sometimes got a little carried away, especially when it came to bellering that line; “Oh, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?” Hung up there on that plague-take-it wagonwheel with Minna fading out on him, he couldn’t help but win the sympathy of the house.

As for the text, Pa used to claim it was a genuine condemned version; Mam Laura allowed he was right. She didn’t have it among her books, so I never read the whole thing till I had the freedom of the Heretics’ secret library at Old City. It’s true there was something slightly drastic about our manner of tearing through the play in two fifteen-minute acts, with an extra sword-fight, but that was the way the yucks liked it: we aimed to please, and what the hell more can an artist do? As Juliet, Minna Selig was an absolute copper-riveted whiz. I can still hear her making with “Oh, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb, lest that thy love prove likewise variable.” Often she’d leave out the line with the orb in it, for she could smell a crowd almost as acutely as Pa Rumley, and tell whether the yucks were the type who’d be so irritated by hearing a word they didn’t know that they might start hooting and hell-raising. Frankly I don’t know what any yuck could do with an orb.

Hoy, little Minna in her nightgown, with her dark hair a mist around her big eyes! — why, she was Juliet, the way she looked innocent as a kitten and not much smarter, and pretty enough to make the dullest yuck want to cry. Bonnie adored watching her perform. I remember we gave Romeo another whirl at the very first stop we made after leaving Seal Harbor. That was down in Vairmant, for we’d taken the road on the eastern side of the mountains, where Rumley’s hadn’t appeared for several years. Bonnie and I watched the show out front — Bonnie was still pretty warm for me after our little excitement in April — and she was in ecstasies whenever Minna-Juliet sounded off, hugging my arm and exclaiming over and over under her breath: “Listen at them chest notes! Aw, Davy, it’s gonna make me cry — ooo-eee — ooh, a’n’t she a pisser!”

That road east of the mountains was presently leading us down along the west bank of the lovely blue Conicut, and we took our time in that pretty country, which is full of little villages and all of them good for a pitch. Pa never would explain what old trouble it was that obliged him to keep out of Nuin: it was a question you just didn’t ask. But he’d been born in Nuin and was bungfull of Nuin history, and disapproved of most of it. I remember a day on the river road when we were approaching the little city state of Holy Oak, north of Lomeda. Old Will Moon was somewhat too drunk to handle the mules — a fault he had — and Pa had taken over for him while he slept it off. Pa enjoyed driving anyway, and carried on a running grudge fight with Old Lightning, the near hind mule on the headquarters wagon. Old Lightning never seemed to pay any attention, but could generally tell from Pa’s voice when it was safe to fall asleep walking, or slack off so gradually that his harness-mate never caught on to the swindle. Sam was out on the front seat with me that day, Pa slouching between us with the reins, and the splendid blue of the Conicut making a music of color under a friendly sun.

The mere name of Holy Oak had got Pa started on Nuin history, a subject that always chafed him. “This little country was part of Nuin,” he told us, “in the old days of Morgan the First, Morgan the Great they call the old sumbitch. I believe it fit a war of independence after he corked off, and so did Lomeda and the other pisswilly countries this side the river — ecclesi-God-damn-astical states is what they call ’em. Morgan the Great! — gentlemen hark, it’s getting so you can’t believe nothing you hear no more, more b’ token you never could, anyway not with Morgan the Great around. They claim you don’t behold his like no more, and I say that’s a good thing. Account of he was a bird. This little country, this Holy Oak, is supposed to be named for a tree that was planted by Morgan the Great. Kay, I’ve seen it — a’n’t no great circumstance of a vegetable, it’s just an oak tree, and you can say it’s a purty little story, but wait a minute. Let’s reason it out. Let’s look at what history says. You got any idea how many frigging oak trees that old man is supposed to’ve planted for himself? Why, gentlemen hark, it’s pitiful — why, if I had as many hairs growing out of my hide as that old man is supposed to’ve planted oak trees, I’d be bowed down, gentlemen, I’d walk on all fours like a bear till they skinned me for a rug. You may well ask why he couldn’t go and plant a cherry or a pecan or something for a change — git up, Old Lightning, you inis’ble petrified threetenths of an illegitimate hoss’s ass, git up, git up! — you may well ask, and I’ll tell you. The God-durn public wouldn’t let him is the reason — had to be oak or nothing and that’s the royalty of it.”

“Still and all,” Sam said, “he called himself a president, not a king, can’t get around that.”

“Ayah,” Pa shouted, “and there’s the biggest pile of hoss-shit ever left unshoveled!” Well, Sam had said it merely to keep him perking. “President my glorious aching butt! He was a king, and that’s the only excuse for him. I mean you got to make allowances for a king, the way he’s got everybody after him, obliged to king it from dawn to dark — planting oak trees, laying cornerstones and maternal ancestors in sinister bars, why, balls of Abraham and Jesus H. K. Hornblower Christ, they never gave that man any rest — git up, Lightning, God blast the shiveled-up mouse-turd you got for a soul, I got to speak rough to you? — no rest at all. How’d he ever find time for kinging, ’s what I want to know? Look, here’s how it was, on just an average day, mind you, when this poor old sumbitch, this Morgan the Great, is trying to address the fucking Senate on a matter of life and death or anyhow a lot of money. You think he’s going to get a chance to fit two sentences together end to end? — gentlemen hark! No, God butter it and the Devil flitter it, no — and why? Because up pops the Minister for Social Contacts or whatever — ‘Sorry, your Majesty, we got here an urgent message concerning a bed over to Wuster that a’n’t been slept in yet by no royalty, only your Majesty will have to sleep into her kind of quick, so to make it up to Lowell in time for to throw a dollar acrost the Merrimac account it says here in the book you done that on the 19th of April — more b’ token, your Majesty, we just this minute got in a new shipment of oak trees—’ why, goodness, gentlemen, that a’n’t no way to live, not for a great man. Takes the heart out of things, don’t it? How can you expect a boy to want to be President if he knows it’s going to be nag, nag all day long? — you Lightning, God damn your evermore backscuttled immortal spirit, will you git up?…”

It wasn’t only Nuin history that bothered Pa Rumley. He didn’t actually like any part of history, nor anybody in it except Cleopatra. He used to say he knew he could have made out with her real smooth, if he could have met her in her native California when he was some younger and had more ginger in his pencil. Nothing Mam Laura said could ever convince him that Cleopatra hadn’t lived in California . Sometimes he got me to wondering about that myself.

From Holy Oak we went on through the other little Low Countries into Conicut, where they were still feeling the reactions from the Rambler “strike” I told you about. Business had been very brisk, but we got there late, after too many other gangs had had the same idea. We passed on into Rhode, a dreamy small land hardly bigger than Lomeda, where coastal fishing is the main occupation and trial marriage the main entertainment — only nation where the Holy Murcan Church allows divorce by consent. The Church calls Rhode a “social testing ground”; they’ve been testing trial marriage there for fifty-some years now without learning anything except that almost everybody likes it. As I understand it, the Church considers this irrelevant, so they go on testing in the hope of more light. While we were there — most of the summer — I naturally did as much testing as possible: Bonnie was drifting then into her permanent attachment with Joe Dulin, and Minna (I don’t like to say it) could now and then be a bore. The testing was fine, and I reached no conclusions that I couldn’t duck.

Since it couldn’t be Nuin, we doubled back through Conicut, and over the border into the southern tip of Levannon, wintering at Norrock where the sound of the great sea is a quieter voice, most of the time, than the one I heard in later years at Old City — there at Old City, Nickie and I lived our private years within sound of the harbor and the big winds. At Norrock on clear days, we could look south from our hillside camp to a far-off blur of sandy shore, the Long Island that Jed Sever used to tell us about; and that seemed far in the past; and so did his death — and my hot-cool games with Vilet — and shafts of green-gold light remembered, slanting down into the warm stillness of Moha wilderness. Oh, the sound of ocean is the same voice wherever you hear it, and be you old or young — at Old City, or Norrock, or along the miles of achingly brilliant white sand in the loneliness of southern Katskil, or speaking of tranquillity on this beach at Neonarcheos.

The spring of 219 saw us traveling north again on the great Lowland Road of Levannon, but that time we stayed with it no further than Beckon, the Levannon harbor town across the Hudson Sea from Nuber the Holy City. Beckon is the first place where there’s a reliable ferry-sailer big enough for Rambler wagons. There’s another at Ryebeck, opposite Katskil’s capital city Kingstone, but that would not have done for us: at Kingstone someone might recognize Sam and pass on word to his wife, who would summon the policers and clobber him with every law in the book. Even the military might get snorty about him, though by this time the pisswilly Moha-Katskil war was in the fading past. At Nuber there wasn’t much risk, Sam thought. We put on a mor’l show there, pantaletted up for righteousness’ sweet sake, and we cleaned up nicely with undercover seffing of horny pictures to brighten the private lives of the brethren; elsewhere, selling them almost openly, we never took in half as much.

We drifted south from Nuber by slow stages. People of the Kingstone district seldom traveled in the south of Katskil. Anywhere in the country, however, there was some slight risk for Sam. He didn’t work with the medicine pitch, but just lent a hand at whatever was needed — muleskinning, scene-shifting, helping Grafton at his harnessmaking — and kept more or less out of sight of the public.

He particularly enjoyed being what Mam Laura called a “noise off” during her fortune-telling. She always had a small tent set up for it, with a canvas partition across the middle. In the front there’d be nothing but one little table and two chairs — no crystal or incense or such-like props. But she did love a good noise off. In the back half of the tent she kept a few gidgets — a cowbell, a drum with a crack in it that was no use to Stud Dabney any more but could still make a dismal sort of noise like a bull’s intestines rumbling somewhere on a misty night. At cue words, Sam would work these objects for her, or knock something over, or sometimes heave a long horrible sigh that Mam Laura warned him not to use too often because she could hardly stand it herself. He’d build up the racket little by little until Mam Laura would holler “Hoot-mon-salaam-aleikum!” or “Peace, troubled spirit!” or something else soothing, and then quit for a while. The yuck could never be quite sure that the canvas panel wouldn’t suddenly rise up and reveal some fearful apparition such as Asmodeus or a four-horned Giasticutus or his mother-in-law. Sam claimed that his job was good for him because it like kept him in touch with the arts but without any real Goddamn responsibility. He also said now and then that he was getting old.

It should not have been true, since he was only in the fifties. But in some ways I suppose it was true.

Southern Katskil is altogether unlike the bustling northern part. A ghostly, evasive land — the big rich farms are in the central part, not the real south. Small sandy roads twist through the pine barrens as if in blind pursuit of a goal you’ll never learn. If such a road comes to an apparent end, you feel sure that you must have missed some turnoff that was the road’s real continuation. In many places, inland as well as close to the fine white beaches, it is deep wilderness instead of the curious pines, wilderness as profound as the semitropical jungles of Penn, which I have also glimpsed. They say that bands of the flap-eared apes have sometimes been encountered in the jungle regions of southern Katskil — the same kind that are well known in Penn, shy, wild, a little dangerous.

There are no cities in southern Katskil, unless you want to give that name to the dull harbor of Vyland in the extreme south, on the immensity of Delaware Bay; it hardly deserves it, and is hardly worth the effort it takes to reach it on the long road through the barrens and jungle and enormous swamps. Vyland was once a pirate town, headquarters of a fleet that ravaged Penn’s coastal commerce with the northern nations. Katskil and Penn for once agreed on something, joining forces to clean out the raiders, as we had to do in Nuin with the Cod Islands lot. The Vyland pirates didn’t have the vinegar and cussedness of the Cod Islanders, however, nor any islands for refuge; it was a massacre. Today, Vyland has nothing to show but fisheries and monasteries, which smell alike.

No proper cities there in the south of Katskil, but a good many small vifiages, widely separated, heavily stockaded, their people often showing a dreary distrust of strangers. We seldom had a really good pitch. I have an impression there was a good deal of hookworm and malaria, possibly other sorry conditions that held the people down through no fault of their own.

One village in that region I am compelled to remember. We came to it in the fall of 319, when we were already moving northwest with the idea of crossing over into Penn near their fine city of Filadeffia. It was late afternoon; the front and rear gates of the village were shut but not locked. We rolled down the road with our customary joyous commotion, playing and singing “I’ll Go No More A-Roving,” a song that usually won us a better welcome than any other. When we were drawn up before the still closed and desolate gates, I blew my golden horn to make it plainer than ever that we came in way of friendship. But no one opened to us. It made Pa angry — well, the whole summer in southern Katskil had done that. “Why,” he said — “bugger me blind, we’ll be going in anyhow, and ask them nicely why they won’t open.”

Poor things, they couldn’t — the few who were there in the village were dead, and had been for months. The houses were starting to fall apart, just a little-holes in the thatched roofs where squirrels had gone through, here and there a door fallen off its hinges because the wind had banged it once too often. We went into all the twenty-odd dwellings, finding the skeletons picked clean by the carrion ants and scavenger beetles — only a few, about a dozen in all I guess; all perfectly inoffensive and dry. Most of them lay on the cord or wicker cots that they use for beds in that country; two had remnants of white hair. It was peaceful. Since the dead were all indoors, and the village gates closed against wolves and dogs, the ants and beetles had done nearly all the housekeeping; we were puzzled to notice how little the bones had been disturbed by mice and rats. Pa Rumley said that rats die from the lumpy plague, same as human beings, which I hadn’t known at that time. But I had a back-of-the-neck feeling — we all had it, I think — that this could be some other kind of plague.

One man (or woman) had been left behind on the village gallows. The crows and vultures had dealt with that; the bones lay in a meek pile below the still dangling rope. At any rate the criminal was now on a level with the respectable citizens who had been hopelessly sick, or too old to travel perhaps. One body still sat in a rocking chair by a closed window, a woman by the shape of the pelvis, probably an old woman; dry cartilage still held together the spine and legs and one arm. I felt some lessening of the horror as I compelled myself to look on her tranquillity. In the world that the people of Old Time left to us, these things have happened often enough, and will again.

Penn is a land of good artisans, farmers, artists, philosophers, poets, wealth, laziness — and why shouldn’t they be lazy, with nature lenient as it is, and all that smell of grape and magnolia? In some parts of the land the climate is over-sweet; the heat after a time seems to come, and mildly, from inside you, although still a gift of the sun. That illusion is strongest in the eastern part of the country, where the sea breeze drives fresh off great Delaware Bay. Filadelfia on the Bay is a fine little city quite near Old-Time ruins that are thought to be harmless — in fact they say some of the modern city is actually built over the site of the old. At Filadeffia all necessary work gets done — the streets are clean, the houses orderly — but you never see anyone, slave or free, seriously exerting himself. The citizens have much more resemblance to each other than the people of the northern countries, on the whole; maybe some of their ancestors in the Years of Confusion were exceptionally prepotent — a dark, tall people with an odd hint of Polynesian as that race appears in Old-Time pictures I have seen. I have no theory to explain that. The girls are big-bodied; deliciously lovely in youth, they stay handsome when in the thirties they begin to look old; and they are kind.

Nearly everyone in Penn seems to be kind, within the limits allowed by religion and politics. Their politics consists of defending the border, which is the Delaware River, and keeping even or ahead of the game in commercial horse-trading. This they manage with a fine fleet of small river craft and a neat army which has never been defeated and has never invaded foreign soil. Trade is assisted by a corps of ambassadors in foreign courts who must be about the most trustworthy and likable liars at large — Dion says so, and my own observation, from the time Nickie and I were with him in Nuin politics up to here, bears it out.

It is a peculiarity of Penn that except for the Delaware River between her and Katskil, and a little jag of territory north of the Delaware’s headwaters that used to be a boundary with Moha, her only border is with the wilderness. I believe no one outside the conсdence of the republic’s government has any notion how far beyond that wilderness border Penn explorers may have penetrated. I can’t think of anything more graceful than a cultured Penn citizen changing the subject when the west is mentioned. We were at Jontown in the summer of 321, as far west as any Rambler gang or other foreign group is ever allowed to go; and yet a small road does lead out of that town westerly, up into the mountains, passing right by a large sign that reads END OF TRAVEL.

As for religion, Penn people appear to take it lightly and calmly, going through the motions, putting up with the flummery in a satisfying tongue-in-cheek manner, as large sections of the population evidently did in Old Time for the sake of keeping peace with the neighbors and avoiding the bitterness of true-believing priests. It is not entirely an honest way, nor a good way in my opinion; I could never take it for my way. But it does make for good manners and a certain peacefulness, and I could blame no one very much for following it, if he has no convictions strong enough to be worth the sacrifice of good nature, or if he feels that a polite conformity with the notions of fools is a necessary protection for his adult labors.

Not that I imagine the Penn people to be a super-race operating in secret of any such fairy-tale crud. There in Penn you encounter a full supply of the old mythologies, ignorance, piety, illiteracy, barbarism. But I did sometimes feel that there might be a good deal of curious thought and ferment behind the smiling indolent surface. And I often felt in the presence of Penn people like an energetic barbarian myself, surely not from any wish of theirs to make me feel so. I think that Penn is, not excepting Nuin, the most nearly civilized of the countries we have left behind us. If one had to live somewhere away from Neonarcheos, one could do worse than dwell in Penn with one or two of the big-lipped, deep-breasted women, and grow old with just enough work and worry to enjoy the other hours of idleness or slow lovemaking in the sun. Penn is not like other lands.

My father died there.

It happened in the autumn of 321 at the town of Betlam, which is forty miles north of Filadeffia — distances are large in Penn — and not far from the Delaware. Sam was fifty-six that year, he told me. Fifty-six, full of piss and vinegar and meanness, he said — but at other times, as I’ve mentioned, he remarked that he was getting old.

We had gone to Jontown along the southern limits of Penn, which are marked — (so far as we’re told) — by a wide twisting river called the Potomac as far as a town named Cumberland. There the only road is One that leads north. From Jontown we came back eastward by a northern route, Pa Rumley having it in mind to winter in western Katskil perhaps, or wherever we might happen to be when November arrived. (Pa didn’t enjoy Penn as much as the rest of us — Mother Spinkton sold badly there, the people preferring their own yarb-women and being uncommonly healthy anyhow. Peepshows didn’t do very well either, for Penn citizens are remarkably unconcerned at nakedness in spite of all the church can do to distress them about it: I’ve seen a Penn girl who felt a fleabite flip off her skirt on the street and go to searching with no sign of embarrassment, and onlookers didn’t regard her with breathless horror — they just laughed and offered bad advice.) There at Betlam a number of us fell sick with what seemed at first to be mere heavy colds, with a good deal of coughing and fever. Matters quickly grew worse.

Many of the townfolk had been troubled the same way, we learned, for several weeks. They were disturbed to think we had caught the sickness from them — a generous, decent place, where they understood music also, actually listening as crowds seldom do — and they did everything they could for us.

Pa hadn’t even tried a medicine pitch there at Betlam. He snarled — around camp where no Penn ear could hear him — that they were hightoned crum-bums who didn’t understand science: Mother’d be wasted on them. But he knew that was foolish talk, and his heart wasn’t in it. When the sickness began to alarm us, he took Mother Spinkton himself, and grumbled that it wasn’t a good vintage — maybe he’d left out some God-damn essential, getting old and incompetent, somebody’d ought to bury him if he was getting that senile — and he went about miserably among us with a bottle of her, and a lost look. No bullying, no insisting that we swallow her. Some of us missed his natural manner so much that we drank her in the hope of curing him. It was a bad time.

Nell Grafton’s boy Jack, turned fourteen that year, was the first to die.

Sam had been sitting up with him because Rex and Nell were both quite sick. This was in my wagon. I was already nearly recovered from a light attack of whatever it was. I heard Sam call me in sudden alarm, and I got to Jack’s compartment in time to see the poor kid with a blazing red face — I’d given him his last licking only two weeks before, for tormenting a stray cat — apparently choke to death on his own sputum. It happened too fast; nothing Sam or I could do. My Da sent me for Pa Rumley, and as I ran off I heard him coughing distressfully; he had been seedy for a couple of days but refused to worry about himself. I found Pa helplessly drunk, no such thing as waking him, and so I fetched Mam Laura instead. I remember how a glance was enough to tell her what had happened to Jack, and then she was staring down at Sam, who sat on a stool by Jack’s bunk swaying, his eyes not quite focussing. “You’ll go to bed now, Sam.”

“Nay, Laura, I’m not in bad shape. Things to do here.”

“We’ll do them. You’re to go and rest.”

“Rest. Why, Laura, it’s been, like, a mixed-up hardworking time, you could say. You see, being a loner by trade—”

“Sam—”

“Nay, wait. Seems I got the sickness, I want to say something while my head’s clear — you seen how it goes, they get off in the head. Now—”

She wouldn’t let him talk until we’d got him over to their wagon and into his bunk. I had never before seen her haunted and terrified, unequal to an emergency. Once in bed and yielding to it, Sam did not talk much after all. All I could receive from his difficult and presently rambling speech was that he wanted to thank us — Mam Laura and me — because we had known him without preventing him from being a loner by trade. At least I think that was what he tried to say.

His mind seemed remote after conveying that much to us, but his body was immensely stubborn, unwilling to yield. His battle to breathe lasted three days and part of a fourth night. The medicine priests — there were two in Betlam — came and went, helping us with Sam and three others who were sick, kindly men somewhat less ignorant than those I’ve met outside of Penn. We made them understand that Sam was unable to speak; he was quite conscious at that moment, sneaking me a grateful look behind their backs and the remnant of a grin when I said my father had made a true confession of faith before speech became impossible.

On the third day we thought he might win through — Nell Grafton had, and Rex, and Joe Dulin. But the decline followed. He regained a slight power of speech for an hour, and talked of his childhood in the hill country and remembered loves. After that, each breath was a separate crisis of a lost war. I am reasonably certain nowadays, from knowing the books, that Old-Time medicine might have healed him. We have no such art.

In the world that Old Time left to us, these things have happened and will again.

During even the last rasping struggles to draw air into his lungs, my father’s eyes were often knowing. They would turn to me with brooding and recognition sometimes, or watch a distant thought. They were never angry, peevish, beseeching or apprehensive; once or twice I thought I saw amusement in them, mild and sarcastic, the amusement of a loner by trade. The religion inflicted on him in childhood did not return in his time of weakness, as I had feared it might, to torment him: he was truly free, and died so, a free man looking with courage on the still face of evening.