“I know, Vilet. I know, dear.”
I cut the hen as fairly as I could and passed it around, and was about to start gnawing when Jed dipped his head and mumbled through a grace, mercifully short. Sam and I began eating right afterward, but Jed said: “Vilet, I was listenin’ whiles I prayed, nor I didn’t hear you none.”
It’s a fact: among the true religioners, if a priest is present, people keep quiet while he says the grace right, but if there’s no priest everyone is expected to say it at the same time, leaving it up to God to analyze the uproar and sort out the faithful from the hippy critics. Of course, Jed hadn’t heard Sam or me either, but our souls evidently weren’t his concern, or else he felt they were too much of a job for him. Vilet’s soul was different. She said: “Aw, Jed, I was just — I mean, I thank thee, 0 Lord, for this my daily bread and—”
“No, dear. Bread means real bread, so then if it’s chicken it’s best you say chicken, understand?”
“For this my — Jed, chicken don’t come daily.”
“Oh — well, kay, you can leave out the daily.”
“For this my chicken and command—”
“Commend.”
“Commend myself to thy service in Abraham’s beloved name — kay?”
“Kay,” said Jed.
After the meal Vilet limped off to hunt up more firewood. I wished that while she was busy I could ask who she was and how she came to be with us, but Jed had been observing the luck-charm at my neck, and asked me about it.
I said: “It’s just a puny old luck-charm.”
“Nay, boy Davy, it’s a truth-maker. I seen one just like it at Kingstone, belonged to an old wise-woman. This is the spitn-image of it, bound to have the same power. Nobody can look on it and tell a lie — fact. Le’ me hold it a minute and show you. Now, look this little man or this little woman right in the face and see if you be able to lie.”
Deadpanning, I said: “The moon shines black.”
“How about that?” said Vilet, dumping an armload of dead sticks. “How about that, Jed o’ boy o’ boy?”
“Why, I got him.” Jed laughed, pleased. “Other side of the moon’s got to be black, or we’d see the shine of it reflected onto the curtain of night, big white patch moving the way the moon does, stands to reason. But all’s we see is the holes prepared in the curtain to let through the light of heaven, and a few of them dots that move different, so they must be little chips, sparkiers like, that God took off of the moon to brighten things up. See?”
Drowsily admiring, Sam murmured: “Bugger me blind!”
“Sam, I got to ask you not to use them foul expressions in the presence of a pure-minded boy and a misfortunate woman-soul that’s trying to find her way into the kingdom of ev’lasting righteousness, more b’ token I won’t put up with no more sack-religion, I purely won’t.”
Sam told him he was sorry, in a way that suggested he was used to saying it, and more or less meaning it every time. Good people like Jed would find things dull, I guess, if they couldn’t arrange to get hurt fairly often. As for the luck-charm — well, Jed was much older than me, fortyplus, and a hell of a lot bigger as well as full of divine grace. I did think if 1 took another try at making extra work for the shovels I wouldn’t be stopped by any dab of clay. But Jed was so proud and happy to have taught me something useful and surprising, I hadn’t the heart to spoil it. Maybe I couldn’t have anyway. Whatever mahooha I offered, he could have produced some gentle explanation to prove I hadn’t told a lie-working it along easy and patient, pushing and crowding Lady Truth around and around the bush till sooner or later the mis’ble old wench had to come crawling out where he wanted her, whimpering and yattering, legs asprawl and vine-leaves a-twitching in her poor scragged-up hair. “Well,” I said, “I never did know it had no such power. It was give’ me when I was born, and people have talked me considerable guck since them days, nothing no-way stopping ’em.”
“You just never caught on to the way of usin’ it,” he said. He still held the image facing me, and asked me as if casually: “It was a true-for-sure accident, that thing you told about?”
Sam Loomis stood up tall and said: “Hellfire and damnation! We take his word and then go doubting it?”
Behind me I could hear Vilet quit breathing. Jed might be forty pounds heavier, but Sam wasn’t anyone you’d try to take, head-wound or no. Jed said at last, mighty soft: “I meant no ha’m, Sam. If my words done ha’m, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t ask my pa’don. Ask his’n.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “No harm done.”
“I do ask y’ pa’don, boy Davy.” Nobody could have asked it more nicely, either.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It don’t matter.”
As Jed smiled and gave me back the clay image, I noticed his hand was unsteady, and I felt, in one of those indescribable flashes which resemble knowledge, that he was not afraid of Sam at all, but of himself. He asked, maybe just for the sake of speaking: “Was you bound anywheah special when we come onto you, boy Davy?”
“Levannon’s where I want to go.”
“Why — them’s no better’n heretics over yonder.”
Sam asked: “You ever bejasus been theah?”
“Sure I have and wouldn’t go again at all.”
“Got to cross Levannon if you and Vilet be goin’ to Vairmant like you say.”
“Ayah,” Jed sighed, “but just to cross it.”
They were still edgy. I said: “I dunno — all’s I ever beam of Levannon was hear-tell.”
“Some pa’ts may be respectable,” Jed allowed. “But them quackpots! Snatch y’ sleeve, bend y’ ear. You hear the Church figgers if the quackpot religioners all drift into Levannon that makes it nicer for the rest of us, but I dunno, it don’t seem right. Grammites, Franklinites, that’s what religious liberty has brung ’em to in Levannon. No better’n a sink-hole of atheism.”
I said: “Never hearn tell of Franklinites.”
“Nay? Oh, they busted away from the New Romans in Conicut — New Romans are strong theah, you know. The Mother Church tol’ates ’em so long as they don’t go building meeting-places and stuff — I mean, you got to have religious liberty within reason, just so it don’t lead to heresy and things. Franklinites — well, I dunno…”
Sam said: “Franklinite a’gument sta’ted up about St. Franklin’s name not being Benjamin and the durn gold standard not being wropped around him when he was buried but around some other educated saint of the same name. My wife’s mother knowed all about it, and she’d testify on the subject till a man dropped dead. One of ’em carried lightning into his umbreller, I disremember which one.”
“The Benjamin one,” said Jed, all friendly again. “Anyhow them Franklinites did stir up a terrible commotion in Conicut, disgraceful — riots, what-not, finally made like persecuted and petitioned Mother Church to let ’em do an exodus or like that into Levannon, which she done it, and theah they be to this day. Awful thing.”
“Wife’s mother was a Grammite. Good woman according to her lights.”
“Didn’t go for to hurt y’ feelings, Sam.”
“Didn’t. According to her lights I said. But when it come to my wife, why, I said to her, ‘Jackson,’ I said, ‘you can be a Grammite like your respected maternal pair’nt and prophesy the end of the world till your own ass flies up,’ I said, ‘and bites this ’ere left one,’ I said, ‘or you can be my good wife, but you can’t do both, Jackson,’ I said, ‘account I a’n’t about to put up with it.’ Homed it out’n her too, so’t of.”
“Why,” said Vilet, “you mean old billy ram!”
“Naw, Jackson baby, that a’n’t meanness, that’s just good sense, that is. All’s I mean, she was a lickin’ good church-woman ever after, real saint, never had a mite of trouble with her that day fo’th. About religion, I mean. Did have a few other faults such as talky-talking fit to wear the han’le off a solid silver thundermug, which is why I j’ined the A’my so to get a smidgi
n of peace and quiet, but a real saint, understand, no trouble with her at all, no sir. Not about religion.”
“Amen,” says Vilet, and glanced up quick at Jed to make sure she’d said the right thing.
12
We spent the early afternoon in that place, drying out, getting acquainted. I again said something about Levannon and the great ships, the thirty-ton outriggers that dare to sail to the ports of Nuin by the northern route. And Jed Sever was troubled again, though not this time about religion.
“The sea’s a devil’s life, boy Davy. I know — I had a taste of it. Signed on with a fishing fleet out of Kingstone, at seventeen. I was big as I am now — too big to listen to my Da, that was the sin of it — but when I got back by the grace of God ’n’ Abraham I weighed no more’n a hund’d and twenty pounds. We sailed south beyond the Black Rock Islands, wheah the Hudson Sea opens out into the big water — oh, Mother Cara have pity, that’s a lonesome place, the Black Rocks! They say a great city stood theah in Old Time, and that’s ha’d to understand. As for the big water beyond, oh, it’s a hund’d thousand mile of nothing, boy Davy, nothing at all. We was gone seven months, op’rating from a camp wheah we smoked the fish, a mis’ble empty spit of land, sand dunes, dab or two of low hills, no shelter if’n the wind’s wrong. Long Island it’s called, pa’t of Levannon and they’s a few small villages at the western end within sight of the Black Rocks; any nation’s free to use the eastern end — sand — seldom a living thing except the gulls. Men get to hating each other, such ventures. Twenty-five of us at the beginning, mostly sinners. Five dead, one murdered in a brawl, and mind you, the comp’ny expects to lose that many, expects it. We never saw a new face only when the comp’ny’s freight vessel brung firewood and took back the smoked cod and mackle. And on our saiings — ah, sometimes we was a couple-three hours full out of sight of land! That’s an awful thing. You be in God’s hand, amen, still it’s a terr’ble test of y’ faith. Can’t do it ay-tall without a compass, some call it a lodestone. Comp’ny owned one that was made in Old Time, and we had three men in the crew considered fit to han’le it and keep watch lest God should weary of holding the little iron true to the no’th for our sakes out of his ev’lasting mercy.”
Vilet sighed. “Hoy, I bet them three was the real panjandrums of the outfit, wasn’t they?”
“You don’t understand these things, woman. Man’s han’ling a holy object, y’ own life depending on it, stands to reason you treat him respectful. Ayah, boy Davy, that’s the blind side of nothing when you’re out of sight of land. You work in skiffs, maybe six-seven hours labor with the big nets, and mustn’t leave the main outrigger out of sight for that’s wheah the compass is — come a sudden fog or a great wide wind, what then? — needn’t ask. And when the last net comes in, then it’s fight y’ way back over the cruel water to make camp, get the fish smoked before they spile. To this day I can’t abide the stink of fish, any fish, couldn’t if I was sta’ving. It’s a judgment onto me for a sinful youth. The sea’s not for men, boy Davy. Le’ me tell you — when I came home at last, sick and punied-out though I was I had me a woman-hunger fit to drive a man hag-wild, and — well, I won’t go into that now, but on my first night back in Kingstone I succumbed to the urging of the evil one, and I got robbed, ever’ penny of my seven months’ pay. A judgment.”
Sam said to the fire: “You claim God would gut a man just for heavin’ it into a chunk of nooky?”
“Language! Nay, why was I robbed, if it wa’n’t a judgment? Answer me that! Ah, Sam, I pray for the time when scoffing will pass from you. You harken to me, boy Davy: at sea you be a slave, no other word. A devil’s life. Work, work, work till you drop, then comes the old chief’s boot in y’ ribs, and sea-law says he’s got the right. I wish ever’ vessel ever built was to the bottom of the deep this day moment. I do. You listen to me: it stands to reason, if’n God meant men to float he’d’ve give us fins.”
We got moving soon after that, to look for a location where we might spend the night in better safety. I learned a few things from Sam as I walked with him, out of hearing of Jed and Vilet. Jed, he told me, was short-sighted, objects twenty feet away from him not much more than a blur, and he was sensitive about it, regarding it as another punishment dealt out to him by the Lord. I couldn’t see Jed as any kind of sinner, let alone a big one, but Jed firmly believed the Lord had it in for him — testing him to be sure and maybe friendly at heart, but tough all the same, never giving him a break without taking away something else or reminding him of the Day of Judgment. The poor Jo could hardly turn his head to spit or square off by a tree-trunk to take a leak, without the Lord’s jolting him up about something he’d done wrong ten days ago, or ten years. Unfair, I thought, and unreasonable-but if that was the way Jed and God wanted it, Sam and I weren’t about to butt in with our ten cents worth of suggestions.
* * *
In Old Time it was possible to help people with poor vision, by grinding glass into lenses that let them see almost normally. Another lost art, gone down the drain of ignorance in the Years of Confusion; recovered, however, and brought with us to the island.
At Old City, in the underground workshops adjoining the Heretics’ secret library, there’s been a man at work some thirty years on problems of lens-making; he stifi is, if he’s alive and undiscovered by the victorious legions of God. Arn Bronstein was his name originally, but he elected to adopt the first name Baruch after reading the life of an Old-Time philosopher who also inflamed his eyes grinding lenses, and who built a curious bridge of reasoning to carry him a remarkable distance beyond the bumbling Christianity and Judaism of his day. Our Baruch could have sailed with us; it was his own decision not to. When Dion was trying to persuade him to join the group who would sail with the Morning Star if we should lose the battle for Old City, he said: “No, I will stay where there’s enough civilization, never mind its quality, so that a man can achieve obscurity.” “Obscurity’s all very well,” said Dion — “do you want the obscurity of grinding spectacles for people who can’t wear them without being burned for witchcraft?” Not answering that, having very likely not listened to it, Baruch asked: “And what facilities do you provide for contemplation aboard your — hoo, your beautiful Morning Star?” He asked that, crouching in the doorway of his musty workshop and blinking pink angry eyes at Dion as if he hated him; crying and swearing, Dion called him a fool, which appeared to gratify him.
Baruch was past fifty when the rebellion began. He said his manuscripts and optical gear made a load too heavy to carry, and he would have no one else burdened with it if you please. I remember him so, in the doorway, stoopshouldered, shrunken, tortured eyes winking and watering, garments haphazard rags although he had money for good clothes, saying this and plainly meaning instead that he would not trust others, heedless ham-handed blunderers, to carry a load so precious. Then — ready to reject instantly any show of affection — he gave Dion a small book bound by himself, painfully handwritten by himself, a labor of pure love. It contains everything that Baruch knew and could tell of lens-making, so that granted the brains and patience (we have them) we can duplicate the practical part of the work at any time.
Many times since that day of retreat it has disturbed me to think of a lens-maker afflicted with something like blindness; of a man with a love for humanity who can’t stand the sight, sound, touch of human beings near him. I can imagine nothing more ridiculous or insulting than “feeling sorry” for Baruch; I suppose his rejection of communication is the thing that wounds.
* * *
We killed a stag that afternoon. I saw him in a clump of birches and let fly my arrow for a neck shot. He went down and Sam was beside him at once, the knife swift and merciful in the throat. Jed was generously admiring. Vilet watched us, me cocky and proud, Sam still-faced with his reddened knife waiting for the carcass to bleed out, and I saw a waking of lust in her, her eyes dilated, lips a little swollen. If Jed had not been there, present but not really sharing the heart of
the excitement, I could imagine her inviting Sam to spread her on the ground. There was that in her smoldering gaze at him — and at me, who after all had shot the arrow. But Jed was there, and in a few minutes we were busy cutting what meat we could carry, the heated moment gone.
We camped for that night in a ravine that must have been a good ten miles from Skoar, but still fairly near the Northeast Road — once or twice we heard horsemen. We made a temporary fireplace of rocks for cooking, below the rim of the ravine, where the blaze could not be seen from the road. When Jed and Vilet took their turn at gathering wood, leaving Sam and me alone, he answered a question before I spoke it: “A camp-follower they call ’em, Jackson. Means she’s been whorin’ it for a living, puttin’ out for any Jo in the comp’ny that had a dollar. She’s good at it, too — I been in there a few times, never a dull moment. She was doing all right — the men treated her nice, got her food free, no pimp or modom riding her, chance to save up her cash for a rainy day. Every comp’ny’s got one-I dunno how ’tis in the Moha army. Our boys always make a real doll out’n the comp’ny whore. It’s natural — only female thing they got to love, and so on… Well, old Jed he kindly got religion, or he’d always had it, but I mean it so’t of rifted up on him, anyway he decided God didn’t wish him to stay in the A’my when there was a war on and a real chance he might be expected to hurt somebody. And it seems God told him to take Vilet along on his way out. He says it was God.”
“So who else would talk thataway?”
Sam gave me one of his long cool stares, checked on the distance of Jed and Vilet off in the brush, and went on with the story: “It come to a head yesterday after we holed up near the road waiting for the Mohas. I blundered onto Jed and her in the bushes, supposed they was just fixing up for a quick piece, but it wasn’t that. Jed he was lit up with the holy spirit or whatever, asked me to stick around and bear witness. He was explaining to Vilet how God wants her to give up the sinful life and love the Lord, along with him who’s intending to lead hencefo’th a life of mercy and purity. Damn, he’s already so gentle and goodhearted and mush-headed you wouldn’t think there was room in him for enough sin to stuff a pisswilly walnut, but he don’t think so. Got a conscience like a bull bison, that man, stompin’ on him all the time. Well, looked to me like Vilet got a bang-up conversion, and when old Jed cut loose with this ’ere repent-leave-all-and-foller-me, why, bedam if she didn’t, she did bedam… Jed he wanted I should come along too. I didn’t estimate I was no-way called. He allowed they’d stay close by for a day or two and pray for me, and if’n I changed my mind I could sneak away from the outfit and make screek-owl noises three at a time till they j’ined up with me. Kay, S’s I, and they took off. Dunno how they ever got by our sentries, him that clumsy with his poor eyesight, but Vilet’s sharp in the woods, got him by some-way. Hadn’t no intention of going with ’em, Jackson — I’m a loner by trade-but then I got my head hurt in that skirmish and the comp’ny took off without me. Real lost for a while. Damn nigh blundered into the Mohas like I told you. Bypassed ’em and come on down along the road — wrong way too, didn’t realize I was headed for Skoar till daylight. Did the screekowl thing a few times not expecting anything, but Vilet heard and answered, and we got connected. Know a rema’kable thing? — they got it fixed they’ll go all the way to Vairmant and cut a fa’m out’n the wilderness which shall be lo, a temple in the lorn waste land and like that. A’n’t bound thataway myself but bless ’em, s’s I, hope they do.”
Davy Page 13