Davy

by Edgar Pangborn

  “I notice you be calling ’em Jed and Vilet instead of Jackson .”

  “Oh, that. Wa’n’t speakin’ to ’em direct.”

  “I see. Like hell I see.”

  Sam put his hand on my head and pushed down — not hard, but I was sitting on the ground the next moment. He rumpled my thatch; all I could do about that was laugh and feel good. “ Jackson ,” he said, “if you wasn’t a big serious brain just like me I wouldn’t betrouble myself to explain it. You see, in this world a man’s got to piss up some kind of a whirlwind or nobody knows he’s there. Now, me bein’ mean, ugly, common’s an old dry bullturd in an upland medder, if I didn’t do something a mite extra-onery — well, tell me, an old dry bull-turd, what does it do?”

  “Just kindly sets there onto the grass.”

  “That’s right! That’s prezactly what it does. You never knowed a bull-turd, anyway not an old dry one, to get up on its hind legs and call people Jackson as if it didn’t know their right names, nor you never will. So now I’ve answered your question fair and honest, what the hell you got into that sack? Been achin’ about it all afternoon.”

  I might have told him the full story then about my golden horn — I did months later, when we happened to be alone-but Jed and Vilet were coming back. It wasn’t for them somehow — there was all the trouble of explaining why I hadn’t killed the mue, other difficulties. Jed heard Sam’s question, however, and when he saw me reluctant and unhappy he gave me a little talk about how since the Lord had thrown us together we must try to be all for one and one for all, which meant sharing everything and not having secrets from each other. So it would be spiritually good for me to tell about what I had in my sack, not that he supposed for one minute it was anything I didn’t ought to have, but — ayah, and meanwhile old Sam is standing off there not doing a thing to get off the hook, just minding the fire and spitting the venison on sticks to grill, and now and then casting me a blank look which might mean: Go ahead, be a bull-turd!

  “Jed,” I said, “would you hold this image again, the way I can look at it whiles I talk?”

  “Why, sure!” He was startled and mighty pleased. Vilet sat down by me, her chunky hand on my back. Affection was her natural way, going along with the bouncy sex though not the same thing. She liked to touch and nudge and kiss, make known her body’s warm presence without any fuss, just as at another time she might say, merely by pouting her mouth or rolling her hip, “Let’s have one!”

  “Here’s the true-tale,” I said, looking at the clay image, “about how I come to kifi that man accidental.” You know, my pesky clay god-thing did bother me a bit at first. But I had meant to tell this part straight anyhow, about climbing back over the Skoar stockade and tangling with that guard. And when I continued, leaving out all mention of Emmia and saying I’d gone back over the stockade into the woods right away when I knew the guard was dead — oh, Mudf ace raised no objections.

  “Poor Davy,” said Vilet, and tickled me just below my loin-rag where Jed didn’t see her hand. “Right back to the woods, huh? Didn’t you have no girl in Skoar, lover-pup?”

  “Well, I did so’t of, only—”

  “What you mean so’t of? I wouldn’t give the sweat off a hoppergrass’s ass for a so’t of a girl, Davy.”

  “Well, I meant kind of. But le’ me tell you what happened in the woods that afternoon, before I accidental killed that jo. You people ever meet a hermit?”

  “Ayah, once,” Jed said. “Hillside cave outside of Kingstone, done his artful healin’ by layin’ on of hands.”

  “That’s just the kind of hermit I mean,” I said — “woodland type. i’d been goofing off, hadn’t no right to quit work that day. Anyway I found this old hermit. All he had was a grass lean-to, no cave. Hadn’t been real holy he’d been et up long before, wouldn’t you think?”

  “The Lord protects his own, alley-loo. That one at Kingstone’s cave wa’n’t nothing. Kept goats in it.”

  Sam asked: “Didn’t it smell some?”

  “Little bit,” said Jed. “You take a hermit, he’s got to overlook some things in God’s service.”

  All right, but the hell with his hermit, I had to get them interested in mine. “This’n was terrible old and strange. When I first seen him it upsottled me so I almost stepped on a big rattler. But he seen it, told me not to move and made the sign of the wheel, and lo!”

  “Lo what?”

  “Well, I mean it just lo slid away, no harm done. Old hermit he said it was a manifestation, account the serpent represented cussing, my greatest fault — which he couldn’t’ve knowed except by second sight, because I hadn’t done no sort of cussing there, you can believe.”

  It got Jed, the way I meant it to. “Praise the Lord, that’s exactly how those things happen! You was led, you was meant to meet that holy man. Go on, son!”

  “Well… He wasn’t only old, he was a-dying.”

  “Oh, think of that!” says Vilet. “The poor old s — the poor old hermit!”

  “Ayah. He looked that peaceful I wouldn’t’ve ever guessed, but he told me. He said: ‘I’m about to pass on, boy Davy’ — nay-nay, there’s another thing, he knowed my name like that, without my telling him. I was some flabberjastered and that’s a fact. I b’lieve it was another manifestation.”

  “I do believe it was. Go on, Davy!”

  “Well, he said I was the first to come by in a long time and do him a kindness, only shit — I mean goodness — I hadn’t done nothing but set by and listen. He said to dig under his lean-to, showed me where, take what I found there and keep it by me all my life. Said it was an Old-Time relic and he knowed the evil was all prayed out’n it account he’d done it himself.” I remember I was scared at the fine and healthy dimensions of that particular whifferoo — spooked enough to make my voice wobble. Jed and Vilet attributed it to reverence-if there’s a difference. “Old hermit said God had guided me to it, meant the Old-Time thing for me if’n I’d learn to you-know, quit cussing and so on.”

  “Praise his name! And you was guided to us too, the way we’ll all help you to quit and never cuss no more. So what happened then?”

  “Then he — died.”

  “You was actu’ly present at the holy passing on?”

  “Ayah. He blessed me, told me again where to dig, and then died — uh — in my arms.” I gazed off into the deep woods, sober and brave, and did a gulp. After all, it was the first time I’d ever killed a hermit. “So — so then I fixed up a hardscrabble grave for him, and—” I stopped, suddenly sick, remembering the rain and a true happening. But presently — in such a thing the mind sometimes appears to use no time at all — I felt that the soldier (who lived now in me and nowhere else) would be pleased to laugh along with me in there behind my eyes at my damnfool hermit, and why not? So I was able to go on with hardly a break: “Took what I found there and came away, was all.”

  I showed them my horn then, but dared not blow it so near the road. Jed and Vilet were too much in awe of it to touch it, but Sam held it in his hands, and said after a while: “A young man could make music with that.”

  Later while we were eating, I asked: “In the battalion-not your company but the men who’d’ve been in that fight I saw this morning — do you remember a jo, maybe seventeen or so, dark hair, gray eyes, real soft-spoken?”

  “Maybe ten-twenty such,” Sam said, and Jed mumbled something to the same effect. “Don’t know his name?”

  “No. Found him after the fighting was over, and we talked some. Nothing I could do for him.”

  Vilet asked: “He was hurt bad? Died?”

  “Ayah. I never learned his name.”

  “Did he die in the Church?” Jed asked.

  “We didn’t talk about religion.” Jed looked sad and shocked; I didn’t understand at once. “I never did learn his name.”

  “Jackson,” Sam said, and tossed me another chunk of venison, not saying anything just then that would make a demand on me. Later, when night had closed down and Sam
and I were taking the first watch, I did understand what Jed had meant by his question, and childhood teaching was another burden of darkness.

  A member of the Holy Murcan Church must make in his dying moments what the priests call a confession of faith, if he can speak at all, or he goes to hell forever. Should he forget because of pain or sickness, others present must remind him. I had been taught that much, like all children; why had it never entered my head when the soldier was dying? I had doubts, true, including doubts about hell, but — what if there was a hell? Everyone else took it for granted…

  Sam and I had a small fire going, and the wall of the ravine at our backs. Even with Sam near me, I had hated to see Jed and Vilet disappear in the little brush lean-to we’d flung together, though I knew they were no further off and probably not asleep. I began to see my gray-eyed friend twisting in the tar-pits, the brain boiling in his skull as Father Clance had so lovingly described; and he was crying out to me: “Why didn’t you help?”

  In marshy ground somewhere the low thunder of frogs was so continuous it had become a part of silence; the peepers were shrilling, and the big owls sounding off from time to time. When the moon rose at last it was reddened by a haze we had noticed at sundown, perhaps the smoke from distant occasions of war. Then I found myself up to my ears and over my head in the question: How does anyone know?

  Who ever went down to the seventh level of hell and saw them hanging up adulterers by the scrotum, so that Father Clance, rolling his eyes and sweating and sighing, could later explain for us just how it was done? How did he know?

  In lesser matters, hadn’t I seen people win satisfaction and power over others just from knowing or pretending to know what those others didn’t? Merciful winds, hadn’t I just worked that same kind of swindle with my damned hermit?

  Could anyone prove to me that the whole hell-andheaven thing wasn’t one big fraud? I may have started at that or fidgeted. Sam’s whisper came: “What’s the matter?”

  The moon had shifted to whiteness, and his face was clear. I knew he wouldn’t harm me or be angry, but I was still timid with my question: “Sam, be there people that don’t believe in hell?”

  “Jackson, you sure that’s the question you want to ask? I got no wisdom on such things.”

  Of course, a question wasn’t the thing; it was only a way of keeping myself off the griddle and putting him on it. “I mean, Sam, I kindly don’t believe in it myself no more.”

  “Seen plenty hell on earth,” he said after a while. “But that wa’n’t what you meant.”

  “No.”

  “Well, the Church kind — I’ve noticed the only ones that act like they want to believe it are the ones that see ’emselves safe-elected for heaven. Take old Jed theah, he don’t get no bang out’n hell. Believes all right, but kindly arranges with himself not to think about it. Doubts, Jackson?”

  “Ayah.”

  He was silent long enough to make me a little afraid again. “Me, I guess I’ve always had ’em… You a’n’t scared I might talk to a priest?”

  “How do you know I wouldn’t?”

  “I b’lieve I just know it, Jackson. Anyhow if I was you, sooner’n eat my heart out thinking that ’ere soldier’s frying account of words that didn’t get said, why, I’d undertake to wonder if the priests didn’t invent the whole damned shibundle.”

  So he trusted me that much, and I could no longer have any doubt that Sam and I were both tremendous heretics and no help for it. I remember thinking: If they was to burn Sam they got to burn me along-with. And wishing I could say something like that aloud. But then it occurred to me that since he evidently knew so many of my thoughts without even trying, he wouldn’t be likely to miss that one.

  13

  What I’ve so far written about happened in a few days of mid-March. By mid-June we were only a few miles further on, for we found a place so pleasant that we holed up there for three months. Sam’s head-wound finished healing there, after a troublesome infection. We loafed, and I struggled through the first stages of learning to play my golden horn. We talked long, and made a thousand plans, and I was growing up.

  The place was a cool deep cliffside cave something like the one I had on North Mountain, but this one was low in the rock wall, fourteen feet above level ground. We had no view of distances from it, but looked into lowland forest as into a vast and quiet room. Shade from the mid-day sun, and no settlement near enough to trouble us. To study the surrounding country all we needed to do was climb a nearby sentinel pine and look away. From that height I never caught sight of man except wisps of smoke from a little lonesome village six miles east of us. The Northeast Road was two miles the other side of that village, and the name of the village we never learned. It wasn’t Wilton Village — we’d slipped by that before we happened on our cave.

  The only access to our hideaway was a drooping oak branch — difficult for Jed — and the only resident we had to disturb was a fat porcupine whom we hit on the head and ate because that was simpler than educating him not to come back and snuggle up to us where we were asleep.

  For two weeks Sam was in bad shape from the infection, feverish and tormented by headaches. Jed cared for him wonderfully, better at it than Vilet or me, and even let Sam cuss all he liked. Vilet and I were the food-winners while Sam was sick, and Vilet searched out wild plants to make some healing mixtures for him. Her mother had been a mountain yarb-woman in southern Katskil, Vilet said, and a midwife too. She was full of stories about the old woman, and told them best when Jed wasn’t around. Sam was pretty patient with her yarb mixtures, but after a while he did get a look when he saw her coming like a man who thinks that the next tree to go over in the storm will take the roof along with it. Then toward the end of his bad time, when she’d landed him with a potion which she admitted herself would prob’ly hoist the hide off a bear and him running, Sam said: “Jackson, it a’n’t that I mind having my gizzard hit by lightning all twistyways, and I suppose I could get used to the feelin’ I’m about to give birth to a three-horned giasticutus — what I can’t no-way endure, Jackson, is the trompling.”

  “Trompling?” says Vilet.

  “Ayah. Ayah. Them microbes and box-terriers that go rushin’ along my gut tryin’ to get the hell away from your remedies. You can’t blame ’em, see, the way they set their feet down, only I can’t stand it, Jackson, and so if you please I’ll just arrange not to be sick no more.”

  * * *

  We have been living slightly more than a month on the island Neonarcheos. The Morning Star sailed two days ago, to search the region east of us where other islands appear on the old map. Captain Barr intends to make no more than a two-day voyage and then return. He took only eight men, enough to handle the schooner.

  We are not calling Dion Governor, not yet, because he rather clearly doesn’t wish it. Still we all find it natural that important decisions — such as sending or not sending Captain Barr on this voyage-should be made mostly by Dion, and before long I think most of the colonists will want it formalized. We shall require something in the nature of a constitution, small though our group is, and written laws.

  Back in Nuin and those other lands, the season will be chilling toward the winter rainy season; here we notice hardly any change. We have erected twelve simple houses; the brookside grass makes good thatch, though we must wait for heavy rains to test it. Seven of the buildings are on the knoll, spaced so that all have a view of the beach and the little bay, and one of the seven is Nickie’s and mine. There’s another on the beach, three along the creek, and Adna-Lee Jason with Ted Marsh and Dane Gregory have chosen to build their house away up on the hill where our stream originates. That’s a love-alliance that began in Old City long before we sailed; they need it as Nickie and I need our more ordinary kind of marriage, and Adna-Lee has been happy lately as I never knew her to be in the old days.

  Aboard the Morning Star we all learned a little of what it must have been like to dwell in the jammed cities and suburbs of the las
t days of Old Time. I was just now rereading an ugly passage in the Book of John Barth: “Our statesmen periodically discover the basic purpose of war. They are, poor little gods, like farmers in a fix: if you have thirty hogs and only one small daily bucket of swill—? And so the finality, the apocalyptic unreason, the shared suicide of nuclear war is for them the most God-damned embarrassing thing. Their one time-tested population control is all spoiled.” A few paragraphs further on he remarks in passing that of course birth control had been a practical solution since the 19th century, except that the godly made rational application of it impossible even late in the 20th when the time was running out. What would he make of our present state, the reverse of the dismal population problem of his day?