I dare say no civilization ever completely dies. There’s at least the stream of physical inheritance, and perhaps some word spoken a thousand years ago can exert unrecognizable power over what you do tomorrow morning. So long as one book survives anywhere-any book, any pitiful handful of pages preserved somehow, buried, locked away in vault or cave — Old Time is not dead. But neither can any civilization return with anything of its former quality. Fragments we may reclaim, memory holds more than we know, there’s a resonance of ancient times in any talk of father to son. But the world of Old Time cannot live again as it was, nor should we dream of it.
* * *
Vilet often came along with me for hunting and fishing while Jed stayed behind to look after Sam. The first day that happened I felt an agreement between us, at first unspoken, created by occasional touches and glances, for instance when she was walking a few yards ahead of me in good forest silence, and turned to look at me over her shoulder, unsmiling. I think Vilet enjoyed being spooked by other people’s mysteries now and then, like my hermit whopmagullion, but she wasn’t one to make mysteries herself. That moment on the trail she might as well have said in words: “I could be caught with a little running.”
Work came first, and we had luck with it that day, nailing a couple of fat bunnies and then locating a good fishing pool about a mile from our cave. There was a grassy bank, sunlight, and a quiet as though no man had troubled the place for centuries. We set out fish-lines, and when she knelt on the grass to adjust hers, her arm slid around my thighs. “You’ve had a girl once or twice, I b’lieve.”
“How d’ you know?”
“Way you look at me.” The next moment she was solid on her feet and pulling her ragged smock off over her head. “Time you really learned something,” she said. “I a’n’t young nor I a’n’t purty, but I know how.” Naked with not a bit of softness (you would have thought), cocky and smiling a little and moving her hips to botber me, she was a grand piece of woman. “Off with them rags, Lover-pup,” she said, “and come take me. You’ll have to work for it.”
I worked for it, wrestling her at first with all my strength and getting no breaks at all until the struggle had warmed her up into real enjoyment. Then of a sudden she was kissing and fondling instead of fighting me off, laughing under her breath and using a few horny words I didn’t know at that time; presently her hands were gripping her knees, I was in her standing, joyfully stallionizing it with not a thought in my head to interfere. When I was spent she flung me a punch in the shoulder and then hugged me. “Lover-pup, you’re good.” What I’d had with Emmia seemed long ago and far away.
We had other times, not so very many, for there were other sides to Vilet: moods of heavy melancholy, of a kind of self-punishing despair; the religious side, that belonged to J ed and was forever shadowing the rest of her life. Often (she told me once) she dreamed that she was in the act of selling her soul to the Devil, and he in the shape of a great gray rock about to topple over and crush her. She couldn’t always be the good randy wrestling-partner when we had privacy and opportunity, but occasionally at such times she did feel like talking to me. It was a time like that, at the fishing pool again and maybe a week after our first romp, that she told me things about her relation with Jed Sever. Whenever Jed was mentioned in his absence by Sam or me, I’d notice a kind of still warning in her kind blocky face, like an animal bracing itself to defend if necessary. She’d hear nothing in criticism of him. At the fishing pool, after we got a few for supper we took a dip in the water to wash off the heat of the day, but she warned me off from playing with her and I wasn’t in form for it myself; we just sat by the pool lazing and drying off, and she said: “I got it figgered out, Davy, the mor’ls of it I mean. Not telling Jed about what we been having, it a’n’t a real sin account it might burden him with grief, and anyway I got so much sin in the past to work off, this’n’s just a little one. He’s so good, Davy, Jed is! He tells me I got to think back through earlier sins and make sure I truly repent ’em, because see, you can’t fix ’em all with one big bang-up repentance, you got to take ’em one by one, he says. So, see, I’m kindly working up to the present time but a’n’t got there yet. I mean, Sugar-piece, if I don’t commit no more’n one sin a day, or say two at the most, and then repent say three sins of past time the same day, well, I mean, after-while you get caught up like. Only it’s so’t of a heartbreak thing, times, remembering ’em all. I’ll be all right by the time we get to Vairmant. And Jed he says it’s too much to try to give up sin all to oncet, too rough,[14] the Lord never intended it like.”
I said: “Jed’s awful good, a’n’t he?”
“Oh, a saint!” And she went on about how generous he was, and thoughtful, and how he’d explained everything about the way to Abraham; when they got their little place in Vairmant they were going to have sinners in every day to hear the word, just everybody, any freeman that would come. Dear Vilet, she was out of her gloomy mood and all aglow from thinking of it, sitting there by the pool naked as a jaybird and patting my knee now and then but not trying to rouse me up because it wasn’t our day for it. “Jed, see, he’s got a great lot of sin-trouble too. ’Most every day he remembers something out’n the past that sets him back because it needs repentance. Like frinstance yesterday he recalled, when he was five, going-on six he’d just learned about fertilizer, see? So here’s his Ma’s bed of yalla nasturtiums she was so peart about, and he wanted to do something real generous, make ’em twice as big and purty right away, so he pees the hell all over ’em, specially a big old gran’daddy nasturtium that’s sticking up kindly impident — well, I mean, by the time he sees it a’n’t turning out just right it’s too late, he can’t stop till he’s emptied out.” Vilet was crying a little as well as laughing. “So the bed’s real swamped, petals fiat on the ground, and he don’t tell, it gets blamed on the dog and he dasn’t tell.”
“Oh,” I said, “that sumbitchin’ nasturtium was purely askin’ for it.”
“Ai-yah, I laughed too when he told me, and so’d he, just a mite, still it’s ser’ous, Davy, because it kindly ties in with a real sin he done when he was nine, poor jo. He done it to the little neighbor girl and his Ma caught ’em into the berry patch. The girl she just larruped on the backside and sent her home bawling, but she didn’t whip Jed. He says it’s how he knows his Ma was the greatest saint that ever lived, for all she done was weep and tell him he’d broke her heart after all she done givin’ him birth in pain and tryin’ to raise him up to something. And so ever since he a’n’t never put it into a woman, except once.”
“He what? He never?”
“Except once. That God-damn Kingstone whore he talks about, after his God-damn fishing trip… Well, anyway — anyway he’s a saint now, and all’s he ever wants me to do is take my smock off and tromple him a little and call him bad names — he says it purifies him and so it’s bound to be pleasing in the sight of God, like the whipping, only he a’n’t had me do that lately, not since we come away from the A’my.” She sighed and stopped crying. “He’s so kind, Davy! And he always knows how ’t is for me too, so sometimes he like helps me with his hand or like that, he says that’s just a little sin, and anyhow we’re both getting stronger and stronger in the Lord all the time now. Calls me his little brand from the burning, and I know that’s Book of Abraham language but you can see he means it — why, sometimes he can hold me in his arms all night long and never get a hard on, a’n’t that ma’velous?”
Those weeks in the cave were also a good time for learning a little about the playing of my horn. I gave it at least an hour of each evening, from deep twilight into full dark. In daylight there was too much danger of a stray hunter hearing and approaching unseen. After twilight not even bandits are likely to stir away from camp, in the Moha woods. I studied my horn, and I took part in our making of plans.
There was my plan about Levannon and the ships, but when I learned that even Sam was unhappy at the notion of my signing on aboard a ship,
I shut my mouth about it, and though it didn’t perish it remained in silence.
There was Jed’s and Vilet’s plan about the Vairmant farm. They were sure about the sinners but they kept altering the rest of the livestock. Vilet held out one long rainy day for goats while Jed stood up for chickens, and it began in fun but he wound up bothered and ended the discussion by saying goats were too lascivious, a word Vilet didn’t know so it shut her up.
Sam, when he was well again, was more concerned about immediate plans. We wouldn’t be able to go anywhere, he pointed out, so long as we had to travel in beat-up Katskil uniforms, a smock of the same dark green, and the gray loin-rag of a Moha bond-servant. He claimed he could see two good ways of acquiring suitable garments, both dishonest, and one honest way that wouldn’t work and was fairly sure to get at least one of us jailed or hanged.
“Dishonesty,” said Jed, “is a sin, Sam, and you don’t need me to tell you so. What’s the honest way?”
“One of us go to the nearest vifiage and buy some clo’es. Got to walk in naked is all. Be had up for indecent explosion right off. I don’t recommend it.”
“I could say I lost ’em some place,” Jed suggested. It was like him to take it for granted he ought to be the one to stick his neck out and get it chopped off. “I think I could justify that to my Maker as a white lie.”
“But maybe not to the storekeeper,” said Sam. “Anyhow you don’t look like the type jo that would get deprived of his ga’ments casual-like — you be too big and important. And me, I look too mean.”
“Maybe I say I lost ’em into a whirlwind.”
“What whirlwind, Jackson ?”
“A ’maginary one. I just say it blowed down the road a piece.”
Sam sighed and looked at Vilet and she looked at me and I looked at my navel and nobody said anything.
“Well,” says Jed, “I could hang leaves around my middle and make like lost in the woods, like.”
Sam said: “I couldn’t no-way justify pickin’ innocent leaves for no such purpose.”
“Look,” I said, “it’d have to be me, account you don’t none of you talk like Moha…”
“Sam, boy,” said Vilet, “just purely for cur’osity and the sake of argument, which so’t of dishonest ways was you in mind of?”
“Might hold up a pa’ty on the road and take what we require, but Jackson theah don’t hold with vi’lence, me neither. Somebody’d get hurt or they’d run tell policer. Another way, one or two of us could shadow-foot it into some village or outlyin’ fa’m and so’t of steal something.”
“Stealing’s a sin,” said Jed, and we sat around all quiet and sad, and I blew a few notes on my horn since it was getting dark. “Anyhow,” said Jed, “I don’t understand how a person could go and steal clothes off of a person without no vi’lence. I mean you got to think about human nature, specially women and like that.”
Sam said gently: “So’t of general workin’ rule, Jackson , the way you steal clo’es, you steal ’em when there a’n’t nobody in ’em, like in a shop or onto a clo’esline.”
I said: “Why’n’t we do that and leave a dollar to make it square?”
Well, they all gazed at me in a sandbagged style, the way grown-ups will gaze at something down there that just doesn’t seem possible, and then I could see them get happier and happier, more and more mellow, till they looked like three saints bungful.l of salvation and pie.
14
We set out next morning for that village six miles away near the Northeast Road — Sam, Vilet and I. We reasoned, and Jed agreed, that temporary sinners on a clothes-stealing expedition would need to be able to move fast and with good eyesight. Besides, we needed to have someone minding the cave and watching our gear. Besideser, he’d been working hard since before sun-up praying good luck into a dollar Vilet provided, because he said that if we left a genuine good-luck dollar to pay for the clothes it would cut the sin down to nearly nothing, and so he’d earned his rest.
I’d scouted the village two or three times on my lone. It was a poor grubby thing with a ramshackle stockade closing in twenty or thirty acres, and so little cleared area outside it that I knew the people must live mostly by hunting and fishing, plus maybe a few handcrafts for trade. A carttrack connected it to the Northeast Road , but there was no road on the back-country side. I’d located three outlying houses with fair-sized gardens, two on the north-east side and one by the back gate which probably belonged to the man such villages call the Guide.
We halted on a tree-covered hillside where we could watch that house by the back gate, for it did have an interesting clothesline, and as we watched, a thin wench in a yellow smock came out and added a basketful of things to what was already hanging there.
In a village like that, the Guide counts for more than anyone except the head priest and the mayor. The Guide bosses any work that has to do with the wilderness, arranges any large hunting and fishing parties, usually leading them himself, keeps track of seasonal and weather signs, distributes whatever the group hunting and fishing brings in, and takes a handsome cut of everything. In a mean small village like this he’d be appointed by the head priest and mayor together; in a baronial village — there aren’t many in eastern Moha — he’d be a sales-manager (sometimes called vassal) of the baron himself, and fixed for life. In either case a village Guide is nobody to fool with, and here we were proposing to rob this one’s everloving clothesline.
We watched from our hillside more than half an hour, watching not only the house but a big dog-kennel at the side. After that girl who hung up the clothes went back inside, we didn’t see a soul stirring. Nor a dog. From the nature of a Guide’s job, he’s away from home a good deal. So are his dogs. And on the line was a huge white smock — it would cut up into three or four loin-rags. Other stuff too, a smallish yellow smock like the one the girl had been wearing, and a whole bunch of lesser items — towels, brown loin-rags. We couldn’t pass it up.
Woodland cover ended a hundred yards from the house and a corn patch began; this was June, the young corn tall enough to conceal a man on all fours. That had to be me, for I was small and not wearing Katskil green, and if I got caught I’d at least have a chance to blarney out of it with a Moha accent. We worked down from the hillside through the woods, and I left Sam and Vilet at the forest edge, promising to whistle if I needed help. I crawled down between the corn-rows, sighting on that yellow smock like a target.[15] Late sunny morning was drawing into noon.
I was at the end of the corn-row when I caught a hint of women’s voices in the house, faint, not the clack of visiting housewives. The clothesline hung between a post and the corner of the house, which was low and rambling and well made, with small windows barred against wolf and tiger and the sneak-bandits who haunt lonely country. I would have to cross a small yard in line with some of the windows. The main door of the house was facing me, and at my right, not more than two hundred feet away, stood the back gate of the village stockade. Beyond the clothesline post I noticed a side door, toward the village, which probably belonged to the kitchen since a neat herb-garden grew just outside. I ducked across the yard, just then realizing that we hadn’t contrived a cover for my red thatch. Nobody challenged me, and at the corner of the house where the clothesline was fastened I was nicely hidden from the windows. I was clawing the yellow smock off the line when the stockade gate creaked open.
A gray-haired woman came through, turning with her hand on the gate to instruct someone inside in a manner he’d remember; she’d evidently caught the gate guard snatching forty winks. The pause gave me a chance. I was into that yellow smock and had a towel twisted around my hair so fast I can’t tell you how I did it. I’d gathered the remaining laundry into a wopse that hid more of me, by the time the dame ended her lecture and came on.
There’d been a flaw in my thinking: now that I’d become a winsome laundress it wouldn’t look right if I just strolled off into the woods with the wash. I was obliged to take the stuff into the house.
Beastly damp. If the grayhaired woman was nearsighted and preoccupied she might take me for the proper owner of that yellow smock, so on my way into the kitchen I tried to give my rump a gentle womanly twitch. I can’t believe it was very attractive — wrong type rump.
The kitchen was big, cool, blessedly empty. Leaving the vifiage alone, that elderly woman couldn’t be coming anywhere but here. Probably visiting — the large white smock couldn’t belong to her, designed for someone shaped like a beer-barrel with two full-grown watermelons attached.
Voices came from the next room, where the front door was. One woman, who must have gone to the window right after I’d crossed the yard, said: “It’s her, Ma.”
Ma replied: “Kay, you know what to do.”
Not much in that, but it chilled me. The young voice was whiny, half-scared; Ma’s tone was high, hoarse and breathy, telling me that she owned the big white smock and liked to eat. I remembered hearing it said that country folk like to use the kitchen door, and I smokefooted into a storeroom with my bundle of wash, eased the door shut and got my eye to the keyhole in time to see Yellow-Smock and Ma come in. That store-room should have had access to the outside, but it didn’t — only one high barred window. I was trapped.
Davy Page 15