“Couple tons maybe?”
“You got things to learn,” Will said, and cackled with delight — when I’m sixty maybe I’ll be all hell on instructing the young too. “Things to learn, bub — why, old Daisy Mae, she won’t go a ton under thirty-three…”
No, I never sailed aboard a Levannon ship, nor ever sped down the road on a bright roan with three attendants, expecting a serving wench at the next inn to bathe me and warm my bed with her willing loins. But I did go with Rumley’s Ramblers through all the nations of the known world except Nuin where Pa Rumley had once run afoul of the law, and the Main city states that you can’t reach by land without passing over Nuin’s province of Hampsher. I lent a hand wrastling those mules on the Renslar dock, and the same evening I was in the entertainment with my horn, never missing one for four years — they loved me. That year we went north along the Lowland Road of Levannon.
It is the greatest road of modern history. Moha’s Northeast Road that pointed my way out of Skoar is a fine thing, but a cowpath beside the Lowland Road. There are travelers who would tell you that the greatest of all is the Old Post Road from Old City of Nuin to Renslar: such is the cussedness of the human race when determined to argue passionately about something that can’t be any way proved — their whole damn trouble is that always they know I’m right but won’t admit it. The Lowland Road of Levannon is not just a road; it’s a natural force and a way of living. It runs from Norrock on the great sea, the Atlantic, all the way north to the rich nastiness of Seal Harbor, a distance of three hundred and seventy-some miles. It not only holds the nation of Levannon together like the spinal column of a snake, but in a real sense that road is Levannon. You can hardly say whether the towns strung along it like vertebrae are served by it or exist in order to serve it.
Traveling north, you walk in the morning shadow of the beautiful green mountains at your right hand. You see at once why the many small but vigorous towns and villages are needed there. Alert and usually fortified, they are connected to the big Lowland Road by good secondary roads and trails, to protect the artery of trade and travel from bandits and other wild beasts. Levannon is never like Moha, sloppy and shiftless about its roads, the one great road and the many small ones — they mean too much. As for the great Lowland Road, the mountains are sure to be either a shield or a menace depending on who commands the heights; a mountain trail is a nervous sort of boundary. Levannon dreams of possessing both sides of the great range; to Vairmant and Bershar and Conicut the same dream is a nightmare, which they will hold off if they can — those three have had no wars among themselves for at least fifty years, too well aware that they might at any moment need to be allies…
I have always found it difficult to understand that the whole region of our known world was in Old Time a small part of a very great nation. The idea of a war over possession of what they called the Berkshires and the Green Mountains would have made the men of that time smile indulgently as at a child’s nonsense: the wars they were concerned with were, materially, so much bigger! Ethically bigger? — I think not, except that they had it in their power to destroy the world completely and very nearly did so.
Well up in the northern country, the mountains become low hills and finally subside into the flat land along the south coast of the Lorenta Sea. Up there crouches Seal Harbor, a steaming corruption near the mouth of a river that is called the St. Francis as it was in Old Time.
Seal Harbor is frankly nothing but a mammoth tryworks. The lamp-oil seal, sometimes called hairseal, breed by the thousands on barren islands far to the north, be yond where the Lorenta Sea spreads out into the Atlantic. Those islands are strung along the wilderness coast of what the old maps call Labrador; modern Levannese call it the Seal Shore. The animals must have taken advantage of man’s decline in the Years of Confusion to increase enormously: Seal Harbor people tell of modern voyages of exploration that have been made north of the regular sealing grounds — it’s just seal islands and more seal islands, they say, up to the point where you can travel no further because the men won’t stand it. They call it Northern Terror and it’s a thing beyond argument or reason — partly the cold, and furious wind, but most of all what they describe as the “madness of the sun.”
But men can manage their business in the southern part of the breeding grounds, and luckily for men, the seal apparently never learn. Greatly daring, the slow outriggers specially built for the task pull out of Seal Harbor late in March and creep down the Lorenta Sea hugging its dangerous northern coast, past the island still named Anticosti and through a strait the sailors nowadays call Belly Wheel. That was once Belle Isle and meant Beautiful Island, but if you tell a modern sealer so, he’ll stare you down with the blubber-faced incomprehension of one of the poor beasts who make his living for him; if it annoys him enough, he may charge.
After passing through Belly Wheel they follow the coast northwest. It’s tricky work I suppose: they don’t dare either to let the cruel land out of sight or to drift too close and risk being caught in the tideways and currents and flung against it. They arrive at the breeding grounds with the winds of the great sea on their necks, and go ashore in small boats to do their butchery in haste, with clubs. They take only the blubber, and the best hides of the baby and yearling seal, leaving all carcasses where they lie to be dealt with by the vultures or swept away in high tide for the swarming sharks. If the voyage were not so tough for those clumsy vessels, and if men were more numerous, less superstitious and a little more brave, the seal would be extinct by now in spite of their massive numbers. The sealers have no least thought of husbandry or mercy, only of the quick dollar. All they can do is kill and kill and go on killing till the fat hulls of the cargo vessels are replete. This they do so that we may have light in the evening.
The untreated blubber is brought back in that state to Seal Harbor. I’ve heard that the townfolk know when the returning fleet has come within ten miles, from the rancid stink that heralds it even if there’s no east wind blowing. It’s a cause for rejoicing — after all it happens only once a year. Then comes a few weeks of work, after which the good citizens of Seal Harbor go back to the longer holiday of loafing, hunting, whoring, fishing, brawling — above all brawling — and picking each other’s pockets until the next year’s “fat weeks.” During the trying and for days afterward unless a merciful wind arrives, the smoke from the blubber-works lays a black-purple cloud over the shabby city, and even hardened long-time inhabitants are sick. That’s one of the main reasons why it is a city of scum, misfits, criminals, failures. No one wants to live there who could earn a living and be welcome somewhere else.
We journeyed north by rather slow stages in the closing days of 317, often spending more than a week in a village if we enjoyed the style of it. Pa Rumley’s way was leisurely; I’ve heard him remark that if a thing wasn’t still there by the time you arrived it likely wouldn’t have been worth hurrying after. Not many Rambler gangs head north when winter’s advancing: as we drifted along the Lowland Road, always with the grave splendor of the mountains at the right hand, the villages were happy to see us and bought well, being somewhat starved for entertainment and news. At a good-sized town named Sanasint we turned east, crossing over the border into the north end of Vairmant. We spent the winter months of December through March in a way most Rambler gangs wouldn’t have cared to do, at a lonely camp of our own devising in a pocket of the Vairmant hills. May, Pa explained, was the time to hit Seal Harbor, when the oil buyers had come and gone, and the companies had paid off the workmen but there hadn’t been time for all the money to settle into the pockets of a few gamblers and crooks; but that wasn’t his main reason for holing up during the winter. He did that for about three months of every year — nay, we did it down in Penn too where there’s hardly such a thing as winter — so that the grown-ups could loaf and mend harness while the young stuff, by Jesus and Abraham, would please to settle down and learn something. Two things, Pa said, were capable of taking some of the devil
out of the young — birch and learning. Of the two, learning was best, in his opinion, even if it did smart considerably more.
Mam Laura concurred. Gentle and gently philosophic at most other times, capable of sitting in the same position for an hour doing nothing but smoke her pipe and gaze at the landscape, Mam Laura became a demon of energy in the presence of a student who showed some inclination to learn a little. Anything went then — snarling invective, language that would have made my Da blush (sometimes did), sarcasm, intense but thoughtful praise, a slap on the cheek — anything, all the way up to a kiss or one of the honey-and-walnut candies that she kept secretly in her own compartment and that no one else knew how to make. Anything went, so long as she could hope it would help to fix a bit of truth in your mind where with luck you might not lose it.
She was born in Vairmant, south of the tranquil wilderness spot where we made our winter quarters that year. The name of her birth town was Lamoy, a hill town close to the Levannon border. Later, when we were journeying down through that part of the nation, we avoided the turnoff for Lamoy although it was a prosperous place and we might have done well there. Mam Laura had nothing against it, but she had made a complete break with childhood long ago and had no wish to attempt revisiting the past. She was the daughter of a schoolmaster; I could hardly hold my amazement when I learned that in Vairmant, though the Holy Murcan Church controls the schools of course, the teachers are not necessarily all priests. Mam Laura’s father was secular, a scholar and visionary, who privately gave her an education far beyond anything he was allowed to impart to the other children of his school: he had a quackpot theory that within her lifetime it might be possible for a woman not a nun to be permitted to teach — a weird thought for which he could have been booted out of the school and into the pillory. In her darker moods Mam Laura sometimes said that he was fortunate because he died rather young. In such moods also, she sometimes felt that his teaching and encouragement had merely unfitted her for any world except the one that existed only in his mind.
I didn’t always understand, in the days when I was struggling to win my way into the region of knowledge she opened up for me, how completely a giver Mam Laura was — well, what child ever does grasp the motives behind a teacher’s thankless labors, or for that matter the value of the teaching itself? I dare say a child with that much insight would be a sort of monster. But now, when Nickie’s twenty-nmth birthday and mine are behind us, it seems to me I do begin to understand Mam Laura and her teaching — now, when we are so much concerned for the child Niche is carrying, so full of thoughts for the child’s future and so uncertain what manner of world that child will be driven to explore.
* * *
This is late April on the island Neonarcheos. Lately I have written only sporadically, often unwillingly, angry at a compulsion that can drive an otherwise reasonably intelligent man both toward and away from the pen — ah, who but a fantastic quackpot would ever write a book? Likely you noticed how my method of storytelling altered, a while back. That was partly because my mind is frightened and distracted — Nickie is not well.
She insists her daily and nightly pain and discomfort are entirely natural for the seventh month of pregnancy. The perils of that stately condition are vastly exaggerated, she says — she’s never lost a husband from it yet. The child lives and moves, we know; often she wants me to feel “him” kick.
But there is another genuine reason why I’m writing about my time with the Ramblers in what may appear to you a more hasty style — no detailed story now, merely a touching of what I best remember. I have no inclination to apologize. Your own worst fault, you know, is just the opposite of haste: I mean this dreadful mewling uncertainty, this messing about never quite able to make up your mind whether you exist; you ought to overcome it if it’s within your power. No apology, but a moderate effort at explanation.
There was a story I was compelled to write, inwardly compelled, no doubt by an obscure hope that in writing it I would come to understand it better myself. That was the story of a particular part of growing up (as far as an experience so continuous can have any “parts”), the story of a boy who came out of one condition into another and a wider one, though perhaps even less than a quarter-inch taller in the busy flesh. Now that story, I was surprised to notice a while ago, I have completed. What happened to me with the Ramblers happened to a far older boy; my meeting with Nickie (which I shall tell you about before long, I think) happened to a man. These are other stories, maybe beyond my power to write, maybe not. However — because there was a voyage, because life is continuous as daylight between dawn and dark, because I was concerned with varieties of time, because I heard no objections from your Aunt Cassandra nor yet from her yellow tomcat with the bent ear — that original story of a boy’s journey grew inseparably in, out of, over, under, through, around, by, with and for those other stories; which obliges me to complete them too — a little bit. (Ask your Aunt C. how it’s possible to complete something “a little bit” — you would have to exist in order to analyze and enjoy a literary gidget like that one, and you’re probably not up to it.) I don’t suppose there’s any need to explain where that boy’s special story ended or partly ended, since it will be obvious almost immediately to a learned, compassionate, profoundly and generously perceptive scholar and gentleman — or quail — like yourself.
Merely notice and remember, if you wish, that for a good many pages now, and on to the end of the book whenever and wherever that may happen, we — I mean myself and you more or less with me, which after all comes fairly close to admitting you might exist — well, we are like people who have finished one day’s journey, and find that here at the inn there’s still some time for drinks and conversation before we sleep.
* * *
“Look at him there!” says Mam Laura — “only look at him sitting there with a redheaded face hung up perpendicularly forninst his brains, trying to tell me you mustn’t split an infinitive! Mustn’t, mustn’t, mustn’t, frig mustn’t! Why, Davy? Why?”
“Well, that grammar book says—”
“Bugger the buggerly book!” she’d cry out. “I want to hear one stunk-up lonely reason why you mustn’t!”
“To be honest, I can’t think of any. It don’t explain—”
“Doesn’t explain. And being honest is what I’m after,” she said, mollified and sweet and smiling again. “You see, Sam, the boy has intelligence; he only needs to have the school rubbish beaten out of him like dust out of a rug. Well, the grammar book doesn’t explain, Davy, because it relies on authority, which is all right and necessary within limits in such a book; if it tried to explain everything along the way it would stop being a grammar and turn into a textbook on etymology — what’s etymology?”
“The — science of words?”
“Don’t ask me, Brother David! I’m asking you.”
“Uh — well — the science of words.”
“Doesn’t tell me enough. Science of what aspect of words? What thing about words?”
“Oh! Word origins.”
“Had to help you on that one. Next time, snap it back at me and no nonsense. All right — that grammar is probably as good as any other on the subject, and it’s also the only one I possess — of course nothing written in our day is worth a tinker’s poop. Davy — English came partly from the much older language Latin, as I told you a while ago. Kay — in Latin the infinitive is a single word: you don’t split it because you can’t. And so, some time or other, some grammarian with an iron brain decided that the laws of Latin ought to govern English because he liked it that way — and, I’m afraid, also because that made grammar seem more mysterious and difficult to the layman, which built up the prestige of the clerical class. But language — the English language anyway — always makes mahooha out of arbitrary notions of that sort. Split ’em whenever it sounds right, love — I don’t mind — whenever the stuffing is slight enough so that a reader can’t forget the little ‘to’ before he gets to the verb. A
nd what’s meant by the word ‘arbitrary’?”
“Decided by will or whim more than by reason.”
“See, Sam? He’s a good boy.”
“Blows that horn good too,” said my Da…
At that camp I did my horn practise on an open hillside some distance from the wagons. It was moderately dangerous, I suppose, and Sam generally went along, to loaf nearby and watch the part of the country that wasn’t under my eyes while I played. I remember an afternoon late in April; the gang was beginning to get ready for another year’s travel, and we knew the first thing would be a serious effort to relieve Seal Harbor of its loose change before we turned back south. Sam had something on his mind that day. My own head was empty except for music and spring fret, and a wish that Bonnie would quit teasing and put out like Minna. She was more interested in pursuit than capture, at that time anyway; later, as I’ve mentioned, she married Joe Dulin, which showed a lot of good sense. When I got tired that afternoon and was finished with my work, Sam stretched and said: “Well, Jackson, I done it.”
“Done what, Mister?”
“Impident. Why, yesterday, after Laura was done teaching you, I hung around like I sometimes do, and I asked her flat-out if she figured it was too late for me to pick up a mite of learning myself in my own spare time. ‘What kind of learning?’ she says right away, and when I told her — nay, you know, Jackson, you bein’ young as all dammit and horny after the green girls, you’d never believe what a soft woman that Laura is, more b’ token she’s your teacher and such is none of your business, but it’s so. ‘What kind of learning, Sam?’ she says, and so to make things plain I told her again about the wife I got behind me in Katskil, for I thought it might be a trouble to her mind. And that’s a sad sort of a fool thing, Jackson, about my wife. Always seemed to hold it against me, my wife did, that we could never get kids — hoy, and then unbeknownst to her I went and got you by another and a better woman, anyhow we think that happened. But that wa’n’t all. Year by year, seemed she felt it more and more of a duty to whittle me down, nag-nag, tell everyone’d listen the main reason I never got a master carpenter’s license was I was too Goddamn lazy to rise up off my ass even in a city like KingStone all bungfull of money and opportunity, only she never said God-damn of course — real saint she was — I mean, why, shit, Jackson, a man couldn’t live with it… Ai-yah — ‘What kind of learning?’ says Laura, and I told her — ‘Look,’ I says, ‘I can’t follow along with the Goddamn etymogolology or whatever,’ I says, ‘account I et too much ignorance when I was young, but I had it in mind to learn about you,’ I said — nay, Jackson, there’s a strange shine to a woman when she’s all of a sudden happy, I mean happy for true. I don’t suppose a man gets to see it more’n once-twice in a lifetime — the lot of us, men and women, bein’ what we are. ‘About you,’ I says, ‘and how I’d share your bed and your nights and days, and so’t of stand by, you might say, as long as I last.’ And here’s the thing, Jackson. After I’d said that, and was so’t of shifting my feet and wondering where I’d run and hide if she was to get the wrong look onto her face-why — why, Jackson, she said: ‘Then I’ll teach you, Sam.’ Just like that she said it — said: ‘I’ll teach you that, Sam, if it’s all right with the boy.’”
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