Davy

by Edgar Pangborn

  “Merciful winds, it’s all right with the boy!” I remember I was able to say that quickly, so that Sam would feel sure there were no second thoughts. And if there were any that mattered, they were buried too deep for me to know anything about them myself. I believe I was honestly happy for him and Mam Laura, who was after all the woman I would have picked for a mother if I’d had anything to say about it, and I had no feeling that she was taking him away from me.

  That night, I remember, I had to have Bonnie — complaisant Minna wouldn’t do, it had to be Bonnie, and never mind her quick and snippy No and her maybe-sometime. And I got her — remembering Emmia, I think. I warmed her up with kissing when I caught her behind our wagon, and followed her to her compartment after she broke away with a friendlier backward look than I was used to from her; when she would have dismissed me there at the curtains I simply went in with her and kept up the good work. When she tried to freeze me, I tickled her under the ribs and she had to laugh. When she informed me she was about to yell and scream and fetch Pa Rumley who’d give me the cowhide but good, I informed her that she probably wasn’t, anyway not if she was the sweet, passionate and beautiful Spice I thought she was — in fact prettier than any quail I ever saw — and so I went on with my enterprise, warming her here and there and yonder until there wasn’t really one sensible thing she could do, except beg me to wait till she got the rest of her clothes off so they wouldn’t be rumpled. And I will be damned if she wasn’t a virgin.

  Also relieved to be one no longer, and a bit grateful — and a good wife to Joe DuIin when she got around to it — but above all a hell of a musician, bless her: I’ve never known a better, certainly not excepting myself. I was fifteen. You can excuse me (if you like) for going rather cocky and quick-tempered and full of brag the next year or two. However, my half-comic good luck with Bonnie was only a part of the reason for it. I think everything, including the enormous discoveries of the books that Mam Laura was opening up for me, was pushing me just then in the direction of a temporary and fairly harmless toughness. I thought, like most grass-green ignoramuses, that in touching the outer fringes of learning I had swallowed it all. I thought that because a few women had been pleased to play with me, I was likely the grandest stud since Adam — (who had, you must admit, certain God-damned advantages we can’t any of us duplicate). I thought that because I could see the absurdity of dreaming about buying a thirty-ton outrigger, heaving an agreeable serving-wench aboard with the rest of the furniture and taking off for the rim of the dadgandered world — why, I was mature, mature.

  I thought those chunks of whopmagullion, yet it’s all right. Humility does arrive. In fact, so fortunate is our human condition, it seems to arrive for many people early enough in life so that we can enjoy it quite a little while before we’re dead.

  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, a
nd 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 object
s 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.