Davy Read online

  Ma was not only ruggedly fat but six feet tall, her dress an ankle-length job of dead black, with expensive cowhide slippers showing at the bottom. Her hair was done up inside a purple turban, and bone ornaments swung at her ears. I still think the man of that house was the village Guide, sober and responsible as they have to be: there was hunter’s gear hung in that store-room, and the location of the house was traditional for a Guide’s dwelling. Maybe when the man was at home the fat woman was a model housewife, her black gown and turban stashed away where he wouldn’t stumble on them. Dressed this way, she had to be a wise woman, and not the legal kind but the kind people sneak to for love philtres, abortions, poisons.

  She set a crystal globe on the table, such as I’d heard of gyppos and Ramblers using in their fortune-telling, and plumped down there with her back to my keyhole, but not before I got a look at her face. Small cruel eyes, clever and quick-moving. Her beaky nose had stayed sharp while the rest of her face grew bloated in pale fat.

  After that glimpse, her flat-faced daughter slinking by impressed me as a near approach to nothing. Going to the door to meet the gray-haired woman, whose knock I heard, she looked flat all over, as if during her growing up — she was somewhere in the twenties — her mother had sat on her most of the time. Her whispery greeting to the gray-haired woman was rehearsed and phony: “Peace unto you, Mam Byers! My mother is already in communication with your dear one.”

  “Oh. Am I late?” Mam Byers spoke like a lady.

  “Nay. Time is illusion.”

  “Yes,” said Mam Byers, and added emptily: “How nice you look, Lurette!”

  “Thank you,” said the flat-faced twirp, keeping it on a high plane. “Be seated.”

  The fat woman had not turned her head. She sat motionless, a great bulging buzzard, giving me a view of the back of her fat neck, offering no greeting even when Mam Byers sat down at the table. I saw the lady’s face then, lean, haggard, haunted. The fat woman said: “Look in the deeps!”

  Lurette closed the outer door against daylight and drew heavy curtains at the windows. She placed candles beside the crystal, and brought a burning splinter from the hearth in the next room to light them. Then she drifted off behind Mam Byers, watching for signals I think. I’ve never seen anyone who looked so much like a witless tool, as if she had given up trying to be a person and become a stick that her Ma used to poke things with.

  “Look in the deeps! What do you see?”

  “I see what I’ve seen before, Mam Zena, the bird trying to escape from a closed room.”

  “Thy mother’s spirit.”

  “Oh, I believe,” said Mam Byers. “I believe. I may have told you — when she was dying she wanted me to kiss her. The only thing she asked — have I told you?”

  “Peace, Mam Byers!” She sighed, the great hag, and rested her enormous arms on the table, where I saw her fat sharp-pointed fingers curled like the legs of a spider. “What does the poor bird do today, my dear?”

  “Oh, the same — beating at the windows. It was the cancer — the smell — you understand, don’t you? I couldn’t kiss her. I pretended. She knew I was pretending…” Mam Byers had set down her expensive leather purse. I knew a poor vifiage like this would have no more than one or two aristocratic families, and she would belong to one of them; it did her no good in dealing with these bloodsuckers. “Is it possible, Main Zena? Can you truly bring her, so that I could speak to her? — oh, it was so long ago!”

  “All things are possible, if one has faith,” said Mam Zena, and Lurette was leaning over Mam Byers, stroking her shoulder and the back of her neck, speaking some words I couldn’t catch in her whiny whisper.

  “Oh!” said Mam Byers — “I meant to give you this be — fore.” And she started taking silver coins from her purse, but her hands shook, and presently she shoved the purse into Lurette’s hands and seemed relieved to let go of it.

  “Take it away, Lurette,” said Mam Zena. “I cannot touch money.” Lurette carried the purse away to a sidetable, and I saw her cringe at what must have been a burny-burn look from Ma. “Take my hands, my dear, and now we must wait, and pray a little.”

  That was evidently a signal for Lurette, who slipped out of the room and was gone a few minutes. She returned silently, coming only as far as the doorway behind Mam Byers to set down a dish of smoking incense which stunk up the place in no time. Lurette on that errand was naked except for a slimpsy pair of underpants, in the middle of a costume change I guessed; as she disappeared again I noticed that she looked flatter than ever in the nude.

  It’s worth remembering that Mam Zena and her whelp could easily have burned if this sort of thing was proved on them — the Church doesn’t put up with that kind of competition. But I dare say there’s no undertaking so dangerous, ridiculous, cruel or nasty but what plenty of goons are ready to have a go at it for a few dollars.

  I got annoyed, and I suppose a little overcharged with teen-age hell; besides, I had to get away with my load of wash. Lurette was obviously going to perform as the spirit of Main Byers’ mother; being the opposition candidate was the only thing I could see that might have a future. I freed my knife from under that yellow smock, and put on the big white one over it. It must have cleared Mam Zena’s ankles; on me it swept the floor with considerable dignity, even after I cinched it up with one of the white loin-rags. This left me a pair of bosom-sacks out front which were line for a lot more laundry. Of course I was a little over-balanced — more a 20th Century style as I look back on it now — and my red hair poking up through and around the towel I’d tied over it probably struck a false note, and there could have been a couple-three other things inconsistent with feminine charm at its best. In spite of being dressed for the part, I didn’t feel matronly. So almost right away I gave up any idea of being the quiet type, and finding some tomato sauce on the shelves I splashed a gob of it over the front of the white smock, and more on my knife. I wouldn’t be Mam Byers’ mother after all, but just some well-nourished lady who’d died sudden and still resented it.

  Back at my keyhole I saw Lurette about to float in with filmy stuff hung all around her. You could make out a mouth painted large, a pair of eyes, not much more. Hypnotized in the smoky darkness, wanting to believe, Mam Byers would see anything those frauds wanted her to see. That was proved right away, for Lurette entered before I had my nerve screwed up to act. Mam Byers — poor soul, she couldn’t stay at the table as Mam Zena told her to, but jumped up and held out her arms. It somehow gave me the push I needed. I cut loose with “Murder! Murder!” and sailed in waving my gory blade.

  Mam Zena rose like a bull out of a mud wallow, knocking over the table and candles, but it was Lurette who screamed in panic, and I went for her first, snatching hold of the drifting white stuff and tripping her so she hit the floor with a fine solid thud. Then I yanked back the window curtains, and when Mam Zena came for me-she had guts — I nipped behind her and started jabbing her in the rump, just enough to keep her active. “Run!” I said, and quoted something nice I recalled from Father Clance’s teaching: “Flee from the wrath to come!”

  She fled. I don’t suppose anyone could stick around for that kind of goosing. She couldn’t run for the village, not in a purple turban and black gown. She plunged away into the next room, and I had to let her go — also get out before she returned with some better weapon than mine. But meanwhile Lurette had scrambled up, and she did dart outside for the village, bare-ass, with no more sense than a spooked pullet. She was screeching “Murder! Rape! Fire!” I never did find out which one she thought it was.

  I shoved the purse into Mam Byers’ wobbling hands. At least she had seen Lurette unveiled; more than that I couldn’t wait to do. I think she was cursing me as I ran out. Anyone is likely to be cursed for smashing a makebelieve.

  I went down those corn rows to the woods about as fast as I’ve ever covered the ground, still brandishing my tomato-killer without knowing it. Sam said later that if he hadn’t known me real well he’d
’ve been worried about my condition, but as it was he just wondered why so much feminine influence didn’t do more to bring out the softer side of my nature. Vilet said she loved me too.

  On the way back to the cave, after I’d told them the whole amazing story of my girlhood, I stopped in my tracks. “Balls of the prophet!” I said — “I still got that dollar.”

  “Oh snummy!” says Vilet, and Sam looked grave. We sat down on a log to reason it out. “It’d be a sin if you’d meant to keep it, but you just forgot, didn’t you, Spice?”

  “Ayah. Stracted like.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Still I suppose we got to ask Jed what’s the mor’l thing to do.”

  Sam said: “Jackson, I’m half-way wishful we wouldn’t do that. I think it’d be mor’lly good for us to solve this ’ere by our lone. Frinstance, could young Jackson, or you, so’t of go on keeping it without meaning to? — naw, naw, sorry, I can see that wouldn’t be just right. More the kind of thing I’d do myself, being a loner by trade.”

  “Of course,” Vilet said, “them people was frauds and cheats — oh ffiy gah!” She jumped up, spilling part of the loot she’d been carrying and brushing her worn old green smock as if she’d sat down on fire-ants. “What if that old bag put a witchment onto the clo’es?”

  “Nay, Jackson, I b’lieve she couldn’t at this distance. Besides, them spirit-maker frauds a’n’t real witches. Know what? — they be more so’t of quackpot religioners, and you know how Jed feels about such-like. He wouldn’t want no dollar going to support heresy, now would he?”

  “That’s a fact,” said Vilet. She was brushing the dirt off the clothes she’d flung away and folding them back into a nice bundle, her hands knowing and sensitive with the cloth. She had a good deal of faith in Sam’s judgment when Jed and God weren’t around.

  “And look at it thisaway too,” Sam said; “young Jackson heah has been under a bad strain — nay, I don’t mean about was he a boy or a girl, I think we got that clear enough, he’s as much a boy as any other jackass with balls, but what I mean, he done good work back theah, savin’ a poor lady from sin and folly whiles we was just resting our ass in the brush. I won’t say his hair has turned white from the exper’ence, because it ha’n’t, but my reasoning is, he’s earned that ’ere lucky dollar — a’n’t that so, Jackson?”

  “Ayah,” said Vilet. “Ayah, that’s so.”

  “Kay. But now, old Jed, he lives on what we got to call a higher mor’l plane — right, Jackson?”

  “That’s right,” said Vilet.

  “So if we was to tell a bang-up white lie about our boy leavin’ the dollar theah, it’d spare Jed sorrow, right?”

  “It would do that,” Vilet said. “Still—”

  “It’d keep the wheels of progress greased, I think.”

  “Ayah,” said Vilet. “Ayah, that’s so.”

  “Account of when you live on a higher mor’l plane, Jackson, you got no time to figger where ever’ God-damn dollar went — if the Lord don’t keep you hopping the unrighteous will.”

  “Well,” said Vilet — “well, I guess you’re right…”

  We stayed at our cave hideaway a few weeks more, while Vilet fixed up clothes for us. She carried a little sewing-kit, and I never tired of watching her skill with it. Scissors, thimble, a few needles and a spool or two of wool thread; that was it, but Vilet could clutter up the landscape with marvels in a way I’ve seldom seen surpassed. The huge white smock provided three good freeman’s white loin-rags for us and part of a shirt for Jed; then Vilet was able to cobble up the rest of that shirt and two more for Sam and me out of the remainder of poor Miss Davy’s wash. That done, she cussed and sweated some, remodeling the yellow smock for herself, asking the woods and sky why in hell Lurette couldn’t at least have grown a pair of hips. She dissected it, however, and added whatsits here and there; when she was done, it fit her cute as buttons.

  We Went on making plans. It seems to be a human necessity, a way of writing your name on a blank wall that may not be there. I can’t very well condemn it, for even nowadays I’m always after doing it myself. We planned we’d go a few miles beyond that village and then strike out boldly on the Northeast Road. I with my real Moha accent would do most of the talking, we planned, but we’d all need to be rehearsed in a good story.

  Jed and Vilet, we decided, had better be man and wife — they would be truly anyhow when they got to Vairmant. We four were all quite different in looks, but Vilet claimed she could see a kind of resemblance between Sam’s face and mine, and was so positive about it I began to see it myself in spite of the obvious differences — Sam stringy and tall with a thin nose, I stocky and short with a puggy one. “It’s mouth and forehead,” Vilet said, “and the eyes, some. Davy is blue-eyed but it’s a darkish blue, and yourn mightn’t look too different, Sam, if you was redheaded.”

  “Got called Sandy when I was young,” he said. “It wa’n’t never a real red. If I was a real red-top like young Jackson, likely I could’ve busted my head through stone walls some better’n I have, last thirty-odd yeahs.”

  “Now, Sam,” said Jed, “it don’t seem to me, honest it don’t, that God’d give a man the power to put his head through a stone wall except in a manner of speaking, like. Unless of course the wall was crumbly, or—”

  “It was a manner of speaking,” said Sam.

  After kicking it around a good deal, we worked it out that Sam would be my uncle and Vilet’s cousin. Jed had a brother in Vairmant who’d just recently died — born in Vairmant himself but moved away when young to Chengo off in western Moha. This brother bequeathed Jed the family farm and we were all going there to work it together. As for me, my parents died of smallpox when I was a baby, and my dear uncle took me in, being a bachelor himself, in fact a loner by trade. When my Pa and Ma died we were living in Katskil, although originally a Moba family, from Kanhar, an important family, damn it.

  “I dunno,” said Jed. “It don’t seem just right.”

  “A manner of speaking, Jackson. Besides, I didn’t mean them hightoned Loomises from Kanhar was aristocrats — just a solid freeman family with a few Misters. Like my own Uncle Jeshurun — Kanhar Town Council give him a Mister, and why? Account the taxes he paid on the old brewery is why, the way it was in the family couple-three generations—”

  “Wine is a mocker,” said Jed. “I don’t want you should go imagining things like breweries.”

  “Damn-gabble it, man,” Sam said, “I’m merely telling you what they done, no use telling a story like this’n if it don’t sound like facts. I didn’t start the durn brewery, more b’ token if you ever hear tell of making wine in a brewery I want to know. It was great-gran’ther sta’ted it, understand, and she run along like a beaut till my Uncle Jeshurun, him with the wooden leg, took to drinking up the profits.”

  Jed studied away at it, not happy.

  “You mean he done that too in a manner of speaking?”

  “He sure as hell did.”

  “I mean, it just don’t seem to me, Sam, that people are going to believe it. About drinking up a whole brewery. He couldn’t do it.”

  “I can see you didn’t know my Uncle Jeshurun. Leg was hollow, Jackson. Old sumbitch’d fill it up at the brewery after a long drunken work-day, take it home and get plastered, carry on like crazy all night long. He didn’t just die neither, not my Uncle Jeshurun. He blowed. Leanin’ over to blow out a candle, forgot whichaway to blow being drunk at the time, or rather he was never sober. Breathed in ’stead of out, all that alcohol in him went whoom — Jesus and Abraham, Mister, not enough left of the old pot-walloper to swear by. Piece of his old wooden leg come down into a cow pasture a mile away. Killed a calf. My Aunt Clotilda said it was a judgment — onto my uncle, I mean. Still, if it hadn’t happened he znight’ve had to leave town.”

  15

  We started the day after the clothes were finished; we may all have been afraid of coming to like that cave too much. At least Sam and I felt — without ever sayin
g so — that we would always be in some way on the move; and for Jed and Vilet the farm in Vairmant colored the future with the warmth of a lamp.

  It’s odd how little thought we gave the war, after being out of touch with the world more than three months. We wondered, and made some idle talk of it, but until we were on the move again, and the days were flowing out of June into the golden immensity of midsummer, we felt no urgent need to learn what the armies had done while we were so much at peace. They could have passed and repassed on the Northeast Road, Skoar could have fallen, we’d never have known it.

  The border wars of that time and place were a far cry from what I saw and experienced of war later on in Nuin. In the Moha-Katskil war of 317 I don’t suppose there were ever more than two thousand men involved in a battle: mostly feinting and maneuvering, armies shoving for position along the few important roads, avoiding the wilderness as much as they could; the forest ambush those Katskil men tried outside Skoar was unusual. As it happened, I saw no more of that particular war. It was settled by negotiation in September. Katskil ceded a trilling port and a few square miles of ground on the Hudson Sea in return for the town of Seneca and a thirty-mile strip of territory that gave them a long-desired access to the Ontara Sea. Brian VI of Katskil had other smart reasons for demanding those treaty terms — I didn’t appreciate this until long later, when I was with Dion in Nuin and getting my own inside view of high-level politics. That thirty-mile strip cut off Moha from any land approach to the western wilderness; so if that unknown, probably rich region is ever tapped by land routes it will be a matter between Katskil and Penn — Moha needn’t bother.

  When we left our cave I was concerned with the more ancient war of human beings against other creatures who desire to hold a place on earth. I felt, superstitiously, that we had been having it too easy. In our hunting and fishing while we stayed at the cave we’d encountered nothing more dangerous than a few snakes. Once a puma started out of the brush ahead of Vilet and me and took off in almost comic terror. One night we smelled a bear, who might have got troublesome if he could have climbed after our supplies. It was only a black of course, as we knew from the prints we found in the morning. The great red bear is so scarce in southern Moha one never really expects to see him. North of Moha Water he is plentiful enough, one of the chief reasons why that great triangle of mountain country bounded by Moha Water and the Lorenta Sea remains mostly unexplored.