Davy Read online

  There was no schooling to speak of at the orphanage. In Moha schooling belonged to the years between the ninth and twelfth birthdays, except for the nobility and candidates for the priesthood, who had to sweat out a great deal more. Even slave children had to go through a bit of schooling: Moha was progressive that way. I well remember the district school on Cayuga Street , the weariness of effort that never found a real focus, and now and then a sense of something vital out of reach. And yet our school was very progressive. We had Projects. I made a birdhouse.

  It wasn’t much like the ones I’d made for fun, off in the woods on my lone, out of bark and vines and whittled sticks. The birds themselves were uneducated enough to like those. The one I made at the school with real bronze tools was lots prettier. You wouldn’t want to hang it in a tree of course — you just don’t do such things with a Project.

  My bond-servant pay wasn’t docked for school hours; a good law saw to that. All the same, compulsory progressive education is no joke, when it takes so much time out of your life that might have been spent at learning somethmg.

  The only child friend I remember from the orphanage time is Caron, who was nine when I was seven. She didn’t grow up with me but was sent to the orphanage after her parents liquidated each other in a knife brawl. Only a few months and then she was bonded out, but in that time she loved me. She was quarrelsome with everyone else, constantly in trouble. Late at night, when the supervisor dozed off by the one candle, there’d be some flitting back and forth between the boys’ and girls’ sides of the dormitory, although the penalty for getting caught at sex games was twenty lashes and a day in the cellar. Caron came to me that way, slipping under my blanket bony and warm. We played our fumbling games, not very well; I remember better her talk, in a tiny voice that could not have been heard ten feet away. True-tales of the outer world, and make-believe, and often (this scared me) talk of what she meant to do to everyone in the institution except me — all the way from burning down the building to carving Father Milsom’s nuts, if he had any. She must have been bonded out away from Skoar, I think. When I was bonded myself, still lonely for her two years later, I never won a clue to what had happened to her. I learned only that the lost do not often return in life as they do in the kindly little romances we can hear from the story-teller beggars at the street-corners for a coin or two.

  Caron would be thirty now, if she’s alive. Sometimes, even in bed with my Nickie, I recall our puppy squirming, the wild inconsequences of childhood thought, and imagine that if I saw her now I would know her.

  I do remember one other, Sister Carnation, smelling of crude soap and sweat, who mothered me and sang to me when I was very small. She was mountainously fat with deep-sunk humorous eyes, a light true voice. I was four when Father Milsom checked my whines of inquiry by saying Sister Carnation had walked with Abraham. So I was sick-jealous of Abraham tifi someone explained it was only a holy way of saying she had died.

  I was bonded out as a yard-boy at the Bull-and-Iron tavern on Kurin Street , and worked at it till a month after my fourteenth birthday, which is where I mean to begin my story. Board at half price; after that and the State’s three-fourths were taken out, I had two dollars a week left, and I supplemented the board unofficially too. Oat bread, stew, and whatever can be “uplifted” as Pa Rumley of Rumley’s Ramblers used to say — a boy can grow on that. And the stew at the Bull-and-Iron was thicker and better than anything at the orphanage — more goat and less religion.

  2

  On a day of middle March a month after my fourteenth birthday I sneaked away from the Bull-and-Iron at firstlight, goofing off. It had been a tough winter — smallpox, flu, everything but the lumpy plague. Snow fell in January an inch deep; I’ve seldom seen it so heavy. Now, winter bemg gone, I ached with the spring unrest, the waking dreams. I wanted and feared the night dreams in which some fantastic embrace short of completion would wake me with jetting of the seed. I knew a thousand ambitions that died of laziness; weariness of nothing-to-do while everything was yet to be done-most children call that boredom, and so did I, although childhood was receding then and not slowly. I saw the intolerant hours slip past, each day befooled by a new maybe-tomorrow and no splendid thing coming down the road.

  There was a frost in Febry[2] on my birthday; people said it was unusual. I recall seeing from my loft window that birthday morning a shaft of icicle clinging to the sign over the inn doorway — a noble sign, painted for Jon Robson by some journeyman artist who likely got bed and a meal out of it, along with the poverty talk Old Jon burped up on such occasions. (Only Jon Robson’s daughter Emmia remembered it was my birthday, by the way; she slipped me a shiny silver dollar, and a sweet look for which I’d have traded all the dollars I owned, but as a bond-servant I could have been slapped in the stocks for having such a thought about a freeman’s daughter.) The sign showed a red bull with tremendous horns, ballocks like a pair of church-bells; representing the iron was a bull-ring dart sticking out of his neck and he not minding it a bit. Mam Robson’s idea likely. For a harmless old broad she got a surprising bang out of the bear-pit, bull-ring, atheist-burnings, public hangings. She said such entertainments were mor’l because they showed you how virtue triumphed in the end.

  The wolves sharpnosed in close that winter. A pack of blacks wiped out a farm family at Wilton Village near Skoar, one of the families that risk dwelling outside the community stockade. Old Jon told every new guest the particulars of the massacre, to make good table-talk and to remind the customers how smart they were to come to a nice inn behind a city-type stockade-reasonable rates too. He might be still telling that yarn, and perhaps mentioning a redheaded yard-boy he once had who turned out to be a real snake in his bosom not fit to carry guts to a bear. Old Jon had connections in Wilton Village and knew the family the wolves killed. In any case he never kept his mouth shut more than a few minutes unless aristocracy was present: then, being a Mister himself, the lowest grade of nobility, he’d hold it shut, his blue damp eyes studying their faces in his lifelong search for the best arses to kiss.

  He wouldn’t keep it shut when he slept. He and the Mam had their bedroom across the wagon-yard from my loft. In mid-winter with their windows closed tight against draftdevils I’d still hear Old Jon sleeping away like an ungreased wagon-wheel. Once in a great while I’d hear the Mam howling briefly during his bedwork. It’s a good question how they managed it, a two-hundred-pound lardbucket and a little dry stick.

  In the dark of that March morning I fed the horses and mules, reasoning that someone else could get his character strengthened by shoveling. The tavern did own a pair of slaves for outside work. My only reason for ever cleaning the stable was that I like to see such jobs done right, but that morning I felt they could take the whole shibundle and shove it. It was a Friday anyway, so all work was sinful, unless you care to claim that shoveling is a work of piety, and I want you to think carefully about that.

  I crept into the main kitchen, knowing my way around. Although a yard-boy, I practiced the habit of washing whenever I could, and so old Jon let me help at waiting on table, minding the taproom fire, fetching drinks. I was safe that morning: everybody would be fasting before church, comfortably, in bed. The slave Judd, boss of the kitchen, wasn’t up yet, so his scullion helpers would also be dead to the world. If Judd had discovered me the worst he’d have done would have been to chase me a step or two on his gimp leg, praising God he hadn’t a chance of catching me.

  I located a peach pie. I’d skipped fasting and church a long time-not hard, for who notices a yard-boy? — and no lightning had clobbered me yet, though I’d been plainly taught that the humblest creatures are the special concern of God. In the storeroom I uplifted a loaf of oat bread and a chunk of bacon, and started thinking, Why not run away for good? Who would care?

  Old Jon Robson would: squaring my bond would hurt in the pocketbook nerve. But then I’d never asked to have my life regarded as a market commodity.

  Emmia might care. I w
orked on that as I stole down the morning emptiness of Kurin Street , true sunrise almost half an hour away. I worked on it hard, being fourteen, maybe more active in the sentimentals than most downyskins of that age. I had myself killed by black wolf, and changed that to bandits because black wolf wouldn’t leave enough bones. I felt we should provide bones. Somebody could fetch them back to show Emmia. “Here’s all’s left of poor Davy except his Katskil knife. He allowed he wanted you should have it, was anything to happen to him.” But I’d never actually got around to saying that to anyone, and anyhow bandits wouldn’t leave a good knife, rot them.

  Emmia was sixteen, big and soft like her Da, only on her it looked good. She was a blue-eyed cushiony honeypot with a few more pounds than mOst girls have of everything except good sense. For a year my nights had been heated by undressing her in my fancy, all alone in my stable loft. The real Emmia occasionally had to bed down with important guests to maintain the reputation of the inn, but I wouldn’t quite admit the fact to myself. Certainly I’d been hearing the old cunty yarns and jokes about innkeeper’s daughters for years, but except for Caron lost in childhood Emmia was my first love. I did somehow avoid understanding that the darling quail was obliged to be a part-time whore.

  I was gulping when I passed the town green. Pillory, whipping-post and stocks had become grayly visible, reminders of what could happen to a bond-servant who should get caught putting a hand on Emmia’s dress, let alone under it. As I neared the place where I meant to get over the stockade, most of the flapdoodle about bones drained out of my head. I was thinking about running away for real.

  Found and brought back, I could be declared a no-brand slave and sold by the State for a ten-year term. But that morning I was telling myself what they could do with such laws. I had the bacon and bread, my flint-and-steel and my luck charm, all in a shoulder-sack that was my rightful property. My knife, also honestly mine by purchase, hung sheathed on a belt under my shirt, and all the money I had saved in the winter, ten dollars, was knotted into my loinrag — the bright coin that Emmia gave me tied off separately, never to be spent if I could help it. Up in the woods of North Mountain where I’d found a cave in my solitary wanderings of the year before, I had other things stored — an ash bow I had made, brass-tipped arrows, fishline, two genuine steel fish-hooks, and ten more dollars buried. The arrow-tips and fishline were cheap; it had taken a couple of weeks to save enough for those good fish-hooks, seeing how scarce and precious steel is nowadays.

  I scrabbled over the palisade logs while the sleepy guard was out of sight on his rounds, and took off up the mountainside. The Emmia who talked in my heart quit whimpering over bones. I thought of the actual soft-lipped girl who would surely want me to turn back and stick it out through my bond-period, although in the flesh I’d done nothing hotter than imagine her beside me on my pallet during those rather sad private games.

  Climbing the steep ground away from the city, I decided I’d merely stay lost a day or two as I’d done other times. Then it had usually been my proper day off. Not always: I’d risked trouble before and blarneyed out of it. This time I’d stay until the bacon was gone, and work up some fancy whopmagullion to tell on my return, to soften the action of Old Jon’s leather strap on my rump — not that he ever hurt much, for he lacked both muscle and active cruelty. The decision calmed me. When I was well into the cover of the big woods I climbed a maple to watch for sunrise.

  From up there the roads out of Skoar were still shut away from sight by the forest. Skoar was insubstantial, a phantom city caught and hung in a veil of early light. I think I knew it was also a prosaic reality, a huddle of ten thousand human beings ready for another day of working, swindling, loafing, stepping on each other’s faces or now and then trying not to.

  Before reaching my maple I had heard the liquid inquiry of the first bird-calls. Now the sun-fire would soon be at the rim; the singers were wide awake, their music rippling back and forth across the top of the world. I heard a whitethroat sparrow, who would not remain long on his way north. Robin and wood-thrush — could a morning begin without them? A cardinal shot past, ablaze. A pair of white parrots broke out of a sycamore to skim over the trees, and I heard a wood-dove, and a wren exploded his small heart in a shower of rainbow notes.

  I watched a pair of whiteface monkeys in a sweet gum nearby; they didn’t mind me. The male put down his head so his wife could groom his neck. When she tired of it he grabbed her haunches and helped himself to a bit of love, a thank-you job acted out with his favorite tool. They sat then with their arms around each other, long black tails hanging, and he yawned at me: “Eee-ooo!” When I looked away from them the east was flaming.

  Of a sudden I wanted to know: Where does it come from, the sun? How is it set afire for the day?

  Understand, in those days I hadn’t a scrap of decent learning. At school I’d toiled through two books, the speller and the Book of Prayers. At a Rambler entertainment when I was thirteen I’d picked up a sex pamphlet because I thought it had pictures, and would have bought a dream book if it hadn’t cost a dollar. I knew of the Book of Abraham, called the one source of true religion, and was aware that common men are forbidden to read it lest they misunderstand. Books, say the priests, are all somewhat dangerous and had much to do with the Sin of Man in Old Time; they tempt men to think independently, which in itself implies a rejection of God’s loving care. As for other types of learning — well, I considered Old Jon remarkably advanced in wisdom because he could keep accounts with the bead-board in the taproom.

  I believed, as I’d been taught, that the world consisted of an area of land three thousand miles square, which was a garden where God and the angels walked freely among men performing miracles until about four hundred years ago when men sinned by lusting after forbidden knowledge and spoiled everything. Now we’re working out the penance until Abraham the Spokesman of God, Advertiser of Salvation whose coming was foretold by the ancient prophet Jesus Christ sometimes called the Sponsor, Abraham born of the Virgin Cara in the wilderness during the Years of Confusion, slain for our sins on the wheel at Nuber in the thirty-seventh year of his life, shall return to earth and judge all souls, saving the few and consigning the many to everlasting fire.

  I knew the present year was 317, dating from the birth of Abraham, and that all nations agreed on this date. I believed that on every side of that lump of land three thousand miles square the great sea spread to the rim of the world. But — what about that rim? The Book of Abraham, said the priests, does not say how far out it is — God doesn’t wish men to know, that’s why. When I heard that in school, naturally I shut up, but it bothered me.

  All my doubts were young and tentative: new grass struggling up through the rotted trash of winter. I did think it remarkable how the lightning never roasted me no matter how I sinned. At the close of my last school year a whole week was devoted to Sin, Father Clance the principal giving it personal attention. The Scarlet Woman puzzled us: we knew whores painted their faces, but it did sound as if this one was red all over — I didn’t get it. We knew what the good father meant by the Sin of Touching Yourself, though we called it jacking off; a few of the greener boys were upset to learn that if you did it your organs would turn blue and presently drop away; two fainted and one ran outside to vomit. Girls and boys had been separated that week, so I don’t know what sacred information got rammed into the quail. I could see that I must be too altogether trifling for God to bother about me, since I’d been taught the technique at least four years earlier at the orphanage, wasn’t even slightly blue, and still had everything. Father Clance was large and pale; he looked as if his stomach hurt and someone else was to blame. You felt that before blundering along and creating human beings male and female, God might in common decency have first consulted Father Clance.

  The Church made it plain that everything connected with sex was sinful, hateful, dirty — even dreaming of a lay was called “pollution” — and also deserving of the utmost reverence. There w
ere other inconsistencies, mevitable I suppose. The Church and its captive secular governments naturally wished the population might rncrease; with so many marriages sterile, mue-births coming nearly one in five, it’s an empty world. But the Church is also committed to the belief — I don’t understand its ongins — that all pleasure is suspect and only the joyless can be virtuous. Therefore the authorities do their best to encourage breeding while solemnly looking the other way. Something like a little show we used to put on when I was with Rumley’s Ramblers: four couples munching a nobility-type dinner with slaves bowing in the baked meats, and those aristocrats jawed gravely about the weather, fashion, church affairs never cracking a smile — but the audience could see under the table, where a squirming of fingers and bared thighs and upper-class codpieces was wondrous to behold.

  The mind of Father Clance could take that kind of inconsistency with no pain; not mine. Religion requires a specially cultivated deafness to contradiction which I’m too sinful to learn.

  Of course at fourteen I understood that you agreed out loud with whatever the Church taught, or else. I watched my first atheist-burning after I started work at the Bull-and-Iron. The attraction was a man who’d been heard to tell his son that nobody was ever born of a virgin. I’m not clear how this made him an atheist, but knew better than to ask. In Moha the burnings were always part of the Spring Festival — children under nine were not required to attend.

  From my maple I watched the birth and growing of the day. Unexpectedly I thought: What if someone were to sail as far as the rim?

  It was too much. I shied away from the thought. I slid from my tree and climbed on through deep forest, where the heat of day is always moderate. I traveled slowly so as not to raise a sweat, for the smell drifts far and black wolf or brown tiger may get interested. Against black wolf I had my knife — he hates steel. Tiger is indifferent to knives — a flip of his paw will do — but he usually avoids mountam country to follow the grazers. He’s said to respect arrows a little, and thrown spears and fire, though I’ve heard of his leaping a fire-circle to take a man.