Davy Page 22

  “’Greensleeves’, frinstance?”

  The mandolin girl had a floppy lock of brown hair that tumbled over her eyes; kay, but the banjo girl had big full lips that started you thinking right away — well, “thinking” is the word I wrote there and I hate to scratch it out. The mandolin girl was still plinking a little, but mostly they were whisper-giggling together now, and I got the notion I was being analyzed.

  “Ayah, ‘Greensleeves’ goes good,” Sam said. “Ramblers — well, they’re touchy people, you hear tell. Might be a wrong tell — never talked to any myself. Prideful, that’s for sure, and smart, and full of guts. Folk say they’re always ready for a fight but they never start one, and that’s good if it’s true. They take them big slow wagons into lone places no ordinary caravan woud ever go, and I’ve hearn tell of bandits tackling a Rambler outfit now and then, but never did hear of the bandits getting the best of it. Every Rambler boss got a silver token that gets him across any national boundary without no fuss, did you know that?”

  “No, that a fact? Hoy, that means if we was with these people we could go smack over into Levannon, wouldn’t have to steal no boat and dodge the customs and so on?”

  He caught my arm and swung me back and forth a little, so I’d keep my mouth shut while he thought. “Jackson, you been contemplating stealing a vessel for to cross the Hudson Sea and similar such-likes?”

  “Oh,” I said, “maybe I done some thinking that a’n’t so big of a much. But is that a fact, Sam? They could get us across if they was a-mind to?”

  “They wouldn’t do it smuggling style — lose their token if they did. I’ve hearn tell they never do that.”

  “But they could maybe take us into the gang?”

  He looked pretty sober, and let go my arm. “Wouldn’t be a one to say they couldn’t — you anyway. You got this music thing, and kind of a way with you.”

  “Well hell, I wouldn’t go with ’em unless you did.”

  He spread out his big clever hands on the fence rail, more than ever quiet and full of reflection, studying all we could see of the Ramblers’ layout. One of the plain wagons was parked, blocked up with its open rear toward the fence, near where the girls were loafing, and several large boxes stood in it; that would be the selling wagon, I knew from Rambler shows I’d seen at Skoar — they’d have a pitch going there by afternoon, with cure-all medicines and considerable junk, some of it good: I’d bought my fine Katskil knife from a Rambler trader. Another wagon, a covered one, stood facing a wide roped-off area of ground, and it had an open side; that would be the theater. “In that case,” said Sam, and I felt he was as nearly happy as either of us could be with East Perkunsvil so short a way in the past — “in that case I believe you might give it a go, Jackson, for I think I see my way clear to go along.”

  “What you got in mind?”

  “Terr’ble question, Jackson, always — nay, if I’m a-mind to squeeze, worm or weasel my way into some place where I a’n’t expected, I most generally do. Wait a shake.” I’d been about to clamber over the fence before my nerve gave out, but just then a new man came in sight around the wagon where the gray-haired woman was sitting, and leaned against the back step to pass the time of day with her.

  He wasn’t actualy big — not as tall as Sam — but managed to seem so, partly with the help of a thick black shag of beard that grew half-way down his chest. The black tangle matching it on his head hadn’t been cut for two or three months, but I noticed the man had his vanities: his brown shirt and white loin-rag were clean and fresh, and his hairy legs wound up in a pair of moose-hide moccasins as wonderful as any I ever saw, for their gilt ornaments were nudes, and the antics he could make those golden girls perform just by wiggling his toes would have stirred up the juices of youth in the dustiest Egyptian mummy and I mean a married one.

  Sam said: “I get a feeling that’s their boss-man, Jackson. Look him over. Try and imagine him getting mad about something.”

  I swung myself over the fence. Once over, I felt everyone watching me — the girls, the card-players, even the white-haired man from under his straw hat, and the blackbearded boss-man whose voice was still going on in a mild rumble like a thunder-roll ten miles away. “Da,” I said — Sam smiled quickly, wincingly as if all pleasure were partly pain, and I dare say it is — “Da, I can imagine it, but I can’t no-way express it.”

  “Uhha. Well, you heam tell about the hazy old fa’mer that got so nearsighted he set out to milk a bull?”

  “And so then?”

  “So nothing, Jackson, nothing special except they do say he a’n’t come down yet, not to this day.”

  I had to go over then, or not at all. My good white loinrag helped, but crossing the immense twenty yards between me and the musicians, my knees quivered, and my hands too, as I lifted out the golden horn and let the sunlight touch it; however, the way their faces gleamed with interest and excitement at seeing the horn cleared away my jitters and left me free to be another friendly human being myself. I said: “Can I make some music with you?”

  The kitten with the dangerous lock of hair on her forehead and the quail with the bedroom lips were suddenly all business and no mockery. Music was serious. Bonnie asked: “Wherever was that made? Isn’t it Old-Time?”

  “Yes. I a’n’t had it long. I can only play a few airs.”

  “Bass range?”

  “Nay, seems best in the middle — I know there’s notes on both sides I can’t play yet.”

  Somebody said: “Boy ’pears to be honest.” I’d felt all along I was being watched from under that straw hat.

  The girls paid Stud no attention. “What airs do you know?” Minna Selig asked, and I learned she possessed a bedroom voice too, but right now she was all business, like Bonnie.

  “Well,” I said — “well, ‘Greensleeves’ — ‘Londonderry Air’—” Minna’s soft-voiced gut-string banjo immediately sang me a few small chords, and I went wandering into “Greensleeves” with of course not the dimmest notion of what key I was using, or of harmony, or of how to adapt myself to another performer. All I had was the melody, and a natural feeling for the horn, and some guts and a whole lot of good will, and a keen ear, and a tremendous admiration for the way the neat black-haired girl sat there cross-legged with her banjo and her bedroom thighs. Then right away Bonnie’s mandolin arrived, laughing and crying silver-voiced; her big gray eyes played games with me — that didn’t distract her from the music, for she could slay a man with those things and never need to give a moment’s thought — and her racing fingers gave my playing a translucent trembling background all the way through to what I supposed was the end.

  The white-haired drummer had swung his arm to beckon a friend or two. People were coming out of the wagons. The flute-player and the cornet man had given up their card-game and were just standing by, listening, thinking it over. So well was the horn responding to me, for a minute I was in danger of thinking it was my playing that drew them and not the Old-Time magic of the horn itself. When I play nowadays that may be true; it can’t have been true that day, though even sweet sharp Bonnie said later on that I did better than any ignoramus had a right to.

  When I had (I thought) finished the melody, Minna’s hand pressed my arm to check any foolishness, and away went Bonnie’s mandolin shimmering and heartbreaking to find the melody on the other side of the clouds transfigured by a tempo twice as fast and dancing in the sun. Someone behind me had brought a guitar, which now was chuckling agreeably about the fun Bonnie was having up there. And Minna was intently humming three notes very close to my ear, just audible to me, and whispering: “Play those on your thing real soft when she goes to singing. Trust your ear how and when to play ’em. We’ll goof some but let’s try.”

  Do you know, we didn’t goof, much? I was ready when Bonnie’s light soprano soared, and Minna unexpectedly came through with a contralto smooth as cream. Well, those girls were good and double good. They’d been making music together since they were Rambler babi
es, besides having a rare sort of friendship that no man could ever break up. I never knew whether they were bed-lovers. Pa Rumley was a little down on such variations, I suppose a hangover of the usual religious clobbering in childhood, so it was a question you didn’t ask. If they were, it didn’t turn them against the male half: I had both saying oh-stopdon’t stop after a while, and they were both all the more delicious for not taking me too seriously, since we were not, as people call it, in love.

  When Bonnie sang a second verse of “Greensleeves” I heard something more happen along with that guitar. Intent on making my horn do what I hoped they wanted, I felt the addition only as a flowing, sustaining chordal murmur, almost remote although I knew the singers were standing quite close behind me. All our best were there — Nell Grafton and Chet Spender and handsome Billy Truro, the only tenor I ever heard of who could also play Romeo and skin mules. And for the down-in-the-cellar thunderpumping bass we had Pa Rumley himself.

  Bonnie wasn’t playing while she sang, but holding her mandolin away, her other hand on my shoulder bedam — never mind, Minna had one on my knee, and some of that was to make a romantic picture for the crowd that was increasing out there in the road, but most of it was real. Bonnie somewhere had learned to sing without too much distorting the charm of her rounded, heart-shaped face — well, with nice teeth, ravishing complexion and brilliant eyes, who’d care if she did have to let the daylight in on her tonsils for some of the big notes? And by the prettiest accident, that day she was wearing a green blouse with long sleeves — you’d have thought the whole show had been planned a month in advance, and I’m sure the yucks believed it was.

  When the song was done, and she’d waved and blown a kiss to the crowd, which was stomping and clapping, even a few of them snuffling — why, didn’t she grab my shirt to pull me on my feet? “C’m’ on, kid!” she said — “they love you too.”

  There was a dizzying pleasure in it, not spoiled by my knowledge that most of the excitement was for Bonnie and ought to be. Yes, I liked it, and I was growing up, I wasn’t too demarbleized—

  * * *

  Nickie and Dion still quarrel occasionally about correcting the places where I goof the spelling. I can’t interfere much, because I did ask them to, away back when I started this book. The last time I heard them beating away at it was very recently, in fact only a few minutes ago, I can’t think why. I had dozed off in the sunshine or appeared to, and I heard Nickie ask Dion how he could be sure I hadn’t meant to write it that way. “Can’t,” he admitted, “and even if I could, why should I be elected to defend the mother tongue against the assaults of a redheaded songbird, politician, hornplayer and drunken sailor? Hasn’t she been raped by experts for centuries past counting, ever since Chaucer made such a bitched-up mess of trying to spell her, and doesn’t she still perk?”

  “A heartless, mean and lazy brute,” said Nickie. “I hate you, Di-yon, the way you can’t even come to the aid of Euterpe who lieth bleeding in the dust.”

  “Euterpe — who she?”

  “What! You calling me a twirp?”

  “No, but—”

  “I ’stinctly heard you say ‘You twirp!’ ”

  “Miranda — Euterpe was not the God-damn Muse of Spelling.”

  “Oh, that’s right. That was Melpomene.”

  “Sorry-sorry, she was the Muse of Tragedy.”

  “So all right! So English spelling always was a tragedy, so what other girl could handle it, so don’t give me all that back talk or you’ll wake up Davy.”

  I’d just perfected a theory of the origins of English spelling, so I woke up officially to share it with them. You see, there was this ancient gandyshank in the dawn of history who had a nagging wife and an acid stomach and chilblains, but English hadn’t been invented, which left him in the demarvelizing position of being unable to cuss. However, the people in charge of politics had passed a revelation to make the alphabet and then chopped it into sticky chunks and passed them around so there’d be enough letters for everybody; so when the old jo’s wife yakked or his feet hurt or his convictions rifted up on him, he’d snatch the alphabet chunks and heave them at the side of a cliff, the only form of cussing adapted to those early days. Centuries later some scholar with a large punkin head and very small bowels of compassion discovered the cliff and invented English right off whiz-pop just like that. But by then all the combinations a decent man would spell had washed off in the rain or the crows had et them.

  Nickie asked: “How’d old Cliffbottom’s wife come to nag and yak so if English hadn’t been invented?”

  Not a bit demongrelized, I told my wife: “She was slightly ahead of her time.”

  20

  While “Greensleeves” was still being applauded I heard the black-beard rumble at us: “Put the lid on, kids. They look ripe for Mother.” And as I was wishing I had a clue to what he meant, he said to me carelessly, pleasantly — I might have been underfoot for years and he so used to me he hardly saw me — “Stick around, Red.”

  I gulped and nodded. He slouched over to that wagon that held the boxes. The banjo girl pulled me down to sit beside her again and slid a friendly arm around me. “That’s Pa Rumley,” she said. “Next time he speaks to you you say ‘Uhha, Pa.’ ’S the way he wants to hear it is all. And don’t worry, I think he likes you. I’m Minna Selig, so what’s your name, dear?”

  Hoy! That was demortalizing if you like. I found out soon enough that Rambler people call each other “dear” all the time, and it doesn’t necessarily mean sweethearting, but I didn’t know it then, and she knew I didn’t. Close to my other ear, the little devil with the mandolin said: “And don’t worry, I think Minna likes you. I’m Bonnie Sharpe, so tell me your name too — dear.”

  “Davy,” says I.

  “Oh, we think that’s nice, don’t we, Minna?”

  Yes, they really worked me over. Well, but for the girls and their mild mischief and warmth and good humor, the end of “Greensleeves” might have been the end of my courage: I might have gathered the rags of my dignity around my shoulders and fled back over the fence with no more word even to Sam about what I wanted most in the world, which was to be accepted by these people and stay with them on their travels as long as they’d have me.

  Pa Rumley standing in the back of that wagon flung up his arms. “Friends, I hadn’t meant for to give you this here message of good tidings till later in the day, but you being drawed by our music — and our kids love you for the nice hand you give ’em — why, I’ll take it as a sign to speak a few words, and you pass ’em on to your dear ones. Open up that gate and gether round, for lo, I bring hope to the sick and lorn and suffering — draw nigh!”

  It was a pleasant custom in practically all villages and middle-sized towns that had no bigger park, to lend the Ramblers the town green for the duration of their stay, as a camp-site and show area; townfolk wouldn’t normally intrude unless specially invited. I’d broken the rule. I think the reason why the girls said nothing about it was my natural-born goofy look, which often does wonders for me. The yucks opened the gate now at Pa Rumley’s invitation, and drifted in, shy, and with the yuck’s invariable anxiety to watch out against swindling — much good it does him. There were twenty-odd men and half again as many women gathered around the wagon, aggressively doughfaced, wanting to be convinced of something, it didn’t much matter what. I saw Sam had strolled in with them. He stayed in the rear; when he caught my eye over a flock of bonnets and broad straw hats he shook his head slightly, which I took to mean that he had something cooking I’d better not disturb.

  “There you are, friends, step right close!” A man would give a lot to own a voice like Pa Rumley’s, big as a church bell but able to go soft as a little boy whispering in the dark. “This here is going to be a blessed day you’ll long remember. You seem to me like fine intelligent souls, responsible citizens, men and women who’ve kept the fear of God in their hearts and evermore prayed and done their share. That’s what I’ll say to my
self whenever I think of Humber Town, and good Mayor Bunwick who let us have these fine accommodations, and done so much for us — no sir, folks, Ramblers don’t forget, never believe it if you hear they do. My friendship with your Mayor Bunwick, and the Progress Club, and the Ladies’ Murcan Temperance Union — this is a memory I’m about to cherish all my days.” As for Bunwick, the old fart certainly wasn’t there at that time in the morning, but a number of his ratty cousins undoubtedly were, to say nothing of the ladies — besides, Pa always said that if you set out to kiss an ass you might just as well kiss it good. “Now, friends, you must have seen how this world is a vale of tears and mis’ry. 0 Lord, Lord, don’t Death on his white charger go day and night raging and stomping up and down amongst our midst? — well, gentlemen hark! Why, it might be there a’n’t a one of you except the children, God bless ’em, and maybe even some of them, that a’n’t been bereavered already by the grim reaper. And sickness — yes, I’m a-mind to talk to you about the common sorrows, them that must come soon or late to one and all. They a’n’t fancy things — step in a little closer now, will you? — oh no, nobody makes up stories about ’em, nor sad songs, but I say to you a man laid low by sickness, he’s gone, folks, just as sure as a hero done to death in battle for his b’loved fatherland, amen, it’s a fact.”

  He gave them time to look around at each other wise and serious and agree that it was so. “Friends, I tell you there do be some sorrows that can’t never at all be healed except in the ev’loving hand of God and by the tooth of time that heals the blows of fate and dries up the tears of the wayworn, and gently leads, and allows the grass to grow green over lo, these many wounds. But concerning the grief of common sicknesses — now there, friends, I got a message for you.

  “Forty-seven years ago, in a little village in the hills of Vairmant green and far away, there lived a woman, simple, humble, Godfearing, mild, like it might’ve been any one of the lovely companions and helpmeets I see before me right now in this good town — where I got to admit I a’n’t yet beheld a member of the tender sex that a’n’t lovely to behold.” (There were just two good-looking women in that whole expanse of landscape and I was sitting between them.) “That’s a fact, no flattery, gentlemen hark! Well, this gentle woman in Vairmant of whom I speak was bereavered of her good man in her middle years, and thereafter she devoted the remainder of a long and blessed life to the healing of the sick. Even her name was humble. Evangeline Amanda Spinkton was her name, and I want you should remember that name, for it’s a name you’ll come to bless with every breath you drawr. Some do say, and I believe it, that Mother Spinkton — ah yes, so a grateful world calls her now! — had in her veins the mystic Injun blood of Old Time. That’s as may be, but there’s no doubt at all the dear angels of the Lord guided her in her lifelong endeavor, her search after them essences of healing that the Lord in his infinite wisdom and mercy has placed obscurely in the simple yarbs that do dwell in the whispering woods or the sunkissed fields or along the gently murmuring streams—”