Davy Read online

  That gives you his style anyway. Pa never let anyone else handle the pitch for Mother Spinkton; even if he was down sick in bed and too mis’ble to live he’d r’ar up out of it to take care of that. He said he reverenced her too much to let any mere God-damn crumb-bum piddlebrained assistant lay a mortal hand on her sacred hide. He claimed also that he could taste and smell a crowd with a special knack nobody else possessed — except his grandfather of course, dead going on forty years — and this knack always told him right off whether to use gently murmuring streams or dark murmuring caverns. Either one might work all right — oh sure, it would work, he’d say, and spit over the footboard between the mules if he was driving, which he liked to do — it’d work, but the g.m.s. yucks are the common type, and the dark caverns type is different, that’s all, and it’s the mark of a real artist to be able to spot that difference and govern yourself accordingly. Long Tom Blaine used to give him an argument about it when the weather was right — Tom said yucks are yucks and that’s it.

  Pa Rumley blathered on, not exactly claiming that God and Abraham and all the angels had worked together showing gentle Mother Spinkton how to construct her Home Remedy, the Only Sovran Cure for All Mortal Complainders of Man or Beast — but you were sort of left of a breathing exercise-he did it because he couldn’t bear doing much more than what a musician would call a scale or a breathing exercise — he did it because he couldn’t bear to let any crowd get away from him, any time, without selling it something. After five or ten minutes more of Mother Spinkton’s character and biography, he squared away for a brisk analysis of a dozen or more diseases, and he was so tender and hopeful and horrible about it — hell, nobody could beat him at that; he’d have you locating so many simpletons[21] throughout your anatomy you simply couldn’t spare the time to die from more than half of them. He’d wind up that section with a horde of widows and orphans at the grave, which Mother Spinkton might have prevented same had they but of knowed — come one, come all! Well, it called for an effort — Mother was one whole dollar a bottle. But did she sell?

  Yes.

  It’s a matter of sober fact that she was a bird, and I do know, because Pa believed in her himself or appeared to, and had no more mercy on us than he had on the public. If you got sick and admitted it, you drank Mother Spinkton or faced Pa’s displeasure, and we loved him too much for that.

  It was Mother’s unpredictable nature that made it impossible to get the best of her. Mother Spinkton could tear into anything at all — epizootic, measles, impotence, broken ribs, cold in the head — and if she couldn’t cure it she wouldn’t try, she’d just start up such a brush fire somewhere else in you that it didn’t matter. Dab some of her on a mortal wound and you would, naturally, want to die, but she’d keep you that interested you couldn’t manage it, for the sheer excitement of wondering how much she was going to hurt next, and where. Of course it might turn out to be an entirely different kettle of shoes of another color, but I’m trying to analyze the psychology of it.

  Pa’s own belief in her was a puzzle to me, but I state it for a fact. I’ve watched him making up a fresh batch according to the secret formula he’d worked out himself, just as careful and hopeful and bright-eyed and bushytailed as an Old-Time physicist with a brand new bang. And then by danm he’d drink some. I don’t know — sowbugs, horseradish, hot peppers, raw corn likker, tar, marawan, rattlesnake’s urine, chicken’s gall-bladder and about a dozen more mysterious yarbs and animal parts, usually including goat’s testicles. Those last were hard to get unless we happened to be near the right kind of farm at the right moment, and Pa did allow they weren’t absolutely essential, but he said they gave her a distinctive Tone that he was partial to himself. Tone was important. He’d drunk her with and without that Tone, he said, and it was possible that for the yucks it didn’t really matter, because the first swallow was calculated to lift any yuck directly out of the studious frame of mind — stifi, if you cared, Tone was important. Pa Rumley liked to discuss vintages too. I never became that expert. All I could tell was that in some vintages Mother Spinkton wouldn’t much more than stink out a town hall, but in her best years she was well able to clear a ten-acre field of everything movable, including the mules.

  That morning in Humber Town, when Pa had wound up his spiel and was about to start passing out bottles with Tom Blaine wrapping up and collecting coin, along comes a hardcase old rip pushing through the crowd snorting and moaning with a hand to his chest and his long scrawny face all puckered up in the wildest sort of misery, so that I had to goggle twice and swallow before convincing myself that this antique calamity was my own Da, Sam Loomis, acting half again as large as life and rarin’ to go.

  “You theah! You talk of healing’? I’m comin’ forward, but there a’n’t no hope for me, not the way my mis’ry’s been ground into me by a life of sin. An, Lord, Lord, f’give a mean horr’ble old man and let ’m die, can’t you?”

  “Why, friend!” Pa Rumley responded — “the Lord f’gives many a sinner. Come for’d and speak your mind!” He was a little uneasy. He told us later he wasn’t sure he’d seen Sam and me talking together, at the fence.

  Sam, that old scoundrel — my Da, mind you — said: “Praise him evermore, but le’ me lay my burdens down!”

  “Let the poor soul come for’d there, good people — he’s a sick man, I can see. Make room, please!” They did, maybe as much from pity as because Sam might have something catching. He did look just about finished — coughing, staggering, fetching up against the backboard of the wagon and letting Tom Blaine support him. If I hadn’t seen that head-shake signal I’d have been over there lickety-doodah, and maybe spoiled things. “Comes on me sudden sometimes,” he said, which took care of any critics who might have noticed him with me before the music, steady and hard as nails. “Real sudden!” — and with his face turned away from the crowd he sent Pa a wink.

  After that you’d have thought they’d practised it for years. I whispered to the nearest ear, which happened to be Minna Selig’s: “That’s my Da.”

  “Ayah? Did see you together.”

  Bonnie said: “A’n’t he a pisser!”

  I near-about busted with pride.

  Pa Rumley was leaning down to him, a soft angelic smile slathered over what you could see of his face outside the black foam of beard. His voice was globs of maple syrup out of a jug. “Don’t despair, man — nay, and think of the joy in heaven over the one sinner that repenteth. Now then, where at is this pain?”

  “Well, it’s a chest mis’ry all kind of wropped up with a zig-zag mortification.”

  “Ayah, ayah. It hurts a mite cross-ways when you breathe?”

  “O Lord, I mean!”

  “Ayah. Now, sir, I can read a man’s heart, and I says to you lo, about this sin, it’s already near-about washed away m repentance, and all you need is to fix up the chest mis’ry so to make straight the pathway for the holy spirit and things — only you got to be careful of course.”

  Tom Blame was right there with a bottle of Mother Spinkton, a look of gladness, and the father and mother of a wooden spoon. I have never understood, myself, how ordinary maple wood could hold together under the charring and shriveling effect Mother always had, but there’s nothing I can do except tell history the way it happened. Bedam if those two old hellions didn’t jaw it back and forth another five minutes, with Tom holding the spoon, before Sam would let himself be talked into swallowing some. They were taking a chance, I think: if the old lady had eaten her way through the spoon while they talked, the crowd might have lynched the pack of us.

  Sam took it at last, and for a few seconds things were pretty quiet. Well, often you don’t feel anything right away except the knowledge that the world has come to an end. Sam of course had been brought up on raw corn likker and fried food and religion; all the same, I don’t believe anything in a person’s past could actually prepare him for Mother Spinkton. He got her down, and when his features sort of rejoined each other so that he was
recognizable again, I thought I heard him murmur: “This happened to me!” It was all right: any yucks who overheard him probably thought he was looking at the nice kind of eternity. Then as soon as he could move, he turned his head so that the yucks might observe the glow of beatitude or whatever spreading over him, and said: “Ali, praise his name, I can breathe again!”

  Well, sure, a man’s bound to feel a surrounding glory at finding himself still able to breathe after a shot of Mother Spinkton. But the yucks hadn’t tried any of her yet, so I guess they didn’t quite understand what he meant. “I was nigh unto death,” says the old rip, “but here I be!” And they all pushed in around him then, wanting to touch and fondle the man who’d been snatched from the grave, even tromple him flat in pure friendliness.

  Pa Rumley hopped off the wagon. He and Tom pried Sam loose from the public; then Tom went to work selling bottles — for a few minutes he was passing them out about as fast as he could handle them — and Pa Rumley walked the sick man over to that wagon where the grayhaired woman was still sitting smoking her pipe and enjoying everything. I trailed along, and the girls stuck with me.

  It’s hard to believe how much space you can find in one of those long covered wagons. The inverted-U frames supporting the canvas has cross-bars usually of hornbeam, just above head-height, and a light wicker-work platform rests on the cross-bars, making a sort of attic for storing light stuff. Those cross-bars also carry hanging partitions for the cubbyhole compartments that run along both sides of the wagon with a single-file walkway between. Up in front there’s an area without sleeping compartments, just canvas walls with usually a window on each side. For laughs, we always called that area the front room.

  That was where Pa Rumley took us sow, to the front room of this wagon, which was the one with his own livingquarters. Because it was the headquarters wagon, the front room was nearly twice the size of those in the others, and had bookshelves, a thing I had never seen nor imagined. This wagon had only four sleeping spaces, two double and two single: singles for Mam Laura and old Will Moon who usually drove the mules, a double for Stud Dabney and his wife, and a double for Pa Rumley with whatever woman was sharing his bunk. Pa swept us in there — Bonnie, Minna, Sam and me. Mam Laura came in last with her clay pipe and sat cross-legged as limberly as the girls. I never heard of Ramblers owning a chair — you sat on the floor, or you lay, or sprawled, suit yourself. In that headquarters room, the whole ten-by-twelve floor was covered by a red bear pelt that was the pride of our hearts. Pa didn’t say anything until the gray-haired woman had settled herself; then he just looked at her and grunted.

  She puffed her pipe till it went out, and rubbed the bowl of it against her thin nose. Studying Sam she was, and he met the stare, and I had the feeling they were exchanging messages that did them good and were none of our business. Though grayer, she was slightly the younger, I believe. At last she said: “From the no’th of Katskil, be’n’t you?”

  “Ayah. A’n’t had word of the war lately.”

  “Oh, that. It’ll be over in a couple-three months. Rambler life attract you, maybe?”

  “Might, allowin’ for the fact I’m a loner by trade.”

  “Did a good jobas a volunteer shill out there. Don’t know that I ever saw that done before.”

  So’t of come over me all-a-sudden like, the way I wouldn’t want you to think my boy’s the only talented one in the family.”

  “You be his Da then?”

  “Ai-yah, that’s a special story,” Sam said, “nor I wouldn’t be a one to tell it without his leave.”

  She looked at me then, and I felt the kindness rn her, and I told the story, finding it not hard to do. Bonnie and Minna had quieted down, anyway I guess they wouldn’t have carried on the game of dividing me down the middle directly under her eye. I told the story straight, feeling no need to change or soften it. When I was finished Sam said: “He must be my boy. He don’t lack my oneriness, you see — just a’n’t quite growed up to it yet.”

  “Be you,” Mam Laura asked me, “a loner by trade?”

  “Likely I must be,” I said, “the way when my Da makes that remark it rings a bell in me. But I like people.”

  “So does your Da,” Mam Laura said — “did you think he didn’t, Davy? Nay, I sometimes wonder if loners aren’t the only ones who do.” I was beginning to notice how she spoke rather differently from the rest of us. I couldn’t have explained the difference at that time; I did feel that her way of using words was better than any I’d heard before, and wished for the knack of speaking that way myself. “You truly want to join up with us, Davy, the uncommon way we live that’s never a safe thing, often lonely, hard, tiresome, dangerous?”

  “Yes,” I told her. “Yes!”

  “Enough to suffer a little schooling in consequence?”

  I had no notion what sort of schooling she meant — while I was knocking off my life story I’d already told her I knew all about how to handle mules. But I said: “Yes, I do — honest, I’d do anything!”

  Pa Rumley laughed at that, gargling it in his beard, but Mam Laura aimed her smile mostly at the universe and not at me. “Hoy, Laura,” Pa said, “didn’t I keep telling you I’d raise a big old God-damn scholard for you somewheres, to. squeeze the good out’n them books that’ve been wearing down the mule-power on this wagon all these years? Maybe I’ve even raised you more’n one. Be you a man for the books, Sam Loomis?”

  My father looked away through one of the little windows — honest glass they were, sewed cleverly into slots in the canvas so that no wind would dislodge them or force the rain through. For a moment or two he looked older and grayer, my father, than ever before; if there was mirth hidden in his craggy face I couldn’t find it. “That wasn’t my fortune, Pa Rumley,” he said. “I tried once to win me a little learning after my young years were long gone — nay, but it don’t matter. If the lady will teach my boy, I’ll answer for it he’ll mind the lessons and get the good of it.”

  Pa Rumley got up and tapped Sam’s shoulder and nodded at me. “He blows that horn pretty good too,” he said. “Well — stick around. You’re lucky — gentlemen hark! Yes sir, it just so happens you hit me at a lucky time: I got over the shock of being born a good while ago, more b’ token I a’n’t dead yet. Best time to tackle a man, understand? — somewhere in there betwix birth and death. If the sumbitch won’t give you a decent answer then he never will.”

  21

  We did stick around — four years.

  Pa Rumley was a sharp-minded observant man, sober; drunk, he was still a good critic of himself, unless he passed a certain point of drinking that he could not always recognize, and tumbled into a black well of despair — then he had no judgment in his darkness, and someone had to stand by and drink with him till he dropped in his tracks. Except during those very rare crises, his sadness always had around it a nimbus of mirth, just as his loudest laughter carried the overtones of grief. True for all of us, but in him it was more obvious, as though the emotional raw stuff that nature, playing safe, doles out to most of us by the teaspoonful, had been sloshed into Pa Rumley with a bucket.

  Pa used to claim that he’d fought and toiled and connived to make himself boss-man of the best God-damn gang in the world for the simple reason that he was at heart a benefactor of the God-damn yuman race, which without him would likely drop dead of its own boredom and meanness and hard luck and general shitty stupidity. And it’s a fact, when you got down to cases he really didn’t seem to have a thing in the world against yumanity except that he never would pronounce the plague-take-it thing with an aitch.

  He had a long, thick-bridged nose that spread at the tip into a double knob. The whole organ had been slammed into at some time in the faraway past, so that when I knew him it aimed more or less at his right shoulder. He said it was no battle that bent it, more likely somebody sat on it when he was young. He asserted that in fact he never did fight except now and then with a club, which was why he never got licked. However, when I
saw him personally lay out Shag Donovan who thought he was boss of Seal Harbor, Pa used no club except the knobby side of his fist, and all two hundred pounds of Shag went softly to sleep. (I was a bit helpful in that Seal Harbor thing, being fifteen and on the quarrelsome side for a while, a temporary trait, a sort of growing pain.) Another time, I heard Pa say that his nose took that starboard slant from having to keep alert and sniffing for the righteous, who generally come up on a man from behind.

  It was a good commanding nose anyway, and useful to the gang because it told of his mood: so long as it stayed red or sunset pink there was nothing much to worry about, but if it went white while Pa was still sober, the wise thing to do was to keep out of sight and hope for the best, supposing you had anything on your conscience. His eyes were important signals too, small and black and restless. Just contrary to his nose, they went bloodshot when he was on the warpath — but of course if you were near enough to notice the swollen veins you wouldn’t benefit by running.