When she stopped for breath I said: “I didn’t goof off, Miss Emmia — thought it was my free day.” Her soft hands fussing at my shirt and the bitten place were rousing me up so that I wondered if my loin-rag would hide the evidence.
“Now shed up, Davy, you didn’t think never no such of a thing, the way you lie to me and everybody it’s a caution to the saints, but I won’t tell, I said I’d covered for you, only more fool me if I ever do it again, and you’re lucky it’s a Friday so you wasn’t missed, and anyway—” There was this about Emmia: if you wished to say anything yourself you had to wait for the breath-pauses and work fast against the gentle stream that couldn’t stop because it must get to the bottom of the hill and there was always more coming. “Now you go right straight up to your bed and I’ll bring you a mint-leaf poultice for that ’ere because Ma says it’s the best thing in the world for any kind of bite, bug-bite I mean, a snake is different of course, for that you’ve got to have a jolt of likker and a beezer-stone[10] but anyway — oh, poo, what did you put on it?” But she didn’t wait to hear. “You take your lantern now, I won’t need it, and straight up to bed with you, don’t stand there fossicking around.”
“Kay,” I said, and tried to hoist my sack without her noticing it, but she could talky-talk and still be sharp.
“Merciful winds, what have you got there?”
“Nothin’.”
“Nothin’ he says and it pushing out the sack big as a house — Davy, listen, if you’ve latched onto something you shouldn’t I can’t cover that for you, it’s a sin—”
“It’s nothing!” I yelled that. “You gotta know everything, Miss Emmia, it’s a chunk of wood I found so to carve you something for your name-day, ’f you gotta know ever’ durn thing, if you gotta.”
“O Davy, little Spice!” She grabbed me again, her face one big rose. I barely swung the sack out of the line of operations before I got kissed.
No one had kissed me since Caron. True, “little Spice” doesn’t mean the same as just “Spice.” But Emmia was keeping hold of me, her fragrant heat pressing — lordy, I hadn’t even known a girl’s nipples could grow firm enough to be felt through the clothes! But something was wrong with me; I was growing limp and scared, stomach fluttering, the spiderbite jumping. “Aw Davy, and I was scolding you so, and you sick with a bite you got account you was doing something for me — O Davy, I feel awful.”
I dropped the sack and tightened my arms, learning her elastic softness. Her eyes opened wide in astonishment as if no such thought had ever touched her so far as I was concerned, and maybe it hadn’t till she felt my hands growing a little courageous at her waist and hips.[11] “Why, Davy!” My hands relaxed too soon and she collected her wits. “You go up to bed now like I said, and I’ll bring the poultice soon as I can sneak back out here.”
I toiled up to the loft, the memory of her flesh printed on mine, reached my pallet without dropping the lantern, and hid my sack in the hay. I flung off my loin-rag but kept my shirt on because of a fever-chill. Under the blanket limp and shivering, I watched fantastic nothings ebb and flow in the darkness around the rafters of the loft, so far above my puddle of lantern-light. I smelled the lantern’s rancid seal-oil, the dry hay, the sweat and manure of horses and mules below. I wished I dared show the golden horn to someone and tell my story. Who but Emmia? At that time she was my one friend.
The bond-servant caste is a sorry thing in Moha, squeezed from above and below. Slaves hated us for being slightly better off, the lifers not so sharply as the shortterm slaves, who probably felt they weren’t too different from us, a mere matter of conviction for minor crime instead of our accident of birth or bad fortune. Freemen despised us for the sake of looking down on someone-no real satisfaction in looking down on a slave. Emmia could have got into bad trouble by showing affection for me when any third person was present; I never expected her to, and that she should do so when we were alone was still a puzzle to me that night, in spite of all the lush daydreams I was in the habit of building on the fact — it just hadn’t occurred to me yet (outside of daydreams) that there was anything about me a woman would actually love.
I must have heard the whole run of popular sayings: “All bond-servants steal a little” — “Give a b.s. an inch and he’ll take a yard” — “A bond-wench may be a good lay but remember your whip!” All the old crud-talk that people seem to need to shore up their vanity and avoid the risk of looking honestly at themselves. In the same way, people said: “All slaves stink.” They never asked: Who lets them have a basin to wash in or time to use it?
And in Moha you heard that no Katskil man should be trusted alone even with a sow. Conicut people tell you every other man in Lomeda is a fairy and the rest backscuttlers. In Nuin I have heard: “It takes three Penn tradesmen to cheat a Levannon man, two Levannese to cheat a Vairmanter, and two Vairmanters have no trouble cheatmg the Devil.” And so on and on, everything your neighbor’s fault until some time maybe a mfflion years from now when the human race runs out of dirt.
At school I heard the teacher-priests explain how race prejudice was one of the sins that persuaded God to destroy the world of Old Time and make men pass through the Years of Confusion so there would be only one race with traces of all the old ones in it, and my opinion of God went up several notches. Inside, though, a somehow older boy who wasn’t quite ready to show his head went on muttering that it was too nice and simple: if God was going to take that much trouble why couldn’t he make modern people decent and kind in other ways?
Today I know it’s a mere historical accident that has made us all fairly close to the same physical pattern in that part of the world. We are the descendants of a small handful of survivors, and they happened to include most of the races of Old Time. Anyone who deviates too far is still treated outrageously, if he escapes early destruction as a mue. In Conicut, with Rumley’s Ramblers, I would have been uneasy about my red hair, if it hadn’t been a strong gang that took care of its own.
Freeman boys, many from poor families living no better than I did, ran in street-gangs and wanted no part of a b.s., unless they could catch one alone, for fun. I could have made friends with a freeman boy, meeting him by himself, but the herd pattern is death on friendship. If the pack must come first — its rituals, cruelties, group make-believes and sham brotherhood — you have no time left for the individual spirit of another; no time, no courage, no recognition.
Against the danger of the street-gangs I had my Katskil knife, but I was so sharp at nipping out of sight whenever I saw more than three boys in a group that I’d never been obliged to use the steel in self-defense. Good thing too, for getting hanged would have interfered seriously with writing this book, and even if you don’t exist I’d hate to see you suffer a deprivation like that.[12]
But even in fever common sense told me I could not show Emmia my golden horn and tell the story. She would never understand why I hadn’t killed the mue. She would be demoralized by the mere thought of a mue existing near the city. Like most women she could scarcely bear the sound of the word “mue” — she’d sooner have had a rat run up her leg.
Then for a while I think the fever sent my wits wandering out of the world.
* * *
While I wrote this morning the fog dissolved. Nickie called me on deck an hour ago — her face was wet — and pointed to the blur of green two or three miles southeast. As I was watching, a white bird circled down to the island. No smoke rises from it; the day is a quiet of blue and gold.
I’ll make only this note of it for the present. We have a light westerly, and Captain Barr intends to circumnavigate, tacking as near the island as he safely can. We shall watch for harbors, stream outlets, reefs, beaches, any sign of habitation. Major note: Miranda Nicoletta is happy.
* * *
I was pulled awake by feeling another blanket being spread over me. Wool-soft it was and sweet with the girlscent of Emmia — I mean her own, not the boughten perfume she sometimes used. She must have
brought it from her own bed, and I a damned yard-boy not brave enough to kill a mue but low enough to steal from him.
Emmia was talking, of what I don’t know; in the middle of the pleasant sound I spoke her name. She said: “Hush, Davy! How you do run on! Be the good jo and let me put on this poultice — don’t squirm so!” Her voice was as kind as her hands that eased down the blankets and pressed a minty-smeiling pad where my skin still hurt, some. The pain was no longer serious; I was pretending to be worse off than I was, to prolong her soft attentions. “What was you yattering about just now, Davy? Where the sun rises, you said, only it’s night, you know it is, so maybe you was fevery the way I heard about a man had the smallpox and he thought he was tumbling off a hoss, so whoa he says, whoa, and falls out of bed for real and dead as anything the next day, the chill you know, come to think, that was Morton Sampson that married a connection of Ma’s and used to live on Cayuga Street catacorny from the old schoolhouse…” I wondered if I could have spoken in my fever about the golden horn. She was coaxing my arms under the blanket. “Yes, you went running on, about traveling, merciful winds, I guess you must like to talk, I couldn’t scarcely get a word in by the thin edge — oh, feel that sweat! Your fever’s busted, Davy, and that’s what they call a good sweat, you be all right now, only keep warm, boy, and you better get to sleep too.”
I said: “If a man went far—”
“Ayah, that’s just the way you was running on, only now you should get to sleep because like Ma says if a person don’t get enough sleep the next day is ruint, see?” Resting a hand on the blanket, she was watching me not quite so directly. Her conversational brook went on, but I think already we had some of the special awkwardness a man and woman feel when each knows the other is thinking of the intercourse not yet shared. “I do marvel — where the sun rises, think of having such fancies when you be fevered, still it must be nice to travel, I always wished I could, like that friend of Pa’s, I can’t think of his name, anyway he went all the way to Humber Town — oh, who was it? — Peckham — I’ll think of it in a minute, it wasn’t Peckham no-way — why, Hamlet Parsons was who it was, remember? — Ham Parsons of course with the one gone eye account of an ax handle in the one I mean, all the way to Huinber Town and come to think, that was just two summers ago because it was the same year we lost old White-Stocking from the bloat — what a nice old thing he was…”
It was restful, sleepy-making, like a brook, like a tree murmuring the wind, only bless her, Emmia wasn’t built like a tree and her bark wasn’t scratchy, not anywhere. In my half-sick drowsiness I wondered why I should feel afraid of Emmia when she was being so kind to me, bringing that blanket, sitting now so close that my right arm was cramped because it didn’t dare sprawl across her lap. I suppose I knew myself to be two or more people, that common trouble. The Davy who wanted to be a gentle, loving (and safely blameless) friend — that’s the only one who was afraid. The healthy jo who needed to grab her and lock her loins till he could spend himself was not afraid of Emmia but only, in a practical way, of the world: he didn’t want to be slammed into the pillory. What never occurred to me until years later was that all these inconsistent and troubling selves are real as soon as your mind has gone through the pain of giving them birth.
7
“Be you warm enough now?” I made some kind of noise. “You know, Davy, them fancies you get in a fever a’n’t real dreams like, I mean not like the ones that tell your fortune if you go to sleep with a corncob under the pillow. You sure you be warm enough?”
“I wish you was always with me.”
“What?”
“Wish you was with me. In my bed.”
She didn’t slap my face. I couldn’t look at hers, but of a sudden she was lying on the pallet warm and close, her breath fluttering my hair. The blankets bunched thick between us. She was on my right arm so it couldn’t slip around her. She held my left hand away. I had at least three times her strength and couldn’t dream of using any of it. “Davy dear, mustn’t — I mean we better not, only—” I kissed her to stop the talk. “You’re being bad now, Davy.” I kissed her ear and the silken hollow of her shoulder. I hadn’t known it, but that was blowing on a fire. Her thigh slid over me and she was trembling, pushing against me through the blankets and presently whimpering: “It’s a sin — Mother of Abraham, don’t let me be so bad!” She thrust herself free and rolled away. I thought she would get up and leave me, but instead she lay on the bare floor rumpled and careless, her knees drawn up, her skirt fallen, hands pressed at her face.
For just that moment, her eyes not watching me, her secret place uncovered wanton and helpless for me, I was all man responding and could have taken her, never mind whether she was crying. Then my mind went idiot and yelped: If Mam Robson comes looking for her, or Old Jon? I heard her fainting voice. “Why’n’t you do it to me?”
I flung the blankets away. The final cold killing thought arrived, not in words but a picture: a wooden frame on a tall column; holes in the frame for the offending bondservant’s neck, wrists and ankles; a clear space on the earth so that rocks and garbage could be readily cleared away after the thing in the pillory had become a mere lesson in morality too motionless to be entertaining.
Emmia’s suffering face was turned to me. She knew I had been ready for her and now was not. She embraced me clumsily, trying to restore me with shaking ineffectual fingers. Maybe that was when she too remembered the law, for she suddenly dragged the blankets over me and stumbled away. I thought: It’s all up with me — can I run?
But she was returning. Her wet face was not angry. She sat by me again, not too near, her smock tucked in at her knees. She groped for a handkerchief, found none, mopped her face on the blanket. “I wouldn’t hurt you, Miss Emmia.”
She stared dumbfounded, then laughed breathlessly. “Oh you poor sweet cloth-head! It’s my fault, and now I suppose you think I’m one of these girls’ll do it for anybody, not a mor’l to their name, honest I’m not like that, Davy, and when it’s just you and me and us such good friends you don’t have to call me Miss Emmia heavensake! Aw Davy, things sort of go to my head, I can’t explain, you wouldn’t know—”
At least she was talking again. My panic faded. The brook ran on, growing more restful by the minute.
* * *
Speaking of brooks—
I stopped writing a week ago, and resumed it this afternoon within sound of a tropic brook. The day has been filled with tasks of settlement on our island. We mean to stay at least until those now in the womb are born, maybe longer. Maybe some will stay and others go on — I can’t imagine Captain Barr letting the schooner ride too long at anchor… The brook runs by a shelter Nickie and I are sharing with Dion and three others while we work at more permanent buildings for the colony.
The island is small, roughly oval, its greatest length along the north-south axis, about ten miles. It must be within the region where the old map gives us a few dots named the Azores . We sailed around it that first day, then seeing no other land on the horizon we inched into the one harbor, a bay on the eastern shore. We anchored in five fathoms near a clean strand where a band of gray monkeys were picking over shells and finding something to eat — hermit crabs. We waited that day and night on board to learn of the tides — they are moderate — and watch for signs of human or other dangerous life.
No one slept much that night at the anchorage — a deep warm night, rest from the long strain and fears of voyaging, a full moon for lovers — high time for a night of music and drink and cheerful riot. There are forty of us — sixteen women, twenty-four men — and nearly all of us are young. We came ashore in the morning not too hung over, all eager except Mr. Wilbrahani who never is.
The only wild things we’ve seen are the monkeys, a few goats, short-eared rabbits, a host of birds. On a walk around the island yesterday Jim Loman and I found tracks of pig, fox and wildcat, and we saw flying squirrels much like the gentle things I used to glimpse in the Moha woods. It must be t
hat human beings haven’t lived here since Old Time. We may find ruins in the interior.
On a knoll near the beach we’ve cleared away vegetation to make room for houses. The brook flowing by the base of the knoll originates a mile inland from the island’s highest hill, about a thousand feet above sea level, we guess. Along the brook a tough reed-like grass grows in abundance; it might be good for paper-making as well as thatch. Our houses will be lightly constructed — thatched roofs on tall supports, the thatched walls coming only half-way to the line of the eaves, the kind of airy buildings I saw in Penn when I went there with Rumley’s Ramblers in 320. They keep a kind of freshness even on the hottest day, and if hurricane comes — well, you haven’t lost too much; you build again.
We wonder of course what snake is in this Eden.
* * *
Speaking of brooks—
Look, said Emmia’s personal brook, what we almost did was a terrible sin because I was a Mere Boy and an awful sin anyhow, only we hadn’t done anything so there wasn’t any sin and all her fault too, but she’d just take it to God in prayer without having to confess it, and never would tell on me, wild horses wouldn’t drag one word out of her, because mostly I was a good dear boy that couldn’t help being born without no advantages, except for wildness and goofing off and like that, but when I corrected that I’d be a good man who everybody’d respect, see, only I must prove myself and remember that like her Ma said life wasn’t all beer and skittles whatever skittles were, she’d always thought it was a funny word, well, life was hard work and responsibility and minding what wiser folk said, not only the priests but everybody who lived respectable because there was a right way and a wrong way just like her Ma said, and you must not be all the time goofing off the way other people had to cover up and so on because they kind of loved you and feed the plague-take-it old mules. I said I was sorry.
Davy Page 7
