It should not have been true, since he was only in the fifties. But in some ways I suppose it was true.
Southern Katskil is altogether unlike the bustling northern part. A ghostly, evasive land — the big rich farms are in the central part, not the real south. Small sandy roads twist through the pine barrens as if in blind pursuit of a goal you’ll never learn. If such a road comes to an apparent end, you feel sure that you must have missed some turnoff that was the road’s real continuation. In many places, inland as well as close to the fine white beaches, it is deep wilderness instead of the curious pines, wilderness as profound as the semitropical jungles of Penn, which I have also glimpsed. They say that bands of the flap-eared apes have sometimes been encountered in the jungle regions of southern Katskil — the same kind that are well known in Penn, shy, wild, a little dangerous.
There are no cities in southern Katskil, unless you want to give that name to the dull harbor of Vyland in the extreme south, on the immensity of Delaware Bay; it hardly deserves it, and is hardly worth the effort it takes to reach it on the long road through the barrens and jungle and enormous swamps. Vyland was once a pirate town, headquarters of a fleet that ravaged Penn’s coastal commerce with the northern nations. Katskil and Penn for once agreed on something, joining forces to clean out the raiders, as we had to do in Nuin with the Cod Islands lot. The Vyland pirates didn’t have the vinegar and cussedness of the Cod Islanders, however, nor any islands for refuge; it was a massacre. Today, Vyland has nothing to show but fisheries and monasteries, which smell alike.
No proper cities there in the south of Katskil, but a good many small vifiages, widely separated, heavily stockaded, their people often showing a dreary distrust of strangers. We seldom had a really good pitch. I have an impression there was a good deal of hookworm and malaria, possibly other sorry conditions that held the people down through no fault of their own.
One village in that region I am compelled to remember. We came to it in the fall of 319, when we were already moving northwest with the idea of crossing over into Penn near their fine city of Filadeffia. It was late afternoon; the front and rear gates of the village were shut but not locked. We rolled down the road with our customary joyous commotion, playing and singing “I’ll Go No More A-Roving,” a song that usually won us a better welcome than any other. When we were drawn up before the still closed and desolate gates, I blew my golden horn to make it plainer than ever that we came in way of friendship. But no one opened to us. It made Pa angry — well, the whole summer in southern Katskil had done that. “Why,” he said — “bugger me blind, we’ll be going in anyhow, and ask them nicely why they won’t open.”
Poor things, they couldn’t — the few who were there in the village were dead, and had been for months. The houses were starting to fall apart, just a little-holes in the thatched roofs where squirrels had gone through, here and there a door fallen off its hinges because the wind had banged it once too often. We went into all the twenty-odd dwellings, finding the skeletons picked clean by the carrion ants and scavenger beetles — only a few, about a dozen in all I guess; all perfectly inoffensive and dry. Most of them lay on the cord or wicker cots that they use for beds in that country; two had remnants of white hair. It was peaceful. Since the dead were all indoors, and the village gates closed against wolves and dogs, the ants and beetles had done nearly all the housekeeping; we were puzzled to notice how little the bones had been disturbed by mice and rats. Pa Rumley said that rats die from the lumpy plague, same as human beings, which I hadn’t known at that time. But I had a back-of-the-neck feeling — we all had it, I think — that this could be some other kind of plague.
One man (or woman) had been left behind on the village gallows. The crows and vultures had dealt with that; the bones lay in a meek pile below the still dangling rope. At any rate the criminal was now on a level with the respectable citizens who had been hopelessly sick, or too old to travel perhaps. One body still sat in a rocking chair by a closed window, a woman by the shape of the pelvis, probably an old woman; dry cartilage still held together the spine and legs and one arm. I felt some lessening of the horror as I compelled myself to look on her tranquillity. In the world that the people of Old Time left to us, these things have happened often enough, and will again.
Penn is a land of good artisans, farmers, artists, philosophers, poets, wealth, laziness — and why shouldn’t they be lazy, with nature lenient as it is, and all that smell of grape and magnolia? In some parts of the land the climate is over-sweet; the heat after a time seems to come, and mildly, from inside you, although still a gift of the sun. That illusion is strongest in the eastern part of the country, where the sea breeze drives fresh off great Delaware Bay. Filadelfia on the Bay is a fine little city quite near Old-Time ruins that are thought to be harmless — in fact they say some of the modern city is actually built over the site of the old. At Filadeffia all necessary work gets done — the streets are clean, the houses orderly — but you never see anyone, slave or free, seriously exerting himself. The citizens have much more resemblance to each other than the people of the northern countries, on the whole; maybe some of their ancestors in the Years of Confusion were exceptionally prepotent — a dark, tall people with an odd hint of Polynesian as that race appears in Old-Time pictures I have seen. I have no theory to explain that. The girls are big-bodied; deliciously lovely in youth, they stay handsome when in the thirties they begin to look old; and they are kind.
Nearly everyone in Penn seems to be kind, within the limits allowed by religion and politics. Their politics consists of defending the border, which is the Delaware River, and keeping even or ahead of the game in commercial horse-trading. This they manage with a fine fleet of small river craft and a neat army which has never been defeated and has never invaded foreign soil. Trade is assisted by a corps of ambassadors in foreign courts who must be about the most trustworthy and likable liars at large — Dion says so, and my own observation, from the time Nickie and I were with him in Nuin politics up to here, bears it out.
It is a peculiarity of Penn that except for the Delaware River between her and Katskil, and a little jag of territory north of the Delaware’s headwaters that used to be a boundary with Moha, her only border is with the wilderness. I believe no one outside the conсdence of the republic’s government has any notion how far beyond that wilderness border Penn explorers may have penetrated. I can’t think of anything more graceful than a cultured Penn citizen changing the subject when the west is mentioned. We were at Jontown in the summer of 321, as far west as any Rambler gang or other foreign group is ever allowed to go; and yet a small road does lead out of that town westerly, up into the mountains, passing right by a large sign that reads END OF TRAVEL.
As for religion, Penn people appear to take it lightly and calmly, going through the motions, putting up with the flummery in a satisfying tongue-in-cheek manner, as large sections of the population evidently did in Old Time for the sake of keeping peace with the neighbors and avoiding the bitterness of true-believing priests. It is not entirely an honest way, nor a good way in my opinion; I could never take it for my way. But it does make for good manners and a certain peacefulness, and I could blame no one very much for following it, if he has no convictions strong enough to be worth the sacrifice of good nature, or if he feels that a polite conformity with the notions of fools is a necessary protection for his adult labors.
Not that I imagine the Penn people to be a super-race operating in secret of any such fairy-tale crud. There in Penn you encounter a full supply of the old mythologies, ignorance, piety, illiteracy, barbarism. But I did sometimes feel that there might be a good deal of curious thought and ferment behind the smiling indolent surface. And I often felt in the presence of Penn people like an energetic barbarian myself, surely not from any wish of theirs to make me feel so. I think that Penn is, not excepting Nuin, the most nearly civilized of the countries we have left behind us. If one had to live somewhere away from Neonarcheos, one could do
worse than dwell in Penn with one or two of the big-lipped, deep-breasted women, and grow old with just enough work and worry to enjoy the other hours of idleness or slow lovemaking in the sun. Penn is not like other lands.
My father died there.
It happened in the autumn of 321 at the town of Betlam, which is forty miles north of Filadeffia — distances are large in Penn — and not far from the Delaware. Sam was fifty-six that year, he told me. Fifty-six, full of piss and vinegar and meanness, he said — but at other times, as I’ve mentioned, he remarked that he was getting old.
We had gone to Jontown along the southern limits of Penn, which are marked — (so far as we’re told) — by a wide twisting river called the Potomac as far as a town named Cumberland. There the only road is One that leads north. From Jontown we came back eastward by a northern route, Pa Rumley having it in mind to winter in western Katskil perhaps, or wherever we might happen to be when November arrived. (Pa didn’t enjoy Penn as much as the rest of us — Mother Spinkton sold badly there, the people preferring their own yarb-women and being uncommonly healthy anyhow. Peepshows didn’t do very well either, for Penn citizens are remarkably unconcerned at nakedness in spite of all the church can do to distress them about it: I’ve seen a Penn girl who felt a fleabite flip off her skirt on the street and go to searching with no sign of embarrassment, and onlookers didn’t regard her with breathless horror — they just laughed and offered bad advice.) There at Betlam a number of us fell sick with what seemed at first to be mere heavy colds, with a good deal of coughing and fever. Matters quickly grew worse.
Many of the townfolk had been troubled the same way, we learned, for several weeks. They were disturbed to think we had caught the sickness from them — a generous, decent place, where they understood music also, actually listening as crowds seldom do — and they did everything they could for us.
Pa hadn’t even tried a medicine pitch there at Betlam. He snarled — around camp where no Penn ear could hear him — that they were hightoned crum-bums who didn’t understand science: Mother’d be wasted on them. But he knew that was foolish talk, and his heart wasn’t in it. When the sickness began to alarm us, he took Mother Spinkton himself, and grumbled that it wasn’t a good vintage — maybe he’d left out some God-damn essential, getting old and incompetent, somebody’d ought to bury him if he was getting that senile — and he went about miserably among us with a bottle of her, and a lost look. No bullying, no insisting that we swallow her. Some of us missed his natural manner so much that we drank her in the hope of curing him. It was a bad time.
Nell Grafton’s boy Jack, turned fourteen that year, was the first to die.
Sam had been sitting up with him because Rex and Nell were both quite sick. This was in my wagon. I was already nearly recovered from a light attack of whatever it was. I heard Sam call me in sudden alarm, and I got to Jack’s compartment in time to see the poor kid with a blazing red face — I’d given him his last licking only two weeks before, for tormenting a stray cat — apparently choke to death on his own sputum. It happened too fast; nothing Sam or I could do. My Da sent me for Pa Rumley, and as I ran off I heard him coughing distressfully; he had been seedy for a couple of days but refused to worry about himself. I found Pa helplessly drunk, no such thing as waking him, and so I fetched Mam Laura instead. I remember how a glance was enough to tell her what had happened to Jack, and then she was staring down at Sam, who sat on a stool by Jack’s bunk swaying, his eyes not quite focussing. “You’ll go to bed now, Sam.”
“Nay, Laura, I’m not in bad shape. Things to do here.”
“We’ll do them. You’re to go and rest.”
“Rest. Why, Laura, it’s been, like, a mixed-up hardworking time, you could say. You see, being a loner by trade—”
“Sam—”
“Nay, wait. Seems I got the sickness, I want to say something while my head’s clear — you seen how it goes, they get off in the head. Now—”
She wouldn’t let him talk until we’d got him over to their wagon and into his bunk. I had never before seen her haunted and terrified, unequal to an emergency. Once in bed and yielding to it, Sam did not talk much after all. All I could receive from his difficult and presently rambling speech was that he wanted to thank us — Mam Laura and me — because we had known him without preventing him from being a loner by trade. At least I think that was what he tried to say.
His mind seemed remote after conveying that much to us, but his body was immensely stubborn, unwilling to yield. His battle to breathe lasted three days and part of a fourth night. The medicine priests — there were two in Betlam — came and went, helping us with Sam and three others who were sick, kindly men somewhat less ignorant than those I’ve met outside of Penn. We made them understand that Sam was unable to speak; he was quite conscious at that moment, sneaking me a grateful look behind their backs and the remnant of a grin when I said my father had made a true confession of faith before speech became impossible.
On the third day we thought he might win through — Nell Grafton had, and Rex, and Joe Dulin. But the decline followed. He regained a slight power of speech for an hour, and talked of his childhood in the hill country and remembered loves. After that, each breath was a separate crisis of a lost war. I am reasonably certain nowadays, from knowing the books, that Old-Time medicine might have healed him. We have no such art.
In the world that Old Time left to us, these things have happened and will again.
During even the last rasping struggles to draw air into his lungs, my father’s eyes were often knowing. They would turn to me with brooding and recognition sometimes, or watch a distant thought. They were never angry, peevish, beseeching or apprehensive; once or twice I thought I saw amusement in them, mild and sarcastic, the amusement of a loner by trade. The religion inflicted on him in childhood did not return in his time of weakness, as I had feared it might, to torment him: he was truly free, and died so, a free man looking with courage on the still face of evening.
24
A few weeks later, when we were on the move northward through Katskil, I told Pa Rumley and Mam Laura that I must go away alone. I found explanation was hardly needed. “Ai-yah,” Pa said — “I know it a’n’t as if you was a Rambler bred and born.” He didn’t seem annoyed, although my horn was a valued thing at the entertainments and I had become useful in other ways.
Mam Laura said: “You’re like my Sam — like your father — one of those who go where the heart leads, and they’re an often-wounded tribe, no help for it.”
I was thinking again, as I had done hardly at all during the Rambler years, about sailing. Not to the rim of the world: Mam Laura knew as well as Captain Barr that you can’t put a rim on a lump of stardust — but maybe I would sail around the world? Others (she taught me) had done it m ancient days. Thirty-ton outriggers had no share in the fantasy now; they’d been washed away when a poor scrannel pup lifted his leg in Renslar Harbor. I didn’t know how it was to be done, but Nuin, one heard, was a nation of brave enterprises. The fancy to sail around the world was certainly there in me at that time, a little while after Sam died, and is in me now, having come this far, this short way to the quiet island Neonarcheos.
“You go where the heart leads,” Mam Laura said. “And the heart changes in ways you don’t expect, and the vision changes, perhaps turning gray. But you go.”
Pa Rumley was stone-cold sober that day. “Laura, it’s a strange time for a man when his father dies.” He knew that, in ways she hardly could for all her wisdom. “He’s not quiet with himself for some time, Laura, no matter was his father a good man or not, no matter was he a good son to his father or a bad one.” Pa Rumley knew human beings; he also knew the God-damn yuman race — yumanity — which isn’t the same thing. He was already selling Mother Spinkton again, by the way, in these Katskil towns, and believing in her once more himself — or anyway expecting her to work miraculous cures, which she sometimes did. He may have guessed, out of the foggy backward regions of hi
s own life, how I sometimes dreamed that Sam Loomis was still living. He may have guessed that in the dream I would often be wretched and confused instead of pleased, unable to greet my father in a natural way. I was impotent with Minna once or twice, and she grew bored with me. I doubt if Pa guessed that: whatever troubles he may have passed through in his rambling half-century, I can’t imagine him unable to get it up. “I’m figuring,” Pa said, “to cross the Hudson Sea from Kingstone, and then winter up somewheres in Bershar. Why’n’t you stay with us through the winter? Then if you still be a-mind for Nuin come spring, I’ll take you down as far as Lomeda and all you need do is cross the Conicut.”
“Kay.”
“The God-damned of it is, we’ll miss you.”
Maybe I said some of the right things then. I was eighteen, beginning to know what they were and why one said them.
Pa also couldn’t have known how often I wished I might at least have seen my mother; orphanage childhood was another thing outside his experience. His own mother was warm in his memory. She kept a dressmaking shop in Wuster, a big Nuin town. It was her death when Pa was fifteen that made him take to the roads. He wouldn’t have favored that wish of mine, for he was a sensible man. Wishing for the impossible in the future is a good exercise, I think, especially for children; wishing for it in the past is surely the emptiest and saddest of occupations.
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