“You didn’t have to, Miss Emmia. I—”
“’Didn’t have to’ — and me trying to save your backside a tanning! Moving away, Mister Independent?”
I squirmed my sack to the floor; my sh!rt sprung open and she saw the smeary bite. “Davy darling, whatever? And here she comes in a warm rush, no more mad at all. “Oh dear, you got a fever too!”
“Orb-spider.”
“Dumb crazy love, going off where them awful things be, if you was small enough to turn over my lap I’d give you a fever where you’d remember it.” She went on so, sugary scolding that means only kindness and female bossiness.
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]
10
Any odd-shaped stone supposed to have medicinal powers, more often called vitamin-stone. I made quite a few for sale when I was with Rumley’s Ramblers; rubbing with wet sand gives them a nice weathered look. My own footnote, by damn!
11
I dunno, Davy. I may form a Sisterly Protective Order of Phernale Women, myself president as well as founder if the salary is nght, for the constitutional purpose of taking you out somewhere and drowning you. After the historical event we’d hold commemorative meetings, and drink tea.
12
Notice he never pauses to consider how it feels to be married to an Irish bull. However, courage! Am