When I had my rags on Jed called off thinly into the wet woods: “Oh, Vilet!”
“Don’t fret,” Sam said to me under his breath — “I wouldn’t done it to you only she’s broad in the mind as well as in the beam.”
Limping out of a nearby thicket, the woman said: “I hearn that, Sam.” She gave him the small half of a grin, and the rest of us a challenging stare from under thick brows black as ink. Her dark green linsey smock left her knees bare, and the left one was bruised but not badly. She was anywhere in the thirties, a short slab-sided bigmuscled wench with no waist to speak of, but someway you didn’t miss it. Even with the slight limp she had a solid animal grace and sureness. She didn’t like being wet as a mushrat. “I did oughta ream y’ out, Sam, talking thataway about a tender blossom like me, hunnert and thirty pounds and all of it wildcat.”
“A’n’t she the sha’p little thing?” said Jed, and I saw he’d gone all mush-mind and lover-dreamy.
“Ayah,” she sighed — “sha’p as an old shovel beat out onto the rocks ten-twenty yeahs.” She slipped off a shoulder-sack something like mine, and tried to wring some of the water from her smock and pull it clear of her crotch and meaty thighs. “You men be lucky, them Goddamn loose shirts and stuff.”
“Vilet!” No longer dreamy, Jed spoke like a stern grandfather. “None of that cussing! We been into that.”
“Aw, Jed!” Her look at him was cocky, affectionate, submissive too. “You’d cuss, I bet, if n you couldn’t tell y’ clo’es from y’ hide.”
“No I wouldn’t.” He stared her down, solemn as a church. “And ‘hide’ — that a’n’t a nice word neither.”
“Aw, Jed!” She squeezed water from her black hair. It was short, and shaggy as if she’d hacked it off with a knife, the way soldiers do if there’s no barber in the outfit. She dropped into a squat beside me and gave my leg a ringing slap with a square brown paw. “Your name’s Davy, ha? Hiya, Davy, and how they hangin’, lover-pup?”
“Vilet dear,” says Jed, mighty patient, “we been into all that. No more cussing, no more lewd talk.”
“Aw, Jed, I’m sorry, anyhow I didn’t mean it like lewd, just friendly.” Her eyes, dark greenish gray with a hint of golden flecks, were uncommonly lovely, set in the frame of her beefy homeliness, violets in rough ground. “I mean, Jed, things keep slippin’ my mind and poppin’ out.” She pulled her wet smock out from her big breasts and winked at me, head turned so that Jed wouldn’t see it, but she meant her words too; she wasn’t fighting him. “You gotta be patient, Jed, you gotta leave me come unto Abraham kind of a gradual sort of a way, like I gotta creep before I walk, see?”
“I know, Vilet. I know, dear.”
I cut the hen as fairly as I could and passed it around, and was about to start gnawing when Jed dipped his head and mumbled through a grace, mercifully short. Sam and I began eating right afterward, but Jed said: “Vilet, I was listenin’ whiles I prayed, nor I didn’t hear you none.”
It’s a fact: among the true religioners, if a priest is present, people keep quiet while he says the grace right, but if there’s no priest everyone is expected to say it at the same time, leaving it up to God to analyze the uproar and sort out the faithful from the hippy critics. Of course, Jed hadn’t heard Sam or me either, but our souls evidently weren’t his concern, or else he felt they were too much of a job for him. Vilet’s soul was different. She said: “Aw, Jed, I was just — I mean, I thank thee, 0 Lord, for this my daily bread and—”
“No, dear. Bread means real bread, so then if it’s chicken it’s best you say chicken, understand?”
“For this my — Jed, chicken don’t come daily.”
“Oh — well, kay, you can leave out the daily.”
“For this my chicken and command—”
“Commend.”
“Commend myself to thy service in Abraham’s beloved name — kay?”
“Kay,” said Jed.
After the meal Vilet limped off to hunt up more firewood. I wished that while she was busy I could ask who she was and how she came to be with us, but Jed had been observing the luck-charm at my neck, and asked me about it.
I said: “It’s just a puny old luck-charm.”
“Nay, boy Davy, it’s a truth-maker. I seen one just like it at Kingstone, belonged to an old wise-woman. This is the spitn-image of it, bound to have the same power. Nobody can look on it and tell a lie — fact. Le’ me hold it a minute and show you. Now, look this little man or this little woman right in the face and see if you be able to lie.”
Deadpanning, I said: “The moon shines black.”
“How about that?” said Vilet, dumping an armload of dead sticks. “How about that, Jed o’ boy o’ boy?”
“Why, I got him.” Jed laughed, pleased. “Other side of the moon’s got to be black, or we’d see the shine of it reflected onto the curtain of night, big white patch moving the way the moon does, stands to reason. But all’s we see is the holes prepared in the curtain to let through the light of heaven, and a few of them dots that move different, so they must be little chips, sparkiers like, that God took off of the moon to brighten things up. See?”
Drowsily admiring, Sam murmured: “Bugger me blind!”
“Sam, I got to ask you not to use them foul expressions in the presence of a pure-minded boy and a misfortunate woman-soul that’s trying to find her way into the kingdom of ev’lasting righteousness, more b’ token I won’t put up with no more sack-religion, I purely won’t.”
Sam told him he was sorry, in a way that suggested he was used to saying it, and more or less meaning it every time. Good people like Jed would find things dull, I guess, if they couldn’t arrange to get hurt fairly often. As for the luck-charm — well, Jed was much older than me, fortyplus, and a hell of a lot bigger as well as full of divine grace. I did think if 1 took another try at making extra work for the shovels I wouldn’t be stopped by any dab of clay. But Jed was so proud and happy to have taught me something useful and surprising, I hadn’t the heart to spoil it. Maybe I couldn’t have anyway. Whatever mahooha I offered, he could have produced some gentle explanation to prove I hadn’t told a lie-working it along easy and patient, pushing and crowding Lady Truth around and around the bush till sooner or later the mis’ble old wench had to come crawling out where he wanted her, whimpering and yattering, legs asprawl and vine-leaves a-twitching in her poor scragged-up hair. “Well,” I said, “I never did know it had no such power. It was give’ me when I was born, and people have talked me considerable guck since them days, nothing no-way stopping ’em.”
“You just never caught on to the way of usin’ it,” he said. He still held the image facing me, and asked me as if casually: “It was a true-for-sure accident, that thing you told about?”
Sam Loomis stood up tall and said: “Hellfire and damnation! We take his word and then go doubting it?”
Behind me I could hear Vilet quit breathing. Jed might be forty pounds heavier, but Sam wasn’t anyone you’d try to take, head-wound or no. Jed said at last, mighty soft: “I meant no ha’m, Sam. If my words done ha’m, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t ask my pa’don. Ask his’n.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “No harm done.”
“I do ask y’ pa’don, boy Davy.” Nobody could have asked it more nicely, either.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It don’t matter.”
As Jed smiled and gave me back the clay image, I noticed his hand was unsteady, and I felt, in one of those indescribable flashes which resemble knowledge, that he was not afraid of Sam at all, but of himself. He asked, maybe just for the sake of speaking: “Was you bound anywheah special when we come onto you, boy Davy?”