Aboard the Morning Star we all learned a little of what it must have been like to dwell in the jammed cities and suburbs of the last days of Old Time. I was just now rereading an ugly passage in the Book of John Barth: “Our statesmen periodically discover the basic purpose of war. They are, poor little gods, like farmers in a fix: if you have thirty hogs and only one small daily bucket of swill—? And so the finality, the apocalyptic unreason, the shared suicide of nuclear war is for them the most God-damned embarrassing thing. Their one time-tested population control is all spoiled.” A few paragraphs further on he remarks in passing that of course birth control had been a practical solution since the 19th century, except that the godly made rational application of it impossible even late in the 20th when the time was running out. What would he make of our present state, the reverse of the dismal population problem of his day?
I dare say no civilization ever completely dies. There’s at least the stream of physical inheritance, and perhaps some word spoken a thousand years ago can exert unrecognizable power over what you do tomorrow morning. So long as one book survives anywhere-any book, any pitiful handful of pages preserved somehow, buried, locked away in vault or cave — Old Time is not dead. But neither can any civilization return with anything of its former quality. Fragments we may reclaim, memory holds more than we know, there’s a resonance of ancient times in any talk of father to son. But the world of Old Time cannot live again as it was, nor should we dream of it.
Vilet often came along with me for hunting and fishing while Jed stayed behind to look after Sam. The first day that happened I felt an agreement between us, at first unspoken, created by occasional touches and glances, for instance when she was walking a few yards ahead of me in good forest silence, and turned to look at me over her shoulder, unsmiling. I think Vilet enjoyed being spooked by other people’s mysteries now and then, like my hermit whopmagullion, but she wasn’t one to make mysteries herself. That moment on the trail she might as well have said in words: “I could be caught with a little running.”
Work came first, and we had luck with it that day, nailing a couple of fat bunnies and then locating a good fishing pool about a mile from our cave. There was a grassy bank, sunlight, and a quiet as though no man had troubled the place for centuries. We set out fish-lines, and when she knelt on the grass to adjust hers, her arm slid around my thighs. “You’ve had a girl once or twice, I b’lieve.”
“How d’ you know?”
“Way you look at me.” The next moment she was solid on her feet and pulling her ragged smock off over her head. “Time you really learned something,” she said. “I a’n’t young nor I a’n’t purty, but I know how.” Naked with not a bit of softness (you would have thought), cocky and smiling a little and moving her hips to botber me, she was a grand piece of woman. “Off with them rags, Lover-pup,” she said, “and come take me. You’ll have to work for it.”
I worked for it, wrestling her at first with all my strength and getting no breaks at all until the struggle had warmed her up into real enjoyment. Then of a sudden she was kissing and fondling instead of fighting me off, laughing under her breath and using a few horny words I didn’t know at that time; presently her hands were gripping her knees, I was in her standing, joyfully stallionizing it with not a thought in my head to interfere. When I was spent she flung me a punch in the shoulder and then hugged me. “Lover-pup, you’re good.” What I’d had with Emmia seemed long ago and far away.
We had other times, not so very many, for there were other sides to Vilet: moods of heavy melancholy, of a kind of self-punishing despair; the religious side, that belonged to J ed and was forever shadowing the rest of her life. Often (she told me once) she dreamed that she was in the act of selling her soul to the Devil, and he in the shape of a great gray rock about to topple over and crush her. She couldn’t always be the good randy wrestling-partner when we had privacy and opportunity, but occasionally at such times she did feel like talking to me. It was a time like that, at the fishing pool again and maybe a week after our first romp, that she told me things about her relation with Jed Sever. Whenever Jed was mentioned in his absence by Sam or me, I’d notice a kind of still warning in her kind blocky face, like an animal bracing itself to defend if necessary. She’d hear nothing in criticism of him. At the fishing pool, after we got a few for supper we took a dip in the water to wash off the heat of the day, but she warned me off from playing with her and I wasn’t in form for it myself; we just sat by the pool lazing and drying off, and she said: “I got it figgered out, Davy, the mor’ls of it I mean. Not telling Jed about what we been having, it a’n’t a real sin account it might burden him with grief, and anyway I got so much sin in the past to work off, this’n’s just a little one. He’s so good, Davy, Jed is! He tells me I got to think back through earlier sins and make sure I truly repent ’em, because see, you can’t fix ’em all with one big bang-up repentance, you got to take ’em one by one, he says. So, see, I’m kindly working up to the present time but a’n’t got there yet. I mean, Sugar-piece, if I don’t commit no more’n one sin a day, or say two at the most, and then repent say three sins of past time the same day, well, I mean, after-while you get caught up like. Only it’s so’t of a heartbreak thing, times, remembering ’em all. I’ll be all right by the time we get to Vairmant. And Jed he says it’s too much to try to give up sin all to oncet, too rough,[14] the Lord never intended it like.”
I said: “Jed’s awful good, a’n’t he?”
“Oh, a saint!” And she went on about how generous he was, and thoughtful, and how he’d explained everything about the way to Abraham; when they got their little place in Vairmant they were going to have sinners in every day to hear the word, just everybody, any freeman that would come. Dear Vilet, she was out of her gloomy mood and all aglow from thinking of it, sitting there by the pool naked as a jaybird and patting my knee now and then but not trying to rouse me up because it wasn’t our day for it. “Jed, see, he’s got a great lot of sin-trouble too. ’Most every day he remembers something out’n the past that sets him back because it needs repentance. Like frinstance yesterday he recalled, when he was five, going-on six he’d just learned about fertilizer, see? So here’s his Ma’s bed of yalla nasturtiums she was so peart about, and he wanted to do something real generous, make ’em twice as big and purty right away, so he pees the hell all over ’em, specially a big old gran’daddy nasturtium that’s sticking up kindly impident — well, I mean, by the time he sees it a’n’t turning out just right it’s too late, he can’t stop till he’s emptied out.” Vilet was crying a little as well as laughing. “So the bed’s real swamped, petals fiat on the ground, and he don’t tell, it gets blamed on the dog and he dasn’t tell.”
“Oh,” I said, “that sumbitchin’ nasturtium was purely askin’ for it.”
“Ai-yah, I laughed too when he told me, and so’d he, just a mite, still it’s ser’ous, Davy, because it kindly ties in with a real sin he done when he was nine, poor jo. He done it to the little neighbor girl and his Ma caught ’em into the berry patch. The girl she just larruped on the backside and sent her home bawling, but she didn’t whip Jed. He says it’s how he knows his Ma was the greatest saint that ever lived, for all she done was weep and tell him he’d broke her heart after all she done givin’ him birth in pain and tryin’ to raise him up to something. And so ever since he a’n’t never put it into a woman, except once.”
14
I feel that Jed was entirely right about this. My own planned salvation involves getting in as much sin as possible in the next 70 years, so that what I give up at age 98 will