“Well,” I said, “I had a snuffle and besides, I’ve seen gentlemen do that, at the Bull-and-Iron.”
“There’s an old saying, rank got its privileges, but a Mister’s nephew a’n’t all that important, Jackson. And another thing — language. Frinstance, when they brang in that God-forgotten smoked codfish last night, which smelt as if a whole pile of moldy ancestors had sudden-like gone illegitimate, why, an aristocrat would’ve told ’em to take it away, sure, and he’d’ve said something real brisk that they’d long remember, but — with a gang of holy pilgrims at the next table, Jackson, he wouldn’t r’ar back and holler: ‘Who shit all over my plate?’ He just wouldn’t, Jackson.”
“Sorry,” I said, sulky — I hadn’t slept much. “I didn’t know pilgrims didn’t have to.”
“It a’n’t that, Jackson . In fact I b’lieve they do, in a manner of speaking. But the dad-gandered almighty thing of it is, you got to consider your influence on the young, the plague-take-it young. You take that ’ere young Jerry. Next time his Ma tells him to eat something he don’t fancy, ask yourself what he’s going to do and say — if his Da a’n’t within hearing. Just ask yourself.”
“See what you mean. A’n’t he a pisser, though!”
“Ayah.” But I couldn’t sidetrack Sam when he was feeling educational. “And you take farting, Jackson . Common people like what you and me really be, we don’t pay it no mind, or we laugh or something, but if you’re going to be the nephew of a Mister you got to do a little different. If you let a noisy one go, you don’t say: ‘Hoy, how about that?’ No, sir, you’re supposed to get a sadful-dreamy look onto y’ face, and study the others present as if you’d just never imagined they could do such a rude thing.”
Vilet and Jed came into our room then, and Sam let up on me. Jed looked all wrong, dark under the eyes as if he hadn’t slept, with a tremor in his big cluthsy hands, and so Vilet of course was troubled about him. Sam was inquiring politely about the bugs on their side of the wall when Jed, not listening, crashed into it saying: “I prayed all night, but the word of God is withheld.”
Vilet said: “Now, Jed—” fondling his arm while he just stood there, two hundred pounds of gloom, a great harmless bull somehow beat-out, no fight in him.
“I’d ought to leave y’ company,” Jed said — “a hopeless sinner like I be.” He sat on my cot heavily and wearily; I remember seeing him look down and appear dimly surprised to find his hand resting on my sack, on the bulge of the golden horn, and he lifted the hand away as if it weren’t right for him to touch a thing that had come from a holy hermit. “And the Lord said: I will spew thee out of my mouth — ’s what he said, it’s somewhere in the book. And that a’n’t all—”
“Now, Jed, honey thing—”
“Nay, hesh, woman. I got to call to y’ mind what the disciple Simon said: The Lord spoke but I turned aside. Remember? It’s what he said after he’d denied Abraham and the Spokesman a-dyin’, a-hangin’ on the wheel in the Nuber marketplace. ‘And they brought Simon to the marketplace—’ that’s how it goes, remember? — ‘to the marketplace, and Simon said: I do not know this man. And they questioned him again, but he said: I do not know this man.’ And then you remember, afterward, when Simon was put to the rack in the Nuber prison, he said them other words I mentioned: The Lord spoke but I turned aside. I’m like that, friends. The Lord spoke but I turned aside. The lighning’ll find you too if I’m with you when it strikes. I don’t wish to leave you, the way you been good to me and us real friends right along, but it’s what I ought to do, and—”
“Well, you a’n’t about to,” said Vilet, crying — “you a’n’t about to account we won’t let you, not me or Sam or Davy neither.”
“I a’n’t fit,” Jed mourned. “Wallowing in sin.”
“Well you didn’t then,” said Vilet. “All’s you done was put it in a couple minutes, and I loved it, I don’t care what you say, a holy man like you does it, it can’t be no sin, it a’n’t fair, anyway if it was sin it’s me that oughta burn—”
“Oh, hesh, woman! Your sins’ll be forgiven unto you account your heart is innocent, but me I got the whole God-given knowledge of good and evil, for me there a’n’t no excuse no-way.”
“Well, come on down to breakfast before you make up your mind about things.”
“Oh, I can’t eat anything.”
Still crying, Vilet said: “God damn it, you come on downstairs and eat breakfast!”
17
The pilgrims were already at breakfast, bacon and eggs no less, and thanks to the savings Vilet carried in her shouldersack, we were able to afford the same. She insisted on it too, with Jed in mind, for she subscribed to a theory very popular among the female sect, that ninety per cent of male grief originates in an empty stomach.
The dining-room at the Black Prince was so small you could have spat across it, and by the look of the walls many former guests had. There were only five tables. The doddery innkeeper had a couple-three slaves for kitchen help but evidently didn’t trust them to wait on table, and did it himself. Recalling the good-smelling, orderly, spacious Bull-and-Iron made it easy for me to despise this tavern, just like an aristocrat.
The Bull-and-Iron, now, was a fine brick building at least a hundred years old. The story was there’d been a lot more clear land around it when it was built, and Old Jon’s father had sold off most of it for a big profit after the new stockade went up to accommodate the city’s expansion, and land values rose. The Bull-and-Iron had fifteen guest bedrooms upstairs, no less, not counting the one for Old Jon and the Mam, nor Emmia’s where I’d left my childhood. Downstairs, there was that grand kitchen with two store-rooms and a fine cellar, and the taproom, and the big dining-room with oak ceiling-beams fourteen inches wide and charcoal-black, and tables to seat thirty people without crowding. Maybe I remember the cool taproom best of all, and the artwork above the bar, a real hand-painted picture just full of people in weird clothes, some riding astraddle of railroad trains and others herding automobiles or shooting off bombs, but all sort of gathered around in worship of a thundering great nude with huge eyes and the most tremendous boobs, like a shelf under her chin. She sat there with her legs crossed showing all her immense white teeth and being adored, so you knew it was a representation of the Old-Time pagan festival of St. Bra. The painting carried the Church’s wheel-mark of approval, or Old Jon couldn’t have displayed it. The Church doesn’t object to art-work of that type in the proper place, so long as it’s decent and reverent and shows up Old Time as a seething sink of scabrous iniquity.
But the Black Prince at East Perkunsvil — hell, the only mural was a spot in the dining-room wall the size of my head where plaster had fallen and nobody’d ever possessed enough alimentary tubing to replace it. The only respectable mural, I mean. They had the other kind of course in the privy out back. One of our Old-Time books mentions some of that kind found in the excavated ruins of Pompeii: the style hasn’t changed a bit.
There were seven of the pilgrims, the usual number because it’s thought to be lucky — Abraham had seven disciples — there are seven days in the week — and so forth. East of the Hudson Sea, pilgrim bands often head for places less sacred than Nuber, usually shrines that mark where Abraham is said to have visited and preached, and those groups, especially in Nuin, are larger, often lively and full of fun. Itinerant students join them for mischief and company, and a crowd like that can stir up a really joyous commotion on the roads. The band at the Black Prince was different — unmistakably a religion-first company, all except Jerry, and from the look of his parents you got the impression that he would take some holiness aboard when they got to Nuber, or else. The other pilgrims of the group have become almost faceless for me in memory — three women and one man. One of the women was young and quite pretty, but all that comes back is an impression of timidity and a very white face; I think one of the two older women was her mother, or aunt.