She rejoined us that frightful morning after a long private session with Father Fay, and gave Sam what Father Delune had told her would be the cost of a good ceremony, our humble way of showing God that we understood and loved Jed for the martyr he was. She told us then how Father Fay had accepted her as a pilgrim, with the prospect that she might some day become sufficiently purified to take the veil. Maybe only Father Fay could have given Vilet that much comfort and saved her, as I hope he did, for the human race. In the same degree, maybe no one but Father Delune could have helped me so nicely along the path of heresy. I wanted to suggest to him that if God was all-knowing he might be able to catch on without our blowing everything on a church performance, and, if he was really all-knowing, how about asking him what the hell good Jed’s martyrdom did to anyone, beginning with Jerry? I said nothing at all of course, mindful of Sam’s neck as well as my own, but my religious feeling ended just about then. I have never missed it.
I felt Vilet’s quiet when she talked to us after that time with Father Fay: quiet and distance, yet she didn’t seem a stranger. I had never understood the hidden existence of a nun in her, cool dim sister to the warm lovable wrestlingpartner who’d opened her good flesh to me many times. The nun was in charge now, staring somewhat blindly out of the face of a woman who had in the last few hours aged twenty years. I don’t think she asked Sam and me what we meant to do. She lost track of her words now and then, as if following sonic discourse in another room. Father Fay max’ have given her a penance — shirt to wear — her smock looked ridgv and she moved carefully like one in physical pain. Her left eye was blinking in a tic i’d never seen before. The pilgrims were conducting a private prayer-meeting of initiation for her soon — after which, she told us, she must not so much as speak to any male except Father Fay until the penitential part of her pilgrimage was done. Leaving us, she kissed me on both cheeks and told me to be a good boy.
I saw her once again, dressed in white with the other pilgrims, at the funeral two days later. If she knew where we were sitting she thought best not to look our way… It seems to me now that I loved her a great deal, maybe as much as I loved Caron who is probably dead.
I remember now a decree I pronounced from that throne on the steps of the presidential palace. The evening was wearing on; they’d brought us a musky wine that went to our heads. I decreed that everyone without exception must immediately live happily ever afterward; somehow I could think of no more fitting decree from a King of the Fools.
19
After the funeral — dismal enough it was, and our Jed would have thought it finer than he deserved — Sam and I didn’t wait for the coach that might go by on Saturday, but decided to chance it on foot at least as far as Humber Town.
In East Perkunsvil after the disaster I heard virtually no talk about the tiger, and not even a sidelong mention of his possible return. The village Guide brought back his hunting party the next day — sorry, angry men they were when they heard the news — and in the afternoon men went out to cultivate the corn patches with no protection but a couple of bowmen. That night also, men were outside minding watchfires, not against tiger but just to keep the grazing creatures away from the corn. Hunters and old wives and other founts of absolute wisdom agree that unless old or sickly, a tiger will attack a particular village only once in a season, and then move on. It could even be true, though I doubt it.
The senseless, accidental quality of the event was what shook and overwhelmed me, I think. Sam stood by me; we didn’t talk much; he was just there, letting me be alone with myself in his presence. Nickie is the only other I’ve known who can do that.[20] When the funeral was over and we were on the road again, I was beginning to understand how if there is any order, meaning or purpose in the human condition, human beings must make it themselves.
We made an early morning start. On such a summer morning, a west wind running along the hills and the sun not quite risen, a freshness everywhere, a ripple of birds’ music, a glimpse of a whitetail deer slipping into the daytime secrecy of the forest, the warmth of the present and the surging life of your own blood make up the whole aspect of truth — how else could it be?
Humber Town is a busy and ambitious place, too small for a city, too large for a village — say about six or seven thousand population and, to use a quaint local expression, growing all the time. On the road Sam and I chewed over a few plans but settled nothing. I still desired Levannon, and the ships. But I had been noticing how often a plan is a scribble on the wind. Sam allowed that, to keep us going, he might look up some journeyman carpentry or mason work — he knew both trades — in Humber Town. He agreed it would be safest to move over into Levannon, if there stifi was a war going on by the time we reached Albany on the Hudson Sea. At East Perkunsvil the only war news they had was whispery rumors about a battle at Chengo in the west, and another on the Hudson coast a little north of Kingstone, barely outside Katskil territory.
Sam and I had not spoken at all of the relation that might exist between us. But as we were coming up to the gates of Huinber Town I said: “If’n you want to be my Da and I want it thataway, it maybe don’t matter if I was or wa’n’t out’n the actual seed?”
“Why, that’s about the way I had it lined up to myself, Davy,” he said. He’d been calling me Jackson as usual that morning. “We might leave it at that…”
The gate guard was happy about something, which made him show uncommonly good manners for a policer. As he let us in I heard the brisk tinkle and thrill of a mandolin somewhere. Then a drum was warming up oom-ta-ta oom-ta-ta, and a flute and a pretty sharp cornet jumped in, not quarreling at all, with the “Irish Washerwoman.” It was happening out of sight around a curve of the main street, not far away. Wherever the Washerwoman came from, and I believe it was Old Time, she’s a grand durable quail and always welcome. “There they go!” the guard said to us, and I saw his feet were interested, and so were mine. “Best damn gang ever was here. You be strangers to Humber Town?”
“I was by, yeahs ago. Sam Loomis, and this ’ere’s my boy Jackson — Jackson David Loomis. Who be they, sounding off?”
“Rumley’s Ramblers.”
“Ayah?” said Sam. “Well, that comet’s got a power into it, but he don’t blow as good as my boy…”
A small idle crowd was already lounging at the rail fence that bordered the town green, though no special show was going on and it was only mid-morning, when most of the townfolk would be at work. The musicians had drifted together and tuned up to amuse themselves, that was all. But nobody with ears and eyes would just walk by, not with Bonnie Sharpe cross-legged on the grass tickling her mandolin, and Minna Selig with her banjo, and Stud Dabney teasing his drum to funny stuff with his white head stuck out over it and his squabby body in a kind of crouch, like a snowy owl about to fly away. Little Joe Dulin was there too tweedling his flute, and big Tom Blame stood back of him — far back, following a rule of his own, for Tom always insisted he couldn’t make his cornet cough up a decent tone unless there was a plug of good tobacco stuffing a hole where a couple of teeth were long gone, which meant spitting at the end of near-about every bar; and he couldn’t spit good, he claimed, unless he was free to swing his head real liberal and fair warning to the world. Uhha, Tom was there in all his glory, as Sam and I joined the other loafers to rest our feet on the rails — Long Tom Blaine pointing his crazy comet at the sky, a man drinking music and turning his head quick as a cat to spit and drink again. Hoy, so I’m running on ahead of myself and don’t care. These were people I soon began to know and love; when I touched my pen their names came tumbling out.
20
I will praise my love for the honey of his words — honest, Spice, it’s simply a matter of keeping one’s mouth shut in a pleasant tone of voice.