The green was large and nicely designed — everything appeared spacious and rather different in Humber Town, or else I’m remembering it better than it was because that was where a good time of my life began, my time with Rumley’s Ramblers. The wagons made a neat square within the green; I saw the big randy pictures and strong colors all over the canvas tops and sides, and the well-fed heavy-muscled mules tethered out where they could find shade and space to move about without bothering anyone.
Rumley’s was a good-sized gang, with four of the large covered mule-wagons and two of the ordinary kind for hauling gear and supplies. The covered wagons — nothing like the rattletrap vans the gyppos use — are for the gang to dwell in whether they’re on the move or in camp. One long covered wagon can provide cubby-hole quarters for more than eight people with their possessions, and you won’t be too cramped so long as the clothes and things — dudery, to use the Rambler word — are properly stashed away. It’s a thing you learn, and once you do, why, it’s rather like living on shipboard and is not a bad way to live at all.
The musicians had polished off the Washerwoman by the time Sam and I got there. The girl with the mandolin was strumming aimlessly; the other had put down her banjo, and when she caught my eye and maybe Sam’s her hand went up to her black curls in that feminine hair-fixing motion which goes back to the time when (Old-Time science says) we were living in unsanitary caves and women had to pay attention to the hairdo so that the mammothbones they got hit with would bounce gracefully. Minna Selig was a charming bundle, but then so was Bonnie Sharpe. For some tinie — near six months as I remember — I could hardly focus on one without being suddenly hornswoggled by the other. They planned it that way.
The flute-player and the cornet man strolled a little way off and settled down with a deck of cards. I saw a tall broad-shouldered gray-headed woman, barefoot and dressed in a faded blue smock, come out to sit on the letdown back step of one of the big covered wagons and smoke a clay pipe in solid comfort. The white-haired drummer, the snowy owl, had quit his music too but stayed by the girls, fiat on his back with an ancient flopperoo of a farmer’s straw hat over his face and his drumsticks weighting it down in case a sudden wind should rise and find him disinclined to move. Stud Dabney was tremendous at that sort of thing: Pa Rumley called him the original God-damned inventor of peace and quiet. He devoted such enormous thought to working out new ways of being restful that it sometimes made him dreadfully tired, but he claimed this was in a good cause, and he’d keep it up b’ Jesus ’n’ Abraham, no matter if it wore him out into an early grave. He was sixty-eight.
That gray-haired woman on the wagon-steps had caught my attention about as strongly as the girls. It was her calm, I think. She’d done her morning chores and was enjoying the lazy break, but it was more than that. She spread calm around her, as other people may spread atmospheres of uneasiness or lust or whatever. Well, after I had known the lady quite a while — two years later, I think, when I was past sixteen — Mam Laura remarked to me that she thought her even disposition was partly a result of her trade of fortune-telling. “You can’t,” she said, “predict anything downright awful to the yucks, that’s obvious — bad for business even if they could take it, which they can’t. But I’ve got an old yen after truth inside me, Davy, same as your father has. So while I dream up sugartits of prophecy to happily the yucks and send ’em away imagining they amount to something, I’m thinking to myself about the actual happenings likely to come upon ’em — and upon me, merciful winds! — this side of death. It’s sobering, calming, Davy. Including the small happenings — I mean the ten million little everyday samenesses that leave you weathered after a while like an old rock, like me, like an old rock in sandy winds. Ai-yah, and after such thinking inside of me while I prophesy, I’m beat but sort of cleaned out too, peaceful, feel like acting nice to people for a change and mostly keeping my shirt on. Philosophy’s what it is, Davy — nay, and there’s another advantage of Rambler life (which I prophesy you’ll not be living all your days — you have a complicated future, love, too complicated for an old woman) and that is, a Rambler woman at my age (never mind what that is) can afford a smidgin of philosophy, the way I believe a woman can’t if she’s running the house and trying to fathom where romance went to and what in thunderuption ails her teener daughters…” She was spreading calm around her that first morning I saw her, smoking her pipe and studying everyone within her view but not seeming to.
I fidgeted against the fence rail and said: “Sam, for honest — how good do I blow that horn?”
“All I can do about music is like it. Can’t even no-way sing. You blow it, to me it sounds good.”
“’Greensleeves’, frinstance?”
The mandolin girl had a floppy lock of brown hair that tumbled over her eyes; kay, but the banjo girl had big full lips that started you thinking right away — well, “thinking” is the word I wrote there and I hate to scratch it out. The mandolin girl was still plinking a little, but mostly they were whisper-giggling together now, and I got the notion I was being analyzed.
“Ayah, ‘Greensleeves’ goes good,” Sam said. “Ramblers — well, they’re touchy people, you hear tell. Might be a wrong tell — never talked to any myself. Prideful, that’s for sure, and smart, and full of guts. Folk say they’re always ready for a fight but they never start one, and that’s good if it’s true. They take them big slow wagons into lone places no ordinary caravan woud ever go, and I’ve hearn tell of bandits tackling a Rambler outfit now and then, but never did hear of the bandits getting the best of it. Every Rambler boss got a silver token that gets him across any national boundary without no fuss, did you know that?”
“No, that a fact? Hoy, that means if we was with these people we could go smack over into Levannon, wouldn’t have to steal no boat and dodge the customs and so on?”
He caught my arm and swung me back and forth a little, so I’d keep my mouth shut while he thought. “Jackson, you been contemplating stealing a vessel for to cross the Hudson Sea and similar such-likes?”
“Oh,” I said, “maybe I done some thinking that a’n’t so big of a much. But is that a fact, Sam? They could get us across if they was a-mind to?”
“They wouldn’t do it smuggling style — lose their token if they did. I’ve hearn tell they never do that.”
“But they could maybe take us into the gang?”
He looked pretty sober, and let go my arm. “Wouldn’t be a one to say they couldn’t — you anyway. You got this music thing, and kind of a way with you.”
“Well hell, I wouldn’t go with ’em unless you did.”
He spread out his big clever hands on the fence rail, more than ever quiet and full of reflection, studying all we could see of the Ramblers’ layout. One of the plain wagons was parked, blocked up with its open rear toward the fence, near where the girls were loafing, and several large boxes stood in it; that would be the selling wagon, I knew from Rambler shows I’d seen at Skoar — they’d have a pitch going there by afternoon, with cure-all medicines and considerable junk, some of it good: I’d bought my fine Katskil knife from a Rambler trader. Another wagon, a covered one, stood facing a wide roped-off area of ground, and it had an open side; that would be the theater. “In that case,” said Sam, and I felt he was as nearly happy as either of us could be with East Perkunsvil so short a way in the past — “in that case I believe you might give it a go, Jackson, for I think I see my way clear to go along.”