“Done what, Mister?”
“Impident. Why, yesterday, after Laura was done teaching you, I hung around like I sometimes do, and I asked her flat-out if she figured it was too late for me to pick up a mite of learning myself in my own spare time. ‘What kind of learning?’ she says right away, and when I told her — nay, you know, Jackson, you bein’ young as all dammit and horny after the green girls, you’d never believe what a soft woman that Laura is, more b’ token she’s your teacher and such is none of your business, but it’s so. ‘What kind of learning, Sam?’ she says, and so to make things plain I told her again about the wife I got behind me in Katskil, for I thought it might be a trouble to her mind. And that’s a sad sort of a fool thing, Jackson, about my wife. Always seemed to hold it against me, my wife did, that we could never get kids — hoy, and then unbeknownst to her I went and got you by another and a better woman, anyhow we think that happened. But that wa’n’t all. Year by year, seemed she felt it more and more of a duty to whittle me down, nag-nag, tell everyone’d listen the main reason I never got a master carpenter’s license was I was too Goddamn lazy to rise up off my ass even in a city like KingStone all bungfull of money and opportunity, only she never said God-damn of course — real saint she was — I mean, why, shit, Jackson, a man couldn’t live with it… Ai-yah — ‘What kind of learning?’ says Laura, and I told her — ‘Look,’ I says, ‘I can’t follow along with the Goddamn etymogolology or whatever,’ I says, ‘account I et too much ignorance when I was young, but I had it in mind to learn about you,’ I said — nay, Jackson, there’s a strange shine to a woman when she’s all of a sudden happy, I mean happy for true. I don’t suppose a man gets to see it more’n once-twice in a lifetime — the lot of us, men and women, bein’ what we are. ‘About you,’ I says, ‘and how I’d share your bed and your nights and days, and so’t of stand by, you might say, as long as I last.’ And here’s the thing, Jackson. After I’d said that, and was so’t of shifting my feet and wondering where I’d run and hide if she was to get the wrong look onto her face-why — why, Jackson, she said: ‘Then I’ll teach you, Sam.’ Just like that she said it — said: ‘I’ll teach you that, Sam, if it’s all right with the boy.’”
“Merciful winds, it’s all right with the boy!” I remember I was able to say that quickly, so that Sam would feel sure there were no second thoughts. And if there were any that mattered, they were buried too deep for me to know anything about them myself. I believe I was honestly happy for him and Mam Laura, who was after all the woman I would have picked for a mother if I’d had anything to say about it, and I had no feeling that she was taking him away from me.
That night, I remember, I had to have Bonnie — complaisant Minna wouldn’t do, it had to be Bonnie, and never mind her quick and snippy No and her maybe-sometime. And I got her — remembering Emmia, I think. I warmed her up with kissing when I caught her behind our wagon, and followed her to her compartment after she broke away with a friendlier backward look than I was used to from her; when she would have dismissed me there at the curtains I simply went in with her and kept up the good work. When she tried to freeze me, I tickled her under the ribs and she had to laugh. When she informed me she was about to yell and scream and fetch Pa Rumley who’d give me the cowhide but good, I informed her that she probably wasn’t, anyway not if she was the sweet, passionate and beautiful Spice I thought she was — in fact prettier than any quail I ever saw — and so I went on with my enterprise, warming her here and there and yonder until there wasn’t really one sensible thing she could do, except beg me to wait till she got the rest of her clothes off so they wouldn’t be rumpled. And I will be damned if she wasn’t a virgin.
Also relieved to be one no longer, and a bit grateful — and a good wife to Joe DuIin when she got around to it — but above all a hell of a musician, bless her: I’ve never known a better, certainly not excepting myself. I was fifteen. You can excuse me (if you like) for going rather cocky and quick-tempered and full of brag the next year or two. However, my half-comic good luck with Bonnie was only a part of the reason for it. I think everything, including the enormous discoveries of the books that Mam Laura was opening up for me, was pushing me just then in the direction of a temporary and fairly harmless toughness. I thought, like most grass-green ignoramuses, that in touching the outer fringes of learning I had swallowed it all. I thought that because a few women had been pleased to play with me, I was likely the grandest stud since Adam — (who had, you must admit, certain God-damned advantages we can’t any of us duplicate). I thought that because I could see the absurdity of dreaming about buying a thirty-ton outrigger, heaving an agreeable serving-wench aboard with the rest of the furniture and taking off for the rim of the dadgandered world — why, I was mature, mature.
I thought those chunks of whopmagullion, yet it’s all right. Humility does arrive. In fact, so fortunate is our human condition, it seems to arrive for many people early enough in life so that we can enjoy it quite a little while before we’re dead.
23
We came down on Seal Harbor like a May wind; Shag Donovan and a dozen of his bully boys smacked into us like a wind out of a sewer. As I think I mentioned, three of them got rather dead, but it wasn’t much of a brawl. Four of them rushed our little theater while we were puttmg on our souped-up version of Romeo and Juliet. Minna was doing Juliet as usual; the hoodlums’ idea was to drag her off into the bushes while the camp was turned upside down. But Pa had smelled trouble, a gift that seldom failed him, and we were ready. There was a personal element in it: Pa had met Shag some years before and got the worst of it; this time he took an artist’s pleasure in cooling Shag off before things could get too serious. Two of the three who wound up dead had got as far as grabbing Minna and tearing her clothes — rape was fashionable up there, and I suppose they expected you to get used to it — so Tom Blame and Sam clubbed them maybe a bit harder than they meant to; luckily Minna wasn’t hurt. Third man who perished got caught in a rather unusual way by Mother Spinkton’s Home Remedy. He was running fast, myself behind him at the time with my knife out and blood in my eye; he was passing through the shadow of one of our supply wagons just at the moment when four of his friends toppled it over; a full case landed on his back.
In a hazy fashion, the crowd was on our side. They had to live with Donovan’s gang, however, and we didn’t, so they left the fighting to us, and helped us by stealing less than you’d expect them to while we were busy. Several bottles in that case of Mother Spinkton broke, after which our guests showed a marked disinclination to hang around — you could almost say that Mother won the war. And by the way, we included the full value of those busted bottles in the bill that Pa Rumley presented next day to the Seal Harbor Town Council no less. Don’t think they didn’t pay it. They whimpered and said they were doing it just to get rid of us before we disturbed the peace. Pa Rumley counted the silver and tied the sack to his belt without asking the obvious question. Life in Seal Harbor had its ups and downs, that was all. A small cheerful crowd followed us to the city gates and cheered us as we departed south.