Speaking of Romeo and Juliet, we always did our best by that one, although since our theater was only a curtamed opening in the side of a wagon we had to simplify it some. The balcony job for instance-the whole stage opening had to be the balcony, with Br’er Romeo operating from the ground, which was all right — good realism — so long as he remembered not to get himself tangled with a wagon-wheel in a spirited moment and set the whole damned balcony swaying and squeaking. Billy Truro, a romantical tenor type, was usually Romeo, and he sometimes got a little carried away, especially when it came to bellering that line; “Oh, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?” Hung up there on that plague-take-it wagonwheel with Minna fading out on him, he couldn’t help but win the sympathy of the house.
As for the text, Pa used to claim it was a genuine condemned version; Mam Laura allowed he was right. She didn’t have it among her books, so I never read the whole thing till I had the freedom of the Heretics’ secret library at Old City. It’s true there was something slightly drastic about our manner of tearing through the play in two fifteen-minute acts, with an extra sword-fight, but that was the way the yucks liked it: we aimed to please, and what the hell more can an artist do? As Juliet, Minna Selig was an absolute copper-riveted whiz. I can still hear her making with “Oh, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb, lest that thy love prove likewise variable.” Often she’d leave out the line with the orb in it, for she could smell a crowd almost as acutely as Pa Rumley, and tell whether the yucks were the type who’d be so irritated by hearing a word they didn’t know that they might start hooting and hell-raising. Frankly I don’t know what any yuck could do with an orb.
Hoy, little Minna in her nightgown, with her dark hair a mist around her big eyes! — why, she was Juliet, the way she looked innocent as a kitten and not much smarter, and pretty enough to make the dullest yuck want to cry. Bonnie adored watching her perform. I remember we gave Romeo another whirl at the very first stop we made after leaving Seal Harbor. That was down in Vairmant, for we’d taken the road on the eastern side of the mountains, where Rumley’s hadn’t appeared for several years. Bonnie and I watched the show out front — Bonnie was still pretty warm for me after our little excitement in April — and she was in ecstasies whenever Minna-Juliet sounded off, hugging my arm and exclaiming over and over under her breath: “Listen at them chest notes! Aw, Davy, it’s gonna make me cry — ooo-eee — ooh, a’n’t she a pisser!”
That road east of the mountains was presently leading us down along the west bank of the lovely blue Conicut, and we took our time in that pretty country, which is full of little villages and all of them good for a pitch. Pa never would explain what old trouble it was that obliged him to keep out of Nuin: it was a question you just didn’t ask. But he’d been born in Nuin and was bungfull of Nuin history, and disapproved of most of it. I remember a day on the river road when we were approaching the little city state of Holy Oak, north of Lomeda. Old Will Moon was somewhat too drunk to handle the mules — a fault he had — and Pa had taken over for him while he slept it off. Pa enjoyed driving anyway, and carried on a running grudge fight with Old Lightning, the near hind mule on the headquarters wagon. Old Lightning never seemed to pay any attention, but could generally tell from Pa’s voice when it was safe to fall asleep walking, or slack off so gradually that his harness-mate never caught on to the swindle. Sam was out on the front seat with me that day, Pa slouching between us with the reins, and the splendid blue of the Conicut making a music of color under a friendly sun.
The mere name of Holy Oak had got Pa started on Nuin history, a subject that always chafed him. “This little country was part of Nuin,” he told us, “in the old days of Morgan the First, Morgan the Great they call the old sumbitch. I believe it fit a war of independence after he corked off, and so did Lomeda and the other pisswilly countries this side the river — ecclesi-God-damn-astical states is what they call ’em. Morgan the Great! — gentlemen hark, it’s getting so you can’t believe nothing you hear no more, more b’ token you never could, anyway not with Morgan the Great around. They claim you don’t behold his like no more, and I say that’s a good thing. Account of he was a bird. This little country, this Holy Oak, is supposed to be named for a tree that was planted by Morgan the Great. Kay, I’ve seen it — a’n’t no great circumstance of a vegetable, it’s just an oak tree, and you can say it’s a purty little story, but wait a minute. Let’s reason it out. Let’s look at what history says. You got any idea how many frigging oak trees that old man is supposed to’ve planted for himself? Why, gentlemen hark, it’s pitiful — why, if I had as many hairs growing out of my hide as that old man is supposed to’ve planted oak trees, I’d be bowed down, gentlemen, I’d walk on all fours like a bear till they skinned me for a rug. You may well ask why he couldn’t go and plant a cherry or a pecan or something for a change — git up, Old Lightning, you inis’ble petrified threetenths of an illegitimate hoss’s ass, git up, git up! — you may well ask, and I’ll tell you. The God-durn public wouldn’t let him is the reason — had to be oak or nothing and that’s the royalty of it.”
“Still and all,” Sam said, “he called himself a president, not a king, can’t get around that.”
“Ayah,” Pa shouted, “and there’s the biggest pile of hoss-shit ever left unshoveled!” Well, Sam had said it merely to keep him perking. “President my glorious aching butt! He was a king, and that’s the only excuse for him. I mean you got to make allowances for a king, the way he’s got everybody after him, obliged to king it from dawn to dark — planting oak trees, laying cornerstones and maternal ancestors in sinister bars, why, balls of Abraham and Jesus H. K. Hornblower Christ, they never gave that man any rest — git up, Lightning, God blast the shiveled-up mouse-turd you got for a soul, I got to speak rough to you? — no rest at all. How’d he ever find time for kinging, ’s what I want to know? Look, here’s how it was, on just an average day, mind you, when this poor old sumbitch, this Morgan the Great, is trying to address the fucking Senate on a matter of life and death or anyhow a lot of money. You think he’s going to get a chance to fit two sentences together end to end? — gentlemen hark! No, God butter it and the Devil flitter it, no — and why? Because up pops the Minister for Social Contacts or whatever — ‘Sorry, your Majesty, we got here an urgent message concerning a bed over to Wuster that a’n’t been slept in yet by no royalty, only your Majesty will have to sleep into her kind of quick, so to make it up to Lowell in time for to throw a dollar acrost the Merrimac account it says here in the book you done that on the 19th of April — more b’ token, your Majesty, we just this minute got in a new shipment of oak trees—’ why, goodness, gentlemen, that a’n’t no way to live, not for a great man. Takes the heart out of things, don’t it? How can you expect a boy to want to be President if he knows it’s going to be nag, nag all day long? — you Lightning, God damn your evermore backscuttled immortal spirit, will you git up?…”
It wasn’t only Nuin history that bothered Pa Rumley. He didn’t actually like any part of history, nor anybody in it except Cleopatra. He used to say he knew he could have made out with her real smooth, if he could have met her in her native California when he was some younger and had more ginger in his pencil. Nothing Mam Laura said could ever convince him that Cleopatra hadn’t lived in California . Sometimes he got me to wondering about that myself.