“I slept in a tree.”
“Do tell. Raining now, a’n’t it?” Both of us were drenched, the water bouncing a stream from a crease in his shirt where I couldn’t shelter him, and pelting on his legs. But he was really asking, not sure of the world, his eyes losing me, finding me again.
“It’s raining some,” I said. “Listen, I’m going to get you deeper in the woods where won’t nobody search, understand? Stay by while you heal up. Then you can come along.”
“Sure enough?” I think he was seeing it, as I was trying to — the journeying, friendship, new places. We’d go together; we’d have women, amusement, something always happening. Above all, the journeying.
I said: “We’d get along all right.”
“Sure. Sure we will.”
I never learned his name. His face smoothed out completely and I had to let him lie back on the earth.
11
I remember the rain. Not long after my friend was dead, it slackened to a dull beating on the earth. I could not hope to scratch a grave in the tree roots and wet clay. In any case I have never liked the thought of burying the dead, unless it might be done as they do in Penn, marking the place with nothing but a grapevine, and taking the wineharvest in later years with no sense of trespass or disrespect. If that can’t be, maybe burning is best. Does it matter? — all the world’s a graveyard, a procreants’ bed, and a cradle.
I slipped away from the road into the bushes, sure now that there’d be no pursuit by men and dogs. In the dripping woods, however, I still moved softly. I was guessing my northeast direction accurately, for I had been on my way more than an hour when, off to my right where it ought to be, I heard a racket of hoofs galloping on wet road-mud, swelling loud, dying away into little taps like the noise a child can make by flipping a stick along a picket fence. A dispatch rider, probably, bound for Skoar. After that I heard only the diminishing sober discourse of the rain.
I grew hungry, but wanted a fire for my hen — raw chicken is discouraging. The morning was spent by the time I located a good spot. An oak had blown over against a slope years before, its root cluster jutting out aslant and catching a gradual drift of leaves, thus creating a roof of sorts. From the pocket of earth where roots had once grown, rains had dug out a drainage gully. I grubbed under the surface of the forest floor and found tindery stuff to start a blaze in the shelter of that overhang. Soon the fire was comforting me while my hen browned on a green ash spit. I hung my shirt and loin-rag on an oak-root near the warmth, and squatted naked letting the harmless rain sluice off my back. For a while, except to keep track of my cooking hen, I can’t have been thinking at all. Rain lulls you out of alertness like someone talking on and on, explaining too much.
The men came quletly. I was aware of them only an instant before the thin one said: “Don’t pull that knife, Jackson. We don’t mean you no ha’m.” His voice was firm but weary, like his long face under a bloody dark green rag.
“Don’t be scared,” said the other man, a moon-faced giant. “Matter-fact I been called by the blessed Abraham not to do no hurt to no man, also—”
The thin man said: “Hold up the mill, will you, whiles I talk to the boy? Jackson, the dang thing of it is, we’d like a snip of that ’ere, bein’ stinkin’ hungry is all.”
He was about fifty, gray and quiet. The rag on his head gave the hollows under his smoky blue eyes a greenish tinge. Long grooves bracketed his mouth and nose. His dark green shirt lacked a section where his head bandage must have been torn out; a hunting knife at his belt very much like mine appeared to be his only weapon. His belt was broad like a sash, with fold-over parts that would be useful for carrying small things. His lean legs sticking out of a shabby green loin-rag were dark and bunchy as bundles of harness leather.
The other man also wore the wreck of a Katskil army uniform; some kind of belt and rope-soled sandals. He carried a sword in a sheath of brass, a worthless thing in the woods. Both had at their belts long and rather flat canteens made of bronze that would have held about a quart.
Stupid as you can get, I said: “Where you from?”
The thin man gave me a good smile, dry and friendly. “Points south, Jackson. Will you share the meat with a man that fit your country yesterday and got a hole in his head, and a big old Jo that looks fit to scare the children but don’t want to fight no more?”
“Kay,” I said. They weren’t crowding me; I almost wanted to share it. “Yesterday? Be’n’t you from that fight down the road by Skoar?”
“Nay. When was it?”
“Couple-three hours gone. I was up a tree.”
“Couldn’t think of a finer place with a fuckin’ war goin’ on.”
“You Katskils done an ambush and got beat off.”
He slapped his leg, mixed satisfaction and disgust. “God damn, I prophesied it. Could’ve told the brass, that’s what you get for splitting the b’talion. Comes to me though, the meat-heads never asked me.” He squatted on his heels beside me, giving my hen the gloomiest gaze any chicken ever got and no fault of its own. The moon-face jo stood apart, watching me. “I feel bad about this, Jackson, If’n it was just me and my large friend standin’ over theah in the rain so bungfull of the milk of human kindness a man can’t see where he’d squeeze in no more nourishment noway—”
“Now, Sam,” said the big man. “Now, Sam—”
But Sam liked to talk, and went on regardless, in his slow-drawly Katskil voice, amusement and sadness ex changing places the way clouds play games with the sun: “If it was only him and me and you, Jackson, we might make out, but the dad-gandered almighty thing of it is, we got one other mouth to consider which’s got itself a bumped knee but still suffers if it don’t eat good. You think that ’ere little-ass bird could do a fourway split?”
“Well, sure,” I said — “two leg-hunks and two halfbosoms and ever’body arise from the God-damn table a mite hungry is good for you as the fella says — where’s the fourth?”
“Off into the brush a piece.”
“See like I told you, Sam? Boy’s got an open nature full of divine grace and things. What’s y’ name, Red?”
“Davy.”
“Davy what?”
“Just Davy. Orphanage. Bonded out at nine.”
“Now we got no wish to betrouble you, but maybe you a’n’t bound back wheah you come from?”
Sam said :”That’s his business, Jackson.”
“I know,” said the moon-faced man. “I a’n’t pushin’ the boy for no answer, but it’s a fair question.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “I’m on the run, ayah.”
“Nor I don’t blame you,” says Moon-face. “Noticed that ’ere gray ballock-rag hangin’ there right away, and what I’ve hearn about the way they’ll always do the dirty on a b.s. in Moha, it’s a national disgrace. You keep y’ chin up, boy, and trust in God. That’s the way to live, understand? Just keep y’ chin up and y’ bowels open, and trust in God.”
“You let him snow you, Jackson, you’ll start thinkin’ they don’t treat bond-servants like shit in Katskil too.”
“Sam, Sam Loomis, some-way I got to break you of that ’ere cussin’ and blasphemin’. A’n’t no fitten type talk for a young boy to hear.” Sam just looked at me; I felt he was laughing up a storm inside of him and nobody’d ever know it except himself and me. The big jo went ofl kindly: “Now, boy Davy, you mustn’t think I’m claimin’ I a’n’t no sinner no more, that’d be an awful vanity, though I do claim a lot of stuff’s been purified out’n me like a refiner’s fire and things, but anyway — my name’s Jedro Sever, call me Jed if you want, we’re all democraticals here I hope, and sinner though I be I fear God and go by his holy laws, and right now I says unto you lo, I says, bond-servant or no, you be just as much a man and citizen in the sight of God as I be, y’ hear?”
More casual, Sam asked: “Things got tough?”