“Why, friend!” Pa Rumley responded — “the Lord f’gives many a sinner. Come for’d and speak your mind!” He was a little uneasy. He told us later he wasn’t sure he’d seen Sam and me talking together, at the fence.
Sam, that old scoundrel — my Da, mind you — said: “Praise him evermore, but le’ me lay my burdens down!”
“Let the poor soul come for’d there, good people — he’s a sick man, I can see. Make room, please!” They did, maybe as much from pity as because Sam might have something catching. He did look just about finished — coughing, staggering, fetching up against the backboard of the wagon and letting Tom Blaine support him. If I hadn’t seen that head-shake signal I’d have been over there lickety-doodah, and maybe spoiled things. “Comes on me sudden sometimes,” he said, which took care of any critics who might have noticed him with me before the music, steady and hard as nails. “Real sudden!” — and with his face turned away from the crowd he sent Pa a wink.
After that you’d have thought they’d practised it for years. I whispered to the nearest ear, which happened to be Minna Selig’s: “That’s my Da.”
“Ayah? Did see you together.”
Bonnie said: “A’n’t he a pisser!”
I near-about busted with pride.
Pa Rumley was leaning down to him, a soft angelic smile slathered over what you could see of his face outside the black foam of beard. His voice was globs of maple syrup out of a jug. “Don’t despair, man — nay, and think of the joy in heaven over the one sinner that repenteth. Now then, where at is this pain?”
“Well, it’s a chest mis’ry all kind of wropped up with a zig-zag mortification.”
“Ayah, ayah. It hurts a mite cross-ways when you breathe?”
“O Lord, I mean!”
“Ayah. Now, sir, I can read a man’s heart, and I says to you lo, about this sin, it’s already near-about washed away m repentance, and all you need is to fix up the chest mis’ry so to make straight the pathway for the holy spirit and things — only you got to be careful of course.”
Tom Blame was right there with a bottle of Mother Spinkton, a look of gladness, and the father and mother of a wooden spoon. I have never understood, myself, how ordinary maple wood could hold together under the charring and shriveling effect Mother always had, but there’s nothing I can do except tell history the way it happened. Bedam if those two old hellions didn’t jaw it back and forth another five minutes, with Tom holding the spoon, before Sam would let himself be talked into swallowing some. They were taking a chance, I think: if the old lady had eaten her way through the spoon while they talked, the crowd might have lynched the pack of us.
Sam took it at last, and for a few seconds things were pretty quiet. Well, often you don’t feel anything right away except the knowledge that the world has come to an end. Sam of course had been brought up on raw corn likker and fried food and religion; all the same, I don’t believe anything in a person’s past could actually prepare him for Mother Spinkton. He got her down, and when his features sort of rejoined each other so that he was recognizable again, I thought I heard him murmur: “This happened to me!” It was all right: any yucks who overheard him probably thought he was looking at the nice kind of eternity. Then as soon as he could move, he turned his head so that the yucks might observe the glow of beatitude or whatever spreading over him, and said: “Ali, praise his name, I can breathe again!”
Well, sure, a man’s bound to feel a surrounding glory at finding himself still able to breathe after a shot of Mother Spinkton. But the yucks hadn’t tried any of her yet, so I guess they didn’t quite understand what he meant. “I was nigh unto death,” says the old rip, “but here I be!” And they all pushed in around him then, wanting to touch and fondle the man who’d been snatched from the grave, even tromple him flat in pure friendliness.
Pa Rumley hopped off the wagon. He and Tom pried Sam loose from the public; then Tom went to work selling bottles — for a few minutes he was passing them out about as fast as he could handle them — and Pa Rumley walked the sick man over to that wagon where the grayhaired woman was still sitting smoking her pipe and enjoying everything. I trailed along, and the girls stuck with me.
It’s hard to believe how much space you can find in one of those long covered wagons. The inverted-U frames supporting the canvas has cross-bars usually of hornbeam, just above head-height, and a light wicker-work platform rests on the cross-bars, making a sort of attic for storing light stuff. Those cross-bars also carry hanging partitions for the cubbyhole compartments that run along both sides of the wagon with a single-file walkway between. Up in front there’s an area without sleeping compartments, just canvas walls with usually a window on each side. For laughs, we always called that area the front room.
That was where Pa Rumley took us sow, to the front room of this wagon, which was the one with his own livingquarters. Because it was the headquarters wagon, the front room was nearly twice the size of those in the others, and had bookshelves, a thing I had never seen nor imagined. This wagon had only four sleeping spaces, two double and two single: singles for Mam Laura and old Will Moon who usually drove the mules, a double for Stud Dabney and his wife, and a double for Pa Rumley with whatever woman was sharing his bunk. Pa swept us in there — Bonnie, Minna, Sam and me. Mam Laura came in last with her clay pipe and sat cross-legged as limberly as the girls. I never heard of Ramblers owning a chair — you sat on the floor, or you lay, or sprawled, suit yourself. In that headquarters room, the whole ten-by-twelve floor was covered by a red bear pelt that was the pride of our hearts. Pa didn’t say anything until the gray-haired woman had settled herself; then he just looked at her and grunted.
She puffed her pipe till it went out, and rubbed the bowl of it against her thin nose. Studying Sam she was, and he met the stare, and I had the feeling they were exchanging messages that did them good and were none of our business. Though grayer, she was slightly the younger, I believe. At last she said: “From the no’th of Katskil, be’n’t you?”
“Ayah. A’n’t had word of the war lately.”
“Oh, that. It’ll be over in a couple-three months. Rambler life attract you, maybe?”
“Might, allowin’ for the fact I’m a loner by trade.”
“Did a good jobas a volunteer shill out there. Don’t know that I ever saw that done before.”
So’t of come over me all-a-sudden like, the way I wouldn’t want you to think my boy’s the only talented one in the family.”
“You be his Da then?”
“Ai-yah, that’s a special story,” Sam said, “nor I wouldn’t be a one to tell it without his leave.”
She looked at me then, and I felt the kindness rn her, and I told the story, finding it not hard to do. Bonnie and Minna had quieted down, anyway I guess they wouldn’t have carried on the game of dividing me down the middle directly under her eye. I told the story straight, feeling no need to change or soften it. When I was finished Sam said: “He must be my boy. He don’t lack my oneriness, you see — just a’n’t quite growed up to it yet.”
“Be you,” Mam Laura asked me, “a loner by trade?”
“Likely I must be,” I said, “the way when my Da makes that remark it rings a bell in me. But I like people.”
“So does your Da,” Mam Laura said — “did you think he didn’t, Davy? Nay, I sometimes wonder if loners aren’t the only ones who do.” I was beginning to notice how she spoke rather differently from the rest of us. I couldn’t have explained the difference at that time; I did feel that her way of using words was better than any I’d heard before, and wished for the knack of speaking that way myself. “You truly want to join up with us, Davy, the uncommon way we live that’s never a safe thing, often lonely, hard, tiresome, dangerous?”