“Yes,” I told her. “Yes!”
“Enough to suffer a little schooling in consequence?”
I had no notion what sort of schooling she meant — while I was knocking off my life story I’d already told her I knew all about how to handle mules. But I said: “Yes, I do — honest, I’d do anything!”
Pa Rumley laughed at that, gargling it in his beard, but Mam Laura aimed her smile mostly at the universe and not at me. “Hoy, Laura,” Pa said, “didn’t I keep telling you I’d raise a big old God-damn scholard for you somewheres, to. squeeze the good out’n them books that’ve been wearing down the mule-power on this wagon all these years? Maybe I’ve even raised you more’n one. Be you a man for the books, Sam Loomis?”
My father looked away through one of the little windows — honest glass they were, sewed cleverly into slots in the canvas so that no wind would dislodge them or force the rain through. For a moment or two he looked older and grayer, my father, than ever before; if there was mirth hidden in his craggy face I couldn’t find it. “That wasn’t my fortune, Pa Rumley,” he said. “I tried once to win me a little learning after my young years were long gone — nay, but it don’t matter. If the lady will teach my boy, I’ll answer for it he’ll mind the lessons and get the good of it.”
Pa Rumley got up and tapped Sam’s shoulder and nodded at me. “He blows that horn pretty good too,” he said. “Well — stick around. You’re lucky — gentlemen hark! Yes sir, it just so happens you hit me at a lucky time: I got over the shock of being born a good while ago, more b’ token I a’n’t dead yet. Best time to tackle a man, understand? — somewhere in there betwix birth and death. If the sumbitch won’t give you a decent answer then he never will.”
21
We did stick around — four years.
Pa Rumley was a sharp-minded observant man, sober; drunk, he was still a good critic of himself, unless he passed a certain point of drinking that he could not always recognize, and tumbled into a black well of despair — then he had no judgment in his darkness, and someone had to stand by and drink with him till he dropped in his tracks. Except during those very rare crises, his sadness always had around it a nimbus of mirth, just as his loudest laughter carried the overtones of grief. True for all of us, but in him it was more obvious, as though the emotional raw stuff that nature, playing safe, doles out to most of us by the teaspoonful, had been sloshed into Pa Rumley with a bucket.
Pa used to claim that he’d fought and toiled and connived to make himself boss-man of the best God-damn gang in the world for the simple reason that he was at heart a benefactor of the God-damn yuman race, which without him would likely drop dead of its own boredom and meanness and hard luck and general shitty stupidity. And it’s a fact, when you got down to cases he really didn’t seem to have a thing in the world against yumanity except that he never would pronounce the plague-take-it thing with an aitch.
He had a long, thick-bridged nose that spread at the tip into a double knob. The whole organ had been slammed into at some time in the faraway past, so that when I knew him it aimed more or less at his right shoulder. He said it was no battle that bent it, more likely somebody sat on it when he was young. He asserted that in fact he never did fight except now and then with a club, which was why he never got licked. However, when I saw him personally lay out Shag Donovan who thought he was boss of Seal Harbor, Pa used no club except the knobby side of his fist, and all two hundred pounds of Shag went softly to sleep. (I was a bit helpful in that Seal Harbor thing, being fifteen and on the quarrelsome side for a while, a temporary trait, a sort of growing pain.) Another time, I heard Pa say that his nose took that starboard slant from having to keep alert and sniffing for the righteous, who generally come up on a man from behind.
It was a good commanding nose anyway, and useful to the gang because it told of his mood: so long as it stayed red or sunset pink there was nothing much to worry about, but if it went white while Pa was still sober, the wise thing to do was to keep out of sight and hope for the best, supposing you had anything on your conscience. His eyes were important signals too, small and black and restless. Just contrary to his nose, they went bloodshot when he was on the warpath — but of course if you were near enough to notice the swollen veins you wouldn’t benefit by running.
I never knew him to clobber anyone who hadn’t, according to Pa’s lights, earned it. Anyone who did received the quick tranquillizing sensation of a tall building falling on him, and when he dug himself out from under that, always amazingly undamaged, he could do as Pa said, God damn it, or quit. In all my time with Rumley’s no one left voluntarily until I did, and when I did it was no fault of Pa or myself: I left with his friendship and good wishes. If I could ever meet him again — idle remark, with all the sea between us and no prospect that any of us will ever turn again toward our native countries — it would be an occasion for affectionate talk and some long drinks. He’d be crowding seventy, now I think of it — and yet, he seemed so durable, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the gang is still Rumley’s Ramblers, still traveling somewhere and himself stifi the law and all the prophets.
He never got rough with the women, except for the loveroughness he must have provided when he took one as a partner for a night or a week or whatever length of time suited both. Now and then I’ve heard them wailing musically from the cubby-hole in his wagon — laughing the next instant or shouting wild talk with scant breath the way a woman won’t do unless she’s truly kindled. And I’ve seen them come out of there looking mighty rumpled, but never discontented.
Pa Rumley didn’t talk about his cot-work — those who do often haven’t done it of course — but some of the women did, to me no less, after I’d been with the gang a good while and developed a habit of listening, a thing almost unheard of in the teens. Minna Selig especially, three or four years older than I, was all hell on analyzing her feelings, for some odd time-passing fun she got out of it. I recall one occasion when she couldn’t rest until she’d stacked up my performance (her word) against Pa’s, detail by detail. I liked that quail, but that was one occasion when I wished she’d shut up — after all, I’d never claimed to be that good! Bonnie Sharpe could let in the daylight on Minna’s intellect with a poke or two, but I didn’t have the knack. When Bonnie wasn’t around, Minna would go after a joke or a light remark as if it were a school problem, and everything else must wait till she’d explained it back to you and sorted Out all its unreasonable aspects. I don’t mean she was grim, she just got her kicks out of it, some way; I think the sweet kid got as much pleasure out of such operations as a dumb creep like me gets out of laughing. It was Pa Rumley’s singleness of purpose, she explained, that made him better in bed than a boy — “Not meaning for to hurt y’ feelings, Davy, it’s just something an older man learns, I guess. Pa’s like a rock, see, I mean even his face gets hard, smooth, cold almost, like he a n t hearing you no more at all, and you know you can do anything — holler, fight, struggle as much as you want, there’s no danger you’ll get away. Why, the wagon could catch afire and he wouldn’t stop till he’d have it, right there.” (I said: “You mean it’s like being screwed by a mountain?” She wasn’t listening.) “Now you, Davy, you be mostly too polite,” said that nice Rambler quail instructing an ex-yard-boy. “And this might surprise you but it’s a fact, Davy, a woman don’t like too much of that.” I says: “No?” “No,” she says — “in fact it might surprise you, but a woman don’t always mean exactly what she says — I know, it’s real surprising.” I said: “Sure enough?”