She said sure enough, and went on explaining it in the very friendliest way, I remember, while I said uhha and ayah and think-of-that-now — you know, being polite because it’s my nature — while we were hearing also the loud lazy screak of the wagon-wheels and the country sounds outside. I was seventeen at the time of that conversation, if my memory hasn’t goofed, and the countryside would have been the almost tropic splendor of southern Penn. It comes back to me with the musky sweetness of scuppernong grape in the air along with Minna’s fragrance, and I lying politely on her bunk with a leg slid conveniently under her hot and sweaty little bare brown tail, waiting (politely) until the never-hurrying wagon should provide just the right amount of jolt to swing us back into action. I knew Minna was right of course, and what she said doubtless had some effect, or I’d have heard other complaints about politeness later on, and I can’t recollect that I ever did.
Pa had never married. A Rambler boss seldom does. It’s traditional that he should remain available to soothe the restless, arbitrate quarrels, comfort the widow, instruct the young, and pacify all concerned by procedures not very convenient for a married man.
He was wondrous patient with the children, the small ones anyway; until they were seven or eight years old he scarcely tried to comb them out of his hair. There were seven when Sam and I arrived, a better showing than most gangs could make — seven children, twelve women, fifteen men, so Sam and I brought the gang total up to thirty-six. Three more children were born during my four years with Rumley’s. The oldest child was Nell Grafton’s boy Jack, ten when I first saw him; his father Rex Grafton had gone blind with cataracts near the time of Jack’s birth, and had taught himself harness-making, basketry, other skills. Jack was a handsome hellion born for trouble. Nell, that big sweet woman, mothered the whole gang and looked after her proud sharp husband in a way that sheltered his raw nerves and yet steered him away from selfpity, but her own wild boy she couldn’t control. Once or twice I tried to beat the cruel streak out of him, and that didn’t work either.
The bearing of Rambler children presents a continual problem to the Holy Murcan Church . How can the authorities be sure that all pregnancies are reported, no woman left alone after the fifth month, every birth attended by a priest, with a group that’s always on the go, in and out of the wilderness, over national boundaries without inspection, even excused from the taxes and other responsibilities that go along with settled residence and national citizenship? You’re right — they can’t. A Rambler is called — legally and with the consent of the Church because the Church can’t help it — a citizen of the world.
The Church has made sporadic efforts to take over the Ramblers, invariably catching its tail in the crack. Every now and then some enterprising prelate gives birth to an idea he thinks is new. The Archbishop of Conicut had a go at it in 318, not very long before we made a circuit of that country and then headed for southern Katskil and Penn. He decreed that every Rambler gang passing through Conicut must have a priest as one of its members. Simple, S’s he — how could they object, and why did nobody think of this before? ord got around before his law went into effect; when did, every gang had left Conicut. Outside each important border post — in Lomeda, and at Dambury in the south of Bershar, and Norrock which is Levannon’s only real southern port, and even away over at Mystic on the border of Rhode — a Rambler gang set up camp within sight of Conicut customs officers, with whom they fraternized agreeably enough, but for three months no Rambler gang set foot on Conicut soil, and no Rambler boss took the trouble to explain why.
They were polite with all visitors, but in those encampments they put on no shows that would be visible from the Conicut side. No music, for music doesn’t recognize boundaries. No selling to Conicut customers, and no passing on of news. The gangs just sat there. A three-month block was enough to rouse every town and village in the land to a dither of exasperation and protest — nay, they were still grumbling about the “Rambler Strike” months later when we passed by, and I wished we’d been in on the fun, but we were away the hell up in northern Levannon at the time. Often during the three months a few handpicked, soft-spoken priests visited the encampments and offered themselves as members — temporary members, even members with limited privileges, anything to get the gangs back in the country before the public rioted. The hopeful fathers were regretfully told that the boss just hadn’t quite made up his mind but would be happy to inform them when he did. I think now, looking on it with the historical background that Nickie and Dion have given me, that if the Church had tried to get tough with the Ramblers the thing could have caught fire in a religious war, with results totally unpredictable; but they were smart, and played it soft. Then at last the gang at Norrock — by prearrangement, and that’s a story in itself, the way the Rambler newsrunners went flickering along the back roads and dim trails from gang to gang with few the wiser — did accept a nice wee priest as a temporary member, and set forth across the country.
They’d prepared for it. That was Bill (Lardpot) Shandy’s gang. Pa Rumley knew Lardpot; he said the man did everything the way he ate, never by halves. Before they set out with the priest, the big sexy pictures on the wagons were painted over with gray — drab and sad. Wherever they stopped, as if for the usual entertainments, no music was offered, just hymns. No plays, no peep-shows. Instead of the account of news from distant places that a Rambler boss customarily provides at the start of every visit, the priest was invited to deliver a sermon. This really hurt, for as I’ve said, the Ramblers are the one source of news that the people can trust: nothing else in our timid, poverty-ridden, illiterate world takes the place of the newspapers of Old Time. In much less than three months all Conicut was bubbling with rumors — earthquakes in Katskil, atheist uprisings in Nuin, Vairmant overrun with revolutionaries, prophets and three-headed calves. That priest, poor devil — Lardpot had purposely chosen a born innocent — did actually preach a sermon, twice, the second time to a loyal hard-core group of five elderly ladies; they couldn’t hear very well, but were gratified to learn the Ramblers had abandoned their nasty ways in favor of nice family-type instruction.
A law that originates in the Church is, naturally, never going to be repealed.[22] But before Bill Shandy’s gang reached the border of Rhode, the Archbishop announced at the Cathedral in New Haven that the wretched clerk who originally transmitted the archiepiscopal message had committed an odious blunder of omission, for which he was now doing a penance that would keep him occupied for a while — here they say the Archbishop smacked his lips and smole a somewhat secular smile. What the Archbishop really said — and if he hadn’t been so busy looking after the spiritual welfare of his flock he’d have learned of the error and corrected it much sooner — what he really said was that any Rambler gang which so desires may accept a priest as a member etc. etc. Observe, please, said the Archbishop, how vast a difference may result from the presence or absence of three little words, and do try to govern yourselves accordingly, and praise the Lord, and be mindful what you say. So there was dancing in the streets. I don’t see how the best of Archbishops could get much more etcetery than that.
So, in practise, the Rambler citizens of the world live mostly by what the Church, like an uneasy schoolmistress, calls the “honor system.” This means that a Rambler boss must take over in his own person many of the functions of policer, priest and judge. He is expected to see to it that pregnancies are reported, even if the gang is likely to be a hundred miles away a few months later. He must make sure women are properly attended through the critical time. And if by chance a mue is born when the gang happens to be not within reach of a priest, the Rambler boss himself must take the knife in his own hand and be certain it penetrates the heart, and with his own eyes see the body buried under a sapling that has been bent over on itself to form the symbol of the wheel…
22
Correction: the Universal Tithing Law, which took an annual dollar from every individual over sixteen, was repealed in 324. True, the Church replaced it with what they call the More Universal Tithing Law, costing everyone a buck and a half; but the first law was honestly repealed, no crud.