Rumley’s other three wagons, except the theater wagon, each had enough compartments for a maximum of twelve people without obliging anyone to sleep in the “front room,” which was thought to bring bad luck — Rambler people were full of small superstitions like that, singularly free from the large ones. Including the headquarters wagon, the top limit for the whole gang would have been forty-two. Some gangs have six wagons or even more; that’s too big. Thirty-six people, the number after Sam and I joined, was comfortable, not so big that Pa couldn’t keep track of all that went on, but big enough so that the toughest bandit outfit wouldn’t attack us — Shag Donovan’s boys weren’t bandits but town toughs, a far stupider breed.
That first day in Humber Town, after accepting us into membership Pa Rumley took off to look after this and that, and I recall Bonnie Sharpe settled down with the back of her head against Mam Laura’s knee making small music with her mandolin, which left no one but Minna to look after Sam and me.
Rambler life followed a rhythm like that, of swift and obvious shifts from tension to calm. Bonnie had clearly relished heanng my story and Mam Laura’s questions and my Da’s occasional remarks, her humorous girl’s eyes huge and gray turning from one to another of us, never missing a thing. Then I was done, and Bonnie knew that Minna would look after us if nobody else got around to it, so for Bonnie I suppose the universe comfortably narrowed down to a trifling section of the red bear-skin, the shiny mandolin strings, the light sounds of music she was making, the pleasure she took in her own healthy body and the warmth of Mam Laura’s knee. A time of tension, a time of uncomplicated quiet with music in it — I learned that rhythm too, after a while. If Nickie had not also learned it I couldn’t get along with her as I do — well, without it she’d be someone else, unrecognizable. Spare me from living with worthy souls whose bow of enthusiasm is never allowed to rest unstrung.
Minna Selig, as she took us over to one of the other wagons, was wearing under her black curls a cute frown of thoughtfulness—
It has just this moment occurred to me that some of you who may or may not exist may also actually be women. If so, you would insist on knowing what else Minna was wearing, this preoccupation with what the other quail have on being an ineradicable trait which I have never been able to beat out of a single one of you. Kay — dark cherryred blouse and sloppy linsey pants, and moccasins like what we all wore — all except Pa, that is, who would have reamed out anyone he caught imitating his gilt nudes.
Minna found places for us, just by chance (she said) in the same wagon where she and Bonnie slept. A happy chance: I kept the same compartment all the four years. Bonnie went over to another wagon when she married Joe Dulin in 319, and Sam later moved in with Mam Laura, a courtship I’ll tell about — but only a little, only the surface happenings, for that’s all I know: there was a depth to it, naturalness, inevitability, which they would not have wanted to explain if they could, and whatever I wrote about it would be no better than half-educated guesswork.
Yes, I stayed with that place Minna picked for me, making a home for myself out of a hole four feet by eight by seven, learning how to live cramped in small ways but not in large — unless you want to say that we’re all bound to be cramped in a moment of time that rarely reaches even a century, on a speck of stardust that’s been precariously spinning in nothing for a mere pitiful three or four billion years. I was also learning how few important material possessions there are that can’t be readily stowed in four-by-eight-by-seven, leaving room for yourself, and now and then for Minna.
22
I came to Levannon and the ships, and I did not sail.
What is it, this very certain destiny that overtakes all our visions, our most reasoned plans equally with our fantastic dreams? Maybe whenever we think of the future, as we must if we’re to be human at all, the act is bound to include a something-too-much, as if with all due human absurdity we were expecting chance to alter its course at the impact of our noise. A boy imagined the great outriggers, the fine thirty-tonners bound east by the northern route; his mind saw their canvas tall, mighty, luminous in a golden haze. A young man in the late summer of 317, the least important member of a Rambler gang he’d never heard of a month earlier, came off the flat-bottomed ferrysailer into the reeking port of Renslar in Levannon, helping old Will Moon wrangle the mules. I suppose he was possibly a quarter-inch taller than when he took hold of Emmia Robson in the way of love. When the two had cussed and coaxed the lead wagon up the ramp and out of the way off the dock — Pa Rumley having pups all over the place, roaring advice to which leathery Will paid no attention — Will called the young man’s attention to the vessel in the next slip, with a jerk of his wizened brown chin and a directional squirt of tobacco juice, and shouted in the manner of the partly deaf: “Can you read, boy?”
“Ayah, I can read.”
“Mam Laura been learnin’ you the learnin’, I hear tell?”
“I can read, Will.”
“Well, read me the name of that old shitpot yonder.”
“Why, that’s the Daisy Mae, it says.”
Poor graceless squabby thing, she smelled of spoiled onions as well as dead fish. She was fat amidships with a tubby blunt bow and a square stern, her single outrigger as ungainly as a wooden leg. The oar-benches had been rubbed to a polish by the aching buttocks of the slaves who were likely penned up somewhere in barracks at that moment waiting for the next ordeal. Nothing else about her had any shine; reefing down hid only some of the patches in her sail. Will shouted: “You any good guessing tonnage?”
“Never saw that kind of boat before.”
He went roaring into laughter. “’Boat’ is good — hoy, they’d skin you for that! ‘Ships’ you gotta call ’em when they’re that size. Come on, give a guess how big she is.”
She looked ancient as well as puny, a salt-frosted gray, a color of loneliness and neglect. She rode high in the water, empty, sun-smitten; if a watchman was aboard he must have been lurking below, where you’d suppose the hot stench would have been past bearing. I imagined her to be some little cargo tub built for short hauls between ports of the Hudson Sea, likely to be abandoned soon or broken up for firewood. “She a’n’t as far gone as she looks,” Will said — “they’ll be painting her before she goes out again, and you’d be surprised.” A miserable dockside cur had been attracted by the flavor of her garbage but didn’t quite dare jump down on her deck. He lifted a scarecrow leg against a dock stanchion, aiming poorly and spattering the ship’s rail. With an empty hand Will Moon made a stone-throwing motion; the mutt scrabbled away jn terror, tail clamped between his legs. I fancied the dreary old vessel sighing meekly at the indignity, too feeble to resent it. “Come on, Davy — give us a guess.”
“Couple tons maybe?”
“You got things to learn,” Will said, and cackled with delight — when I’m sixty maybe I’ll be all hell on instructing the young too. “Things to learn, bub — why, old Daisy Mae, she won’t go a ton under thirty-three…”
No, I never sailed aboard a Levannon ship, nor ever sped down the road on a bright roan with three attendants, expecting a serving wench at the next inn to bathe me and warm my bed with her willing loins. But I did go with Rumley’s Ramblers through all the nations of the known world except Nuin where Pa Rumley had once run afoul of the law, and the Main city states that you can’t reach by land without passing over Nuin’s province of Hampsher. I lent a hand wrastling those mules on the Renslar dock, and the same evening I was in the entertainment with my horn, never missing one for four years — they loved me. That year we went north along the Lowland Road of Levannon.