Poor things, they couldn’t — the few who were there in the village were dead, and had been for months. The houses were starting to fall apart, just a little-holes in the thatched roofs where squirrels had gone through, here and there a door fallen off its hinges because the wind had banged it once too often. We went into all the twenty-odd dwellings, finding the skeletons picked clean by the carrion ants and scavenger beetles — only a few, about a dozen in all I guess; all perfectly inoffensive and dry. Most of them lay on the cord or wicker cots that they use for beds in that country; two had remnants of white hair. It was peaceful. Since the dead were all indoors, and the village gates closed against wolves and dogs, the ants and beetles had done nearly all the housekeeping; we were puzzled to notice how little the bones had been disturbed by mice and rats. Pa Rumley said that rats die from the lumpy plague, same as human beings, which I hadn’t known at that time. But I had a back-of-the-neck feeling — we all had it, I think — that this could be some other kind of plague.
One man (or woman) had been left behind on the village gallows. The crows and vultures had dealt with that; the bones lay in a meek pile below the still dangling rope. At any rate the criminal was now on a level with the respectable citizens who had been hopelessly sick, or too old to travel perhaps. One body still sat in a rocking chair by a closed window, a woman by the shape of the pelvis, probably an old woman; dry cartilage still held together the spine and legs and one arm. I felt some lessening of the horror as I compelled myself to look on her tranquillity. In the world that the people of Old Time left to us, these things have happened often enough, and will again.
Penn is a land of good artisans, farmers, artists, philosophers, poets, wealth, laziness — and why shouldn’t they be lazy, with nature lenient as it is, and all that smell of grape and magnolia? In some parts of the land the climate is over-sweet; the heat after a time seems to come, and mildly, from inside you, although still a gift of the sun. That illusion is strongest in the eastern part of the country, where the sea breeze drives fresh off great Delaware Bay. Filadelfia on the Bay is a fine little city quite near Old-Time ruins that are thought to be harmless — in fact they say some of the modern city is actually built over the site of the old. At Filadeffia all necessary work gets done — the streets are clean, the houses orderly — but you never see anyone, slave or free, seriously exerting himself. The citizens have much more resemblance to each other than the people of the northern countries, on the whole; maybe some of their ancestors in the Years of Confusion were exceptionally prepotent — a dark, tall people with an odd hint of Polynesian as that race appears in Old-Time pictures I have seen. I have no theory to explain that. The girls are big-bodied; deliciously lovely in youth, they stay handsome when in the thirties they begin to look old; and they are kind.
Nearly everyone in Penn seems to be kind, within the limits allowed by religion and politics. Their politics consists of defending the border, which is the Delaware River, and keeping even or ahead of the game in commercial horse-trading. This they manage with a fine fleet of small river craft and a neat army which has never been defeated and has never invaded foreign soil. Trade is assisted by a corps of ambassadors in foreign courts who must be about the most trustworthy and likable liars at large — Dion says so, and my own observation, from the time Nickie and I were with him in Nuin politics up to here, bears it out.
It is a peculiarity of Penn that except for the Delaware River between her and Katskil, and a little jag of territory north of the Delaware’s headwaters that used to be a boundary with Moha, her only border is with the wilderness. I believe no one outside the conсdence of the republic’s government has any notion how far beyond that wilderness border Penn explorers may have penetrated. I can’t think of anything more graceful than a cultured Penn citizen changing the subject when the west is mentioned. We were at Jontown in the summer of 321, as far west as any Rambler gang or other foreign group is ever allowed to go; and yet a small road does lead out of that town westerly, up into the mountains, passing right by a large sign that reads END OF TRAVEL.
As for religion, Penn people appear to take it lightly and calmly, going through the motions, putting up with the flummery in a satisfying tongue-in-cheek manner, as large sections of the population evidently did in Old Time for the sake of keeping peace with the neighbors and avoiding the bitterness of true-believing priests. It is not entirely an honest way, nor a good way in my opinion; I could never take it for my way. But it does make for good manners and a certain peacefulness, and I could blame no one very much for following it, if he has no convictions strong enough to be worth the sacrifice of good nature, or if he feels that a polite conformity with the notions of fools is a necessary protection for his adult labors.
Not that I imagine the Penn people to be a super-race operating in secret of any such fairy-tale crud. There in Penn you encounter a full supply of the old mythologies, ignorance, piety, illiteracy, barbarism. But I did sometimes feel that there might be a good deal of curious thought and ferment behind the smiling indolent surface. And I often felt in the presence of Penn people like an energetic barbarian myself, surely not from any wish of theirs to make me feel so. I think that Penn is, not excepting Nuin, the most nearly civilized of the countries we have left behind us. If one had to live somewhere away from Neonarcheos, one could do worse than dwell in Penn with one or two of the big-lipped, deep-breasted women, and grow old with just enough work and worry to enjoy the other hours of idleness or slow lovemaking in the sun. Penn is not like other lands.
My father died there.
It happened in the autumn of 321 at the town of Betlam, which is forty miles north of Filadeffia — distances are large in Penn — and not far from the Delaware. Sam was fifty-six that year, he told me. Fifty-six, full of piss and vinegar and meanness, he said — but at other times, as I’ve mentioned, he remarked that he was getting old.
We had gone to Jontown along the southern limits of Penn, which are marked — (so far as we’re told) — by a wide twisting river called the Potomac as far as a town named Cumberland. There the only road is One that leads north. From Jontown we came back eastward by a northern route, Pa Rumley having it in mind to winter in western Katskil perhaps, or wherever we might happen to be when November arrived. (Pa didn’t enjoy Penn as much as the rest of us — Mother Spinkton sold badly there, the people preferring their own yarb-women and being uncommonly healthy anyhow. Peepshows didn’t do very well either, for Penn citizens are remarkably unconcerned at nakedness in spite of all the church can do to distress them about it: I’ve seen a Penn girl who felt a fleabite flip off her skirt on the street and go to searching with no sign of embarrassment, and onlookers didn’t regard her with breathless horror — they just laughed and offered bad advice.) There at Betlam a number of us fell sick with what seemed at first to be mere heavy colds, with a good deal of coughing and fever. Matters quickly grew worse.
Many of the townfolk had been troubled the same way, we learned, for several weeks. They were disturbed to think we had caught the sickness from them — a generous, decent place, where they understood music also, actually listening as crowds seldom do — and they did everything they could for us.
Pa hadn’t even tried a medicine pitch there at Betlam. He snarled — around camp where no Penn ear could hear him — that they were hightoned crum-bums who didn’t understand science: Mother’d be wasted on them. But he knew that was foolish talk, and his heart wasn’t in it. When the sickness began to alarm us, he took Mother Spinkton himself, and grumbled that it wasn’t a good vintage — maybe he’d left out some God-damn essential, getting old and incompetent, somebody’d ought to bury him if he was getting that senile — and he went about miserably among us with a bottle of her, and a lost look. No bullying, no insisting that we swallow her. Some of us missed his natural manner so much that we drank her in the hope of curing him. It was a bad time.