Nell Grafton’s boy Jack, turned fourteen that year, was the first to die.
Sam had been sitting up with him because Rex and Nell were both quite sick. This was in my wagon. I was already nearly recovered from a light attack of whatever it was. I heard Sam call me in sudden alarm, and I got to Jack’s compartment in time to see the poor kid with a blazing red face — I’d given him his last licking only two weeks before, for tormenting a stray cat — apparently choke to death on his own sputum. It happened too fast; nothing Sam or I could do. My Da sent me for Pa Rumley, and as I ran off I heard him coughing distressfully; he had been seedy for a couple of days but refused to worry about himself. I found Pa helplessly drunk, no such thing as waking him, and so I fetched Mam Laura instead. I remember how a glance was enough to tell her what had happened to Jack, and then she was staring down at Sam, who sat on a stool by Jack’s bunk swaying, his eyes not quite focussing. “You’ll go to bed now, Sam.”
“Nay, Laura, I’m not in bad shape. Things to do here.”
“We’ll do them. You’re to go and rest.”
“Rest. Why, Laura, it’s been, like, a mixed-up hardworking time, you could say. You see, being a loner by trade—”
“Sam—”
“Nay, wait. Seems I got the sickness, I want to say something while my head’s clear — you seen how it goes, they get off in the head. Now—”
She wouldn’t let him talk until we’d got him over to their wagon and into his bunk. I had never before seen her haunted and terrified, unequal to an emergency. Once in bed and yielding to it, Sam did not talk much after all. All I could receive from his difficult and presently rambling speech was that he wanted to thank us — Mam Laura and me — because we had known him without preventing him from being a loner by trade. At least I think that was what he tried to say.
His mind seemed remote after conveying that much to us, but his body was immensely stubborn, unwilling to yield. His battle to breathe lasted three days and part of a fourth night. The medicine priests — there were two in Betlam — came and went, helping us with Sam and three others who were sick, kindly men somewhat less ignorant than those I’ve met outside of Penn. We made them understand that Sam was unable to speak; he was quite conscious at that moment, sneaking me a grateful look behind their backs and the remnant of a grin when I said my father had made a true confession of faith before speech became impossible.
On the third day we thought he might win through — Nell Grafton had, and Rex, and Joe Dulin. But the decline followed. He regained a slight power of speech for an hour, and talked of his childhood in the hill country and remembered loves. After that, each breath was a separate crisis of a lost war. I am reasonably certain nowadays, from knowing the books, that Old-Time medicine might have healed him. We have no such art.
In the world that Old Time left to us, these things have happened and will again.
During even the last rasping struggles to draw air into his lungs, my father’s eyes were often knowing. They would turn to me with brooding and recognition sometimes, or watch a distant thought. They were never angry, peevish, beseeching or apprehensive; once or twice I thought I saw amusement in them, mild and sarcastic, the amusement of a loner by trade. The religion inflicted on him in childhood did not return in his time of weakness, as I had feared it might, to torment him: he was truly free, and died so, a free man looking with courage on the still face of evening.
24
A few weeks later, when we were on the move northward through Katskil, I told Pa Rumley and Mam Laura that I must go away alone. I found explanation was hardly needed. “Ai-yah,” Pa said — “I know it a’n’t as if you was a Rambler bred and born.” He didn’t seem annoyed, although my horn was a valued thing at the entertainments and I had become useful in other ways.
Mam Laura said: “You’re like my Sam — like your father — one of those who go where the heart leads, and they’re an often-wounded tribe, no help for it.”
I was thinking again, as I had done hardly at all during the Rambler years, about sailing. Not to the rim of the world: Mam Laura knew as well as Captain Barr that you can’t put a rim on a lump of stardust — but maybe I would sail around the world? Others (she taught me) had done it m ancient days. Thirty-ton outriggers had no share in the fantasy now; they’d been washed away when a poor scrannel pup lifted his leg in Renslar Harbor. I didn’t know how it was to be done, but Nuin, one heard, was a nation of brave enterprises. The fancy to sail around the world was certainly there in me at that time, a little while after Sam died, and is in me now, having come this far, this short way to the quiet island Neonarcheos.
“You go where the heart leads,” Mam Laura said. “And the heart changes in ways you don’t expect, and the vision changes, perhaps turning gray. But you go.”
Pa Rumley was stone-cold sober that day. “Laura, it’s a strange time for a man when his father dies.” He knew that, in ways she hardly could for all her wisdom. “He’s not quiet with himself for some time, Laura, no matter was his father a good man or not, no matter was he a good son to his father or a bad one.” Pa Rumley knew human beings; he also knew the God-damn yuman race — yumanity — which isn’t the same thing. He was already selling Mother Spinkton again, by the way, in these Katskil towns, and believing in her once more himself — or anyway expecting her to work miraculous cures, which she sometimes did. He may have guessed, out of the foggy backward regions of his own life, how I sometimes dreamed that Sam Loomis was still living. He may have guessed that in the dream I would often be wretched and confused instead of pleased, unable to greet my father in a natural way. I was impotent with Minna once or twice, and she grew bored with me. I doubt if Pa guessed that: whatever troubles he may have passed through in his rambling half-century, I can’t imagine him unable to get it up. “I’m figuring,” Pa said, “to cross the Hudson Sea from Kingstone, and then winter up somewheres in Bershar. Why’n’t you stay with us through the winter? Then if you still be a-mind for Nuin come spring, I’ll take you down as far as Lomeda and all you need do is cross the Conicut.”
“Kay.”
“The God-damned of it is, we’ll miss you.”
Maybe I said some of the right things then. I was eighteen, beginning to know what they were and why one said them.
Pa also couldn’t have known how often I wished I might at least have seen my mother; orphanage childhood was another thing outside his experience. His own mother was warm in his memory. She kept a dressmaking shop in Wuster, a big Nuin town. It was her death when Pa was fifteen that made him take to the roads. He wouldn’t have favored that wish of mine, for he was a sensible man. Wishing for the impossible in the future is a good exercise, I think, especially for children; wishing for it in the past is surely the emptiest and saddest of occupations.
The only thing I remember with real clearness about that winter in Bershar, my last with the Ramblers, is the drill that Mam Laura gave me in polite manners. I’d encounter them in Nuin, she said, in fact I ought to do so deliberately, seeking out people who knew how to manage themselves with grace and thoughtfulness. Manners mattered, Mam Laura said, and if I didn’t think so I was a danm fool. Which left me brash enough to ask why. She said: “Would you want to ride a wagon with no grease on the axles? But that isn’t all. If you’ve got an honest heart, the outward show may become something more than that. Be pleasant to someone for any reason and you may easily wind up liking the poor sod, which does no harm.”