Edgar Pangborn - Davy

“Aw, Jed, I’m sorry, anyhow I didn’t mean it like lewd, just friendly.” Her eyes, dark greenish gray with a hint of golden flecks, were uncommonly lovely, set in the frame of her beefy homeliness, violets in rough ground. “I mean, Jed, things keep slippin’ my mind and poppin’ out.” She pulled her wet smock out from her big breasts and winked at me, head turned so that Jed wouldn’t see it, but she meant her words too; she wasn’t fighting him. “You gotta be patient, Jed, you gotta leave me come unto Abraham kind of a gradual sort of a way, like I gotta creep before I walk, see?”

“I know, Vilet. I know, dear.”

I cut the hen as fairly as I could and passed it around, and was about to start gnawing when Jed dipped his head and mumbled through a grace, mercifully short. Sam and I began eating right afterward, but Jed said: “Vilet, I was listenin’ whiles I prayed, nor I didn’t hear you none.”

It’s a fact: among the true religioners, if a priest is present, people keep quiet while he says the grace right, but if there’s no priest everyone is expected to say it at the same time, leaving it up to God to analyze the uproar and sort out the faithful from the hippy critics. Of course, Jed hadn’t heard Sam or me either, but our souls evidently weren’t his concern, or else he felt they were too much of a job for him. Vilet’s soul was different. She said: “Aw, Jed, I was just — I mean, I thank thee, 0 Lord, for this my daily bread and—”

“No, dear. Bread means real bread, so then if it’s chicken it’s best you say chicken, understand?”

“For this my — Jed, chicken don’t come daily.”

“Oh — well, kay, you can leave out the daily.”

“For this my chicken and command—”

“Commend.”

“Commend myself to thy service in Abraham’s beloved name — kay?”

“Kay,” said Jed.

After the meal Vilet limped off to hunt up more firewood. I wished that while she was busy I could ask who she was and how she came to be with us, but Jed had been observing the luck-charm at my neck, and asked me about it.

I said: “It’s just a puny old luck-charm.”

“Nay, boy Davy, it’s a truth-maker. I seen one just like it at Kingstone, belonged to an old wise-woman. This is the spitn-image of it, bound to have the same power. Nobody can look on it and tell a lie — fact. Le’ me hold it a minute and show you. Now, look this little man or this little woman right in the face and see if you be able to lie.”

Deadpanning, I said: “The moon shines black.”

“How about that?” said Vilet, dumping an armload of dead sticks. “How about that, Jed o’ boy o’ boy?”

“Why, I got him.” Jed laughed, pleased. “Other side of the moon’s got to be black, or we’d see the shine of it reflected onto the curtain of night, big white patch moving the way the moon does, stands to reason. But all’s we see is the holes prepared in the curtain to let through the light of heaven, and a few of them dots that move different, so they must be little chips, sparkiers like, that God took off of the moon to brighten things up. See?”

Drowsily admiring, Sam murmured: “Bugger me blind!”

“Sam, I got to ask you not to use them foul expressions in the presence of a pure-minded boy and a misfortunate woman-soul that’s trying to find her way into the kingdom of ev’lasting righteousness, more b’ token I won’t put up with no more sack-religion, I purely won’t.”

Sam told him he was sorry, in a way that suggested he was used to saying it, and more or less meaning it every time. Good people like Jed would find things dull, I guess, if they couldn’t arrange to get hurt fairly often. As for the luck-charm — well, Jed was much older than me, fortyplus, and a hell of a lot bigger as well as full of divine grace. I did think if 1 took another try at making extra work for the shovels I wouldn’t be stopped by any dab of clay. But Jed was so proud and happy to have taught me something useful and surprising, I hadn’t the heart to spoil it. Maybe I couldn’t have anyway. Whatever mahooha I offered, he could have produced some gentle explanation to prove I hadn’t told a lie-working it along easy and patient, pushing and crowding Lady Truth around and around the bush till sooner or later the mis’ble old wench had to come crawling out where he wanted her, whimpering and yattering, legs asprawl and vine-leaves a-twitching in her poor scragged-up hair. “Well,” I said, “I never did know it had no such power. It was give’ me when I was born, and people have talked me considerable guck since them days, nothing no-way stopping ’em.”

“You just never caught on to the way of usin’ it,” he said. He still held the image facing me, and asked me as if casually: “It was a true-for-sure accident, that thing you told about?”

Sam Loomis stood up tall and said: “Hellfire and damnation! We take his word and then go doubting it?”

Behind me I could hear Vilet quit breathing. Jed might be forty pounds heavier, but Sam wasn’t anyone you’d try to take, head-wound or no. Jed said at last, mighty soft: “I meant no ha’m, Sam. If my words done ha’m, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t ask my pa’don. Ask his’n.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “No harm done.”

“I do ask y’ pa’don, boy Davy.” Nobody could have asked it more nicely, either.

“It’s all right,” I said. “It don’t matter.”

As Jed smiled and gave me back the clay image, I noticed his hand was unsteady, and I felt, in one of those indescribable flashes which resemble knowledge, that he was not afraid of Sam at all, but of himself. He asked, maybe just for the sake of speaking: “Was you bound anywheah special when we come onto you, boy Davy?”

“Levannon’s where I want to go.”

“Why — them’s no better’n heretics over yonder.”

Sam asked: “You ever bejasus been theah?”

“Sure I have and wouldn’t go again at all.”

“Got to cross Levannon if you and Vilet be goin’ to Vairmant like you say.”

“Ayah,” Jed sighed, “but just to cross it.”

They were still edgy. I said: “I dunno — all’s I ever beam of Levannon was hear-tell.”

“Some pa’ts may be respectable,” Jed allowed. “But them quackpots! Snatch y’ sleeve, bend y’ ear. You hear the Church figgers if the quackpot religioners all drift into Levannon that makes it nicer for the rest of us, but I dunno, it don’t seem right. Grammites, Franklinites, that’s what religious liberty has brung ’em to in Levannon. No better’n a sink-hole of atheism.”

I said: “Never hearn tell of Franklinites.”

“Nay? Oh, they busted away from the New Romans in Conicut — New Romans are strong theah, you know. The Mother Church tol’ates ’em so long as they don’t go building meeting-places and stuff — I mean, you got to have religious liberty within reason, just so it don’t lead to heresy and things. Franklinites — well, I dunno…”

Sam said: “Franklinite a’gument sta’ted up about St. Franklin’s name not being Benjamin and the durn gold standard not being wropped around him when he was buried but around some other educated saint of the same name. My wife’s mother knowed all about it, and she’d testify on the subject till a man dropped dead. One of ’em carried lightning into his umbreller, I disremember which one.”

“The Benjamin one,” said Jed, all friendly again. “Anyhow them Franklinites did stir up a terrible commotion in Conicut, disgraceful — riots, what-not, finally made like persecuted and petitioned Mother Church to let ’em do an exodus or like that into Levannon, which she done it, and theah they be to this day. Awful thing.”

“Wife’s mother was a Grammite. Good woman according to her lights.”