Edgar Pangborn - Davy

“Here’s the true-tale,” I said, looking at the clay image, “about how I come to kifi that man accidental.” You know, my pesky clay god-thing did bother me a bit at first. But I had meant to tell this part straight anyhow, about climbing back over the Skoar stockade and tangling with that guard. And when I continued, leaving out all mention of Emmia and saying I’d gone back over the stockade into the woods right away when I knew the guard was dead — oh, Mudf ace raised no objections.

“Poor Davy,” said Vilet, and tickled me just below my loin-rag where Jed didn’t see her hand. “Right back to the woods, huh? Didn’t you have no girl in Skoar, lover-pup?”

“Well, I did so’t of, only—”

“What you mean so’t of? I wouldn’t give the sweat off a hoppergrass’s ass for a so’t of a girl, Davy.”

“Well, I meant kind of. But le’ me tell you what happened in the woods that afternoon, before I accidental killed that jo. You people ever meet a hermit?”

“Ayah, once,” Jed said. “Hillside cave outside of Kingstone, done his artful healin’ by layin’ on of hands.”

“That’s just the kind of hermit I mean,” I said — “woodland type. i’d been goofing off, hadn’t no right to quit work that day. Anyway I found this old hermit. All he had was a grass lean-to, no cave. Hadn’t been real holy he’d been et up long before, wouldn’t you think?”

“The Lord protects his own, alley-loo. That one at Kingstone’s cave wa’n’t nothing. Kept goats in it.”

Sam asked: “Didn’t it smell some?”

“Little bit,” said Jed. “You take a hermit, he’s got to overlook some things in God’s service.”

All right, but the hell with his hermit, I had to get them interested in mine. “This’n was terrible old and strange. When I first seen him it upsottled me so I almost stepped on a big rattler. But he seen it, told me not to move and made the sign of the wheel, and lo!”

“Lo what?”

“Well, I mean it just lo slid away, no harm done. Old hermit he said it was a manifestation, account the serpent represented cussing, my greatest fault — which he couldn’t’ve knowed except by second sight, because I hadn’t done no sort of cussing there, you can believe.”

It got Jed, the way I meant it to. “Praise the Lord, that’s exactly how those things happen! You was led, you was meant to meet that holy man. Go on, son!”

“Well… He wasn’t only old, he was a-dying.”

“Oh, think of that!” says Vilet. “The poor old s — the poor old hermit!”

“Ayah. He looked that peaceful I wouldn’t’ve ever guessed, but he told me. He said: ‘I’m about to pass on, boy Davy’ — nay-nay, there’s another thing, he knowed my name like that, without my telling him. I was some flabberjastered and that’s a fact. I b’lieve it was another manifestation.”

“I do believe it was. Go on, Davy!”

“Well, he said I was the first to come by in a long time and do him a kindness, only shit — I mean goodness — I hadn’t done nothing but set by and listen. He said to dig under his lean-to, showed me where, take what I found there and keep it by me all my life. Said it was an Old-Time relic and he knowed the evil was all prayed out’n it account he’d done it himself.” I remember I was scared at the fine and healthy dimensions of that particular whifferoo — spooked enough to make my voice wobble. Jed and Vilet attributed it to reverence-if there’s a difference. “Old hermit said God had guided me to it, meant the Old-Time thing for me if’n I’d learn to you-know, quit cussing and so on.”

“Praise his name! And you was guided to us too, the way we’ll all help you to quit and never cuss no more. So what happened then?”

“Then he — died.”

“You was actu’ly present at the holy passing on?”

“Ayah. He blessed me, told me again where to dig, and then died — uh — in my arms.” I gazed off into the deep woods, sober and brave, and did a gulp. After all, it was the first time I’d ever killed a hermit. “So — so then I fixed up a hardscrabble grave for him, and—” I stopped, suddenly sick, remembering the rain and a true happening. But presently — in such a thing the mind sometimes appears to use no time at all — I felt that the soldier (who lived now in me and nowhere else) would be pleased to laugh along with me in there behind my eyes at my damnfool hermit, and why not? So I was able to go on with hardly a break: “Took what I found there and came away, was all.”

I showed them my horn then, but dared not blow it so near the road. Jed and Vilet were too much in awe of it to touch it, but Sam held it in his hands, and said after a while: “A young man could make music with that.”

Later while we were eating, I asked: “In the battalion-not your company but the men who’d’ve been in that fight I saw this morning — do you remember a jo, maybe seventeen or so, dark hair, gray eyes, real soft-spoken?”

“Maybe ten-twenty such,” Sam said, and Jed mumbled something to the same effect. “Don’t know his name?”

“No. Found him after the fighting was over, and we talked some. Nothing I could do for him.”

Vilet asked: “He was hurt bad? Died?”

“Ayah. I never learned his name.”

“Did he die in the Church?” Jed asked.

“We didn’t talk about religion.” Jed looked sad and shocked; I didn’t understand at once. “I never did learn his name.”

“Jackson,” Sam said, and tossed me another chunk of venison, not saying anything just then that would make a demand on me. Later, when night had closed down and Sam and I were taking the first watch, I did understand what Jed had meant by his question, and childhood teaching was another burden of darkness.

A member of the Holy Murcan Church must make in his dying moments what the priests call a confession of faith, if he can speak at all, or he goes to hell forever. Should he forget because of pain or sickness, others present must remind him. I had been taught that much, like all children; why had it never entered my head when the soldier was dying? I had doubts, true, including doubts about hell, but — what if there was a hell? Everyone else took it for granted…

Sam and I had a small fire going, and the wall of the ravine at our backs. Even with Sam near me, I had hated to see Jed and Vilet disappear in the little brush lean-to we’d flung together, though I knew they were no further off and probably not asleep. I began to see my gray-eyed friend twisting in the tar-pits, the brain boiling in his skull as Father Clance had so lovingly described; and he was crying out to me: “Why didn’t you help?”

In marshy ground somewhere the low thunder of frogs was so continuous it had become a part of silence; the peepers were shrilling, and the big owls sounding off from time to time. When the moon rose at last it was reddened by a haze we had noticed at sundown, perhaps the smoke from distant occasions of war. Then I found myself up to my ears and over my head in the question: How does anyone know?

Who ever went down to the seventh level of hell and saw them hanging up adulterers by the scrotum, so that Father Clance, rolling his eyes and sweating and sighing, could later explain for us just how it was done? How did he know?

In lesser matters, hadn’t I seen people win satisfaction and power over others just from knowing or pretending to know what those others didn’t? Merciful winds, hadn’t I just worked that same kind of swindle with my damned hermit?

Could anyone prove to me that the whole hell-andheaven thing wasn’t one big fraud? I may have started at that or fidgeted. Sam’s whisper came: “What’s the matter?”