Edgar Pangborn - Davy

Vilet often came along with me for hunting and fishing while Jed stayed behind to look after Sam. The first day that happened I felt an agreement between us, at first unspoken, created by occasional touches and glances, for instance when she was walking a few yards ahead of me in good forest silence, and turned to look at me over her shoulder, unsmiling. I think Vilet enjoyed being spooked by other people’s mysteries now and then, like my hermit whopmagullion, but she wasn’t one to make mysteries herself. That moment on the trail she might as well have said in words: “I could be caught with a little running.”

Work came first, and we had luck with it that day, nailing a couple of fat bunnies and then locating a good fishing pool about a mile from our cave. There was a grassy bank, sunlight, and a quiet as though no man had troubled the place for centuries. We set out fish-lines, and when she knelt on the grass to adjust hers, her arm slid around my thighs. “You’ve had a girl once or twice, I b’lieve.”

“How d’ you know?”

“Way you look at me.” The next moment she was solid on her feet and pulling her ragged smock off over her head. “Time you really learned something,” she said. “I a’n’t young nor I a’n’t purty, but I know how.” Naked with not a bit of softness (you would have thought), cocky and smiling a little and moving her hips to botber me, she was a grand piece of woman. “Off with them rags, Lover-pup,” she said, “and come take me. You’ll have to work for it.”

I worked for it, wrestling her at first with all my strength and getting no breaks at all until the struggle had warmed her up into real enjoyment. Then of a sudden she was kissing and fondling instead of fighting me off, laughing under her breath and using a few horny words I didn’t know at that time; presently her hands were gripping her knees, I was in her standing, joyfully stallionizing it with not a thought in my head to interfere. When I was spent she flung me a punch in the shoulder and then hugged me. “Lover-pup, you’re good.” What I’d had with Emmia seemed long ago and far away.

We had other times, not so very many, for there were other sides to Vilet: moods of heavy melancholy, of a kind of self-punishing despair; the religious side, that belonged to J ed and was forever shadowing the rest of her life. Often (she told me once) she dreamed that she was in the act of selling her soul to the Devil, and he in the shape of a great gray rock about to topple over and crush her. She couldn’t always be the good randy wrestling-partner when we had privacy and opportunity, but occasionally at such times she did feel like talking to me. It was a time like that, at the fishing pool again and maybe a week after our first romp, that she told me things about her relation with Jed Sever. Whenever Jed was mentioned in his absence by Sam or me, I’d notice a kind of still warning in her kind blocky face, like an animal bracing itself to defend if necessary. She’d hear nothing in criticism of him. At the fishing pool, after we got a few for supper we took a dip in the water to wash off the heat of the day, but she warned me off from playing with her and I wasn’t in form for it myself; we just sat by the pool lazing and drying off, and she said: “I got it figgered out, Davy, the mor’ls of it I mean. Not telling Jed about what we been having, it a’n’t a real sin account it might burden him with grief, and anyway I got so much sin in the past to work off, this’n’s just a little one. He’s so good, Davy, Jed is! He tells me I got to think back through earlier sins and make sure I truly repent ’em, because see, you can’t fix ’em all with one big bang-up repentance, you got to take ’em one by one, he says. So, see, I’m kindly working up to the present time but a’n’t got there yet. I mean, Sugar-piece, if I don’t commit no more’n one sin a day, or say two at the most, and then repent say three sins of past time the same day, well, I mean, after-while you get caught up like. Only it’s so’t of a heartbreak thing, times, remembering ’em all. I’ll be all right by the time we get to Vairmant. And Jed he says it’s too much to try to give up sin all to oncet, too rough, [14] I feel that Jed was entirely right about this. My own planned salvation involves getting in as much sin as possible in the next 70 years, so that what I give up at age 98 will amount to something. — Nick. the Lord never intended it like.”

I said: “Jed’s awful good, a’n’t he?”

“Oh, a saint!” And she went on about how generous he was, and thoughtful, and how he’d explained everything about the way to Abraham; when they got their little place in Vairmant they were going to have sinners in every day to hear the word, just everybody, any freeman that would come. Dear Vilet, she was out of her gloomy mood and all aglow from thinking of it, sitting there by the pool naked as a jaybird and patting my knee now and then but not trying to rouse me up because it wasn’t our day for it. “Jed, see, he’s got a great lot of sin-trouble too. ’Most every day he remembers something out’n the past that sets him back because it needs repentance. Like frinstance yesterday he recalled, when he was five, going-on six he’d just learned about fertilizer, see? So here’s his Ma’s bed of yalla nasturtiums she was so peart about, and he wanted to do something real generous, make ’em twice as big and purty right away, so he pees the hell all over ’em, specially a big old gran’daddy nasturtium that’s sticking up kindly impident — well, I mean, by the time he sees it a’n’t turning out just right it’s too late, he can’t stop till he’s emptied out.” Vilet was crying a little as well as laughing. “So the bed’s real swamped, petals fiat on the ground, and he don’t tell, it gets blamed on the dog and he dasn’t tell.”

“Oh,” I said, “that sumbitchin’ nasturtium was purely askin’ for it.”

“Ai-yah, I laughed too when he told me, and so’d he, just a mite, still it’s ser’ous, Davy, because it kindly ties in with a real sin he done when he was nine, poor jo. He done it to the little neighbor girl and his Ma caught ’em into the berry patch. The girl she just larruped on the backside and sent her home bawling, but she didn’t whip Jed. He says it’s how he knows his Ma was the greatest saint that ever lived, for all she done was weep and tell him he’d broke her heart after all she done givin’ him birth in pain and tryin’ to raise him up to something. And so ever since he a’n’t never put it into a woman, except once.”

“He what? He never?”

“Except once. That God-damn Kingstone whore he talks about, after his God-damn fishing trip… Well, anyway — anyway he’s a saint now, and all’s he ever wants me to do is take my smock off and tromple him a little and call him bad names — he says it purifies him and so it’s bound to be pleasing in the sight of God, like the whipping, only he a’n’t had me do that lately, not since we come away from the A’my.” She sighed and stopped crying. “He’s so kind, Davy! And he always knows how ’t is for me too, so sometimes he like helps me with his hand or like that, he says that’s just a little sin, and anyhow we’re both getting stronger and stronger in the Lord all the time now. Calls me his little brand from the burning, and I know that’s Book of Abraham language but you can see he means it — why, sometimes he can hold me in his arms all night long and never get a hard on, a’n’t that ma’velous?”

Those weeks in the cave were also a good time for learning a little about the playing of my horn. I gave it at least an hour of each evening, from deep twilight into full dark. In daylight there was too much danger of a stray hunter hearing and approaching unseen. After twilight not even bandits are likely to stir away from camp, in the Moha woods. I studied my horn, and I took part in our making of plans.