Edgar Pangborn - Davy

There was my plan about Levannon and the ships, but when I learned that even Sam was unhappy at the notion of my signing on aboard a ship, I shut my mouth about it, and though it didn’t perish it remained in silence.

There was Jed’s and Vilet’s plan about the Vairmant farm. They were sure about the sinners but they kept altering the rest of the livestock. Vilet held out one long rainy day for goats while Jed stood up for chickens, and it began in fun but he wound up bothered and ended the discussion by saying goats were too lascivious, a word Vilet didn’t know so it shut her up.

Sam, when he was well again, was more concerned about immediate plans. We wouldn’t be able to go anywhere, he pointed out, so long as we had to travel in beat-up Katskil uniforms, a smock of the same dark green, and the gray loin-rag of a Moha bond-servant. He claimed he could see two good ways of acquiring suitable garments, both dishonest, and one honest way that wouldn’t work and was fairly sure to get at least one of us jailed or hanged.

“Dishonesty,” said Jed, “is a sin, Sam, and you don’t need me to tell you so. What’s the honest way?”

“One of us go to the nearest vifiage and buy some clo’es. Got to walk in naked is all. Be had up for indecent explosion right off. I don’t recommend it.”

“I could say I lost ’em some place,” Jed suggested. It was like him to take it for granted he ought to be the one to stick his neck out and get it chopped off. “I think I could justify that to my Maker as a white lie.”

“But maybe not to the storekeeper,” said Sam. “Anyhow you don’t look like the type jo that would get deprived of his ga’ments casual-like — you be too big and important. And me, I look too mean.”

“Maybe I say I lost ’em into a whirlwind.”

“What whirlwind, Jackson ?”

“A ’maginary one. I just say it blowed down the road a piece.”

Sam sighed and looked at Vilet and she looked at me and I looked at my navel and nobody said anything.

“Well,” says Jed, “I could hang leaves around my middle and make like lost in the woods, like.”

Sam said: “I couldn’t no-way justify pickin’ innocent leaves for no such purpose.”

“Look,” I said, “it’d have to be me, account you don’t none of you talk like Moha…”

“Sam, boy,” said Vilet, “just purely for cur’osity and the sake of argument, which so’t of dishonest ways was you in mind of?”

“Might hold up a pa’ty on the road and take what we require, but Jackson theah don’t hold with vi’lence, me neither. Somebody’d get hurt or they’d run tell policer. Another way, one or two of us could shadow-foot it into some village or outlyin’ fa’m and so’t of steal something.”

“Stealing’s a sin,” said Jed, and we sat around all quiet and sad, and I blew a few notes on my horn since it was getting dark. “Anyhow,” said Jed, “I don’t understand how a person could go and steal clothes off of a person without no vi’lence. I mean you got to think about human nature, specially women and like that.”

Sam said gently: “So’t of general workin’ rule, Jackson , the way you steal clo’es, you steal ’em when there a’n’t nobody in ’em, like in a shop or onto a clo’esline.”

I said: “Why’n’t we do that and leave a dollar to make it square?”

Well, they all gazed at me in a sandbagged style, the way grown-ups will gaze at something down there that just doesn’t seem possible, and then I could see them get happier and happier, more and more mellow, till they looked like three saints bungful.l of salvation and pie.

We set out next morning for that village six miles away near the Northeast Road — Sam, Vilet and I. We reasoned, and Jed agreed, that temporary sinners on a clothes-stealing expedition would need to be able to move fast and with good eyesight. Besides, we needed to have someone minding the cave and watching our gear. Besideser, he’d been working hard since before sun-up praying good luck into a dollar Vilet provided, because he said that if we left a genuine good-luck dollar to pay for the clothes it would cut the sin down to nearly nothing, and so he’d earned his rest.

I’d scouted the village two or three times on my lone. It was a poor grubby thing with a ramshackle stockade closing in twenty or thirty acres, and so little cleared area outside it that I knew the people must live mostly by hunting and fishing, plus maybe a few handcrafts for trade. A carttrack connected it to the Northeast Road , but there was no road on the back-country side. I’d located three outlying houses with fair-sized gardens, two on the north-east side and one by the back gate which probably belonged to the man such villages call the Guide.

We halted on a tree-covered hillside where we could watch that house by the back gate, for it did have an interesting clothesline, and as we watched, a thin wench in a yellow smock came out and added a basketful of things to what was already hanging there.

In a village like that, the Guide counts for more than anyone except the head priest and the mayor. The Guide bosses any work that has to do with the wilderness, arranges any large hunting and fishing parties, usually leading them himself, keeps track of seasonal and weather signs, distributes whatever the group hunting and fishing brings in, and takes a handsome cut of everything. In a mean small village like this he’d be appointed by the head priest and mayor together; in a baronial village — there aren’t many in eastern Moha — he’d be a sales-manager (sometimes called vassal) of the baron himself, and fixed for life. In either case a village Guide is nobody to fool with, and here we were proposing to rob this one’s everloving clothesline.

We watched from our hillside more than half an hour, watching not only the house but a big dog-kennel at the side. After that girl who hung up the clothes went back inside, we didn’t see a soul stirring. Nor a dog. From the nature of a Guide’s job, he’s away from home a good deal. So are his dogs. And on the line was a huge white smock — it would cut up into three or four loin-rags. Other stuff too, a smallish yellow smock like the one the girl had been wearing, and a whole bunch of lesser items — towels, brown loin-rags. We couldn’t pass it up.

Woodland cover ended a hundred yards from the house and a corn patch began; this was June, the young corn tall enough to conceal a man on all fours. That had to be me, for I was small and not wearing Katskil green, and if I got caught I’d at least have a chance to blarney out of it with a Moha accent. We worked down from the hillside through the woods, and I left Sam and Vilet at the forest edge, promising to whistle if I needed help. I crawled down between the corn-rows, sighting on that yellow smock like a target. [15] That’s my Davy. What other shape would get him started? — Nick. Late sunny morning was drawing into noon.

I was at the end of the corn-row when I caught a hint of women’s voices in the house, faint, not the clack of visiting housewives. The clothesline hung between a post and the corner of the house, which was low and rambling and well made, with small windows barred against wolf and tiger and the sneak-bandits who haunt lonely country. I would have to cross a small yard in line with some of the windows. The main door of the house was facing me, and at my right, not more than two hundred feet away, stood the back gate of the village stockade. Beyond the clothesline post I noticed a side door, toward the village, which probably belonged to the kitchen since a neat herb-garden grew just outside. I ducked across the yard, just then realizing that we hadn’t contrived a cover for my red thatch. Nobody challenged me, and at the corner of the house where the clothesline was fastened I was nicely hidden from the windows. I was clawing the yellow smock off the line when the stockade gate creaked open.