Edgar Pangborn - Davy

Well, sure, a man’s bound to feel a surrounding glory at finding himself still able to breathe after a shot of Mother Spinkton. But the yucks hadn’t tried any of her yet, so I guess they didn’t quite understand what he meant. “I was nigh unto death,” says the old rip, “but here I be!” And they all pushed in around him then, wanting to touch and fondle the man who’d been snatched from the grave, even tromple him flat in pure friendliness.

Pa Rumley hopped off the wagon. He and Tom pried Sam loose from the public; then Tom went to work selling bottles — for a few minutes he was passing them out about as fast as he could handle them — and Pa Rumley walked the sick man over to that wagon where the grayhaired woman was still sitting smoking her pipe and enjoying everything. I trailed along, and the girls stuck with me.

It’s hard to believe how much space you can find in one of those long covered wagons. The inverted-U frames supporting the canvas has cross-bars usually of hornbeam, just above head-height, and a light wicker-work platform rests on the cross-bars, making a sort of attic for storing light stuff. Those cross-bars also carry hanging partitions for the cubbyhole compartments that run along both sides of the wagon with a single-file walkway between. Up in front there’s an area without sleeping compartments, just canvas walls with usually a window on each side. For laughs, we always called that area the front room.

That was where Pa Rumley took us sow, to the front room of this wagon, which was the one with his own livingquarters. Because it was the headquarters wagon, the front room was nearly twice the size of those in the others, and had bookshelves , a thing I had never seen nor imagined. This wagon had only four sleeping spaces, two double and two single: singles for Mam Laura and old Will Moon who usually drove the mules, a double for Stud Dabney and his wife, and a double for Pa Rumley with whatever woman was sharing his bunk. Pa swept us in there — Bonnie, Minna, Sam and me. Mam Laura came in last with her clay pipe and sat cross-legged as limberly as the girls. I never heard of Ramblers owning a chair — you sat on the floor, or you lay, or sprawled, suit yourself. In that headquarters room, the whole ten-by-twelve floor was covered by a red bear pelt that was the pride of our hearts. Pa didn’t say anything until the gray-haired woman had settled herself; then he just looked at her and grunted.

She puffed her pipe till it went out, and rubbed the bowl of it against her thin nose. Studying Sam she was, and he met the stare, and I had the feeling they were exchanging messages that did them good and were none of our business. Though grayer, she was slightly the younger, I believe. At last she said: “From the no’th of Katskil, be’n’t you?”

“Ayah. A’n’t had word of the war lately.”

“Oh, that. It’ll be over in a couple-three months. Rambler life attract you, maybe?”

“Might, allowin’ for the fact I’m a loner by trade.”

“Did a good jobas a volunteer shill out there. Don’t know that I ever saw that done before.”

So’t of come over me all-a-sudden like, the way I wouldn’t want you to think my boy’s the only talented one in the family.”

“You be his Da then?”

“Ai-yah, that’s a special story,” Sam said, “nor I wouldn’t be a one to tell it without his leave.”

She looked at me then, and I felt the kindness rn her, and I told the story, finding it not hard to do. Bonnie and Minna had quieted down, anyway I guess they wouldn’t have carried on the game of dividing me down the middle directly under her eye. I told the story straight, feeling no need to change or soften it. When I was finished Sam said: “He must be my boy. He don’t lack my oneriness, you see — just a’n’t quite growed up to it yet.”

“Be you ,” Mam Laura asked me, “a loner by trade?”

“Likely I must be,” I said, “the way when my Da makes that remark it rings a bell in me. But I like people.”

“So does your Da,” Mam Laura said — “did you think he didn’t, Davy? Nay, I sometimes wonder if loners aren’t the only ones who do.” I was beginning to notice how she spoke rather differently from the rest of us. I couldn’t have explained the difference at that time; I did feel that her way of using words was better than any I’d heard before, and wished for the knack of speaking that way myself. “You truly want to join up with us, Davy, the uncommon way we live that’s never a safe thing, often lonely, hard, tiresome, dangerous?”

“Yes,” I told her. “Yes!”

“Enough to suffer a little schooling in consequence?”

I had no notion what sort of schooling she meant — while I was knocking off my life story I’d already told her I knew all about how to handle mules. But I said: “Yes, I do — honest, I’d do anything! ”

Pa Rumley laughed at that, gargling it in his beard, but Mam Laura aimed her smile mostly at the universe and not at me. “Hoy, Laura,” Pa said, “didn’t I keep telling you I’d raise a big old God-damn scholard for you somewheres, to. squeeze the good out’n them books that’ve been wearing down the mule-power on this wagon all these years? Maybe I’ve even raised you more’n one. Be you a man for the books, Sam Loomis?”

My father looked away through one of the little windows — honest glass they were, sewed cleverly into slots in the canvas so that no wind would dislodge them or force the rain through. For a moment or two he looked older and grayer, my father, than ever before; if there was mirth hidden in his craggy face I couldn’t find it. “That wasn’t my fortune, Pa Rumley,” he said. “I tried once to win me a little learning after my young years were long gone — nay, but it don’t matter. If the lady will teach my boy, I’ll answer for it he’ll mind the lessons and get the good of it.”

Pa Rumley got up and tapped Sam’s shoulder and nodded at me. “He blows that horn pretty good too,” he said. “Well — stick around. You’re lucky — gentlemen hark! Yes sir, it just so happens you hit me at a lucky time: I got over the shock of being born a good while ago, more b’ token I a’n’t dead yet. Best time to tackle a man, understand? — somewhere in there betwix birth and death. If the sumbitch won’t give you a decent answer then he never will.”

We did stick around — four years.

Pa Rumley was a sharp-minded observant man, sober; drunk, he was still a good critic of himself, unless he passed a certain point of drinking that he could not always recognize, and tumbled into a black well of despair — then he had no judgment in his darkness, and someone had to stand by and drink with him till he dropped in his tracks. Except during those very rare crises, his sadness always had around it a nimbus of mirth, just as his loudest laughter carried the overtones of grief. True for all of us, but in him it was more obvious, as though the emotional raw stuff that nature, playing safe, doles out to most of us by the teaspoonful, had been sloshed into Pa Rumley with a bucket.

Pa used to claim that he’d fought and toiled and connived to make himself boss-man of the best God-damn gang in the world for the simple reason that he was at heart a benefactor of the God-damn yuman race, which without him would likely drop dead of its own boredom and meanness and hard luck and general shitty stupidity. And it’s a fact, when you got down to cases he really didn’t seem to have a thing in the world against yumanity except that he never would pronounce the plague-take-it thing with an aitch.

He had a long, thick-bridged nose that spread at the tip into a double knob. The whole organ had been slammed into at some time in the faraway past, so that when I knew him it aimed more or less at his right shoulder. He said it was no battle that bent it, more likely somebody sat on it when he was young. He asserted that in fact he never did fight except now and then with a club, which was why he never got licked. However, when I saw him personally lay out Shag Donovan who thought he was boss of Seal Harbor, Pa used no club except the knobby side of his fist, and all two hundred pounds of Shag went softly to sleep. (I was a bit helpful in that Seal Harbor thing, being fifteen and on the quarrelsome side for a while, a temporary trait, a sort of growing pain.) Another time, I heard Pa say that his nose took that starboard slant from having to keep alert and sniffing for the righteous, who generally come up on a man from behind.