Edgar Pangborn - Davy

Of course I’ll always remember Michael’s face winking at me, late in the evening, when we had to tear off a Murcan hymn to please Father Bland, for the wink gave me a feverish need to talk to him privately and learn whether I had met another loner of my own kind, even a heretic. Once the thought entered my head, it seemed to me that Michael had been feeling me out along that line, as subtly as a wild creature tasting the breeze, ever since we’d met.

He gave me the opportunity that night, late, slipping into my room with a candle he didn’t light until he had closed the door. “May we talk, David Loomis? Something on my mind, but send me away if you’re too beat and want to sleep.” He was still fully dressed, I noticed, including the rapier.

I wasn’t sleepy. He pulled a chair near my bed and sat straddling it, relaxed as a little cat. I was afraid of him in several ways along with a powerful affection, thinking also how slight be looked, as if a high wind would blow him away. His voice seemed more like a contralto than a tenor; he had not sung with us, claiming to be tone-deaf, and that wasn’t true, but he had his reasons. “David Loomis, when I turn my face toward you I smell heresy. Nay, don’t be alarmed, please. I’m hunting for it, but from the heretics’ side, do you understand? — not the other.” Nobody ever watched me as penetratingly as Michael did then, before he rapped out a small sharp question: “No impulse to run tell Father Mordan?”

“None,” I said — “what do you take me for?”

“I had to ask,” Michael said. “I’ve as good as told you Fm a heretic, the dangerous kind, and I had to watch for any such impulse in you. If I had seen it, I’d have had some decision to make.”

I looked at the rapier. “With that?”

It seemed to distress him. He shook his head, turning his exploring gaze away. “Nay, I don’t think I could do that to you. If there’d been danger of your betraying me, I suppose I’d have faded — taking you along until we’d made a safe distance. But I see no such danger. I think you’re a heretic yourself. Do you believe God made the world for man?”

“For a long time,” I said, “I haven’t believed in God at all.”

“It doesn’t scare you?”

“No.”

“I like you, Davy…” We must have talked two hours that night. My life tumbled out in words because he convinced me he wanted to know of it, convinced me it mattered to him — as a personal thing, not solely because we were like-minded and traveling the same road. In the past, only Sam and Mam Laura (and very far in the past, on a different level, little Caron who is probably dead) had made me feel what I said mattered and what I had done was m its own fashion a bit of history. Now the warmth, the reaching out and the recognition, came from one of my own age who clearly had a history of learning and manners equalling or surpassing Mam Laura’s; one who was also an adventurer engaged in dangerous work that set my own ambition glowing.

I told Michael what I had dreamed about journeying, thinking long ago that I would see the sun set afire for the day. “There are other fires to be lit,” Michael said, “smaller than the sun in certain ways but not others. Fires in human minds and hearts.” Yes, he was concerned with revolution in those days. Here on the island Neonarcheos I am of course never so sure of anything as I suppose we have to be sure at eighteen.

The reaching out and the recognition — why, growing up is partly a succession of recognitions. I have heard that growing old will turn out to be a series of good-byes. I think it was Captain Barr who made that remark to me, not very long ago.

Michael, that first night while the rest of the inn was snoring, did not tell me as much of his own story in return. Some things he was not ready to tell until he knew me better, others he could not have told without violating his oath to the membership of the Society of Heretics. But he was free to tell me that such a society existed in Nuin and was beginning to have a trifle of following beyond Nuin’s borders. He could tell me his conviction that the Church would not rule forever, perhaps not even much longer — optimism of his own youth there, I think. And he said just before he left me that if I wished, he could very soon put me in touch with someone who would admit me to tentative membership. Probation, they called it — was I interested?

Does a fish swim? I wanted to hop Out of bed and hug him, but before I could he produced a little flask from inside his shirt and handed it to me. “Virgin’s milk,” he said, “sometimes called cawn-squeezings — hey, go easy, you sumbitch, it’s got to last us all the way to Wuster. Sleep on the talk, Davy, and come along with our gaggle of pilgrims in the morning and we’ll talk again. But another time, if a heretic winks at you, don’t wink back if there’s a priest where he can catch the wind of your eyelashes.”

“Oh!—”

“Nay, no sweat, they didn’t notice anything. But be careful, friend. That’s how joes like you and me stay alive.”

In the morning, on the road, Father Mordan was still concerned with original sin, and it may have prevented his insides from dealing rightly with a very good breakfast, for his discourse along the first mile or two of a dusty highway was punctuated by the sudden, uncomfortable type of burp. Father Bland endured it as long as he could and then picked on a theological point — I’m sure God alone could have appreciated it — to give Father Mordan the father and mother of an argument. Under cover of this inspiring noise and heat, Michael and I fell behind out of earshot and continued our conversation of the night.

He seemed in a more speculative frame of mind, taking me for granted a little more too. Yet there were also more unspoken things between us, in spite of the agreements and discoveries of a sudden friendship. Most of that morning’s talk I remember only in bits and pieces, though all the feeling of it remains with me. “Davy — you might feel perhaps that Father Mordan is not in possession of absolute truth?”

“Well, after all—”

“Uhha. Father Bland, you know, would honestly like to see everybody safe in a comfortable heaven — no pain, no sin, just glory-glory all day long. It would bore the hell out of you or me, but he truly believes he’d like it, and so would everybody else. And that jo, Davy, gave up a rich man’s existence to serve the rest of his life as a small-time priest. And in case you think there’s anything trifling about him — well, a month ago he went with me into a smallpoxrotten village up in Hampsher, an escort for a wagon-load of food for any poor devils that might be still alive. The wagon-dnver wouldn’t go without a priest. Not a one of the other pilgrims would go, and Father Mordan felt it his duty to stay behind with them. Just Father Bland and a bond-servant driver and me — and no danger for me because I had the disease in childhood and happen to know it gives immunity, which most people won’t believe — but Father Bland never had it. Is Father Bland in possession of absolute truth?”

“No.”

“Why?”

In the night when he went away with his candle he had left me testing my own thoughts a while before I could sleep — testing, and grappling with them to the point of suffering; but then I did sleep, profoundly and restfully. Not that I was in any sense free of confusion or uncertainty — I am not today — but what Michael was doing with me that morning was a very gentle kind of wrestling after all, demanding only that I think for myself, as Main Laura had done in her different way. I said: “Why, Michael, I think it’s because absolute truth either doesn’t exist or can’t be reached. A man’s being brave and kindly doesn’t make him wise.”