Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

Limekiller said that he thought he had read it in a book. The old captain repeated the word, lengthening it in his local speech. “Ah boook, sah. To t’eenk ahv dot. Een ah boook. Me w’own name een ah boook.” By and by he departed as silently as always.

In the dusk a white cloth waved behind the thin line of white beach. He took off his shirt and waved back. Then he transferred the groceries into the skiff and, as soon as it was dark and he had lit and securely fixed his lamp, set about rowing ashore. By and by a voice called out, “Mon, where de Hell you gweyn? You keep on to de right, you gweyn wine up een Sponeesh Hidalgo: Mah to de lef, mon: mah to de lef! ” And with such assistances, soon enough the skiff softly scraped the beach.

Mr. John Samuel’s greeting was, “You bring de rum?” The rum put in his hand, he took up one of the sacks, gestured Limekiller towards the other. “Les go timely, noew,” he said. For a moment, in what was left of the dimmest dimlight, Jack thought the man was going to walk straight into an enormous tree: instead, he walked across the enormous roots and behind the tree. Limekiller followed the faint white patch of shirt bobbing in front of him. Sometimes the ground was firm, sometimes it went squilchy, sometimes it was simply running water — shallow, fortunately — sometimes it felt like gravel. The bush noises were still fairly soft. A rustle. He hoped it was only a wish-willy lizard, or a bamboo-chicken-an iguana — and not a yellow-jaw, that snake of which it was said… but this was no time to remember scare stories about snakes.

Without warning — although what sort of warning there could have been was a stupid question, anyway — there they were. Gertrude Stein, returning to her old home town after an absence of almost forty years, and finding the old home itself demolished, had observed (with a lot more objectivity than she was usually credited with) that there was no there , there. The there , here, was simply a clearing, with a very small fire, and a ramada: four poles holding up a low thatched roof. John Samuel let his sack drop. “Ahnd noew,” he said, portentously, “let us broach de rum.”

After the chaparita had been not only broached but drained, for the second time that day Limekiller dined ashore. The cooking was done on a raised fire-hearth of clay-and-sticks, and what was cooked was a breadfruit, simply strewn, when done, with sugar; and a gibnut. To say that the gibnut, or paca, is a rodent, is perhaps — though accurate — unfair: it is larger than a rabbit, and it eats well. After that Samuel made black tea and laced it with more rum. After that he gave a vast belch and a vast sigh. “Can you play de bon- joe ?” he next asked.

“Well… I have been known to try…”

The lamp flared and smoked. Samuel adjusted it…somewhat… He got up and took a bulky object down from a peg on one of the roof-poles. It was a sheet of thick plastic, laced with raw-hide thongs, which he laboriously unknotted. Inside that was a deerskin. And inside that , an ordinary banjo-case, which contained an ordinary, if rather old and worn, banjo.

“Mehk I hear ah sahng… ah sahng ahv you country.”

What song should he make him hear? No particularly Canadian song brought itself to mind. Ah well, he would dip down below the border just a bit… His fingers strummed idly on the strings. The words grew, the tune grew, he lifted up what some (if not very many) had considered a not-bad-baritone, and began to sing and play.

An enormous hand suddenly covered his own and pressed it down. The tune subsided into a jumble of chords, and an echo, and a silence.

“Mon, mon, you not do me right. I no di say,”Mehk I hear a sahng ahv you country?” Samuel, on his knees, breathed heavily. His breath was heavy with rum and his voice was heavy with reproof…and with a something else for which Limekiller had no immediate name. But, friendly it was not.

Puzzled more than apologetic, Jack said, “Well, it is a North American song, anyway. It was an old Erie Canal song. It — Oh. I’ll be damned. Only it’s supposed to go, ‘Buffalo gal, ain’t you coming out tonight ,’ and I dunno what made me change it, what difference does it make?”

“What different? What different it mehk? Ah, Christ me King! You lee’ buckra b’y, you not know w’ehnnah-teeng?”

It was all too much for Limekiller. The last thing he wanted was anything resembling an argument, here in the deep, dark bush, with an all-but-stranger. Samuel having lifted his heavy hand from the instrument, Limekiller, moved by a sudden spirit, began,

With a rough catch of his breath, Samuel muttered, “Yes. Yes. Dot ees good. Go on, b’y. No stop.”

He sang the beautiful old hymn to the end: and, by that time, if not overpowered by Grace, John Samuel — having evidently broached the second and the third chaparita — was certainly overpowered: and it did not look as though the dinner-guest was going to get any kind of guided tour back to the shore and the skiff. He sighed and he looked around him. A bed rack had roughly been fixed up, and its lashings were covered with a few deer hides and an old Indian blanket. Samuel not responding to any shakings or urgings, Limekiller, with a shrug and a “Well what the Hell,” covered him with the blanket as he lay upon the ground. Then, having rolled up the sacks the supplies had come in and propped them under his head, Limekiller disposed himself for slumber on the hides. Some lines were running through his head and he paused a moment to consider what they were. What they were, they were, From ghoulies and ghosties, long-leggedy feasties, and bugges that go boomp in the night, Good Lord, deliver us. With an almost absolute certainty that this was not the Authorized Version or Text, he heard himself give a grottle and a snore and knew he was fallen asleep.

He awoke to slap heartily at some flies, and the sound perhaps awoke the host, who was heard to mutter and mumble. Limekiller leaned over. “What did you say?”

The lines said, Limekiller learned that he had heard them before.

“Eef you tie ah rottlesnake doewn fah me, I weel freeg eet.”

“I yield,” said Limekiller, “to any man so much hornier than myself. Produce the snake, sir, and I will consider the rest of the matter.”

The red eye of the expiring fire winked at him. It was still winking at him when he awoke from a horrid nightmare of screams and thrashings-about, in the course of which he had evidently fallen or had thrown himself from the bed-rack to the far side. Furthermore, he must have knocked against one of the roof-poles in doing so, because a good deal of the thatch had landed on top of him. He threw it off, and, getting up, began to apologize.

“Sorry if I woke you, Mr. Samuel. I don’t know what—” There was no answer, and looking around in the faint light of the fire, he saw no one.

“Mr. Samuel? Mr. Samuel? John? Oh, hey, Johhhn … !? ”

No answer. If the man had merely gone out to “ease himself,” as the Bayfolk delicately put it, he would have surely been near enough to answer. No one in the colony engaged in strolling in the bush at night for fun. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. He felt for and found his matches, struck one, found the lamp, lit it, looked around.