“No, dear. Bread means real bread, so then if it’s chicken it’s best you say chicken, understand?”
“For this my — Jed, chicken don’t come daily.”
“Oh — well, kay, you can leave out the daily.”
“For this my chicken and command—”
“Commend.”
“Commend myself to thy service in Abraham’s beloved name — kay?”
“Kay,” said Jed.
After the meal Vilet limped off to hunt up more firewood. I wished that while she was busy I could ask who she was and how she came to be with us, but Jed had been observing the luck-charm at my neck, and asked me about it.
I said: “It’s just a puny old luck-charm.”
“Nay, boy Davy, it’s a truth-maker. I seen one just like it at Kingstone, belonged to an old wise-woman. This is the spitn-image of it, bound to have the same power. Nobody can look on it and tell a lie — fact. Le’ me hold it a minute and show you. Now, look this little man or this little woman right in the face and see if you be able to lie.”
Deadpanning, I said: “The moon shines black.”
“How about that?” said Vilet, dumping an armload of dead sticks. “How about that, Jed o’ boy o’ boy?”
“Why, I got him.” Jed laughed, pleased. “Other side of the moon’s got to be black, or we’d see the shine of it reflected onto the curtain of night, big white patch moving the way the moon does, stands to reason. But all’s we see is the holes prepared in the curtain to let through the light of heaven, and a few of them dots that move different, so they must be little chips, sparkiers like, that God took off of the moon to brighten things up. See?”
Drowsily admiring, Sam murmured: “Bugger me blind!”
“Sam, I got to ask you not to use them foul expressions in the presence of a pure-minded boy and a misfortunate woman-soul that’s trying to find her way into the kingdom of ev’lasting righteousness, more b’ token I won’t put up with no more sack-religion, I purely won’t.”
Sam told him he was sorry, in a way that suggested he was used to saying it, and more or less meaning it every time. Good people like Jed would find things dull, I guess, if they couldn’t arrange to get hurt fairly often. As for the luck-charm — well, Jed was much older than me, fortyplus, and a hell of a lot bigger as well as full of divine grace. I did think if 1 took another try at making extra work for the shovels I wouldn’t be stopped by any dab of clay. But Jed was so proud and happy to have taught me something useful and surprising, I hadn’t the heart to spoil it. Maybe I couldn’t have anyway. Whatever mahooha I offered, he could have produced some gentle explanation to prove I hadn’t told a lie-working it along easy and patient, pushing and crowding Lady Truth around and around the bush till sooner or later the mis’ble old wench had to come crawling out where he wanted her, whimpering and yattering, legs asprawl and vine-leaves a-twitching in her poor scragged-up hair. “Well,” I said, “I never did know it had no such power. It was give’ me when I was born, and people have talked me considerable guck since them days, nothing no-way stopping ’em.”
“You just never caught on to the way of usin’ it,” he said. He still held the image facing me, and asked me as if casually: “It was a true-for-sure accident, that thing you told about?”
Sam Loomis stood up tall and said: “Hellfire and damnation! We take his word and then go doubting it?”
Behind me I could hear Vilet quit breathing. Jed might be forty pounds heavier, but Sam wasn’t anyone you’d try to take, head-wound or no. Jed said at last, mighty soft: “I meant no ha’m, Sam. If my words done ha’m, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t ask my pa’don. Ask his’n.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “No harm done.”
“I do ask y’ pa’don, boy Davy.” Nobody could have asked it more nicely, either.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It don’t matter.”
As Jed smiled and gave me back the clay image, I noticed his hand was unsteady, and I felt, in one of those indescribable flashes which resemble knowledge, that he was not afraid of Sam at all, but of himself. He asked, maybe just for the sake of speaking: “Was you bound anywheah special when we come onto you, boy Davy?”
“Levannon’s where I want to go.”
“Why — them’s no better’n heretics over yonder.”
Sam asked: “You ever bejasus been theah?”
“Sure I have and wouldn’t go again at all.”
“Got to cross Levannon if you and Vilet be goin’ to Vairmant like you say.”
“Ayah,” Jed sighed, “but just to cross it.”
They were still edgy. I said: “I dunno — all’s I ever beam of Levannon was hear-tell.”
“Some pa’ts may be respectable,” Jed allowed. “But them quackpots! Snatch y’ sleeve, bend y’ ear. You hear the Church figgers if the quackpot religioners all drift into Levannon that makes it nicer for the rest of us, but I dunno, it don’t seem right. Grammites, Franklinites, that’s what religious liberty has brung ’em to in Levannon. No better’n a sink-hole of atheism.”
I said: “Never hearn tell of Franklinites.”
“Nay? Oh, they busted away from the New Romans in Conicut — New Romans are strong theah, you know. The Mother Church tol’ates ’em so long as they don’t go building meeting-places and stuff — I mean, you got to have religious liberty within reason, just so it don’t lead to heresy and things. Franklinites — well, I dunno…”
Sam said: “Franklinite a’gument sta’ted up about St. Franklin’s name not being Benjamin and the durn gold standard not being wropped around him when he was buried but around some other educated saint of the same name. My wife’s mother knowed all about it, and she’d testify on the subject till a man dropped dead. One of ’em carried lightning into his umbreller, I disremember which one.”
“The Benjamin one,” said Jed, all friendly again. “Anyhow them Franklinites did stir up a terrible commotion in Conicut, disgraceful — riots, what-not, finally made like persecuted and petitioned Mother Church to let ’em do an exodus or like that into Levannon, which she done it, and theah they be to this day. Awful thing.”
“Wife’s mother was a Grammite. Good woman according to her lights.”
“Didn’t go for to hurt y’ feelings, Sam.”
“Didn’t. According to her lights I said. But when it come to my wife, why, I said to her, ‘Jackson,’ I said, ‘you can be a Grammite like your respected maternal pair’nt and prophesy the end of the world till your own ass flies up,’ I said, ‘and bites this ’ere left one,’ I said, ‘or you can be my good wife, but you can’t do both, Jackson,’ I said, ‘account I a’n’t about to put up with it.’ Homed it out’n her too, so’t of.”
“Why,” said Vilet, “you mean old billy ram!”
“Naw, Jackson baby, that a’n’t meanness, that’s just good sense, that is. All’s I mean, she was a lickin’ good church-woman ever after, real saint, never had a mite of trouble with her that day fo’th. About religion, I mean. Did have a few other faults such as talky-talking fit to wear the han’le off a solid silver thundermug, which is why I j’ined the A’my so to get a smidgin of peace and quiet, but a real saint, understand, no trouble with her at all, no sir. Not about religion.”
“Amen,” says Vilet, and glanced up quick at Jed to make sure she’d said the right thing.
12
We spent the early afternoon in that place, drying out, getting acquainted. I again said something about Levannon and the great ships, the thirty-ton outriggers that dare to sail to the ports of Nuin by the northern route. And Jed Sever was troubled again, though not this time about religion.
“The sea’s a devil’s life, boy Davy. I know — I had a taste of it. Signed on with a fishing fleet out of Kingstone, at seventeen. I was big as I am now — too big to listen to my Da, that was the sin of it — but when I got back by the grace of God ’n’ Abraham I weighed no more’n a hund’d and twenty pounds. We sailed south beyond the Black Rock Islands, wheah the Hudson Sea opens out into the big water — oh, Mother Cara have pity, that’s a lonesome place, the Black Rocks! They say a great city stood theah in Old Time, and that’s ha’d to understand. As for the big water beyond, oh, it’s a hund’d thousand mile of nothing, boy Davy, nothing at all. We was gone seven months, op’rating from a camp wheah we smoked the fish, a mis’ble empty spit of land, sand dunes, dab or two of low hills, no shelter if’n the wind’s wrong. Long Island it’s called, pa’t of Levannon and they’s a few small villages at the western end within sight of the Black Rocks; any nation’s free to use the eastern end — sand — seldom a living thing except the gulls. Men get to hating each other, such ventures. Twenty-five of us at the beginning, mostly sinners. Five dead, one murdered in a brawl, and mind you, the comp’ny expects to lose that many, expects it. We never saw a new face only when the comp’ny’s freight vessel brung firewood and took back the smoked cod and mackle. And on our saiings — ah, sometimes we was a couple-three hours full out of sight of land! That’s an awful thing. You be in God’s hand, amen, still it’s a terr’ble test of y’ faith. Can’t do it ay-tall without a compass, some call it a lodestone. Comp’ny owned one that was made in Old Time, and we had three men in the crew considered fit to han’le it and keep watch lest God should weary of holding the little iron true to the no’th for our sakes out of his ev’lasting mercy.”