“Of course,” Vilet said, “them people was frauds and cheats — oh ffiy gah!” She jumped up, spilling part of the loot she’d been carrying and brushing her worn old green smock as if she’d sat down on fire-ants. “What if that old bag put a witchment onto the clo’es?”
“Nay, Jackson, I b’lieve she couldn’t at this distance. Besides, them spirit-maker frauds a’n’t real witches. Know what? — they be more so’t of quackpot religioners, and you know how Jed feels about such-like. He wouldn’t want no dollar going to support heresy, now would he?”
“That’s a fact,” said Vilet. She was brushing the dirt off the clothes she’d flung away and folding them back into a nice bundle, her hands knowing and sensitive with the cloth. She had a good deal of faith in Sam’s judgment when Jed and God weren’t around.
“And look at it thisaway too,” Sam said; “young Jackson heah has been under a bad strain — nay, I don’t mean about was he a boy or a girl, I think we got that clear enough, he’s as much a boy as any other jackass with balls, but what I mean, he done good work back theah, savin’ a poor lady from sin and folly whiles we was just resting our ass in the brush. I won’t say his hair has turned white from the exper’ence, because it ha’n’t, but my reasoning is, he’s earned that ’ere lucky dollar — a’n’t that so, Jackson?”
“Ayah,” said Vilet. “Ayah, that’s so.”
“Kay. But now, old Jed, he lives on what we got to call a higher mor’l plane — right, Jackson?”
“That’s right,” said Vilet.
“So if we was to tell a bang-up white lie about our boy leavin’ the dollar theah, it’d spare Jed sorrow, right?”
“It would do that,” Vilet said. “Still—”
“It’d keep the wheels of progress greased, I think.”
“Ayah,” said Vilet. “Ayah, that’s so.”
“Account of when you live on a higher mor’l plane, Jackson, you got no time to figger where ever’ God-damn dollar went — if the Lord don’t keep you hopping the unrighteous will.”
“Well,” said Vilet — “well, I guess you’re right…”
We stayed at our cave hideaway a few weeks more, while Vilet fixed up clothes for us. She carried a little sewing-kit, and I never tired of watching her skill with it. Scissors, thimble, a few needles and a spool or two of wool thread; that was it, but Vilet could clutter up the landscape with marvels in a way I’ve seldom seen surpassed. The huge white smock provided three good freeman’s white loin-rags for us and part of a shirt for Jed; then Vilet was able to cobble up the rest of that shirt and two more for Sam and me out of the remainder of poor Miss Davy’s wash. That done, she cussed and sweated some, remodeling the yellow smock for herself, asking the woods and sky why in hell Lurette couldn’t at least have grown a pair of hips. She dissected it, however, and added whatsits here and there; when she was done, it fit her cute as buttons.
We Went on making plans. It seems to be a human necessity, a way of writing your name on a blank wall that may not be there. I can’t very well condemn it, for even nowadays I’m always after doing it myself. We planned we’d go a few miles beyond that village and then strike out boldly on the Northeast Road. I with my real Moha accent would do most of the talking, we planned, but we’d all need to be rehearsed in a good story.
Jed and Vilet, we decided, had better be man and wife — they would be truly anyhow when they got to Vairmant. We four were all quite different in looks, but Vilet claimed she could see a kind of resemblance between Sam’s face and mine, and was so positive about it I began to see it myself in spite of the obvious differences — Sam stringy and tall with a thin nose, I stocky and short with a puggy one. “It’s mouth and forehead,” Vilet said, “and the eyes, some. Davy is blue-eyed but it’s a darkish blue, and yourn mightn’t look too different, Sam, if you was redheaded.”
“Got called Sandy when I was young,” he said. “It wa’n’t never a real red. If I was a real red-top like young Jackson, likely I could’ve busted my head through stone walls some better’n I have, last thirty-odd yeahs.”
“Now, Sam,” said Jed, “it don’t seem to me, honest it don’t, that God’d give a man the power to put his head through a stone wall except in a manner of speaking, like. Unless of course the wall was crumbly, or—”
“It was a manner of speaking,” said Sam.
After kicking it around a good deal, we worked it out that Sam would be my uncle and Vilet’s cousin. Jed had a brother in Vairmant who’d just recently died — born in Vairmant himself but moved away when young to Chengo off in western Moha. This brother bequeathed Jed the family farm and we were all going there to work it together. As for me, my parents died of smallpox when I was a baby, and my dear uncle took me in, being a bachelor himself, in fact a loner by trade. When my Pa and Ma died we were living in Katskil, although originally a Moba family, from Kanhar, an important family, damn it.
“I dunno,” said Jed. “It don’t seem just right.”
“A manner of speaking, Jackson. Besides, I didn’t mean them hightoned Loomises from Kanhar was aristocrats — just a solid freeman family with a few Misters. Like my own Uncle Jeshurun — Kanhar Town Council give him a Mister, and why? Account the taxes he paid on the old brewery is why, the way it was in the family couple-three generations—”
“Wine is a mocker,” said Jed. “I don’t want you should go imagining things like breweries.”
“Damn-gabble it, man,” Sam said, “I’m merely telling you what they done, no use telling a story like this’n if it don’t sound like facts. I didn’t start the durn brewery, more b’ token if you ever hear tell of making wine in a brewery I want to know. It was great-gran’ther sta’ted it, understand, and she run along like a beaut till my Uncle Jeshurun, him with the wooden leg, took to drinking up the profits.”
Jed studied away at it, not happy.
“You mean he done that too in a manner of speaking?”
“He sure as hell did.”
“I mean, it just don’t seem to me, Sam, that people are going to believe it. About drinking up a whole brewery. He couldn’t do it.”
“I can see you didn’t know my Uncle Jeshurun. Leg was hollow, Jackson. Old sumbitch’d fill it up at the brewery after a long drunken work-day, take it home and get plastered, carry on like crazy all night long. He didn’t just die neither, not my Uncle Jeshurun. He blowed. Leanin’ over to blow out a candle, forgot whichaway to blow being drunk at the time, or rather he was never sober. Breathed in ’stead of out, all that alcohol in him went whoom — Jesus and Abraham, Mister, not enough left of the old pot-walloper to swear by. Piece of his old wooden leg come down into a cow pasture a mile away. Killed a calf. My Aunt Clotilda said it was a judgment — onto my uncle, I mean. Still, if it hadn’t happened he znight’ve had to leave town.”
15
We started the day after the clothes were finished; we may all have been afraid of coming to like that cave too much. At least Sam and I felt — without ever saying so — that we would always be in some way on the move; and for Jed and Vilet the farm in Vairmant colored the future with the warmth of a lamp.
It’s odd how little thought we gave the war, after being out of touch with the world more than three months. We wondered, and made some idle talk of it, but until we were on the move again, and the days were flowing out of June into the golden immensity of midsummer, we felt no urgent need to learn what the armies had done while we were so much at peace. They could have passed and repassed on the Northeast Road, Skoar could have fallen, we’d never have known it.