She was wearing nothing but a little skirt, like most of our girls. Blonde and delicious, you wouldn’t think to look at Nora almost naked that she’s an expert weaver and spinner, so deft and imaginative that some of the older women have asked her for instruction. At work, she never spends a second of waste motion, though every thin steady finger seems to possess an independent life. She is trying sculpture too, claiming to be no good at it, and has searched the island for usable clay.
“Some of the time back yonder,” Dion said, “I’m afraid I liked being His Excellency by grace of God and the Senate Regent in Our Very Present Emergency — hoo boy! The emergency was good for eight years and would still be perking if we hadn’t been kicked out. I thmk the term ‘emergency’ originally meant ‘until His Excellency Morgan the Third by grace of God and the Senate President of the Commonwealth shall have the gracious goodness to cork off.’ But then time spun on and on, and it came to mean ‘that period extending from the time your Excellency got away with it until such time as your Excellency can by grace of God and the Senate be safely booted the hell out…’”
We were obliged to stay in East Perkunsvil until after Jed’s funeral. But for Vilet we’d have been forced to do a sneakout, for Sam and I between us hadn’t anything like the money needed for the expected religious performances, yet we were thought to be aristocrats and loaded with it — dear Jed, he would have explained it was a punishment on us for lying to the guard that evening. No doubt religion had to be invented for such gentle and simple minds, and perhaps they can’t get along without it any more than I can get along with it. Vilet had enough salted away in her sack to meet the expenses, and now — why, now Vilet was a pilgrim and didn’t want money.
She rejoined us that frightful morning after a long private session with Father Fay, and gave Sam what Father Delune had told her would be the cost of a good ceremony, our humble way of showing God that we understood and loved Jed for the martyr he was. She told us then how Father Fay had accepted her as a pilgrim, with the prospect that she might some day become sufficiently purified to take the veil. Maybe only Father Fay could have given Vilet that much comfort and saved her, as I hope he did, for the human race. In the same degree, maybe no one but Father Delune could have helped me so nicely along the path of heresy. I wanted to suggest to him that if God was all-knowing he might be able to catch on without our blowing everything on a church performance, and, if he was really all-knowing, how about asking him what the hell good Jed’s martyrdom did to anyone, beginning with Jerry? I said nothing at all of course, mindful of Sam’s neck as well as my own, but my religious feeling ended just about then. I have never missed it.
I felt Vilet’s quiet when she talked to us after that time with Father Fay: quiet and distance, yet she didn’t seem a stranger. I had never understood the hidden existence of a nun in her, cool dim sister to the warm lovable wrestlingpartner who’d opened her good flesh to me many times. The nun was in charge now, staring somewhat blindly out of the face of a woman who had in the last few hours aged twenty years. I don’t think she asked Sam and me what we meant to do. She lost track of her words now and then, as if following sonic discourse in another room. Father Fay max’ have given her a penance — shirt to wear — her smock looked ridgv and she moved carefully like one in physical pain. Her left eye was blinking in a tic i’d never seen before. The pilgrims were conducting a private prayer-meeting of initiation for her soon — after which, she told us, she must not so much as speak to any male except Father Fay until the penitential part of her pilgrimage was done. Leaving us, she kissed me on both cheeks and told me to be a good boy.
I saw her once again, dressed in white with the other pilgrims, at the funeral two days later. If she knew where we were sitting she thought best not to look our way… It seems to me now that I loved her a great deal, maybe as much as I loved Caron who is probably dead.
I remember now a decree I pronounced from that throne on the steps of the presidential palace. The evening was wearing on; they’d brought us a musky wine that went to our heads. I decreed that everyone without exception must immediately live happily ever afterward; somehow I could think of no more fitting decree from a King of the Fools.
19
After the funeral — dismal enough it was, and our Jed would have thought it finer than he deserved — Sam and I didn’t wait for the coach that might go by on Saturday, but decided to chance it on foot at least as far as Humber Town.
In East Perkunsvil after the disaster I heard virtually no talk about the tiger, and not even a sidelong mention of his possible return. The village Guide brought back his hunting party the next day — sorry, angry men they were when they heard the news — and in the afternoon men went out to cultivate the corn patches with no protection but a couple of bowmen. That night also, men were outside minding watchfires, not against tiger but just to keep the grazing creatures away from the corn. Hunters and old wives and other founts of absolute wisdom agree that unless old or sickly, a tiger will attack a particular village only once in a season, and then move on. It could even be true, though I doubt it.
The senseless, accidental quality of the event was what shook and overwhelmed me, I think. Sam stood by me; we didn’t talk much; he was just there, letting me be alone with myself in his presence. Nickie is the only other I’ve known who can do that.[20] When the funeral was over and we were on the road again, I was beginning to understand how if there is any order, meaning or purpose in the human condition, human beings must make it themselves.
We made an early morning start. On such a summer morning, a west wind running along the hills and the sun not quite risen, a freshness everywhere, a ripple of birds’ music, a glimpse of a whitetail deer slipping into the daytime secrecy of the forest, the warmth of the present and the surging life of your own blood make up the whole aspect of truth — how else could it be?
Humber Town is a busy and ambitious place, too small for a city, too large for a village — say about six or seven thousand population and, to use a quaint local expression, growing all the time. On the road Sam and I chewed over a few plans but settled nothing. I still desired Levannon, and the ships. But I had been noticing how often a plan is a scribble on the wind. Sam allowed that, to keep us going, he might look up some journeyman carpentry or mason work — he knew both trades — in Humber Town. He agreed it would be safest to move over into Levannon, if there stifi was a war going on by the time we reached Albany on the Hudson Sea. At East Perkunsvil the only war news they had was whispery rumors about a battle at Chengo in the west, and another on the Hudson coast a little north of Kingstone, barely outside Katskil territory.
Sam and I had not spoken at all of the relation that might exist between us. But as we were coming up to the gates of Huinber Town I said: “If’n you want to be my Da and I want it thataway, it maybe don’t matter if I was or wa’n’t out’n the actual seed?”
“Why, that’s about the way I had it lined up to myself, Davy,” he said. He’d been calling me Jackson as usual that morning. “We might leave it at that…”
The gate guard was happy about something, which made him show uncommonly good manners for a policer. As he let us in I heard the brisk tinkle and thrill of a mandolin somewhere. Then a drum was warming up oom-ta-ta oom-ta-ta, and a flute and a pretty sharp cornet jumped in, not quarreling at all, with the “Irish Washerwoman.” It was happening out of sight around a curve of the main street, not far away. Wherever the Washerwoman came from, and I believe it was Old Time, she’s a grand durable quail and always welcome. “There they go!” the guard said to us, and I saw his feet were interested, and so were mine. “Best damn gang ever was here. You be strangers to Humber Town?”
20
I will praise my love for the honey of his words — honest, Spice, it’s simply a matter of keeping one’s mouth shut in a pleasant tone of voice.