Davy

The tiger did not speak again, but in the next room beyond the closed door I heard Vilet suddenly say: “Oh, Jed! Oh — oh—” and there was the rhythmic squeak of a cot, and a thumping as a wooden frame beat against the wail; for a moment or two I also heard Jed groan like a slave under the lash, and Sam said under his breath: “I’ll be damned.”

It was soon quiet again in there, at least no sound penetrated the doorway. Sam came over to the window and presently murmured: “Cur’ous — I didn’t think he could.”

“Just once, Vilet told me. Just once, with that Kingstone whore he talks about so often.”

“Ayah, told me the same.” I felt him watching me kindly and speculatively through the dark. Then he was leaning out the window, his dimly starlit face gazing down at the lightless village. “Little cunt been taking care of you, Jackson?”

“Ayah.” I suppose my dull embarrassment was a result of orphanage training, a mixture of sour prudery and piety, that sticky mess with which the human race so often tars and feathers its children.

Sam and I could hear a child crying, away off somewhere in the village, probably frightened by the tiger’s roar; it was a persistent helpless whimpering that a woman’s tired and kindly voice was trying to soothe. I heard her say — somewhere, bodiless, as if the words hung m the dark — “Ai-yah, now, he can’t get you, baby…”

Getting dressed in the morning, it occurred to me, as I had suspected during di

“Well,” I said, “I had a snuffle and besides, I’ve seen gentlemen do that, at the Bull-and-Iron.”

“There’s an old saying, rank got its privileges, but a Mister’s nephew a’n’t all that important, Jackson. And another thing — language. Frinstance, when they brang in that God-forgotten smoked codfish last night, which smelt as if a whole pile of moldy ancestors had sudden-like gone illegitimate, why, an aristocrat would’ve told ’em to take it away, sure, and he’d’ve said something real brisk that they’d long remember, but — with a gang of holy pilgrims at the next table, Jackson, he wouldn’t r’ar back and holler: ‘Who shit all over my plate?’ He just wouldn’t, Jackson.”

“Sorry,” I said, sulky — I hadn’t slept much. “I didn’t know pilgrims didn’t have to.”

“It a’n’t that, Jackson . In fact I b’lieve they do, in a ma

“See what you mean. A’n’t he a pisser, though!”

“Ayah.” But I couldn’t sidetrack Sam when he was feeling educational. “And you take farting, Jackson . Common people like what you and me really be, we don’t pay it no mind, or we laugh or something, but if you’re going to be the nephew of a Mister you got to do a little different. If you let a noisy one go, you don’t say: ‘Hoy, how about that?’ No, sir, you’re supposed to get a sadful-dreamy look onto y’ face, and study the others present as if you’d just never imagined they could do such a rude thing.”

Vilet and Jed came into our room then, and Sam let up on me. Jed looked all wrong, dark under the eyes as if he hadn’t slept, with a tremor in his big cluthsy hands, and so Vilet of course was troubled about him. Sam was inquiring politely about the bugs on their side of the wall when Jed, not listening, crashed into it saying: “I prayed all night, but the word of God is withheld.”

Vilet said: “Now, Jed—” fondling his arm while he just stood there, two hundred pounds of gloom, a great harmless bull somehow beat-out, no fight in him.

“I’d ought to leave y’ company,” Jed said — “a hopeless si

“Now, Jed, honey thing—”

“Nay, hesh, woman. I got to call to y’ mind what the disciple Simon said: The Lord spoke but I turned aside. Remember? It’s what he said after he’d denied Abraham and the Spokesman a-dyin’, a-hangin’ on the wheel in the Nuber marketplace. ‘And they brought Simon to the marketplace—’ that’s how it goes, remember? — ‘to the marketplace, and Simon said: I do not know this man. And they questioned him again, but he said: I do not know this man.’ And then you remember, afterward, when Simon was put to the rack in the Nuber prison, he said them other words I mentioned: The Lord spoke but I turned aside. I’m like that, friends. The Lord spoke but I turned aside. The lighning’ll find you too if I’m with you when it strikes. I don’t wish to leave you, the way you been good to me and us real friends right along, but it’s what I ought to do, and—”

“Well, you a’n’t about to,” said Vilet, crying — “you a’n’t about to account we won’t let you, not me or Sam or Davy neither.”

“I a’n’t fit,” Jed mourned. “Wallowing in sin.”

“Well you didn’t then,” said Vilet. “All’s you done was put it in a couple minutes, and I loved it, I don’t care what you say, a holy man like you does it, it can’t be no sin, it a’n’t fair, anyway if it was sin it’s me that oughta burn—”

“Oh, hesh, woman! Your sins’ll be forgiven unto you account your heart is i

“Well, come on down to breakfast before you make up your mind about things.”

“Oh, I can’t eat anything.”

Still crying, Vilet said: “God damn it, you come on downstairs and eat breakfast!”

17

The pilgrims were already at breakfast, bacon and eggs no less, and thanks to the savings Vilet carried in her shouldersack, we were able to afford the same. She insisted on it too, with Jed in mind, for she subscribed to a theory very popular among the female sect, that ninety per cent of male grief originates in an empty stomach.

The dining-room at the Black Prince was so small you could have spat across it, and by the look of the walls many former guests had. There were only five tables. The doddery i

The Bull-and-Iron, now, was a fine brick building at least a hundred years old. The story was there’d been a lot more clear land around it when it was built, and Old Jon’s father had sold off most of it for a big profit after the new stockade went up to accommodate the city’s expansion, and land values rose. The Bull-and-Iron had fifteen guest bedrooms upstairs, no less, not counting the one for Old Jon and the Mam, nor Emmia’s where I’d left my childhood. Downstairs, there was that grand kitchen with two store-rooms and a fine cellar, and the taproom, and the big dining-room with oak ceiling-beams fourteen inches wide and charcoal-black, and tables to seat thirty people without crowding. Maybe I remember the cool taproom best of all, and the artwork above the bar, a real hand-painted picture just full of people in weird clothes, some riding astraddle of railroad trains and others herding automobiles or shooting off bombs, but all sort of gathered around in worship of a thundering great nude with huge eyes and the most tremendous boobs, like a shelf under her chin. She sat there with her legs crossed showing all her immense white teeth and being adored, so you knew it was a representation of the Old-Time pagan festival of St. Bra. The painting carried the Church’s wheel-mark of approval, or Old Jon couldn’t have displayed it. The Church doesn’t object to art-work of that type in the proper place, so long as it’s decent and reverent and shows up Old Time as a seething sink of scabrous iniquity.