Davy

It is a peculiarity of Pe

As for religion, Pe

Not that I imagine the Pe

My father died there.

It happened in the autumn of 321 at the town of Betlam, which is forty miles north of Filadeffia — distances are large in Pe

We had gone to Jontown along the southern limits of Pe

Many of the townfolk had been troubled the same way, we learned, for several weeks. They were disturbed to think we had caught the sickness from them — a generous, decent place, where they understood music also, actually listening as crowds seldom do — and they did everything they could for us.

Pa hadn’t even tried a medicine pitch there at Betlam. He snarled — around camp where no Pe

Nell Grafton’s boy Jack, turned fourteen that year, was the first to die.

Sam had been sitting up with him because Rex and Nell were both quite sick. This was in my wagon. I was already nearly recovered from a light attack of whatever it was. I heard Sam call me in sudden alarm, and I got to Jack’s compartment in time to see the poor kid with a blazing red face — I’d given him his last licking only two weeks before, for tormenting a stray cat — apparently choke to death on his own sputum. It happened too fast; nothing Sam or I could do. My Da sent me for Pa Rumley, and as I ran off I heard him coughing distressfully; he had been seedy for a couple of days but refused to worry about himself. I found Pa helplessly drunk, no such thing as waking him, and so I fetched Mam Laura instead. I remember how a glance was enough to tell her what had happened to Jack, and then she was staring down at Sam, who sat on a stool by Jack’s bunk swaying, his eyes not quite focussing. “You’ll go to bed now, Sam.”

“Nay, Laura, I’m not in bad shape. Things to do here.”

“We’ll do them. You’re to go and rest.”

“Rest. Why, Laura, it’s been, like, a mixed-up hardworking time, you could say. You see, being a loner by trade—”

“Sam—”

“Nay, wait. Seems I got the sickness, I want to say something while my head’s clear — you seen how it goes, they get off in the head. Now—”

She wouldn’t let him talk until we’d got him over to their wagon and into his bunk. I had never before seen her haunted and terrified, unequal to an emergency. Once in bed and yielding to it, Sam did not talk much after all. All I could receive from his difficult and presently rambling speech was that he wanted to thank us — Mam Laura and me — because we had known him without preventing him from being a loner by trade. At least I think that was what he tried to say.

His mind seemed remote after conveying that much to us, but his body was immensely stubborn, unwilling to yield. His battle to breathe lasted three days and part of a fourth night. The medicine priests — there were two in Betlam — came and went, helping us with Sam and three others who were sick, kindly men somewhat less ignorant than those I’ve met outside of Pe

On the third day we thought he might win through — Nell Grafton had, and Rex, and Joe Dulin. But the decline followed. He regained a slight power of speech for an hour, and talked of his childhood in the hill country and remembered loves. After that, each breath was a separate crisis of a lost war. I am reasonably certain nowadays, from knowing the books, that Old-Time medicine might have healed him. We have no such art.

In the world that Old Time left to us, these things have happened and will again.

During even the last rasping struggles to draw air into his lungs, my father’s eyes were often knowing. They would turn to me with brooding and recognition sometimes, or watch a distant thought. They were never angry, peevish, beseeching or apprehensive; once or twice I thought I saw amusement in them, mild and sarcastic, the amusement of a loner by trade. The religion inflicted on him in childhood did not return in his time of weakness, as I had feared it might, to torment him: he was truly free, and died so, a free man looking with courage on the still face of evening.