Davy

24

A few weeks later, when we were on the move northward through Katskil, I told Pa Rumley and Mam Laura that I must go away alone. I found explanation was hardly needed. “Ai-yah,” Pa said — “I know it a’n’t as if you was a Rambler bred and born.” He didn’t seem a

Mam Laura said: “You’re like my Sam — like your father — one of those who go where the heart leads, and they’re an often-wounded tribe, no help for it.”

I was thinking again, as I had done hardly at all during the Rambler years, about sailing. Not to the rim of the world: Mam Laura knew as well as Captain Barr that you can’t put a rim on a lump of stardust — but maybe I would sail around the world? Others (she taught me) had done it m ancient days. Thirty-ton outriggers had no share in the fantasy now; they’d been washed away when a poor scra

“You go where the heart leads,” Mam Laura said. “And the heart changes in ways you don’t expect, and the vision changes, perhaps turning gray. But you go.”

Pa Rumley was stone-cold sober that day. “Laura, it’s a strange time for a man when his father dies.” He knew that, in ways she hardly could for all her wisdom. “He’s not quiet with himself for some time, Laura, no matter was his father a good man or not, no matter was he a good son to his father or a bad one.” Pa Rumley knew human beings; he also knew the God-damn yuman race — yumanity — which isn’t the same thing. He was already selling Mother Spinkton again, by the way, in these Katskil towns, and believing in her once more himself — or anyway expecting her to work miraculous cures, which she sometimes did. He may have guessed, out of the foggy backward regions of his own life, how I sometimes dreamed that Sam Loomis was still living. He may have guessed that in the dream I would often be wretched and confused instead of pleased, unable to greet my father in a natural way. I was impotent with Mi

“Kay.”

“The God-damned of it is, we’ll miss you.”

Maybe I said some of the right things then. I was eighteen, begi

Pa also couldn’t have known how often I wished I might at least have seen my mother; orphanage childhood was another thing outside his experience. His own mother was warm in his memory. She kept a dressmaking shop in Wuster, a big Nuin town. It was her death when Pa was fifteen that made him take to the roads. He wouldn’t have favored that wish of mine, for he was a sensible man. Wishing for the impossible in the future is a good exercise, I think, especially for children; wishing for it in the past is surely the emptiest and saddest of occupations.

The only thing I remember with real clearness about that winter in Bershar, my last with the Ramblers, is the drill that Mam Laura gave me in polite ma

They flung a party for me at Lomeda, Rambler style, stalling all work at the wharf and getting the ferry-sailer captain too joyously drunk to object to anything. I remember Mi

To my fancy, even the air of Nuin tastes different from the air of other lands. Except for Pe

Pe

Oh, and sometimes I am — not weary of words, but beatout and a little foolish from the effort, the pleasure and torment of trying to preserve a fraction of my life in the continually moving medium of words. And I think of ask ing this poor prince — my equal and superior, whippingboy, cherished friend — to go on with this book if I should give up, stop short of what I set out to do and walk away from it. As I walked away from Rumley’s Ramblers when there was no honest need to do so. But he couldn’t do that, and with a grain of sense, I hold myself back from asking it.

When I came off the boat at Hamden, the Nuin ferry town across from Lomeda, what I first noticed was the statues. There were some modern ones, clumsy but really not too bad, of Morgan the Great and a few other wellnourished majesties, and these were shown up dreadfully by the fine sculpture of the Old-Time figures — including many bronzes that I’m certain would have been melted down for the metal anywhere except in Nuin. Hamden is proud of them — a fine, healthy, middle-sized town, clean and friendly, open to the river and neatly stockaded on the other three sides; proud of its white-painted houses too, and the pretty green, and the well-conducted market.

All the same, Old City has a flock of statues to make Hamden or any other town look sick. Most of them are of Old Time, which in Nuin is sometimes made to seem almost like yesterday, an illusion I never felt in any other place. I’m thinking at the moment of a fine seated bronze gentleman in Palace Square, who carries clear traces of ancient paint in the cracks and hollows of his patinaed garments. It’s Old-Time paint, they say. Some President — Morgan II, I think — had it covered over with thick modern varnish to preserve it. It appears in patches of crimson, green, and purple; no blue. Odd to think that this unknown religious ritual must have been going on in the very last days when the Old-Time world was passing away. The inscribed name of the subject of worship is John Harvard. Nobody seems quite clear about who he was, but he sits there modestly, rather stuffily, with timeless and splendid indifference.