It was restful, sleepy-making, like a brook, like a tree murmuring the wind, only bless her, Emmia wasn’t built like a tree and her bark wasn’t scratchy, not anywhere. In my half-sick drowsiness I wondered why I should feel afraid of Emmia when she was being so kind to me, bringing that blanket, sitting now so close that my right arm was cramped because it didn’t dare sprawl across her lap. I suppose I knew myself to be two or more people, that common trouble. The Davy who wanted to be a gentle, loving (and safely blameless) friend — that’s the only one who was afraid. The healthy jo who needed to grab her and lock her loins till he could spend himself was not afraid of Emmia but only, in a practical way, of the world: he didn’t want to be slammed into the pillory. What never occurred to me until years later was that all these inconsistent and troubling selves are real as soon as your mind has gone through the pain of giving them birth.
7
“Be you warm enough now?” I made some kind of noise. “You know, Davy, them fancies you get in a fever a’n’t real dreams like, I mean not like the ones that tell your fortune if you go to sleep with a corncob under the pillow. You sure you be warm enough?”
“I wish you was always with me.”
“What?”
“Wish you was with me. In my bed.”
She didn’t slap my face. I couldn’t look at hers, but of a sudden she was lying on the pallet warm and close, her breath fluttering my hair. The blankets bunched thick between us. She was on my right arm so it couldn’t slip around her. She held my left hand away. I had at least three times her strength and couldn’t dream of using any of it. “Davy dear, mustn’t — I mean we better not, only—” I kissed her to stop the talk. “You’re being bad now, Davy.” I kissed her ear and the silken hollow of her shoulder. I hadn’t known it, but that was blowing on a fire. Her thigh slid over me and she was trembling, pushing against me through the blankets and presently whimpering: “It’s a sin — Mother of Abraham, don’t let me be so bad!” She thrust herself free and rolled away. I thought she would get up and leave me, but instead she lay on the bare floor rumpled and careless, her knees drawn up, her skirt fallen, hands pressed at her face.
For just that moment, her eyes not watching me, her secret place uncovered wanton and helpless for me, I was all man responding and could have taken her, never mind whether she was crying. Then my mind went idiot and yelped: If Mam Robson comes looking for her, or Old Jon? I heard her fainting voice. “Why’n’t you do it to me?”
I flung the blankets away. The final cold killing thought arrived, not in words but a picture: a wooden frame on a tall column; holes in the frame for the offending bondservant’s neck, wrists and ankles; a clear space on the earth so that rocks and garbage could be readily cleared away after the thing in the pillory had become a mere lesson in morality too motionless to be entertaining.
Emmia’s suffering face was turned to me. She knew I had been ready for her and now was not. She embraced me clumsily, trying to restore me with shaking ineffectual fingers. Maybe that was when she too remembered the law, for she suddenly dragged the blankets over me and stumbled away. I thought: It’s all up with me — can I run?
But she was returning. Her wet face was not angry. She sat by me again, not too near, her smock tucked in at her knees. She groped for a handkerchief, found none, mopped her face on the blanket. “I wouldn’t hurt you, Miss Emmia.”
She stared dumbfounded, then laughed breathlessly. “Oh you poor sweet cloth-head! It’s my fault, and now I suppose you think I’m one of these girls’ll do it for anybody, not a mor’l to their name, honest I’m not like that, Davy, and when it’s just you and me and us such good friends you don’t have to call me Miss Emmia heavensake! Aw Davy, things sort of go to my head, I can’t explain, you wouldn’t know—”
At least she was talking again. My panic faded. The brook ran on, growing more restful by the minute.
Speaking of brooks—
I stopped writing a week ago, and resumed it this afternoon within sound of a tropic brook. The day has been filled with tasks of settlement on our island. We mean to stay at least until those now in the womb are born, maybe longer. Maybe some will stay and others go on — I can’t imagine Captain Barr letting the schooner ride too long at anchor… The brook runs by a shelter Nickie and I are sharing with Dion and three others while we work at more permanent buildings for the colony.
The island is small, roughly oval, its greatest length along the north-south axis, about ten miles. It must be within the region where the old map gives us a few dots named the Azores . We sailed around it that first day, then seeing no other land on the horizon we inched into the one harbor, a bay on the eastern shore. We anchored in five fathoms near a clean strand where a band of gray monkeys were picking over shells and finding something to eat — hermit crabs. We waited that day and night on board to learn of the tides — they are moderate — and watch for signs of human or other dangerous life.
No one slept much that night at the anchorage — a deep warm night, rest from the long strain and fears of voyaging, a full moon for lovers — high time for a night of music and drink and cheerful riot. There are forty of us — sixteen women, twenty-four men — and nearly all of us are young. We came ashore in the morning not too hung over, all eager except Mr. Wilbrahani who never is.
The only wild things we’ve seen are the monkeys, a few goats, short-eared rabbits, a host of birds. On a walk around the island yesterday Jim Loman and I found tracks of pig, fox and wildcat, and we saw flying squirrels much like the gentle things I used to glimpse in the Moha woods. It must be that human beings haven’t lived here since Old Time. We may find ruins in the interior.
On a knoll near the beach we’ve cleared away vegetation to make room for houses. The brook flowing by the base of the knoll originates a mile inland from the island’s highest hill, about a thousand feet above sea level, we guess. Along the brook a tough reed-like grass grows in abundance; it might be good for paper-making as well as thatch. Our houses will be lightly constructed — thatched roofs on tall supports, the thatched walls coming only half-way to the line of the eaves, the kind of airy buildings I saw in Penn when I went there with Rumley’s Ramblers in 320. They keep a kind of freshness even on the hottest day, and if hurricane comes — well, you haven’t lost too much; you build again.
We wonder of course what snake is in this Eden.
Speaking of brooks—
Look, said Emmia’s personal brook, what we almost did was a terrible sin because I was a Mere Boy and an awful sin anyhow, only we hadn’t done anything so there wasn’t any sin and all her fault too, but she’d just take it to God in prayer without having to confess it, and never would tell on me, wild horses wouldn’t drag one word out of her, because mostly I was a good dear boy that couldn’t help being born without no advantages, except for wildness and goofing off and like that, but when I corrected that I’d be a good man who everybody’d respect, see, only I must prove myself and remember that like her Ma said life wasn’t all beer and skittles whatever skittles were, she’d always thought it was a funny word, well, life was hard work and responsibility and minding what wiser folk said, not only the priests but everybody who lived respectable because there was a right way and a wrong way just like her Ma said, and you must not be all the time goofing off the way other people had to cover up and so on because they kind of loved you and feed the plague-take-it old mules. I said I was sorry.