Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 17

Shortly after dawn—and before breakfast, since Nick had said that Jeebee would learn faster on an empty stomach—and even if he didn’t learn faster, be lighter on his feet—the two men stood outside the wagon parallel with and facing each other. They stood about five feet apart, Jeebee just having finished some target practice with the little handgun Paul had given him. As Paul had predicted, it threw high and to the left, but it pointed naturally, and by the end of the session Jeebee was grouping his shots with satisfying consistency.

“Stick it down into your boot,” said Paul, after.

“You’ll just have to do a lot of practicing and get used to it,” he said. “Do a lot of dry firing, but always have it loaded with empty cartridge casings when you do. Saves wear on the firing pin. If it didn’t have a shroud, I’d probably suggest that you let the hammer rest on an empty chamber, but with only five rounds you’ll probably want all the firepower it’s got to offer. Now, reload it and put it down in your boot—no, in the boot with the bowie strapped outside it.”

Wondering a little, Jeebee obeyed. He was now wearing calf-high horseman boots that had been given him and that came up within about four inches of his knee. The sheath holding the big knife was strapped to the outside of the boot.

“Now, maybe you’re beginning to understand?” said Nick. “You reach down and everybody’s going to think you’re going for that big knife when you’re really going for the pistol in your boot. You might even be lucky, with somebody holding another gun on you, and a second person tries to take the bowie from you—because it’s so big and it attracts so much attention—but never thinks to look inside the boot for a holdout gun.”

Jeebee nodded.

“All right,” Nick said to him, “now, you can untie those thongs holding the bowie handle to your leg, pull the knife out, and let me see how you stand with it.”

Jeebee untied the thongs, pulled the knife, and stood up with it, feeling a little foolish with the huge weapon in his hand.

Nick looked at him and nodded. “Just as I thought,” he said, “you don’t even know how to stand, do you?”

“No,” Jeebee answered.

“All right,” said Nick, “we’ll start at the very beginning, then. To begin with, remember this big knife is there mainly for camouflage. Your real weapon is that little revolver down in your boot. But it just might happen that for some reason a revolver won’t do it for you, or isn’t there, or something like that. So you have to use a knife. If that’s the case, here are the rules.”

A knife considerably smaller than Jeebee’s suddenly appeared in Nick’s hand.

“The first rule of knife fighting,” said Nick, “is—don’t. If you think there’s any possibility of somebody pulling a knife on you, get out of there—wherever there is. Best way to avoid something like that is to make sure it doesn’t start in the first place.

“The second rule is,” he went on, “if you see someone standing the way I’m standing, run. Or get out any way you can if you haven’t already. That’s because the man you’ll be looking at knows something about how to use his blade. Look at how I’m standing.”

Jeebee looked. Nick was standing full face on to him with his feet almost parallel. The left foot was a little behind the right and the stance had the feet slightly spread. Nick’s left arm that was not carrying a knife was bent at the elbow up and out in front of him, and almost mimicking its position was his right arm and fist that held the knife, blade up and with the point forward toward Jeebee.

“Now,” said Nick, “if there’s no way you can get away from someone who stands like this or this”—Nick suddenly reversed his grip and held it like an icepick with the blade lying along his wrist—“and is forcing a fight on you, the only advantage you’re likely to have is the length of your knife. Most good knife fighters like the quickness of a short blade, but a long blade gives you reach. Make it work for you. Stand back and make him come to you. Don’t wait for a vital spot; attack whatever part of his body comes into range. If you cut his knife hand, the fight’s half-won, but if he’s standing like I am, chances are he’ll try to draw your attack or tangle up your knife with his empty hand. You can limit his options by circling to his right—that is, the side that’s holding the knife. But if his empty hand gets too close, cut it. Do whatever you have to do to keep him away from you. If a man with a small knife gets in close, range is on his side. He could cut you three, maybe four or five times before you could get that big bowie moving. So use the pommel. It’s not just for decoration and balance. It’s a weapon. Hit him in the face, the temple, even his knife hand.

“If you cut him up enough, he’ll slow down. Cuts kill, but they don’t kill quickly. That’s why a knife has a point. So remember what I told you last night. Go for the belly—but aim low and angle up. If you go straight in and he scoots his hips back, you’ll either miss or catch his breastbone on the upsweep. If you aim low, you’ll be under the breastbone—which is where you want to be. If he’s wearing a lot of clothes, try to go in at a point where the clothes button together, because thick cloth, and especially, thick layers of cloth, can stop a knife blade better than you ever dreamed. So if someone comes at you with a jacket or belt or even a shirt wrapped around his left arm, don’t count on being able to cut it.

“All right. Then there’s a whole list of other don’ts. Even if you figure you’re as good as the man opposite—if you ever get that way, which I hope you don’t, for your sake—don’t fight the people I’m going to tell you about. One, don’t fight anyone my size or smaller, particularly if he’s as young or younger than you are, unless of course he’s a kid. Even then, even if he’s a kid, you could be in trouble. The reason is, if he’s smaller, chances are his reflexes are faster than yours.

“Second, for the same sort of reason, don’t try to take on anyone a lot bigger than you. He just maybe could be enough bigger and heavier so that he can absorb enough punishment to get to you. And if he can get to you, chances are he can either kill you or do real damage to you even if he dies for it. Don’t get into a fight at all if you think the other man’s got friends around. They don’t even have to step in and help him. You could just be backing up and find a chair in your way where there wasn’t a chair before, to say nothing of being actually tripped. Carry the big knife in all kinds of weather, so it looks like you’re used to using it, but try to forget you’ve got it, except for cleaning and sharpening it when you think it needs it. Otherwise, just put it out of your mind. It’s like a life preserver on a luxury liner; it’s there, but ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time you don’t even need to think about it. Just so you shouldn’t never think about using this knife until there’s no other way than that. Remember that forearm knife rig I showed you, your first day at the wagon? Well, this bowie’s just another rig. Remember that.”

“I will,” said Jeebee.

The knife disappeared from Nick’s hand as magically as it had appeared.

“Now,” he said, “if you’ll forget all about the revolver and the Bowie, I’ve got some sticks here; and I’ll run you through just a few things that might help you with real knife trouble. Take one of the longer sticks. We’ll use them like knives.”

The sticks were about as thick and round as broomstick handles. Jeebee picked one that was about sixteen inches long and, standing at a little more than arm’s length from Nick, tried to imitate the other’s stance.

“If you want to make best use of the longer blade,” said Nick, “you probably shouldn’t stand like me. Let your right foot lead. You won’t be able to make much use of your empty hand, but it’ll give you another six inches of reach. All right, that’s better. Come at me, then.”

“No,” Jeebee said cautiously, “you come at me first.”

“Good. You remembered,” said Nick, “let the other man make the first move.” He was still talking when suddenly Jeebee found himself tripped by something hooked behind his right ankle. He fell heavily on his back, and a moment later one of Nick’s boots was pinning down his arm that held the stick, while the other one rested lightly with its boot edge against his Adam’s apple.

“I thought you were going to show me about knife fighting!” Jeebee said.

“That is part of knife fighting,” said Nick. “It’s your ‘third’ hand. I find people remember that part of it better if I simply show them before I tell them about it. Do you remember what I did just now?”

Jeebee had to stop and remember, as if he was rerunning a memory tape in his head. He remembered Nick suddenly dropping toward the ground, then he had been tripped—that was all that came to mind.

He said as much. Nick laughed.

“Watch,” he said, “I’ll do it slowly for you.”

He took the weight of his one boot off Jeebee’s arm and the touch of his other boot off Jeebee’s throat and stood back.

“I did this,” he said.

He dropped vertically suddenly until he was squatting on one leg. The other leg snaked out and swung in an arc at full length before him, the toe of the boot turned inward.

“That tripped you up,” Nick said. “Then it was simply a matter of stepping on your arm and on your throat. If I’d wanted to, I could have crushed your throat and everything would’ve been over right then and there.”

“I’m going to have to practice getting down and doing that leg swing,” Jeebee said ruefully.

“Practice all you want,” said Nick, “but remember that that’s just one thing you can do. When you’re fighting, a knife is just one of the things you fight with. Most people forget that, just like most people think that if you point a gun at them, it’s all over and you might as well give up. Not necessarily. Now, if you’re interested, we will work with the actual sticks themselves while we’re on our feet.”

They practiced for a while with the sticks. Jeebee tried desperately to use his longer arms and stick to keep the stick Nick held from touching him, but he was a constant failure. If they had actually been holding knives, Nick would have killed him a dozen times over.

At the same time, Jeebee’s mind was reacting in its usual manner by trying to remember what he was going through and to see some pattern in it. He was just beginning to see what he thought of as that pattern when Nick called a halt.

“Enough for now.” Nick reached out with his left hand to take the stick from Jeebee’s hand. “You’re beginning to get jumpy and poke out blindly. After you leave us, try it the same way you’d try shadowboxing. Just imagine me or somebody coming at you with a knife and imagine what you’d have to do to block him. Let’s go to breakfast.”

This morning Merry was making the breakfast, and Nick would be washing up afterwards, now that Jeebee was leaving. They ate pancakes and bacon, and after they were done, Merry took off her apron and put her hand on Jeebee’s arm.

“Come along,” she said, “come on back with me to the horses.”

Jeebee swallowed a final syrup-drenched piece of pancake, gulped the last of his coffee from its cup, and got up. The two of them went out of the wagon, climbed down to the ground, and walked together toward the back of it, behind which the horses were picketed.

Merry went briskly, so that he had to stretch his legs to keep up with her. It was almost as if she brought him along with an invisible grip on his ear with her fingers. Behind the wagon, Jeebee saw that tied directly to it was one horse already saddled, and tied to that saddle with a lead rope, another horse, which must be his packhorse, which had only a blanket on its back secured by a strap around its belly.

On the ground next to this horse was a pile of gear ready to travel. Merry took him to it.

“Here you go,” she said over her shoulder, “and here’s something I particularly wanted you to have.”

From a sack, the drawstring of which she had untied, she brought out a ball of dark blue yarn, thick strands, and a couple of long knitting needles stuck through the ball.

“There’s a book here, too,” she said, rummaging in a small box, and produced it. It was not so much a book as a thick pamphlet, with paper covers. The title How to Knit was printed plainly on the cover. She shoved it into his hands.

“You study this now,” she said sternly, “and you work with the needles and the yarn. Learn how to knit things for yourself. You’ll need them more than you think, and they can be more use to you than anything you can imagine. You’ll have all winter long someplace where you’ve nothing to do but knit, so you might as well start learning now. You’ll need socks, sweaters, everything else. Look here!”

From the same box she produced a pair of socks knitted of bright red yarn. They looked enormous, and Jeebee estimated that they would come well up to his knee, if not over it. The feet were very large and the legs were wide. He felt slightly embarrassed, since clearly she had guessed at his feet and leg sizes and had got them wrong.

“I don’t think you understand,” she said, looking at his face. “When winter comes, you’re going to need to wear layers of all kinds of clothes, including three or four pairs of socks. This is the pair that goes outside everything else, that’s why I made them so big. I made it exactly according to the diagram and directions on page forty-nine. The first thing you do is try to make another pair of socks just like it; and you can look at this pair to see how close you’re coming. Do you understand that?”

“Oh, I see!” said Jeebee. “I… thank you. I never thought of anything like this. I’ll do just what you say. I’ll learn how to knit.”

“You’ll make a lot of mistakes while you’re learning, and there’s going to be no one around to help. It’ll be you and the book,” said Merry. “But if you keep on trying, you’ll get to where you can make socks, sweaters—all sorts of things. Mittens too. Don’t forget mittens!”

She passed him the pamphlet and dug back into the box, coming up with another paper-bound volume. She shoved it into his hands.

“This,” she said. “This will give you instructions on how to skin animals, how to tan the hide, and how to use it making clothing and shoes. Study that, too!”

“I will,” he said. The gear that was to go on the back of Sally, the packhorse, was piled on the green plastic groundsheet that could have its edges tied together to protect its contents from rain. He stooped to put what she had just given him into one of the loading bags that had room to take it.

Pushing it into one of the bags, he stopped, staring at what was laid out on the groundsheet before him.

“Now,” said Merry’s voice crisply, “let’s see you load Sally and see if you do it right.”

He straightened up and looked at her.

“I wasn’t supposed to get all this stuff,” he said, waving a hand at the items on the groundsheet. “Paul said—”

“He changed his mind,” Merry said, still crisply. She looked straight at him. He stared back, his mind fumbling for words he wanted to say to her and finding none.

“Paul only promised… ” he began at last, unsurely.

“It’s that gold of yours,” she said, still looking him in the eye as if daring him to argue. “He’d been valuing it at the minimum he could get for it. Instead, he decided to value it for the maximum. There can be a big difference; particularly if he can sell those coins in one of the southern cities that didn’t burn itself to the ground, or have everyone in it shoot each other trying to stay alive after the power, water, and food stopped coming in.”

“He didn’t say anything about changing his mind to me.” Even to Jeebee’s ears, his own words sounded weak and unconvincing. It was hardly Paul’s way to announce his reasons for anything he did, even for a change as enormous as this.

He looked again at what lay on the groundsheet. Besides the flour, ammunition, blankets, clothes, and other things of relatively small value that Paul had promised him, there were both a double-bladed and a single-bladed ax, a small wall-supported tent with a frame of aluminum poles, and a large number of other kinds of gear that were—from the viewpoint of Jeebee’s survival—unexpected luxuries.

He raised his eyes again to Merry.

“You had something to do with this,” he said.

“What makes you think so?”

“I just know you did,” he told her. “Paul wouldn’t do it on his own and Nick couldn’t make Paul change his mind, even if Nick wanted to. It had to be you.”

For the first time, her direct glance yielded a little. There was no real change in her expression, but having said what he had and seeing her standing there, for the moment silent, he was suddenly sure of what he had merely suspected before saying it.

“What did you give—what did you promise to get me all this?” Jeebee demanded. “I’m not going to take—”

“Nothing!” she said, almost violently. “I didn’t give up or promise anything. Dad understands me. I told him you had to have these things if you were going to have any chance of staying alive until we come back next year.”

“And he went along with you—just like that?”

“All right!” she said. “I told him I’d give you my own things if he wouldn’t, and he said in that case he didn’t have a choice, because he’d just have to replace them so I’d still have them. Yes, I know it was a hard thing to do to him. He loves me, Jeebee. All this—”

She waved her hand at the wagon.

“—all this, he did for me. I didn’t give him any choice in this case, no. But I’d do what I did again in a minute. I tell you, I want you to stay alive.”

They stood staring into each other’s eyes for a long, painful minute. Then Jeebee stooped to the pile on the groundsheet and began the process of loading the packhorse. Merry had always taken charge of packing the horses when the two of them had gone after the seed. Even when she had allowed Jeebee to help, it had been strictly under her supervision.

Merry had explained that not only was each horse best off loaded with the optimum amount the animal could carry, some carried their loads best when those loads were arranged in a way that suited the particular horse. Jeebee had followed orders, listened, and to his surprise, ended up knowing more than he had ever suspected there was to know about loading a packhorse.

In this case, he could take it for granted that Merry had not supplied him with too heavy a load for Sally to carry comfortably, and he remembered that Sally had a ticklish spot high on her left side, which was best off without having anything pressing directly on it.

As he worked, he waited to hear Merry correcting him in what he was doing. But she said nothing. When at last he had put everything on the horse’s back, covered the load completely with the groundsheet, and secured it all with rope in a diamond hitch, he heard something that was almost a small sigh behind him.

He turned and stood facing Merry once more.

“It’s all right,” Merry said, after a moment. “You’ll do all right. Just remember, she can carry perhaps another fifty pounds comfortably for a full day, at a walking pace—but no more, for day-in, day-out travel.”

They were once more looking unhappily into each other’s eyes.

“You don’t have to go,” Merry said, finally. The words came almost as if forced from her.

“Yes,” Jeebee said with a tight throat, “you know I do. And there’s no hope at all… ”

His voice ran out.

“I can’t leave Dad,” she said. “You know that. But you’d be as safe with us as with anybody else.”

“It’s not just safety,” he said. “It’s a place where I can work I need.” [*original book says this, page 204]

“What work?”

“Maybe someday figuring out how all this happened to us. How maybe it could be kept from ever happening again.”

She shook her head slowly.

“Why you?” she asked. “And what difference does it make now?”

“It makes a difference because a civilized world’s going to grow back together again,” he said. “You know that. Paul knows it. He even plans on it—for your future. You know that, too. As for why it has to be me who finds it, maybe it doesn’t, but I don’t know of anyone else who’s trying, with what I know.”

He had never told her as much of his personal history as he would have liked, and the meanings of it to him—even though they had talked at length on the seed-farm trip. She had not, perhaps, asked the right questions to get him going, and he was not yet beyond the reticence that had simply been his habit for a lifetime. So now, even as the words left him, he felt suddenly sure she would not understand what he was talking about.

Perhaps she did not, but in any case, she seemed to take them at face value.

“We’ll be coming by here again next year at this time, give or take a week or so,” she said.

“I’ll be here,” he said.

They stood for a moment more. Then, since nothing more came to him to say, he turned, put his foot in the stirrup of Brute’s saddle, and himself up onto the back of the riding horse.

He looked down at her from horseback.

“Well,” he said, “I guess I’ll get going.”

He could not bring himself to say good-bye. Apparently, neither could she. But as he lifted the reins and Brute stirred to make his first step, she caught hold of Jeebee’s knee with one hand, stopping the horse.

“I love you!” she said.

He looked down at her, feeling the pressure of her hand on his knee. It was out in the open now. Like a naked, twin-edged sword between them, he remembered, as if it had been only a moment ago, the pressure of her body against his when he had held her for that moment on the seed trip.

He knew now that she had no more defenses left. If he should get back down from the horse now and put his arms around her and hold her and kiss her, she would go with him. Or would he stay? The strength of the emotion between them was almost overwhelming. They could gamble either way—that it would work out if she came with him, that it would work out if he stayed with her.

But this was not a gamblers’ world anymore. The last few months and weeks, especially the weeks before, had taught him that. That in his near starvation, they dared not kiss.

“And God knows—” he said, sitting still in the saddle where he was. The words were pulling from him, after a moment’s struggle to find his voice. “God knows I love you!”

He shook up the reins and Brute led off, Sally trailing obediently at the end of the length of rope that attached her to Brute and Jeebee. Wolf, who had been lying all this time, watching them from the step to the back door of the wagon, leaped down and trotted to catch up with him.

Halfway to the trees beyond the cleared side of the road he half turned in the saddle, looking back, and saw her still standing where he had left her, gazing after him. He lifted his left hand from the elbow in a single wave. Her hand went up in answer.

He turned, rode on into the trees, and the wagon behind him, with all about it, was lost to sight.