The Avram Davidson Treasury Read Online Free PDF

Conklin rolled his eyes at Marie Dressler.
    “So what will you write to Tillie?” old Mr. Gumbeiner asked.
    “What should I write?” old Mrs. Gumbeiner shrugged. “I’ll write that the weather is lovely out here and that we are both, Blessed be the Name, in good health.”
    The old man nodded his head slowly, and they sat together on the front porch in the warm afternoon sun.
     
The Necessity of His Condition
    I NTRODUCTION BY P OUL AND K AREN A NDERSON
    We have remembered this story since we first read it, nearly forty years ago. Published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, it won first prize in that periodical’s 1957 contest, against strong competition.
    Like other early works of Avram Davidson’s, already it showed what rich diversity was to come. Two of his fantasies had been set in the here-and-now, although their quirky originality made each of them sui generis . But elsewhere had appeared elements less familiar—a larcenous antique dealer in Cyprus, a Casbah-smart youth with Agitprop training, a mesmerizer in eighteenth-century England. Always the thought and speech of the characters was authentic, fully within their given cultures, and yet those characters were always fully individual human beings. Later tales kept this far too rare quality. They explored more of today’s world, other planets, the future, real and legendary epochs of the past. Invariably their landscapes, mental as well as physical, were vivid and utterly convincing. Much of this came through in the dialogue, for which Avram had an incredibly keen ear.
    “The Necessity of His Condition” is set in an antebellum border state. With a few strokes he gives a town, in it a history, economy, and population as various, in both good and evil, as any real community’s. Every true tragedy is profoundly moral. Avram bore a deep sympathy for the weak and oppressed. Here, in an almost biblical fashion, the unrighteous has digged a pit for another, and fallen therein.
     
    THE NECESSITY OF HIS CONDITION
    S HOLTO HILL WAS MOSTLY residential property, but it had its commercial district in the shape of Persimmon Street and Rampart Street, the latter named after some long-forgotten barricade stormed and destroyed by Benedict Arnold (wearing a British uniform and eaten with bitterness and perverted pride). Persimmon Street, running up-slope, entered the middle of Rampart at right angles, and went no farther. This section, with its red brick houses and shops, its warehouses and offices, was called The T, and it smelled of tobacco and potatoes and molasses and goober peas and dried fish and beer and cheap cookshop food and (the spit-and-whittle humorists claimed) old man Bailiss’ office, where the windows were never opened—never had been opened, they said, never were made to be opened. Any smell off the street or farms or stables that found its way up to Bailiss’ office was imprisoned there for life, they said. Old man Bailiss knew what they said, knew pretty much everything that went on anywhere; but he purely didn’t care. He didn’t have to, they said.
    J. Bailiss, Attorney-at-Law (his worn old sign said), had a large practice and little competition. James Bailiss, Broker (his newer, but by no means new, sign), did an extensive business; again, with little competition. The premises of the latter business were located, not in The T, but in a white-washed stone structure with thick doors and barred windows, down in The Bottom—as it was called—near the river, the canal, and the railroad line.
    James Bailiss, Broker, was not received socially. Nobody expected that bothered him much. Nothing bothered old man Bailiss much—Bailiss, with his old white hat and his old black coat and his old cowhide shoes that looked old even when they were new—turned old on the shoemaker’s last (the spit-and-whittle crowd claimed) directly they heard whose feet they were destined for.
    It was about twenty-five years earlier, in 1825, that an