of sharp clicks, as if it might be clicking claws together,
although it had no claws that I could see. When I looked this up in the
pasimology manual I learned that what it was trying to say was that it was
all right, that it needed no attention, and please leave it alone. Which I
did thereafter.
And at the end of the paragraph, jammed into the little space that had
been left, was the notation: See Oct. 16, 1931.
He turned the pages until he came to October 16 and that had been one
of the days, he saw, that Ulysses had arrived to inspect the station.
His name, of course, was not Ulysses. As a matter of fact, he had no
name at all. Among his people there was no need of names; there was other
identifying terminology which was far more expressive than mere names. But
this terminology, even the very concept of it, was such that it could not be
grasped, much less put to use, by human beings.
"I shall call you Ulysses," Enoch recalled telling him, the first time
they had met. "I need to call you something."
"It is agreeable," said the then strange being (but no longer strange).
"Might one ask why the name Ulysses?"
"Because it is the name of a great man of my race."
"I am glad you chose it," said the newly christened being. "To my
hearing it has a dignified and noble sound and, between the two of us, I
shall be glad to bear it. And I shall call you Enoch, for the two of us
shall work together for many of your years."
And it had been many years, thought Enoch, with the record book open to
that October entry of more than thirty years ago. Years that had been
satisfying and enriching in a way that one could not have imagined until it
had all been laid out before him.
And it would go on, he thought, much longer than it already had gone
on-for many centuries more, for a thousand years, perhaps. And at the end of
that thousand years, what would he know then?
Although, perhaps, he thought, the knowing was not the most important
part of it.
And none of it, he knew, might come to pass, for there was interference
now. There were watchers, or at least a watcher, and before too long whoever
it might be might start closing in. What he'd do or how he'd meet the
threat, he had no idea until that moment came. It was something that had
been almost bound to happen. It was something he had been prepared to have
happen all these years. There was some reason to wonder, he knew, that it
had not happened sooner.
He had told Ulysses of the danger of it that first day they'd met. He'd
been sitting on the steps that led up to the porch, and thinking of it now,
he could remember it as clearly as if it had been only yesterday.
6
He was sitting on the steps and it was late afternoon. He was watching
the great white thunderheads that were piling up across the river beyond the
Iowa hills. The day was hot and sultry and there was not a breath of moving
air. Out in the barnyard a half a dozen bedraggled chickens scratched
listlessly, for the sake, it seemed, of going through the motions rather
than from any hope of finding food. The sound of the sparrows' wings, as
they flew between the gable of the barn and the hedge of honeysuckle that
bordered the field beyond the road, was a harsh, dry sound, as if the
feathers of their wings had grown stiff with heat.
And here he sat, he thought, staring at the thunderheads when there was
work to do-corn to be plowed and hay to be gotten in and wheat to reap and
shock.
For despite whatever might have happened, a man still had a life to
live, days to be gotten through the best that one could manage. It was a
lesson, he reminded himself, that he should have learned in all its fullness
in the last few years. But war, somehow, was different from what had
happened here. In war you knew it and expected it and were ready when it
happened, but this was not the war. This was the peace to which he had
returned. A man had a right to expect that in the world of peace there
really would be peace fencing out the violence and the horror.
Now he was alone, as he'd never been alone before. Now, if ever, could
be a new beginning; now, perhaps, there had to be a new beginning. But
whether it was here, on the homestead acres, or in some other place, it
still would be a beginning of bitterness and anguish.
He sat on the steps, with his wrists resting on his knees, and watched
the thunderheads piling in the west. It might mean rain and the land could
use the rain-or it might be nothing, for above the merging river valleys the
air currents were erratic and there was no way a man could tell where those
clouds might flow.
He did not see the traveler until he turned in at the gate. He was a
tall and gangling one and his clothes were dusty and from the appearance of
him he had walked a far way. He came up the path and Enoch sat waiting for
him, watching him, but not stirring from the steps.
"Good day, sir," Enoch finally said. "It's a hot day to be walking. Why
don't you sit a while."
"Quite willingly," said the stranger. "But first, I wonder, could I
have a drink of water?"
Enoch got up to his feet. "Come along," he said. "I'll pump a fresh one
for you."
He went down across the barnyard until he reached the pump. He unhooked
the dipper from where it hung upon a bolt and handed it to the man. He
grasped the handle of the pump and worked it up and down.
"Let it run a while," he said. "It takes a time for it to get real
cool."
The water splashed out of the spout, running on the boards that formed
the cover of the well. It came in spurts as Enoch worked the handle.
"Do you think," the stranger asked, "that it is about to rain?"
"A man can't tell," said Enoch. "We have to wait and see."
There was something about this traveler that disturbed him. Nothing,
actually, that one could put a finger on, but a certain strangeness that was
vaguely disquieting. He watched him narrowly as he pumped and decided that
probably this stranger's ears were just a bit too pointed at the top, but
put it down to his imagination, for when he looked again they seemed to be
all right.
"I think," said Enoch, "that the water should be cold by now."
The traveler put down the dipper and waited for it to fill. He offered
it to Enoch. Enoch shook his head.
"You first. You need it worse than I do."
The stranger drank greedily and with much slobbering.
"Another one?" asked Enoch.
"No, thank you," said the stranger. "But I'll catch another dipperful
for you if you wish me to."
Enoch pumped, and when the dipper was full the stranger handed it to
him. The water was cold and Enoch, realizing for the first time that he had
been thirsty, drank it almost to the bottom.
He hung the dipper back on its bolt and said to the man, "Now, let's
get in that sitting."
The stranger grinned. "I could do with some of it," he said. Enoch
pulled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his face. "The air gets
close," he said, "just before a rain."
And as he mopped his face, quite supenly he knew what it was that had
disturbed him about the traveler. Despite his bedraggled clothes and his
dusty shoes, which attested to long walking, despite the heat of this
time-before-a-rain, the stranger was not sweating. He appeared as fresh and
cool as if he had been lying at his ease beneath a tree in springtime.
Enoch put the bandanna back into his pocket and they walked back to the
steps and sat there, side by side.
"You've traveled a far way," said Enoch, gently prying.
"Very far, indeed," the stranger told him. "I'm a right smart piece
from home."
"And you have a far way yet to go?"
"No," the stranger said, "I believe that I have gotten to the place
where I am going."
"You mean ..." asked Enoch, and left the question hanging. "I mean
right here," said the stranger, "sitting on these steps. I have been looking
for a man and I think that man is you. I did not know his name nor where to
look for him, but yet I knew that one day I would find him."
"But me," Enoch said, astonished. "Why should you look for me?"
"I was looking for a man of many different parts. One of the things
about him was that he must have looked up at the stars and wondered what
they were."
"Yes," said Enoch, "that is something I have done. On many nights,
camping in the field, I have lain in my blankets and looked up at the sky,
looking at the stars and wondering what they were and how they'd been put up
there and, most important of all, why they had been put up there. I have
heard some say that each of them is another sun like the sun that shines on
Earth, but I don't know about that. I guess there is no one who knows too
much about them."
"There are some," the stranger said, "who know a deal about them."
"You, perhaps," said Enoch, mocking just a little, for the stranger did
not look like a man who'd know much of anything.
"Yes, I," the stranger said. "Although I do not know as much as many
others do."
"I've sometimes wondered," Enoch said, "if the stars are other suns,
might there not be other planets and other people, too."
He remembered sitting around the campfire of a night, jawing with the
other fellows to pass away the time. And once he'd mentioned this idea of
maybe other people on other planets circling other suns and the fellows all
had jeered him and for days afterward had made fun of him, so he had never
mentioned it again. Not that it mattered much, for he had no real belief in
it himself; it had never been more than campfire speculation.
And now he'd mentioned it again and to an utter stranger. He wondered
why he had.
"You believe that?" asked the stranger.
Enoch said, "It was just an idle notion."
"Not so idle," said the stranger. "There are other planets and there
are other people. I am one of them."
"But you ..." cried Enoch, then was stricken into silence.
For the stranger's face had split and began to fall away and beneath it
he caught the glimpse of another face that was not a human face.
And even as the false human face sloughed off that other face, a great
sheet of lightning went crackling across the sky and the heavy crash of
thunder seemed to shake the land and from far off he heard the rushing rain
as it charged across the hills.
7
That was how it started, Enoch thought, almost a hundred years ago. The
campfire fantasy had turned into fact and the Earth now was on galactic
charts, a way station for many different peoples traveling star to star.
Strangers once, but now there were no strangers. There were no such things
as strangers. In whatever form, with whatever purpose, all of them were
people.
He looked back at the entry for October 16, 1931, and ran through it
swiftly. There, near the end of it was the sentence:
Ulysses says the Thubans from planet VI are perhaps the greatest
mathematicians in the galaxy. They have developed, it seems, a numeration
system superior to any in existence, especially valuable in the handling of
statistics.
He closed the book and sat quietly in the chair, wondering if the
statisticians of Mizar X knew of the Thubans' work. Perhaps they did, he
thought, for certainly some of the math they used was unconventional.
He pushed the record book to one side and dug into a desk drawer,
bringing out his chart. He spread it flat on the desk before him and puzzled
over it. If he could be sure, he thought. If he only knew the Mizar
statistics better. For the last ten years or more he had labored at the
chart, checking and rechecking all the factors against the Mizar system,
testing again and again to determine whether the factors he was using were
the ones he should be using.
He raised a clenched fist and hammered at the desk. If he only could be
certain. If he could only talk with someone. But that had been something
that he had shrank from doing, for it would be equivalent to showing the
very nakedness of the human race.
He still was human. Funny, he thought, that he should stay human, that
in a century of association with these beings from the many stars he should
have, through it all, remained a man of Earth.
For in many ways, his ties with Earth were cut. Old Winslowe Grant was
the only human he ever talked with now. His neighbors shunned him, and there
were no others, unless one could count watchers, and those he seldom
saw-only glimpses of them, only the places they had been.
Only old Winslowe Grant and Mary and the other people from the shadow
who came occasionally to spend lonely hours with him.
That was all of Earth he had, old Winslowe and the shadow people and
the homestead acres that lay outside the house-but not the house itself, for
the house was alien now.
He shut his eyes and remembered how the house had been in the olden
days. There had been a kitchen, in this same area where he was sitting, with
the iron cook-stove, black and monstrous, in its corner, showing its row of
fiery teeth along the slit made by the grate. Pushed against the wall had
been the table where the three of them had eaten, and he could remember how
the table looked, with the vinegar cruet and the glass that held the spoons
and the Lazy Susan with the mustard, horseradish, and chili sauce sitting in
a group, a sort of centerpiece in the miple of the red checkered cloth that
the table wore.
There had been a winter night and he had been, it seemed, no more than
three or four. His mother was busy at the stove with supper. He was sitting
on the floor in the center of the kitchen, playing with some blocks, and
outside he could hear the muffled howling of the wind as it prowled along
the eaves. His father had come in from milking at the barn, and a gust of
wind and a swirl of snow had come into the room with him. Then he'd shut the
door and the wind and snow were gone, shut outside this house, condemned to
the outer darkness and the wilderness of night. His father had set the pail
of milk that he had been carrying on the kitchen sink and Enoch saw that his
beard and eyebrows were coated with snow and there was frost on the whiskers
all around his mouth.
He held that picture still, the three of them like historic manikins
posed in a cabinet in a museum-his father with the frost upon his whiskers
and the great felt boots that came up to his knees; his mother with her face
flushed from working at the stove and with the lace cap upon her head, and
himself upon the floor, playing with the blocks.
There was one other thing that he remembered, perhaps more clearly than
all the rest of it. There was a great lamp sitting on the table, and on the
wall behind it hung a calendar, and the glow of the lamp fell like a
spotlight upon the picture on the calendar. There was old Santa Claus,
riding in his sleigh along a woodland track and all the little woodland
people had turned out to watch him pass. A great moon hung above the trees
and there was thick snow on the ground. A pair of rabbits sat there, gazing
soulfully at Santa, and a deer beside the rabbits, with a raccoon just a
little distance off, ringed tail wrapped about his feet, and a squirrel and
chickadee side by side upon an overhanging branch. Old Santa had his whip
raised high in greeting and his cheeks were red and his smile was merry and
the reindeer hitched to his sled were fresh and spirited and proud.
Through all the years this mid-nineteenth-century Santa had ripen down
the snowy aisles of time, with his whip uplifted in happy greeting to the
woodland creatures. And the golden lamplight had ripen with him, still
bright upon the wall and the checkered tablecloth.
So, thought Enoch, some things do endure-the memory and the thought and
the snug warmness of a childhood kitchen on a stormy winter night.
But the endurance was of the spirit and the mind, for nothing else
endured. There was no kitchen now, nor any sitting room with its
old-fashioned sofa and the rocking chair; no back parlor with its stuffy
elegance of brocade and silk, no guest bedroom on the first and no family
bedrooms on the second floor.
It all was gone and now one room remained. The second-story floor and
all partitions had been stripped away. Now the house was one great room. One
side of it was the galactic station and the other side the living space for
the keeper of the station. There was a bed over in one corner and a stove
that worked on no principle known on Earth and a refrigerator that was of
alien make. The walls were lined with cabinets and shelves, stacked with
magazines and books and journals.
There was just one thing left from the early days, the one thing Enoch
had not allowed the alien crew that had set up the station to strip away-the
massive old fireplace of brick and native stone that had stood against one
wall of the sitting room. It still stood there, the one reminder of the days
of old, the one thing left of Earth, with its great, scarred oak mantel that
his father had carved out with a broadax from a massive log and had smoothed
by hand with plane and draw-shave.
On the fireplace mantel and strewn on shelf and table were articles and
artifacts that had no earthly origin and some no earthly names-the steady
accumulation through the years of the gifts from friendly travelers.
Some of them were functional and others were to look at only, and there
were other things that were entirely useless because they had little
application to a member of the human race or were inoperable on Earth, and
many others of the purpose of which he had no idea, accepting them,
embarrassed, with many stumbling thanks, from the well-meaning folks who had
brought them to him.
And on the other side of the room stood the intricate mass of
machinery, reaching well up into the open second story, that wafted
passengers through the space that stretched from star to star.
An inn, he thought, a stopping place, a galactic crossroads.
He rolled up the chart and put it back into the desk. The record book
he put away in its proper place among all the other record books upon the
shelf.
He glanced at the galactic clock upon the wall and it was time to go.
He pushed the chair tight against the desk and shrugged into the jacket
that hung upon the chair back. He picked the rifle off the supports that
held it on the wall and then he faced the wall itself and said the single
word that he had to say. The wall slid back silently and he stepped through
it into the little shed with its sparse furnishings. Behind him the section
of the wall slid back and there was nothing there to indicate it was
anything but a solid wall.
Enoch stepped out of the shed and it was a beautiful late summer day.
In a few weeks now, he thought, there'd be the signs of autumn and a strange
chill in the air. The first goldenrods were blooming now and he'd noticed,
just the day before, that some of the early asters down in the ancient fence
row had started to show color.
He went around the corner of the house and headed toward the river,
striding down the long deserted field that was overrun with hazel brush and
occasional clumps of trees.
This was the Earth, he thought-a planet made for Man. But not for Man
alone, for it was as well a planet for the fox and owl and weasel, for the
snake, the katydid, the fish, for all the other teeming life that filled the
air and earth and water. And not these natives alone, but for other beings
that called other earths their home, other planets that far light-years
distant were basically the same as Earth. For Ulysses and the Hazers and all
the rest of them who could live upon this planet, if need be, if they
wished, with no discomfort and no artificial aids.
Our horizons are so far, he thought, and we see so little of them. Even
now, with flaming rockets striving from Canaveral to break the ancient
bonds, we dream so little of them.
The ache was there, the ache that had been growing, the ache to tell
all mankind those things that he had learned. Not so much the specific
things, although there were some of them that mankind well could use, but
the general things, the unspecific central fact that there was intelligence
throughout the universe, that Man was not alone, that if he only found the
way he need never be alone again.
He went down across the field and through the strip of woods and came
out on the great outthrust of rock that stood atop the cliff that faced the
river. He stood there, as he had stood on thousands of other mornings, and
stared out at the river, sweeping in majestic blue-and-silverness through
the wooded bottom land.
Old, ancient water, he said, talking silently to the river, you have
seen it happen-the mile-high faces of the glaciers that came and stayed and
left, creeping back toward the pole inch by stubborn inch, carrying the
melting water from those very glaciers in a flood that filled this valley
with a tide such as now is never known; the mastodon and the sabertooth and
the bear-sized beaver that ranged these olden hills and made the night
clamorous with trumpeting and screaming; the silent little bands of men who
trotted in the woods or clambered up the cliffs or papled on your surface,
woods-wise and water-wise, weak in body, strong in purpose, and persistent
in a way no other thing ever was persistent, and just a little time ago that
other breed of men who carried dreams within their skulls and cruelty in
their hands and the awful sureness of an even greater purpose in their
hearts. And before that, for this is ancient country beyond what is often
found, the other kinds of life and the many turns of climate and the changes
that came upon the Earth itself. And what think you of it? he asked the
river. For yours is the memory and the perspective and the time and by now
you should have the answers, or at least some of the answers.
As Man might have some of the answers had he lived for several million
years-as he might have the answers several million years from this very
summer morning if be still should be around.
I could help, thought Enoch. I could not give the answers but I could
help Man in his scramble after them. I could give him faith and hope and I
could give purpose such as he has not had before.
But he knew he dare not do it.
Far below a hawk swung in lazy circles above the highway of the river.
The air was so clear that Enoch imagined, if he strained his eyes a little,
he could see every feather in those outspread wings.
There was almost a fairy quality to this place, he thought. The far
look and the clear air and the feeling of detachment that touched almost on
greatness of the spirit. As if this were a special place, one of those
special places that each man must seek out for himself, and count himself as
lucky if he ever found it, for there were those who sought and never found
it. And worst of all, there were even those who never hunted for it.
He stood upon the rock and stared out across the river, watching the
lazy hawk and the sweep of water and the green carpeting of trees, and his
mind went up and out to those other places until his mind was dizzy with the
thought of it. And then he called it home.
He turned slowly and went back down the rock and moved off among the
trees, following the path he'd beaten through the years.
He considered going down the hill a way to look in on the patch of pink
lady's-slippers, to see how they might be coming, to try to conjure up the
beauty that would be his again in June, but decided that there'd be little
point to it, for they were well hipen in an isolated place, and nothing
could have harmed them. There had been a time, a hundred years ago, when
they had bloomed on every hill and he had come trailing home with great
armloads of them, which his mother had put in the great brown jug she had,
and for a day or two the house had been filled with the heaviness of their
rich perfume. But they were hard to come by now. The trampling of the
pastured cattle and flower-hunting humans had swept them from the hills.
Some other day, he told himself, some day before first frost, he would
visit them again and satisfy himself that they'd be there in the spring.
He stopped a while to watch a squirrel as it frolicked in an oak. He
squatted down to follow a snail which had crossed his path. He stopped
beside a massive tree and examined that pattern of the moss that grew upon
the trunk. And he traced the wanderings of a silent, flitting songbird as it
fluttered tree to tree.
He followed the path out of the woods and along the edge of field until
he came to the spring that bubbled from the hillside.
Sitting beside the spring was a woman and he recognized her as Lucy
Fisher, the deaf-mute daughter of Hank Fisher, who lived down in the river
bottoms.
He stopped and watched her and thought how full she was of grace and
beauty, the natural grace and beauty of a primitive and lonely creature.
She was sitting by the spring and one hand was uplifted and she held in
it, at the tips of long and sensitive fingers, something that glowed with
color. Her head was held high, with a sharp look of alertness, and her body
was straight and slender, and it also had that almost startled look of quiet
alertness.
Enoch moved slowly forward and stopped not more than three feet behind
her, and now he saw that the thing of color on her fingertips was a
butterfly, one of those large gold and red butterflies that come with the
end of summer. One wing of the insect stood erect and straight, but the
other was bent and crumpled and had lost some of the dust that lent sparkle
to the color.
She was, he saw, not actually holding the butterfly. It was standing on
one fingertip, the one good wing fluttering very slightly every now and then
to maintain its balance.
But he had been mistaken, he saw, in thinking that the second wing was
injured, for now he could see that somehow it had been simply bent and
distorted in some way. For now it was straightening slowly and the dust (if
it ever had been gone) was back on it again, and it was standing up with the
other wing.
He stepped around the girl so that she could see him and when she saw
him there was no start of surprise. And that, he knew would be quite
natural, for she must be accustomed to it-someone coming up behind her and
supenly being there.
Her eyes were radiant and there was, he thought, a holy look upon her
face, as if she had experienced some ecstasy of the soul. And he found
himself wondering again, as he did each time he saw her, what it must be
like for her, living in a world of two-way silence, unable to communicate.
Perhaps not entirely unable to communicate, but at least barred from that
free flow of communication which was the birthright of the human animal.
There had been, he knew, several attempts to establish her in a state
school for the deaf, but each had been a failure. Once she'd run away and
wandered days before being finally found and returned to her home. And on
other occasions she had gone on disobedience strikes, refusing to co-operate
in any of the teaching.
Watching her as she sat there with the butterfly, Enoch thought he knew
the reason. She had a world, he thought, a world of her very own, one to
which she was accustomed and knew how to get along in. In that world she was
no cripple, as she most surely would have been a cripple if she had been
pushed, part way, into the normal human world.
What good to her the hand alphabet or the reading of the lips if they
should take from her some strange inner serenity of spirit?
She was a creature of the woods and hills, of springtime flower and
autumn flight of birds. She knew these things and lived with them and was,
in some strange way, a specific part of them. She was one who dwelt apart in
an old and lost apartment of the natural world. She occupied a place that
Man long since had abandoned, if, in fact, he'd ever held it.
And there she sat, with the wild red and gold of the butterfly poised
upon her finger, with the sense of alertness and expectancy and, perhaps,
accomplishment shining on her face. She was alive, thought Enoch, as no
other thing he knew had ever been alive.
The butterfly spread its wings and floated off her finger and went
fluttering, unconcerned, unfrightened, up across the wild grass and the
goldenrod of the field.
She pivoted to watch it until it disappeared near the top of the hill
up which the old field climbed, then she turned to Enoch. She smiled and
made a fluttery motion with her hands, like the fluttering of the red and
golden wings, but there was something else in it, as well-a sense of
happiness and an expression of well-being, as if she might be saying that
the world was going fine.
If, Enoch thought, I could only teach her the pasimology of my galactic
people-then we could talk, the two of us, almost as well as with the flow of
words on the human tongue. Given the time, he thought, it might not be too
hard, for there was a natural and a logical process to the galactic sign
language that made it almost instinctive once one had caught the underlying
principle.
Throughout the Earth as well, in the early days; there had been sign
languages, and none so well developed as that one which obtained among the
aborigines of North America, so that an Amerindian, no matter what his
tongue, could express himself among many other tribes.
But even so the sign language of the Indian was, at best, a crutch that
allowed a man to hobble when he couldn't run. Whereas that of the galaxy was
in itself a language, adaptable to many different means and methods of
expression. It had been developed through millennia, with many different
peoples making contributions, and through the centuries it had been refined
and shaken down and polished until today it was a communications tool that
stood on its own merits.
There was need for such a tool, for the galaxy was Babel. Even the
galactic science of pasimology, polished as it might be, could not surmount
all the obstacles, could not guarantee, in certain cases, the basic minimum
of communication. For not only were there millions of tongues, but those
other languages as well which could not operate on the principle of sound
because the races were incapable of sound. And even sound itself failed of
efficiency when the race talked in ultrasonics others could not hear. There
was telepathy, of course, but for every telepath there were a thousand races
that had telepathic blocks. There were many who got along on sign languages
alone and others who could communicate only by a written or pictographic
system, including some who carried chemical blackboards built into their
bodies. And there was that sightless, deaf, and speechless race from the
mystery stars of the far side of the galaxy who used what was perhaps the
most complicated of all the galactic languages-a code of signals routed
along their nervous systems.
Enoch had been at the job almost a century, and even so, he thought,
with the aid of the universal sign language and the semantic translator,
which was little more than a pitiful (although complicated) mechanical
contrivance, he still was hard put at times to know what many of them said.
Lucy Fisher picked up a cup that was standing by her side-a cup
fashioned of a strip of folded birch bark-and dipped it in the spring. She
held it out to Enoch and he stepped close to take it, kneeling down to drink
from it. It was not entirely water-tight, and water ran from it down across
his arm, wetting the cuff of shirt and jacket.
He finished drinking and handed back the cup. She took it in one hand
and reached out the other, to brush across his forehead with the tip of
gentle fingers in what she might have thought of as a benediction.
He did not speak to her. Long ago he had ceased talking to her, sensing
that the movement of his mouth, making sounds she could not hear, might be
embarrassing.
Instead he put out a hand and laid his broad palm against her cheek,
holding it there for a reassuring moment as a gesture of affection. Then he
got to his feet and stood staring down at her and for a moment their eyes
looked into the other's eyes and then turned away.
He crossed the little stream that ran down from the spring and took the
trail that led from the forest's edge across the field, heading for the
ridge. Halfway up the slope, he turned around and saw that she was watching
him. He held up his hand in a gesture of farewell and her hand gestured in
reply.
It had been, he recalled, twelve years or more ago that he first had
seen her, a little fairy person of ten years or so, a wild thing running in
the woods. They had become friends, he recalled, only after a long time,
although he saw her often, for she roamed the hills and valley as if they
were a playground for her-which, of course, they were.
Through the years he had watched her grow and had often met her on his
daily walks, and between the two of them had grown up an understanding of
the lonely and the outcast, but understanding based on something more than
that-on the fact that each had a world that was their own and worlds that
had given them an insight into something that others seldom saw. Not that
either, Enoch thought, ever told the other, or tried to tell the other, of
these private worlds, but the fact of these private worlds was there, in the
consciousness of each, providing a firm foundation for the building of a
friendship.
He recalled the day he'd found her at the place where the pink
lady's-slippers grew, just kneeling there and looking at them, not picking
any of them, and how he'd stopped beside her and been pleased she had not
moved to pick them, knowing that in the sight of them, the two, he and she,
had found a joy and a beauty that was beyond possession.
He reached the ridgetop and turned down the grass-grown road that led
down to the mailbox.
And he'd not been mistaken back there, he told himself, no matter how
it may have seemed on second look. The butterfly's wing had been torn and
crumpled and drab from the lack of dust. It had been a crippled thing and
then it had been whole again and had flown away.
8
Winslowe Grant was on time.
Enoch, as he reached the mailbox, sighted the dust raised by his old
jalopy as it galloped along the ridge. It had been a dusty year, he thought,
as he stood beside the box. There had been little rain and the crops had
suffered. Although, to tell the truth, there were few crops on the ridge
these days. There had been a time when comfortable small farms had existed,
almost cheek by jowl, all along the road, with the barns all red and the
houses white. But now most of the farms had been abandoned and the houses
and the barns were no longer red or white, but gray and weathered wood, with
all the paint peeled off and the ridgepoles sagging and the people gone.
It would not be long before Winslowe would arrive and Enoch settled
down to wait. The mailman might be stopping at the Fisher box, just around
the bend, although the Fishers, as a rule, got but little mail, mostly just
the advertising sheets and other junk that was mailed out indiscriminately
to the rural boxholders. Not that it mattered to the Fishers, for sometimes
days went by in which they did not pick up their mail. If it were not for
Lucy, they perhaps would never get it, for it was mostly Lucy who thought to
pick it up.
The Fishers were, for a fact, Enoch told himself, a truly shiftless
outfit. Their house and all the buildings were ready to fall in upon
themselves and they raised a grubby patch of corn that was drowned out, more
often than not, by a flood rise of the river. They mowed some hay off a
bottom meadow and they had a couple of raw-boned horses and a half-dozen
scrawny cows and a flock of chickens. They had an old clunk of a car and a
still hipen out somewhere in the river bottoms and they hunted and fished
and trapped and were generally no-account. Although, when one considered it,
they were not bad neighbors. They tended to their business and never
bothered anyone except that periodically they went around, the whole tribe
of them, distributing pamphlets and tracts through the neighborhood for some
obscure fundamentalist sect that Ma Fisher had become a member of at a tent
revival meeting down in Millville several years before.
Winslowe didn't stop at the Fisher box, but came boiling around the
bend in a cloud of dust. He braked the panting machine to a halt and turned
off the engine.
"Let her cool a while," he said.
The block crackled as it started giving up its heat.
"You made good time today," said Enoch.
"Lots of people didn't have any mail today," said Winslowe. "Just went
sailing past their boxes."
He dipped into the pouch on the seat beside him and brought out a
bundle tied together with a bit of string for Enoch-several daily papers and
two journals.
"You get a lot of stuff," said Winslowe, "but hardly ever letters."
"There is no one left," said Enoch, "who would want to write to me."
"But," said Winslowe, "you got a letter this time."
Enoch looked, unable to conceal surprise, and could see the end of an
envelope peeping from between the journals.
"A personal letter," said Winslowe, almost smacking his lips. "Not one
of them advertising ones. Nor a business one."
Enoch tucked the bundle underneath his arm, beside the rifle stock.
"Probably won't amount to much," he said.
"Maybe not," said Winsl!we, a sly
glitter in his eyes. He pulled a pipe and pouch from his pocket and slowly
filled the pipe. The engine block continued its crackling and popping. The
sun beat down out of a cloudless sky. The vegetation alongside the road was
coated with dust and an acrid smell rose from it.
"Hear that ginseng fellow is back again," said Winslowe,
conversationally, but unable to keep out a conspiratorial tone. "Been gone
for three, four days."
"Maybe off to sell his sang."
"You ask me," the mailman said, "he ain't hunting sang. He's hunting
something else."
"Been at it," Enoch said, "for a right smart time."
"First of all," said Winslowe, "there's barely any market for the stuff
and even if there was, there isn't any sang. Used to be a good market years
ago. Chinese used it for medicine, I guess. But now there ain't no trade
with China. I remember when I was a boy we used to go hunting it. Not easy
to find, even then. But most days a man could locate a little of it."
He leaned back in the seat, puffing serenely at his pipe.
"Funny goings on," he said.
"I never saw the man," said Enoch.
"Sneaking through the woods," said Winslowe. "Digging up different
kinds of plants. Got the idea myself he maybe is a sort of magic-man.
Getting stuff to make up charms and such. Spends a lot of his time yarning
with the Fisher tribe and drinking up their likker. You don't hear much of
it these days, but I still hold with magic. Lots of things science can't
explain. You take that Fisher girl, the dummy, she can charm off warts."
"So I've heard," said Enoch.
And more than that, he thought. She can fix a butterfly.
Winslowe hunched forward in his seat.
"Almost forgot," he said. "I have something else for you."
He lifted a brown paper parcel from the floor and handed it to Enoch.
"This ain't mail