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 he 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 dared 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. 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. 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. 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 ways to look in on the patch of pink lady 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. They were well hidden in an isolated place. Nothing could have harmed them. There had been a time, a hundred years ago, when they had bloomed on every hill. Then 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 pastured cattle and flowerhunting humans had swept them from the hills.
Some other day, he told himself, some day before first frost, he would visit them again to satisfy himself that they’d be there in 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 the pattern of the moss that grew upon its trunk. And he traced the wanderings of a silent, flitting songbird as it fluttered from 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. 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 with one hand uplifted. She held in it, at the tips of long and sensitive fingers, something that glowed with color. Her head was held alert and high, and her slender body had the same almost startled look of quiet alertness.
Enoch moved slowly forward and stopped, not more than three feet behind her.
The thing of color on her fingertips was 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 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 perhaps he had been mistaken in thinking that the second wing was injured, for now he could see that somehow it had been simply bent and distorted. Now it was straightening slowly. 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, and when she saw him there was no start of surprise. That would be quite natural. She must be accustomed to it—someone coming up behind her and suddenly being there.
Her eyes were radiant, 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, 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 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 away her 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. She was, in some way, a part of them, 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, alive, thought Enoch, as no other thing he knew had ever been alive.
The butterfly spread its wings and floated off her finger. Unconcerned, unfrightened, it fluttered up across the wild grass and the goldenrod of the field.
She pivoted to watch it until it disappeared, then 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 wellbeing, 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. 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. But Earth’s best was only a crutch that allowed a man to hobble when he couldn’t run. Whereas that of the galaxy was in itself a language, developed through millenia, with many different peoples making contributions. 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 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. Even sound failed 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. Even so, even 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 F
ISHER picked up a cup fashioned of a strip of folded birch bark, dipped it in the spring and held it out to Enoch. He stepped close and knelt to drink from it. It was not entirely watertight. Water ran from it down across his arm, wetting the cuff of shirt and jacket.
He finished 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.
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 for a moment. Then he got to his feet. 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 or so, a wild thing running in the woods. They had become friends only after a long time, although he saw her often. 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, often meeting her on his daily walks. Between the two of them had grown up the understanding of the lonely and the outcast, or something more than that. Each had a world that was his own, a world that had given him 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 the private worlds was there, providing a firm foundation for friendship.
He recalled the day he’d found her at the place where the pink lady slippers grew, just kneeling there and looking at them, not picking any of them. 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.
VI
WINSLOWE GRANT was on time.
As Enoch reached the mailbox, he sighted the dust raised by his old jalopy as it galloped along the ridge. It had been a dusty year, he thought. 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 all along the road, with the barns all red and the houses white. But now most of the farms had been abandoned. The houses and the barns were no longer red or white, but the 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. 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 box-holders. 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, a truly shiftless outfit. Their house and all the buildings were ready to fall in upon themselves. 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 hid out somewhere in the river bottoms, and they hunted and fished and trapped and were generally no account. Still, when one considered it, they were not bad neighbors. They tended to their business. They 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 who would want to write to me.”
“But,” said Winslowe, “you got a letter this time.”
ENOCH LOOKED, unable to conceal surprise. He 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.”
Enoch tucked the bundle underneath his arm, beside the rifle stock. “Probably won’t amount to much,” he said.
“Maybe not,” said Winslowe, 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 conspiratory 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 for a right smart time,” Enoch said.
“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.”
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,” he said. “It’s something that I made for you.”
“Why, thank you,” Enoch said, taking it from him.
“Go ahead,” Winslowe said, “and open it up.”
Enoch hesitated.
“Ah, hell,” said Winslowe, “don’t be bashful.”
ENOCH TORE off the paper and there it was, a full-figure wood carving of himself. It was in a blond, honey-colored wood and some twelve inches tall. It shone like golden crystal in the sun. He was walking, with his rifle tucked beneath his arm and a wind was blowing, for he was leaning slightly into it and there were wind-flutter r
ipples on his jacket and his trousers.
Enoch gasped, then stood staring at it.
-“Wins,” he said, “that’s the most beautiful piece of work I have ever seen.”
“Did it,” said the mailman, “out of that piece of wood you gave me last winter. Best piece of whittling stuff I ever fan across. Hard, and without hardly any grain. No danger of splitting or nicking or shredding. When you make a cut, you make it where you want to and it stays the way you cut it. And it takes polish as you cut. Just rub it up a little is all you need to do.”
“You don’t know,” said Enoch, “how much this means to me.”
“Over the years,” the mailman told him, “you’ve given me an awful lot of wood. Different kinds of wood no one’s ever see before. All of it top-grade stuff and beautiful. It was time I was whittling something for you.”
“And you have done a lot for me, lugging things from town.”
“Enoch,” Winslowe said, “I like you. I don’t know what you are and I ain’t about to ask, but, anyhow, I like you.”
“I wish that I could tell you what I am,” said Enoch.
“Well,” said Winslowe, moving over to plant himself behind the wheel, “it don’t matter much what any of us are, just so we get along with one another. If some of the nations would only take a lesson in how to get along from some small neighborhood like the world would be a whole lot better.”
Enoch nodded gravely. “It doesn’t look too good, does it?”
“It sure don’t,” said the mailman, starting up the car.
Enoch stood and watched the car move off, down the hill, building up its cloud of dust as it moved along.
Then he looked again at the wooden statuette of himself.
It was as if the wooden figure were walking on a hilltop, naked to the full force of the wind and bent against the gale.
Why? He wondered. What was it the mailman had seen in him to portray him as walking in the wind?
HE LAID the rifle and the mail upon a patch of dusty grass and carefully rewrapped the statuette in the piece of paper. He’d put it, he decided, on the mantlepiece. Or, perhaps better yet, on the coffee table that stood beside his favorite chair, in the corner by the desk. He wanted it, he admitted to himself, with some quiet embarrassment, where it was close at hand, where he could look at it or pick it up any time he wished. And he wondered at the deep, soul-satisfying pleasure that he got from the mailman’s gift.
The Complete Serials Page 87