Over the River and Through the Woods

by Clifford D. Simak

  Bert was a bit upset about it, so I tried to calm him down.

  “These city folks get excited easy,” I told him. “There’s nothing to it.”

  I didn’t worry much about it because I felt sure that Heath could handle things and even if Rickard did write a story for the New York papers it wouldn’t bother us. Coon Valley is a long piece from New York.

  I figured we’d probably seen and heard the last from Rickard.

  But in all my life, I’ve never been more wrong.

  About midnight or so I woke up with Helen shaking me.

  “There’s someone at the door,” she said. “Go see who it is.”

  So I shucked into my overalls and shoes and lit the lamp and went downstairs to see.

  While I’d been getting dressed there’d been some knocking at the door, but as soon as I lit the lamp it quit.

  I went to the door and opened it and there stood Rickard and he wasn’t near as chipper as he’d been in the morning.

  “Sorry to get you up,” he said, “but it seems that I’m lost.”

  “You can’t be lost,” I told him. “There isn’t but one road through the valley. One end of it ties up to Sixty and the other to Eighty-five. You follow the valley road and you’re bound to hit one or the other of them.”

  “I’ve been driving,” he told me, “for the last four hours and I can’t find either of them.”

  “Look,” I said, “all you do is drive one way or the other. You can’t get off the road. Fifteen minutes either way and you’re on the state highway.”

  I was exasperated with him, for it seemed a silly thing to do. And I don’t take kindly to being routed out at midnight.

  “But I tell you I’m lost,” he said in a sort of desperation and I could see that he was close to panic. “The wife is getting scared and the kids are dead on their feet—”

  “All right,” I told him. “Let me get on my shirt and tie my shoes. I’ll get you out of here.”

  He told me he wanted to get to Sixty, so I got out my car and told him to follow me. I was pretty sore about it, but I figured the only thing to do was to help him out. He’d upset the valley and the sooner out the better.

  I drove for thirty minutes before I began to get confused myself. That was twice as long as it should have taken to get out to the highway. But the road looked all right and there seemed to be nothing wrong, except for the time it took. So I kept on going. At the end of forty-five minutes we were back in front of my place again.

  I couldn’t figure it out for the life of me. I got out of my car and went back to Rickard’s car.

  “You see what I mean,” he said.

  “We must have got turned around,” I said.

  His wife was almost hysterical.

  “What’s going on?” she asked me in a high, shrill voice. “What is going on around here?”

  “We’ll try again,” I said. “We’ll drive slower this time so we don’t make the same mistake.”

  I drove slower and this time it took an hour to get back to the farm. So we tried for Eighty-five and forty minutes later were right back where we started.

  “I give up,” I told them. “Get out and come in. We’ll fix up some beds. You can spend the night and we’ll get you out come light.”

  I cooked up some coffee and found stuff to make sandwiches while Helen fixed up beds to take care of the five of them.

  “The dog can sleep out here in the kitchen,” she said.

  I got an apple box and quilt and fixed the dog a bed.

  The dog was a nice little fellow, a wire-hair who was full of fun, and the Rickard kids were about as fine a bunch of kids as you’d find anywhere.

  Mrs. Rickard was all set to have hysterics, but Helen got her to drink some coffee and I wouldn’t let them talk about not being able to get out.

  “Come daylight,” I told them, “and there’ll be nothing to it.”

  After breakfast they were considerably calmed down and seemed to have no doubt they could find Number Sixty. So they started out alone, but in an hour were back again. I took my car and started out ahead of them and I don’t mind admitting I could feel bare feet walking up and down my spine.

  I watched closely and all at once I realized that somehow we were headed back into the valley instead of heading out of it. So I stopped the car and we turned our cars around and headed back in the right direction. But in ten minutes we were turned around again. We tried again and this time we fairly crawled, trying to spot the place where we got turned around. But we could never spot it.

  We went back to my place and I called up Bert and Jingo and asked them to come over.

  Both of them tried to lead the Rickards out, one at a time, then the two of them together, but they were no better at it than I was. Then I tried it alone, without the Rickards following me, and I had no trouble at all. I was out to highway Sixty and back in half an hour. So we thought maybe the jinx was broken and I tried to lead out the Rickard car, but it was no soap.

  By mid-afternoon we knew the answer. Any of the natives could get out of the valley, but the Rickards couldn’t.

  Helen put Mrs. Rickard to bed and fed her some sedative and I went over to see Heath.

  He was glad to see me and he listened to me, but all the time I was talking to him I kept remembering how one time I had wondered if maybe he could stretch out time. When I had finished he was silent for a while, as if he might have been going over some decision just to be certain that it was right.

  “It’s a strange business, Calvin,” he said finally, “and it doesn’t seem right the Rickards should be trapped in this valley if they don’t want to stay here.

  “Yet, it’s a fortunate thing for us, actually, Rickard was planning on writing a story about us, and if he’d written as he planned to, there’d been a lot of attention paid us. There would have been a crowd of people coming in—other newspapermen and government men and people from the universities and the idly curious. They’d have upset our lives and some of them would have offered us big sums of money for our farms, much more than they’re worth, and all of it would spoil the valley for us. I don’t know about you, but I like the valley as it is. It reminds me of…well, of another place.”

  “Rickard still can telephone that story,” I told him, “or he can mail it out. Just keeping Rickard here won’t prevent that story being printed.”

  “Somehow I think it will,” he said. “I am fairly certain he won’t telephone it or send it in the mails.”

  I had come half prepared to go to bat for Rickard, but I thought over what Heath had pointed out to me and I didn’t do it.

  I saw that if there were some principle or power which kept the valley healthy and insured good weather and made living pleasant, why, then, the rest of the world would be hell-bent to use the same principle or power. It might have been selfish of me, but I felt fairly certain the principle or power couldn’t be spread thin enough to cover all the world. And if anyone were to have it, I wanted it kept right here, where it rightfully belonged.

  And there was another thing: If the world should learn there was such a power or principle and if we couldn’t share it or refused to share it, then all the world would be sore at us and we’d live in the center of a puddle of hatred.

  I went back home and had a talk with Rickard and I didn’t try to hide anything from him. He was all set to go and have it out with Heath, but I advised against it. I pointed out that he didn’t have a shred of proof and he’d only make himself look silly, for Heath would more than likely act as if he didn’t know what he was getting at. After quite a tussle, he took my advice.

  The Rickards stayed on at our place for several days and occasionally Rickard and I would make a trial run just to test the situation out, but there was no change.

  Finally Bert and Jingo came over and we had a council of war with the Rickard family. By this time Mrs. Rickard was taking it somewhat better and the Rickard kids were happy with the outdoor life and the Rickard dog was busily
engaged in running all the valley rabbits down to skin and bones.

  “There’s the old Chandler place up at the head of the valley,” said Jingo. “No one’s been living there for quite a while, but it’s in good shape. It could be fixed up so it was comfortable.”

  “But I can’t stay here,” protested Rickard. “I can’t settle down here.”

  “Who said anything about settling down?” asked Bert. “You just got to wait it out. Some day whatever is wrong will get straightened out and then you can get away.”

  “But my job,” said Rickard.

  Mrs. Rickard spoke up then. You could see she didn’t like the situation any better than he did, but she had the queer, practical, everyday logic that a woman at times surprised a man by showing. She knew that they were stuck here in the valley and she was out to make the best of it.

  “Remember that book you’re always threatening to write?” she asked. “Maybe this is it.”

  That did it.

  Rickard mooned around for a while, making up his mind, although it already was made up. Then he began talking about the peace in the valley—the peace and quietness and the lack of hurry—just the place to write a book.

  The neighbors got together and fixed up the house on the old Chandler place and Rickard called his office and made some excuse and got a leave of absence and wrote a letter to his bank, transferring whatever funds he had. Then he settled down to write.

  Apparently in his phone calls and his letter writing he never even hinted at the real reason for his staying—perhaps because it would have sounded downright silly—for there was no ruckus over his failure to go back.

  The valley settled down to its normal life again and it felt good after all the uproar. The neighbors shopped for the Rickards and carried out from town all the groceries and other things they needed and once in a while Rickard took the car and had a try at finding the state highways.

  But mostly he wrote and in about a year he sold this book of his. Probably you have read it: You Could Hear the Silence. Made him a hunk of money. But his New York publishers still are going slowly mad trying to understand why he steadfastly refuses to stir out of the valley. He has refused lecture tours, has declined dinners in his honor and turned down all the other glitter that goes with writing a best-seller.

  The book didn’t change Rickard at all. By the time he sold it he was well liked in the valley and seemed to like everyone—except possibly Heath. He stayed rather cold to Heath. He used to do a lot of walking, to get exercise, he said, although I think that he thought up most of his book out on those walks. And he’d stop by and chew the fat when he was out on those walks and that way everyone got to know him. He used to talk a lot about when he could get out of the valley and all of us were beginning to feel sorry that a time would come when he would leave, for the Rickards had turned out to be good neighbors. There must be something about the valley that brings out the best there is in everyone. As I have said before, we have yet to get a bad neighbor and that is something most neighborhoods can’t say.

  One day I had stopped on my way from town to talk a while with Heath and as we stood talking, up the road came Rickard. You could see he wasn’t going anywhere, but was just out for a walk.

  He stopped and talked with us for a few minutes, then suddenly he said, “You know, we’ve made up our minds that we would like to stay here.”

  “Now, that is fine,” said Heath.

  “Grace and I were talking about it the other night,” said Rickard. “About the time when we could get out of here. Then suddenly we stopped our talking and looked at one another and we knew right then and there we didn’t want to leave. It’s been so peaceful and the kids like the school here so much better than in the city and the people are so fine we couldn’t bear to leave.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that,” Heath told him. “But it seems to me you’ve been sticking pretty close. You ought to take the wife and kids in town to see a show.”

  And that was it. It was as simple as all that.

  Life goes on in the valley as it always has, except it’s even better now. All of us are healthy. We don’t even seem to get colds any more. When we need rain we get it and when there’s need for sun the sun is sure to shine. We aren’t getting rich, for you can’t get rich with all this Washington interference, but we’re making a right good living. Rickard is working on his second book and once in a while I go out at night and try to locate the star Heath showed me that evening long ago.

  But we still get some publicity now and then. The other night I was listening to my favorite newscaster and he had an item he had a lot of fun with.

  “Is there really such a place as Coon Valley?” he asked and you could hear the chuckle just behind the words. “If there is, the government would like to know about it. The maps insist there is and there are statistics on the books that say it’s a place where there is no sickness, where the climate is ideal, where there’s never a crop failure—a land of milk and honey. Investigators have gone out to seek the truth of this and they can’t find the place, although people in nearby communities insist there’s such a valley. Telephone calls have been made to people listed as residents of the valley, but the calls can’t be completed. Letters have been written to them, but the letters are returned to the sender for one or another of the many reasons the post office has for non-delivery. Investigators have waited in nearby trading centers, but Coon Valley people never came to town while the investigators were there. If there is such a place and if the things the statistics say of it are true, the government would be very interested, for there must be data in the valley that could be studied and applied to other sectors. We have no way of knowing whether this broadcast can reach the valley—if it is any more efficient than investigators or telephone or the post service. But if it does—and if there is such a place as Coon Valley—and if one of its residents should be listening, won’t he please speak up!”

  He chuckled then, chuckled very briefly, and went on to tell the latest rumor about Khrushchev.

  I shut off the radio and sat in my chair and thought about the times when for several days no one could find his way out of the valley and of the other times when the telephones went dead for no apparent reason. And I remembered how we’d talked about it among ourselves and wondered if we should speak to Heath about it, but had in each case decided not to, since we felt that Heath knew what he was doing and that we could trust his judgment.

  It’s inconvenient at times, of course, but there are a lot of compensations. There hasn’t been a magazine solicitor in the valley for more than a dozen years—nor an insurance salesman, either.

  Over the River and Through the Woods

  The two children came trudging down the lane in apple-canning time, when the first goldenrods were blooming and the wild asters large in bud. They looked, when she first saw them, out the kitchen window, like children who were coming home from school, for each of them was carrying a bag in which might have been their books. Like Charles and James, she thought, like Alice and Maggie—but the time when those four had trudged the lane on their daily trips to school was in the distant past. Now they had children of their own who made their way to school.

  She turned back to the stove to stir the cooking apples, for which the wide-mouthed jars stood waiting on the table, then once more looked out the kitchen window. The two of them were closer now and she could see that the boy was the older of the two—ten, perhaps, and the girl no more than eight.

  They might be going past, she thought, although that did not seem too likely, for the lane led to this farm and to nowhere else.

  They turned off the lane before they reached the barn and came sturdily trudging up the path that led to the house. There was no hesitation in them; they knew where they were going.

  She stepped to the screen door of the kitchen as they came onto the porch and they stopped before the door and stood looking up at her.

  The boy said, “You are our grandma. Papa said we
were to say at once that you were our grandma.”

  “But that’s not…” she said, and stopped. She had been about to say that it was impossible that she was their grandma. And, looking down into the sober, childish faces, she was glad that she had not said the words.

  “I am Ellen,” said the girl, in a piping voice.

  “Why, that is strange,” the woman said. “That is my name, too.”

  The boy said, “My name is Paul.”

  She pushed open the door for them and they came in, standing silently in the kitchen, looking all about them as if they’d never seen a kitchen.

  “It’s just like Papa said,” said Ellen. “There’s the stove and the churn and…”

  The boy interrupted her. “Our name is Forbes,” he said.

  This time the woman couldn’t stop herself. “Why, that’s impossible,” she said. “That is our name, too.”

  The boy nodded solemnly. “Yes, we knew it was.”

  “Perhaps,” the woman said, “you’d like some milk and cookies.”

  “Cookies!” Ellen squealed, delighted.

  “We don’t want to be any trouble,” said the boy. “Papa said we were to be no trouble.”

  “He said we should be good,” piped Ellen.

  “I am sure you will be,” said the woman, “and you are no trouble.”

  In a little while, she thought, she’d get it straightened out.

  She went to the stove and set the kettle with the cooking apples to one side, where they would simmer slowly.

  “Sit down at the table,” she said. “I’ll get the milk and cookies.”

  She glanced at the clock, ticking on the shelf. Four o’clock, almost. In just a little while the men would come in from the fields. Jackson Forbes would know what to do about this; he had always known.

  They climbed up on two chairs and sat there solemnly, staring all about them, at the ticking clock, at the woodstove with the fire glow showing through its draft, at the wood piled in the wood box, at the butter churn standing in the corner.