No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) (31 page)

“Thank you, Johnny,” they said. “It was nice of you to trade with us.”

He reached out his hand and took the thing they’d traded him and even in the darkness it flashed with hidden fire. He turned it in the palm of his hand and saw that it was some sort of jewel, many-faceted, and that the glow came from inside of it and that it burned with many different colors.

It wasn’t until he saw how much light came from it that he realized how long he’d stayed and how dark it was and when he saw that he jumped to his feet and ran, without waiting to say goodbye.

It was too dark now to look for the cows and he hoped they had started home alone and that he could catch up with them and bring them in. He’d tell Uncle Eb that he’d had a hard time rounding them up. He’d tell Uncle Eb that the two heifers had broken out of the fence and he had to get them back. He’d tell Uncle Eb—he’d tell—he’d tell—

His breath gasped with his running and his heart was thumping so it seemed to shake him and fear rode on his shoulders—fear of the awful thing he’d done—of this final unforgivable thing after all the others, after not going to the spring to get the water, after missing the two heifers the night before, after the matches in his pocket.

He did not find the cows going home alone—he found them in the barnyard and he knew that they’d been milked and he knew he’d stayed much longer and that it was far worse than he had imagined.

He walked up the rise to the house, shaking now with fear. There was a light in the kitchen and he knew that they were waiting.

He came into the kitchen and they sat at the table, facing him, waiting for him, with the lamplight on their faces and their faces were so hard that they looked like graven stone.

Uncle Eb stood up, towering toward the ceiling, and you could see the muscles stand out on his arms, with the sleeves rolled to the elbow.

He reached for Johnny and Johnny ducked away, but the hand closed on the back of his neck and the fingers wrapped around his throat and lifted him and shook him with a silent savagery.

“I’ll teach you,” Uncle Eb was saying through clenched teeth. “I’ll teach you. I’ll teach you …”

Something fell upon the floor and rolled toward the corner, leaving a trail of fire as it rolled along the floor.

Uncle Eb stopped shaking him and just stood there holding him for an instant, then dropped him to the floor.

“That fell out of your pocket,” said Uncle Eb. “What is it?”

Johnny backed away, shaking his head.

He wouldn’t tell what it was. He’d never tell. No matter what Uncle Eb might do to him, he’d never tell. Not even if he killed him.

Uncle Eb stalked the jewel, bent swiftly and picked it up. He carried it back to the table and dropped it there and bent over, looking at it, sparkling in the light.

Aunt Em leaned forward in her chair to look at it.

“What in the world!” she said.

They bent there for a moment, staring at the jewel, their eyes bright and shining, their bodies tense, their breath rasping in the silence. The world could have come to an end right then and there and they’d never noticed.

Then they straightened up and turned to look at Johnny, turning away from the jewel as if it didn’t interest them any longer, as if it had had a job to do and had done that job and no longer was important. There was something wrong with them—no, not wrong, but different.

“You must be starved,” Aunt Em said to Johnny. “I’ll warm you up some supper. Would you like some eggs?”

Johnny gulped and nodded.

Uncle Eb sat down, not paying any attention to the jewel at all.

“You know,” he said, “I saw a jackknife uptown the other day. Just the kind you want …”

Johnny scarcely heard him.

He just stood there, listening to the friendliness and love that hummed through all the house.

The Whistling Well

First published in 1980 in the original anthology
Dark Forces
, edited by Kirby McCauley, who at the time was Clifford Simak’s agent, this story is one that relies heavily on its author’s boyhood. I suspect that as an intelligent and imaginative boy living in a countryside filled with mysterious hollows, cliffs, and caves, with extensive reaches of dark forest, and vistas from which one could see the Wisconsin River flowing from its deep-cut valley to the even larger Mississippi, Cliff developed the habit of looking at his own life, and at the people and places around him, and saying—as adventurous children do—“This is boring, but what if …” I think he wandered the forests and ridges and peopled them, in his mind, with Native Americans and goblins and soldiers and, as his world expanded, with aliens and, yes, dinosaurs.

There actually was a whistling well on Cliff’s grandfather’s farm.

—dww

He walked the ridge, so high against the sky, so windswept, so clean, so open, so far-seeing. As if the very land itself, the soil, the stone, were reaching up, standing on tiptoe, to lift itself, stretching toward the sky. So high that one, looking down, could see the backs of hawks that swung in steady hunting circles above the river valley.

The highness was not all. There was, as well, the sense of ancientness and the smell of time. And the intimacy, as if this great high ridge might be transferring to him its personality. A personality, he admitted to himself, for which he had a liking, a thing that he could wrap, as a cloak, around himself.

And through it all, he heard the creaking of the rocker as it went back and forth, with the hunched and shriveled, but still energetic, old lady crouched upon it, rocking back and forth, so small, so dried up, so emaciated that she seemed to have shrunken into the very structure of the chair, her feet dangling, not reaching the floor. Like a child in a great-grandfather chair. Her feet not touching, not even reaching out a toe to make the rocker go. And, yet, the rocker kept on rocking, never stopping. How the hell, Thomas Parker asked himself, had she made the rocker go?

He had reached the ultimate point of the ridge where steep, high limestone cliffs plunged down toward the river. Cliffs that swung east and from this point continued along the river valley, a stony rampart that fenced in the ridge against the deepness of the valley.

He turned and looked back along the ridge and there, a mile or so away, stood the spidery structure of the windmill, the great wheel facing west, toward him, its blades a whir of silver movement in the light of the setting sun.

The windmill, he knew, was clattering and clanking, but from this distance, he could hear no sound of it, for the strong wind blowing from the west so filled his ears that he could pick up no sound but the blowing of the wind. The wind whipped at his loose jacket and made his pants legs ripple and he could feel its steady pressure at his back.

And, yet, within his mind, if not within his ears, he still could hear the creaking of the rocker, moving back and forth within that room where a bygone gentility warred against the brusqueness of present time. The fireplace was built of rosy brick, with white paneling placed around the brick, the mantel loaded with old figurines, with framed photographs from another time, with an ornate, squatty clock that chimed each quarter hour. There had been furniture of solid oak, a threadbare carpet on the floor. The drapes at the large bow windows, with deep window seats, were of some heavy material, faded over the years to a nondeterminate coloring. Paintings with heavy gilt frames hung on the walls, but the gloom within the room was so deep that there was no way of seeing what they were.

The woman-of-all-work, the companion, the housekeeper, the practical nurse, the cook, brought in the tea, with bread-and-butter sandwiches piled on one plate and delicate cakes ranged on another. She had set the tray on the table in front of the rocking old lady and then had gone away, back into the dark and mysterious depths of the ancient house.

The old lady spoke in her brittle voice, “Thomas,” she said, “if you will pour. Two lumps for me, no cream.”

Awkwardly, he had risen from the horsehair chair. Awkwardly he had poured. He had never poured before. There was a feeling that he should do it charmingly and delicately and with a certain genteel flair, but he did not have the flair. He had nothing that this house or this old lady had. His was another world.

He had been summoned here, imperatively summoned, in a crisp little note on paper that had a faint scent of lavender, the script of the writing more bold than he would have expected, the letters a flowing dignity in old copperplate.

I shall expect you
, she had written,
on the afternoon of the 17th. We have matters to discuss.

A summons from the past and from seven hundred miles away and he had responded, driving his beaten-up, weather-stained, lumbering camper through the flaming hills of a New England autumn.

The wind still tugged and pushed at him, the windmill blades still a swirl of movement and below him, above the river, the small, dark shape of the circling hawk. Autumn then, he told himself, and here another autumn, with the trees of the river valley, the trees of other far-off vistas, taking on the color of the season.

The ridge itself was bare of trees, except for a few that still clustered around the sites of homesteads, the homesteads now gone, burned down or weathered away or fallen with the passage of the years. In time long past, there might have been trees, but more than a hundred years ago, if there had been any, they had fallen to the ax to clear the land for fields. The fields were still here, but no longer fields; they had known no plow for decades.

He stood at the end of the ridge and looked back across it, seeing all the miles he had tramped that day, exploring it, getting to know it, although why he felt he should get to know it, he did not understand. But there was some sort of strange compulsion within him that, until this moment, he had not even questioned.

Ancestors of his had trod this land, had lived on it and slept on it, had procreated on it, had known it as he, in a few short days, would never know it. Had known it and had left. Fleeing from some undefinable thing. And that was wrong, he told himself, that was very wrong. The information he’d been given had been somehow garbled. There was nothing here to flee from. Rather, there was something here to live for, to stay for—the closeness to the sky, the cleansing action of the wind, the feeling of intimacy with the soil, the stone, the air, the storm, the very sky itself.

Here his ancestors had walked the land, the last of many who had walked it. For millions of years unknown, perhaps unsuspected, creatures had walked along this ridge. The land was unchanging, geologically ancient, a sentinel of land standing as a milepost amidst other lands that had been forever changing. No great mountain-building surges had distorted it, no glacial action had ground it down, no intercontinental seas had crept over it. For hundreds of millions of years, it had been a freestanding land. It had stayed as it was through all that time, with only the slow and subtle changes brought about by weathering.

He had sat in that room from out of the past and across the table from him had been the rocking woman, rocking even as she drank the tea and nibbled at the bread-and-butter sandwich.

“Thomas,” she had said, speaking in her old brittle voice, “I have a job for you to do. It’s a job that you must do, that only you can do. It’s something that’s important to me.”

Important to her. Not to someone else, to no one else but her. It made no difference to whom else it might be important or unimportant. To her, it was important and that was all that counted.

He said, amused at her, at her rocking and her intensity, the amusement struggling up through the out-of-placeness of the room, the woman and the house, “Yes, Auntie, what kind of job? If it’s one that I can do …”

“You can do it,” she said, tartly. “Thomas, don’t get cute with me. It’s something you can do. I want you to write a history of our family, of our branch of the Parkers. I am aware there are many Parkers in the world, but it’s our direct line in which my interest lies. You can ignore all collateral branches.”

He had stuttered at the thought. “But, Auntie, that would take a long time. It might take years.”

“I’ll pay you for your time,” she’d said. “You write books about other things. Why not about the family? You’ve just finished a book about paleontology. You spent three years or more on that. You’ve written books on archaeology, on the old Egyptians, on the ancient trade routes of the world. Even a book on old folklore and superstitions and, if you don’t mind my saying so, that was the silliest book I ever read. Popular science, you call it, but it takes a lot of work. You talk to many different people, you dig into dusty records. You could do as much for me.”

“But there’d be no market for such a book. No one would be interested.”

“I would be interested,” she said sharply, the brittle voice cracking. “And who said anything about publication? I simply want to know. I want to know, Thomas, where we came from and who we are and what kind of folks we are. I’ll pay you for the job. I’ll insist on paying you. I’ll pay you …”

And she named a sum that quite took his breath away. He had never dreamed she had that kind of money.

“And expenses,” she said. “You must keep a very close accounting of everything you spend.”

He tried to be gentle with her, for quite obviously she was mad. “But, Auntie, you can get it at a much cheaper figure. There are genealogy people who make a business of tracing back old family histories.”

She sniffed at him. “I’ve had them do the tracing. I’ll give you what I have. That should make it easier for you.”

“But if you have that—”

“I suspect what they have told me. The record is unclear. To my mind, it is. They try too hard to give you something for your money. They set out to please you. They gild the lily, Thomas. They tell about the manor house in Shropshire, but I’m not sure there ever was a manor house. It sounds just a bit too pat. I want to know if there ever was or not. There was a merchant in London. He dealt in cutlery, they say. That’s not enough for me; I must know more of him. Even in our New England, the record is a fuzzy one. Another thing, Thomas. There are no horse thieves mentioned. There are no gallows birds. If there are horse thieves and gallows birds, I want to know of them.”

“But, why, Auntie? Why go to all the bother? If it is written, it will never be published. No one but you and I will know. I hand you the manuscript and that is all that happens.”

“Thomas,” she had said, “I am a mad old woman, a senile old woman, with only a few years left of madness and senility. I should hate to have to beg you.”

“You will not have to beg me,” he had said. “My feet, my brain, my typewriter are for hire. But I don’t understand.”

“Don’t try to understand,” she’d told him. “I’ve had my way my entire life. Let me continue to.”

And, now, it had finally come to this. The long trail of the Parkers had finally come down to this high and windswept ridge with its clattering windmill and the little clumps of trees that had stood around the farmsteads that were no longer there, to the fields that had long been fallow fields, to the little spring beside which he had parked the camper.

He stood there above the cliffs and looked down the slope to where a tangled mass of boulders, some of them barn-size or better, clustered on the hillside, with a few clumps of paper birch growing among them.

Strange, he thought. These were the only trees, other than the homestead trees, that grew upon the ridge, and the only boulder clump. Not, certainly, the residue of glaciation, for the many Ice Age glaciers that had come down across the Middle West had stopped north of here. This country, for many miles around, was known as the driftless area, a magic little pocket that, for some reason not yet known, had been bypassed by the glaciers while they crunched far south on each side of it.

Perhaps, at one time, he told himself, there had been an extrusive rock formation jutting from the ridge, now reduced by weathering to the boulder cluster.

Idly, with no reason to do so, without really intending to, he went down the slope to the cluster with its growth of paper birch.

Close up, the boulders were fully as large as they had appeared from the top of the ridge. Lying among the half dozen or so larger ones were many others, broken fragments that had been chipped off by frost or running water, perhaps aided by the spalling effect of sunlight.

Thomas grinned to himself as he climbed among them, working his way through the cracks and intervals that separated them. A great place for kids to play, he thought. A castle, a fort, a mountain to childish imagination. Blowing dust and fallen leaves through the centuries had found refuge among them and had formed a soil in which were rooted many plants, including an array of wild asters and goldenrod, now coming into bloom.

He found, toward the center of the cluster, a cave or what amounted to a cave. Two of the larger boulders, tipped together, formed a roofed tunnel that ran for a dozen feet or more, six feet wide, the sides of the boulders sloping inward to meet some eight feet above the tunnel’s floor. In the center of the tunnel lay a heaped pile of stones. Some kid, perhaps, Thomas told himself, had gathered them many years ago and had hidden them here as an imagined treasure trove.

Walking forward, he stooped and picked up a fistful of the stones. As his fingers touched them, he knew there was something wrong. These were not ordinary stones. They felt polished and sleek beneath his fingertips, with an oily texture to them.

A year or more ago, in a museum somewhere in the west—perhaps Colorado, although he could not be sure—he had first seen and handled other stones like these.

“Gastroliths,” the grey-bearded curator had told him. “Gizzard stones. We think they came from the stomachs of herbivorous dinosaurs—perhaps all dinosaurs. We can’t be certain.”