No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) (33 page)

“If you’re going to write your book the way it should be written,” the old black man had said, “you got to look deeper than the Devil. I don’t suppose I should be saying this, but since you promise you will not use my name …”

“I won’t use your name,” Thomas had told him.

“I was a preacher for years,” the old man said. “And in those years, I learned plenty on the Devil. I held him up in scorn; I threatened people with him. I said, ‘If you don’t behave yourselves, Old Devil, he will drag you down them long, long stairs, hauling you by your heels, with your head bumping on the steps, while you scream and plead and cry. But Old Devil, he won’t pay no attention to your screaming and your pleading. He won’t even hear you. He’ll just haul you down those stairs and cast you in the pit.’ The Devil, he was something those people could understand. They’d heard of him for years. They knew what he looked like and the kind of manners that he had …”

“Did it ever help?” Thomas had asked. “Threatening them with the Devil, I mean.”

“I can’t be sure. I think sometimes it did. Not always, but sometimes. It was worth the try.”

“But you tell me I must go beyond the Devil.”

“You white folks don’t know. You don’t feel it in your bones. You’re too far from the jungle. My people, we know. Or some of us do. We’re only a few lifetimes out of Africa.”

“You mean—”

“I mean you must go way back. Back beyond the time when there were any men at all. Back to the older eons. The Devil is a Christian evil—a gentle evil, if you will, a watered-down version of real evil, a shadow of what there was and maybe is. He came to us by way of Babylon and Egypt and even the Babylonians and Egyptians had forgotten, or had never known, what evil really was. I tell you the Devil isn’t a patch on the idea he is based on. Only a faint glimmer of the evil that was sensed by early men—not seen, but sensed, in those days when men chipped the first flint tools, while he fumbled with the idea of the use of fire.”

“You’re saying that there was evil before man? That figures of evil are not man’s imagining?”

The old man grinned, a bit lopsidely, at him, with still a serious grin. “Why should man,” he asked, “take to himself the sole responsibility for the concept of evil?”

He’d spent, Thomas remembered, a pleasant afternoon on the porch, in the shade of the chinaberry tree, talking with the old man and drinking elderberry wine. And, at other times and in other places, he had talked with other men and from what they’d told him had been able to write a short and not too convincing chapter on the proposition that a primal evil may have been the basis for all the evil figures mankind had conjured up. The book had sold well, still was selling. It had been worth all the work he had put into it. And the best part of it was that he had escaped scot-free. He did not believe in the Devil or any of the rest of it. Although, reading his book, a lot of other people did.

The fire burned down, the bottle was appreciably less full than when he’d started on it. The landscape lay mellow in the faint moonlight. Tomorrow, he told himself, I’ll spend tomorrow here, then I’ll be off again. Aunt’s Elsie’s job is finished.

He got up from the chair and went in to bed. Just before he went to bed, it seemed to him that he could hear, again, the creaking and the scuffing of Auntie’s rocking chair.

After breakfast, he climbed the ridge again to the site of the Parker homestead. He’d walked past it on his first quick tour of the ridge, only pausing long enough to identify it.

A massive maple tree stood at one corner of the cellar hole. Inside the hole, raspberry bushes had taken root. Squatting on the edge of the hole, he used a stick he had picked up to pry into the loam. Just beneath the surface lay flakes of charcoal, adding a blackness to the soil.

He found a bed of rosemary. Picking a few of the leaves, he crushed them in his fingers, releasing the sharp smell of mint. To the east of the cellar hole, a half dozen apple trees still survived, scraggly, branches broken by the winds, but still bearing small fruit. He picked one of the apples and when he bit into it, he sensed a taste out of another time, a flavor not to be found in an apple presently marketed. He found a still flourishing patch of rhubarb, a few scrawny rosebushes with red hips waiting for the winter birds, a patch of iris so crowded that corms had been pushed above the surface of the ground.

Standing beside the patch of iris, he looked around. Here, at one time, more than a century ago, his ancestor had built a homestead—a house, a barn, a chicken house, a stable, a granary, a corncrib, and perhaps other buildings, had settled down as a farmer, a soldier returned from the wars, had lived here for a term of years and then had left. Not only he but all the others who had lived on this ridge as well.

On this, his last trip to complete the charge that had been put upon him by that strange old lady hunched in her rocking chair, he had stopped at the little town of Patch Grove to ask his way. A couple of farmers sitting on a bench outside a barbershop had looked at him—reticent, disbelieving, perhaps somewhat uneasy.

“Parker’s Ridge?” they’d asked. “You want to know the way to Parker’s Ridge?”

“I have business there,” he’d told them.

“There ain’t no one to do business with on Parker’s Ridge,” they’d told him. “No one ever goes there.”

But when he’d insisted, they’d finally told him. “There’s only one ridge, really,” they’d said, “but it’s divided into two parts. You go north of town until you reach a cemetery. Just short of the cemetery, you take a left. That puts you on Military Ridge. You keep to the high ground. There are some roads turning off, but you stay on top the ridge.”

“But that you say is Military Ridge. What I want is Parker’s Ridge.”

“One and the same,” said one of the men. “When you reach the end of it, that’s Parker’s Ridge. It stands high above the river. Ask along the way.”

So he’d gone north of town and taken a left before he reached the cemetery. The ridge road was a secondary route, a farm road, either unpaved or paved so long ago and so long neglected that it bore little trace of paving. Small farms were strung along it, little ridgetop farms, groups of falling-down buildings surrounded by scant and runty fields. Farm dogs raced out to bark at him as he passed the farms.

Five miles down the road a man was taking mail out of a mailbox. Thomas pulled up. “I’m looking for Parker’s Ridge,” he said. “Am I getting close?”

The man stuffed the three or four letters he’d taken from the box into the rear pocket of his overalls. He stepped down to the road and stood beside the car. He was a large man, rawboned. His face was creased and wrinkled and wore a week of beard.

“You’re almost there,” he said. “Another three miles or so. But would you tell me, stranger, why you want to go there?”

“Just to look around,” said Thomas.

The man shook his head. “Nothing there to look at. No one there. Used to be people there. Half a dozen farms. People living on them, working the farms. But that was long ago. Sixty years ago—no, maybe more than that. Now they all are gone. Someone owns the land, but I don’t know who. Someone runs cattle here. Goes out West in the spring to buy them, runs them on pasture until fall, then rounds them up and feeds them grain, finishing them for the market.”

“You’re sure there’s no one there?”

“No one there now. Used to be. Buildings, too. Houses and old farm buildings. Not any longer. Some of them burned. Kids, most likely, setting a match to them. Kids probably thought they were doing right. The ridge has a bad reputation.”

“What do you mean, a bad reputation? How come a bad—”

“There’s a whistling well, for one thing. Although I don’t know what the well has to do with it.”

“I don’t understand. I’ve never heard of a whistling well.”

The man laughed. “That was old Ned Parker’s well. He was one of the first settlers out there on the ridge. Come home from the Civil War and bought land out there. Got it cheap. Civil War veterans could buy government land at a dollar an acre and, at that time, this was all government land. Ned could have bought rich, level land out on Blake’s Prairie, some twenty miles or so from here, for the same dollar an acre. But not him. He knew what he wanted. He wanted a place where timber would be handy, where there’d be a running spring for water, where he’d be close to hunting and fishing.”

“I take it the place didn’t work out too well.”

“Worked out all right except for the water. There was one big spring he counted on, but a few dry years came along and the spring began running dry. It never did run dry, but Ned was afraid it would. It is still running. But Ned, he wasn’t going to be caught without water, so, by God, he drilled a well. Right on top that ridge. Got in a well driller and put him to work. Hit a little water, but not much. Went deeper and deeper and still not enough. Until the well driller said, ‘Ned, the only way to get water is to go down to the river level. But the rest of the way it is going to cost you a dollar and a quarter a foot.’ Now, in those days, a dollar and a quarter was a lot of money, but Ned had so much money sunk in the well already that he said to go ahead. So the well driller went ahead. Deepest well anyone had ever heard of. People used to come and just stand there, watching the well being drilled. My grandfather told me this, having heard it from his father. When the hole reached river level, they did find water, a lot of water. A well that would never run dry. But pumping was a problem. That water had to be pumped straight up a long way. So Ned bought the biggest, heaviest, strongest windmill that was made and that windmill set him back a lot of cash. But Ned never complained. He wanted water and now he had it. The windmill never gave no trouble, like a lot of windmills did. It was built to last. It’s still there and still running, although it’s not pumping water anymore. The pump shaft broke years ago. So did the vane control, the lever to shut off the wheel. Now that mill runs all the time. There’s no way to shut it off. Running without grease, it’s gotten noisier and noisier. Some day, of course, it will stop, just break down.”

“You told me a whistling well. You told me everything else, but nothing about a whistling well.”

“Now that’s a funny thing,” the farmer said. “At times, the well whistled. Standing on the platform, over the bore, you can feel a rush of wind. When the rush gets strong enough, it is said to make a whistling sound. People say it still does, although I couldn’t say. Some people used to say it only whistled when the wind was from the north, but I can’t swear to that, either. You know how people are. They always have answers for everything whether they know anything about it or not. I understand that those who said it only whistled when the wind was from the north explained it by saying that a strong north wind would blow directly against the cliffs facing the river. There are caves and crevices in those cliffs and they said some of the crevices ran back into the ridge and that the well cut through some of them. So a north wind would blow straight back along the crevices until it hit the well and then come rushing up the bore.”

“It sounds a bit far-fetched to me.” said Thomas.

The farmer scratched his head. “Well, I don’t know. I can’t tell you. It’s only what the old-time people said. And they’re all gone now. Left their places many years ago. Just pulled up and left.”

“All at once?”

“Can’t tell you that, either. I don’t think so. Not all in a bunch. First one family and then another, until they all were gone. That happened long ago. No one would remember now. No one knows why they left. There are strange stories—not stories, really, just things you hear. I don’t know what went on. No one killed, so far as I know. No one hurt. Just strange things. I tell you, young man, unless I had urgent business there, I wouldn’t venture out on Parker’s Ridge. Neither would any of my neighbors. None of us could give you reasons, but we wouldn’t go.”

“I’ll be careful,” Thomas promised.

Although, as it turned out, there’d been no reason to be careful. Rather, once he’d reached the ridge, he’d felt that inexplicable sense of belonging, of being in a place where he was supposed to be. Walking the ridge, he’d felt this barren backbone of land had transferred, or was in the process of transferring, its personality to him and he’d taken it and made it fit him like a cloak, wrapping himself in it, asking himself: Can a land have a personality?

The road, once Military Ridge had ended beyond the last farmhouse and Parker’s Ridge began, had dwindled to a track, only a grassy hint that a road once had existed there. Far down the ridge he had sighted the windmill, a spidery construction reared against the sky, its wheel clanking in the breeze. He had driven on past it and then had stopped the camper, walking down the slope until he had located the still-flowing spring at the head of the ravine. Going back to the camper, he had driven it off the track and down the sloping hillside, to park it beneath the cottonwood that stood above the spring. That had been the day before yesterday and he had one more day left before he had to leave.

Standing now, beside the iris bed, he looked around him and tried to imagine the kind of place this may have been—to see it with the eyes of his old ancestor, home from the wars and settled on acres of his own. There would still have been deer, for this old man had wanted hunting, and it had not been until the great blizzard of the early 1880s that the wild game of this country had been decimated. There would have been wolves to play havoc with the sheep, for in those days, everyone kept sheep. There would have been guinea fowls whistling in the hedgerows, for, in those days, as well, everyone kept guineas. And the chances were that there would have been peacocks, geese, ducks, chickens, wandering the yards. Good horses in the stable, for everyone in those days placed great emphasis on good horses. And, above all, the great pride in one’s own acreage, in the well-kept barns, the herds of cattle, the wheat, the corn, the newly planted orchard. And the old man, himself, he wondered—what kind of man was old Ned Parker, walking the path from the house up to the windmill. A stout and stocky man, perhaps, for the Parkers ran to stocky. An erect old man, for he’d been four years a soldier in the Union Army. Walking, perhaps, with his hands clasped behind his back, and head thrown back to stare up at the windmill, his present pride and glory.