The Autumn Land Read online

  The Autumn Land

  Clifford D. Simak

  An engineer drifting through life finds himself trapped in a village where nothing ever happens.

  Clifford D. Simak

  The Autumn Land

  He sat on the porch in the rocking chair, with the loose board creaking as he rocked. Across the street the old white-haired lady cut a bouquet of chrysanthemums in the never-ending autumn. Where he could see between the ancient houses to the distant woods and wastelands, a soft Indian-summer blue lay upon the land. The entire village was soft and quiet, as old things often are - a place constructed for a dreaming mind rather than a living being. It was an hour too early for his other old and shaky neighbor to come fumbling down the grass-grown sidewalk, tapping the bricks with his seeking cane. And he would not hear the distant children at their play until dusk had fallen - if he heard them then. He did not always hear them.

  There were books to read, but he did not want to read them. He could go into the backyard and spade and rake the garden once again, reducing the soil to a finer texture to receive the seed when it could be planted - if it ever could be planted - but there was slight incentive in the further preparation of a seed bed against a spring that never came. Earlier, much earlier, before he knew about the autumn and the spring, he had mentioned garden seeds to the Milkman, who had been very much embarrassed.

  He had walked the magic miles and left the world behind in bitterness and when he first had come here had been content to live in utter idleness, to be supremely idle and to feel no guilt or shame at doing absolutely nothing or as close to absolutely nothing as a man was able. He had come walking down the autumn street in the quietness and the golden sunshine, and the first person that he saw was the old lady who lived across the street. She had been waiting at the gate of her picket fence as if she had known he would be coming, and she had said to him, ‘You’re a new one come to live with us. There are not many come these days. That is your house across the street from me, and I know we’ll be good neighbors.’ He had reached up his hand to doff his hat to her, forgetting that he had no hat. ‘My name is Nelson Rand,’ he’d told her. ‘I am an engineer. I will try to be a decent neighbor.’ He had the impression that she stood taller and straighter than she did, but old and bent as she might be there was a comforting graciousness about her. ‘You will please come in,’ she said. ‘I have lemonade and cookies. There are other people there, but I shall not introduce them to you.’ He waited for her to explain why she would not introduce him, but there was no explanation, and he followed her down the time-mellowed walk of bricks with great beds of asters and chrysanthemums, a mass of color on either side of it.

  In the large, high-ceilinged living room, with its bay windows forming window seats, filled with massive furniture from another time and with a small blaze burning in the fireplace, she had shown him to a seat before a small table to one side of the fire and had sat down opposite him and poured the lemonade and passed the plate of cookies.

  ‘You must pay no attention to them,’ she had told him. ‘They are all dying to meet you, but I shall not humor them.’

  It was easy to pay no attention to them, for there was no one there.

  ‘The Major, standing over there by the fireplace,’ said his hostess, ‘with his elbow on the mantel, a most ungainly pose if you should ask me, is not happy with my lemonade. He would prefer a stronger drink. Please, Mr. Rand, will you not taste my lemonade? I assure you it is good. I made it myself. I have no maid, you see, and no one in the kitchen. I live quite by myself and satisfactorily, although my friends keep dropping in, sometimes more often than I like.’

  He tasted the lemonade, not without misgivings, and to his surprise it was lemonade and was really good, like the lemonade he had drunk when a boy at Fourth of July celebrations and at grade school picnics, and had never tasted since.

  ‘It is excellent,’ he said.

  ‘The lady in blue,’ his hostess said, ‘sitting in the chair by the window, lived here many years ago. She and I were friends, although she moved away some time ago and I am surprised that she comes back, which she often does. The infuriating thing is that I cannot remember her name, if I ever knew it. You don’t know it, do you?’

  ‘I am afraid I don’t.’

  ‘Oh, of course, you wouldn’t. I had forgotten. I forget so easily these days. You are a new arrival.’

  He had sat through the afternoon and drank her lemonade and eaten her cookies, while she chattered on about her nonexistent guests. It was only when he had crossed the street to the house she had pointed out as his, with her standing on the stoop and waving her farewell, that he realized she had not told him her name. He did not know it even now.

  How long had it been? He wondered, and realized he didn’t know. It was this autumn business. How could a man keep track of time when it was always autumn?

  It all had started on that day when he’d been driving across Iowa, heading for Chicago. No, he reminded himself, it had started with the thinnesses, although he had paid little attention to the thinnesses to begin with. Just been aware of them, perhaps as a strange condition of the mind, or perhaps an unusual quality to the atmosphere and light. As if the world lacked a certain solidity that one had come to expect, as if one were running along a mystic borderline between here and somewhere else.

  He had lost his West Coast job when a government contract had failed to materialize. His company had not been the only one; there were many other companies that were losing contracts and there were a lot of engineers who walked the streets bewildered. There was a bare possibility of a job in Chicago, although he was well aware that by now it might be filled. Even if there were no job, he reminded himself, he was in better shape than a lot of other men. He was young and single, he had a few dollars in the bank, he had no house mortgage, no car payments, no kids to put through school. He had only himself to support - no family of any sort at all. The old, hard-fisted bachelor uncle who had taken him to raise when his parents had died in a car crash and had worked him hard on that stony hilly Wisconsin farm, had receded deep into the past becoming a dim, far figure that was hard to recognize. He had not liked his uncle, Rand remembered - had not hated him, simply had not liked him. He had shed no tears, he recalled, when the old man had been caught out in a pasture by a bull and gored to death. So now Rand was quite alone, not even holding the memories of a family.

  He had been hoarding the little money that he had, for with a limited work record, with other men better qualified looking for the jobs, he realized that it might be some time before he could connect with anything. The beat-up wagon that he drove had space for sleeping, and he stopped at the little wayside parks along the way to cook his meals.

  He had almost crossed the state, and the road had started its long winding through the bluffs that rimmed the Mississippi. Ahead he caught a glimpse, at several turnings of the road, of smokestacks and tall structures that marked the city just ahead.

  He emerged from the bluffs, and the city before him, a small industrial center that lay on either side the river. It was then that he felt and saw (if one could call it seeing) the thinness that he had seen before or had sensed before. There was about it, not exactly an alienness, but a sense of unreality, as if one were seeing the actuality of the scene through some sort of veil, with the edges softened and the angles flattened out, as if one might be looking at it as one would look at the bottom of a clear-water lake with a breeze gently ruffling the surface. When he had seen it before, he had attributed it to road fatigue and had opened the window to get a breath of air or had stopped the car and gotten out to walk up and down the road awhile, and it had gone away.

  But this time it was worse than ever, and he was somewhat frightened at it
- not so much frightened at it as he was frightened of himself, wondering what might be wrong with him.

  He pulled off to the side of the road, braking the car to a halt, and it seemed to him, even as he did it, that the shoulder of the road was rougher than he’d thought. As he pulled off the road, the thinness seemed to lessen, and he saw that the road had changed, which explained its roughness. The surface was pocked with chuckholes and blocks of concrete had been heaved up and other blocks were broken into pebbly shards.

  He raised his eyes from the road to look at the city, and there was no city, only the broken stumps of a place that had somehow been destroyed. He sat with his hands frozen on the wheel, and in the silence - the deadly, unaccustomed silence - he heard the cawing of crows. Foolishly, he tried to remember the last time he had heard the caw of crows, and then he saw them, black specks that flapped just above the bluff top. There was something else as well - the trees. No longer trees, but only here and there blackened stumps. The stumps of a city and the stumps of trees, with the black, ash-like flecks of crows flapping over them.

  Scarcely knowing what he did, he stumbled from the car. Thinking of it later, it had seemed a foolish thing to do, for the car was the only thing he knew, the one last link he had to reality. As he stumbled from it, he put his hand down in the seat, and beneath his hand he felt the solid, oblong object. His fingers closed upon it, and it was not until he was standing by the car that he realized what he held - the camera that had been lying in the seat beside him.

  Sitting on the porch, with the loose floor board creaking underneath the rocker, he remembered that he still had the pictures, although it had been a long time since he had thought of them - a long time, actually, since he’d thought of anything at all beyond his life, day to day, in this autumn land. It was as though he had been trying to keep himself from thinking, attempting to keep his mind in neutral, to shut out what he knew - or, more precisely perhaps, what he thought he knew.

  He did not consciously take the pictures, although afterward he had tried to tell himself he did (but never quite convincing himself that this was entirely true), complimenting himself in a wry sort of way for providing a piece of evidence that his memory alone never could have provided. For a man can think so many things, daydream so many things, imagine so many things that he can never trust his mind.

  The entire incident, when he later thought of it, was hazy, as if the reality of that blasted city lay in some strange dimension of experience that could not be explained, or even rationalized. He could remember only vaguely the camera at his eyes and the clicking as the shutter snapped. He did recall the band of people charging down the hill toward him and his mad scramble for the car, locking the door behind him and putting the car in gear, intent on steering a zigzag course along the broken pavement to get away from the screaming humans who were less than a hundred feet away.

  But as he pulled off the shoulder, the pavement was no longer broken. It ran smooth and level toward the city that was no longer blasted. He pulled off the road again and sat limply, beaten, and it was only after many minutes that he could proceed again, going very slowly because he did not trust himself, shaken as he was, to drive at greater speed.

  He had planned to cross the river and continue to Chicago, getting there that night, but now his plans were changed. He was too shaken up and, besides, there were the films. And he needed time to think, he told himself, a lot of time to think.

  He found a roadside park a few miles outside the city and pulled into it, parking alongside an outdoor grill and an old-fashioned pump. He got some wood from the small supply he carried in the back and built a fire. He hauled out the box with his cooking gear and food, fixed the coffee pot, set a pan upon the grill and cracked three eggs into it.

  When he had pulled off the road, he had seen the man walking along the roadside; and now, as he cracked the eggs, he saw that the man had turned into the park and was walking toward the car. The man came up to the pump.

  ‘Does this thing work?’ he asked.

  Rand nodded. ‘I got water for the pot,’ he said. ‘Just now.’

  ‘It’s a hot day,’ said the man.

  He worked the pump handle up and down.

  ‘Hot for walking,’ he said.

  ‘You been walking far?’

  ‘The last six weeks,’ he said.

  Rand had a closer look at him. The clothes were old and worn, but fairly clean. He had shaved a day or two before. His hair was long - not that he wore it long, but from lack of barbering.

  Water gushed from the spout and the man cupped his hands under it, bent to drink.

  ‘That was good,’ be finally said. ‘I was thirsty.’

  ‘How are you doing for food?’ asked Rand, The man hesitated. ‘Not too well,’ he said.

  ‘Reach into that box on the tailgate. Find yourself a plate and some eating implements. A cup, too. Coffee will be ready soon.’

  ‘Mister, I wouldn’t want you to think I was walking up here…’

  ‘Forget it,’ said Rand. ‘I know how it is. There’s enough for the both of us.’

  The man got a plate and cup, a knife, a fork, a spoon. He came over and stood beside the fire.

  ‘I am new at this.’ he said. ‘I’ve never had to do a thing like this before. I always had a job. For seventeen years I had a job …’

  ‘Here you are,’ said Rand. He slid the eggs onto the plate, went back to the box to get three more.

  The man walked over to a picnic table and put down his plate. ‘Don’t wait for me,’ said Rand. ‘Eat them while they’re hot. The coffee’s almost ready. There’s bread if you want any.’

  ‘I’ll get a slice later,’ said the man, ‘for mopping up.’

  John Sterling, he said his name was, and where now would John Sterling be, Rand wondered - still tramping the highways, looking for work, any kind of work, a day of work, an hour of work, a man who for seventeen years had held a job and had a job no longer? Thinking of Sterling, he felt a pang of guilt. He owed John Sterling a debt he never could repay, not knowing at the time they talked there was any debt involved.

  They had sat and talked, eating their eggs, mopping up the plates with bread, drinking hot coffee.

  ‘For seventeen years,’ said Sterling. ‘A machine operator. An experienced hand. With the same company. Then they let me out. Me and four hundred others. All at one time. Later they let out others. I was not the only one. There were a lot of us. We weren’t laid off, we were let out. No promise of going back. Not the company’s fault, I guess. There was a big contract that fizzled out. There was no work to do. How about yourself? You let out, too?’

  Rand nodded. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Well, eating like this. Cheaper than a restaurant. And you got a sleeping bag. You sleep in the car?’

  ‘That is right,’ said Rand. ‘It’s not as bad for me as it is for some of the others. I have no family.’

  ‘I have a family,’ said Sterling. ‘Wife, three kids. We talked it over, the wife and me. She didn’t want me to leave, but it made sense I should. Money all gone, unemployment run out. Long as I was around, it was hard to get relief. But if I deserted her, she could get relief. That way there’s food for the wife and kids, a roof over their heads. Hardest thing I ever did. Hard for all of us. Someday I’ll go back. When times get better, I’ll go back. The family will be waiting.’

  Out on the highway the cars went whisking past. A squirrel came down out of a tree, advanced cautiously toward the table, suddenly turned and fled for his very life, swarming up a nearby trunk.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sterling. ‘It might be too big for us, this society of ours. It may be out of hand. I read a lot. Always liked to read. And I think about what I read. It seems to me maybe we’ve outrun our brains. The brains we have maybe were OK back in prehistoric days. We did all right with the brains we had until we built too big and complex. Maybe we built beyond our brains. Maybe our brains no longer are good enough to handle what we h
ave. We have set loose economic forces we don’t understand and political forces that we do not understand, and if we can’t understand them, we can’t control them. Maybe that is why you and I are out of jobs.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Rand. ‘I never thought about it.’

  ‘A man thinks a lot,’ said Sterling. ‘He dreams a lot walking down the road. Nothing else to do. He dreams some silly things: Things that are silly on the face of them, but are hard to say can’t be really true. Did this ever happen to you?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Rand.

  ‘One thing I thought about a lot. A terribly silly thought. Maybe thinking it because I do so much walking. Sometimes people pick me up, but mostly I walk. And I got to wondering if a man should walk far enough could he leave it all behind? The farther a man might walk, the farther he would be from everything.’

  ‘Where you heading?’ Rand asked.

  ‘Nowhere in particular. Just keep on moving, that is all. Month or so I’ll start heading south. Get a good head start on winter. These northern states are no place to be when winter comes,’

  ‘There are two eggs left,’ said Rand. ‘How about it?’

  ‘Hell, man, I can’t. I already…

  ‘Three eggs aren’t a lot. I can get some more.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure that you don’t mind. Tell you what - let’s split them, one for you, one for me.’

  The giddy old lady had finished cutting her bouquet and had gone into the house. From up the street came the tapping of a cane - Rand’s other ancient neighbor, out for his evening walk. The sinking sun poured a blessing on the land. The leaves were gold and red, brown and yellow - they had been that way since the day that Rand had come. The grass had a tawny look about it - not dead, just dressed up for dying.

  The old man came trudging carefully down the walk, his cane alert against a stumble, helping himself with it without really needing any help. He was slow, was all. He halted by the walk that ran up to the porch. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘Good afternoon.’ said Rand. ‘You have a nice day for your walk.’ The old man acknowledged the observation graciously and with a touch of modesty, as if he, himself, might somehow be responsible for the goodness of the day. ‘It looks,’ he said, ‘as if we might have another fine day tomorrow.’ And having said that, he continued down the street.