Over the River and Through the Woods Read online

  Lewis is working hard at it, but he isn’t having any luck. And the Trader is gone now. As soon as we dared come home, I went into the house and had a look at the desk. The inlaid dot was gone. I tried putting something where it had been, but nothing happened.

  What scared the Trader off? I’d give a lot to know. Meanwhile, there are some commercial prospects.

  The rose-tinted glasses, for instance, that we call the Happiness Lenses. Put them on and you’re happy as a clam. Almost every person on the face of the Earth would like a pair of them, so they could forget their troubles for a while. They would probably play hob with the liquor business.

  The trouble is that we don’t know how to make them and, now that the Trader’s gone, we can’t swap for them.

  But there’s one thing that keeps worrying me. I know I shouldn’t let it bother me, but I can’t keep it out of mind.

  Just what did the Trader do with those couple of million zebras we sent him?

  Neighbor

  Coon Valley is a pleasant place, but there’s no denying it’s sort of off the beaten track and it’s not a place where you can count on getting rich because the farms are small and a lot of the ground is rough. You can farm the bottomlands, but the hillsides are only good for pasture and the roads are just dirt roads, impassable at certain times of year.

  The old-timers, like Bert Smith and Jingo Harris and myself, are well satisfied to stay here, for we grew up with the country and we haven’t any illusions about getting rich and we’d feel strange and out-of-place anywhere but in the valley. But there are others, newcomers, who move in and get discouraged after a while and up and move away, so there usually is a farm or two standing idle, waiting to be sold.

  We are just plain dirt farmers, with emphasis on the dirt, for we can’t afford a lot of fancy machinery and we don’t go in for blooded stock—but there’s nothing wrong with us; we’re just everyday, the kind of people you meet all over the United States. Because we’re out of the way and some of the families have lived here for so long, I suppose you could say that we have gotten clannish. But that doesn’t mean we don’t like outside folks; it just means we’ve lived so long together that we’ve got to know and like one another and are satisfied with things just as they are.

  We have radios, of course, and we listen to the programs and the news, and some of us take daily papers, but I’m afraid that we may be a bit provincial, for it’s fairly hard to get us stirred up much about world happenings. There’s so much of interest right here in the valley we haven’t got the time to worry about all those outside things. I imagine you’d call us conservative, for most of us vote Republican without even wondering why and there’s none of us who has much time for all this government interference in the farming business.

  The valley has always been a pleasant place—not only the land, but the people in it, and we’ve always been fortunate in the new neighbors that we get. Despite new ones coming in every year or so, we’ve never had a really bad one and that means a lot to us.

  But we always worry a little when one of the new ones up and moves away and we speculate among ourselves, wondering what kind of people will buy or rent the vacant farm.

  The old Lewis farm had been abandoned for a long time, the buildings all run down and gone to ruin and the fields gone back to grass. A dentist over at Hopkins Corners had rented it for several years and run some cattle in it, driving out on weekends to see how they were doing. We used to wonder every now and then if anyone would ever farm the place again, but finally we quit wondering, for the buildings had fallen into such disrepair that we figured no one ever would. I went in one day and talked to the banker at Hopkins Corners, who had the renting of the place, and told him I’d like to take it over if the dentist ever gave it up. But he told me the owners, who lived in Chicago then, were anxious to sell rather than to rent it, although he didn’t seem too optimistic that anyone would buy it.

  Then one spring a new family moved onto the farm and in time we learned it had been sold and that the new family’s name was Heath—Reginald Heath. And Bert Smith said to me: “Reginald! That’s a hell of a name for a farmer!” But that was all he said.

  Jingo Harris stopped by one day, coming home from town, when he saw Heath out in the yard, to pass the time of day. It was a neighborly thing to do, of course, and Heath seemed glad to have him stop, although Jingo said he seemed to be a funny kind of man to be a farmer.

  “He’s a foreigner,” Jingo told me. “Sort of dark. Like he might be a Spaniard or from one of those other countries. I don’t know how he got that Reginald. Reginald is English and Heath’s no Englishman.”

  Later on we heard that the Heaths weren’t really Spanish, but were Rumanians or Bulgarians and that they were refugees from the Iron Curtain.

  But Spanish, or Rumanian, or Bulgarian, the Heaths were workers. There was Heath and his wife and a half-grown girl and all three of them worked all the blessed time. They paid attention to their business and didn’t bother anyone and because of this we liked them, although we didn’t have much to do with them. Not that we didn’t want to or that they didn’t want us to; it’s just that in a community like ours new folks sort of have to grow in instead of being taken in.

  Heath had an old beaten-up wired-together tractor that made a lot of noise, and as soon as the soil was dry enough to plow he started out to turn over the fields that through the years had grown up to grass. I used to wonder if he worked all night long, for many times when I went to bed I heard the tractor running. Although that may not be as late as it sounds to city dwellers, for here in the valley we go to bed early—and get up early, too.

  One night after dark I set out to hunt some cows, a couple of fence-jumping heifers that gave me lots of trouble. Just let a man come in late from work and tired and maybe it’s raining a little and dark as the inside of a cat and those two heifers would turn up missing and I’d have to go and hunt them. I tried all the different kinds of pokes and none of them did any good. When a heifer gets to fence-jumping there isn’t much that can be done with her.

  So I lit a lantern and set out to hunt for them, but I hunted for two hours and didn’t find a trace of them. I had just about decided to give up and go back home when I heard the sound of a tractor running and realized that I was just above the west field of the old Lewis place. To get home I’d have to go right past the field and I figured it might be as well to wait when I reached the field until the tractor came around and ask Heath if he had seen the heifers.

  It was a dark night, with thin clouds hiding the stars and a wind blowing high in the treetops and there was a smell of rain in the air. Heath, I figured, probably was staying out extra late to finish up the field ahead of the coming rain, although I remember that I thought he was pushing things just a little hard. Already he was far ahead of all the others in the valley with his plowing.

  So I made my way down the steep hillside and waded the creek at a shallow place I knew and while I was doing this I heard the tractor make a complete round of the field. I looked for the headlight, but I didn’t see it and I thought probably the trees had hidden it from me.

  I reached the edge of the field and climbed through the fence, walking out across the furrows to intercept the tractor. I heard it make the turn to the east of me and start down the field toward me and although I could hear the noise of it, there wasn’t any light.

  I found the last furrow and stood there waiting, sort of wondering, not too alarmed as yet, how Heath managed to drive the rig without any light. I thought that maybe he had cat eyes and could see in the dark and although it seemed funny later when I remembered it, the idea that a man might have cat eyes did not seem funny then.

  The noise kept getting louder and it seemed to be coming pretty close, when all at once the tractor rushed out of the dark and seemed to leap at me. I guess I must have been afraid that it would run over me, for I jumped back a yard or two, with my heart up in my neck. But I needn’t have bothered, for I was out of the
way to start with.

  The tractor went on past me and I waved the lantern and yelled for Heath to stop and as I waved the lantern the light was thrown onto the rear of the tractor and I saw there was no one on it.

  A hundred things went through my mind, but the one idea that stuck was that Heath had fallen off the tractor and might be lying injured, somewhere in the field.

  I ran after the tractor, thinking to shut it down before it got loose and ran into a tree or something, but by the time I reached it, it had reached a turn and it was making that turn as neatly as if it had been broad daylight and someone had been driving it.

  I jumped up on the drawbar and grabbed the seat, hauling myself up. I reached out a hand, grabbing for the throttle, but with my hand upon the metal I didn’t pull it back. The tractor had completed the turn now and was going down the furrow—and there was something else.

  Take an old tractor, now—one that wheezed and coughed and hammered and kept threatening to fall apart, like this one did—and you are bound to get a lot of engine vibration. But in this tractor there was no vibration. It ran along as smooth as a high-priced car and the only jolts you got were when the wheels hit a bump or slight gully in the field.

  I stood there, hanging onto the lantern with one hand and clutching the throttle with the other, and I didn’t do a thing. I just rode down to the point where the tractor started to make another turn. Then I stepped off and went on home. I didn’t hunt for Heath lying in the field, for I knew he wasn’t there.

  I suppose I wondered how it was possible, but I didn’t really fret myself too much trying to figure it all out. I imagine, in the first place, I was just too numb. You may worry a lot about little things that don’t seem quite right, but when you run into a big thing, like that self-operating tractor, you sort of give up automatically, knowing that it’s too big for your brain to handle, that it’s something you haven’t got a chance of solving. And after a while you forget it because it’s something you can’t live with. So your mind rejects it.

  I got home and stood out in the barnyard for a moment, listening. The wind was blowing fairly hard by then and the first drops of rain were falling, but every now and then, when the wind would quiet down, I could hear the tractor.

  I went inside the house and Helen and the kids were all in bed and sound asleep, so I didn’t say anything about it that night. And the next morning, when I had a chance to think about it, I didn’t say anything at all. Mostly, I suppose, because I knew no one would believe me and that I’d have to take a lot of kidding about automatic tractors.

  Heath got his plowing done and his crops in, well ahead of everyone in the valley. The crops came up in good shape and we had good growing weather; then along in June we got a spell of wet, and everyone got behind with corn plowing because you can’t go out in the field when the ground is soggy. All of us chored around our places, fixing fences and doing other odd jobs, cussing out the rain and watching the weeds grow like mad in the unplowed field.

  All of us, that is, except Heath. His corn was clean as a whistle and you had to hunt to find a weed. Jingo stopped by one day and asked him how he managed, but Heath just laughed a little, in that quiet way of his, and talked of something else.

  The first apples finally were big enough for green-apple pies and there is no one in the country makes better green-apple pies than Helen. She wins prizes with her pies every year at the county fair and she is proud of them.

  One day she wrapped up a couple of pies and took them over to the Heaths. It’s a neighborly way we have of doing in the valley, with the women running back and forth from one neighbor to another with their cooking. Each one of them has some dish she likes to show off to the neighbors and it’s a sort of harmless way of bragging.

  Helen and the Heaths got along just swell. She was late in getting home and I was starting supper, with the kids yelling they were hungry when-do-we-eat-around-here, when she finally showed up.

  She was full of talk about the Heaths—how they had fixed up the house, you never would have thought anyone could do so much to such a terribly run-down place as they had, and about the garden they had—especially about the garden. It was a big one, she said, and beautifully taken care of and it was full of vegetables she had never seen before. The funniest things you ever saw, she said. Not the ordinary kind of vegetables.

  We talked some about those vegetables, speculating that maybe the Heaths had brought the seeds out with them from behind the Iron Curtain, although so far as I could remember, vegetables were vegetables, no matter where you were. They grew the same things in Russia or Rumania or Timbuktu as we did. And, anyhow, by this time I was getting a little skeptical about that story of their escaping from Rumania.

  But we didn’t have the time for much serious speculation on the Heaths, although there was plenty of casual gossip going around the neighborhood. Haying came along and then the small-grain harvest and everyone was busy. The hay was good and the small-grain crop was fair, but it didn’t look like we’d get much corn. For we hit a drought. That’s the way it goes—too much rain in June, not enough in August.

  We watched the corn and watched the sky and felt hopeful when a cloud showed up, but the clouds never meant a thing. It just seems at times that God isn’t on your side.

  Then one morning Jingo Harris showed up and stood around, first on one foot, then the other, talking to me while I worked on an old corn binder that was about worn out and which it didn’t look nohow I’d need to use that year.

  “Jingo,” I said, after I’d watched him fidget for an hour or more, “you got something on your mind.”

  He blurted it out then. “Heath got rain last night,” he said.

  “No one else did,” I told him.

  “I guess you’re right,” said Jingo. “Heath’s the only one.”

  He told me how he’d gone to cut through Heath’s north cornfield, carrying back a couple of balls of binder twine he’d borrowed from Bert Smith. It wasn’t until he’d crawled through the fence that he noticed the field was wet, soaked by a heavy rain.

  “It must have happened in the night,” he said.

  He thought it was funny, but figured maybe there had been a shower across the lower end of the valley, although as a rule rains travel up and down the valley, not across it. But when he had crossed the corner of the field and crawled through the fence, he noticed it hadn’t rained at all. So he went back and walked around the field and the rain had fallen on the field, but nowhere else. It began at the fence and ended at the fence.

  When he’d made a circuit of the field he sat down on one of the balls of twine and tried to get it all thought out but it made no sense—furthermore, it was plain unbelievable.

  Jingo is a thorough man. He likes to have all the evidence and know all there is to know before he makes up his mind. So he went over to Heath’s second corn patch, on the west side of the valley. And once again, he found that it had rained on that field—on the field, but not around the field.

  “What do you make of it?” Jingo asked me and I said I didn’t know. I came mighty close to telling him about the unmanned tractor, but I thought better of it. After all, there was no point in getting the neighborhood stirred up.

  After Jingo left I got in the car and drove over to the Heath farm, intending to ask him if he could loan me his posthole digger for a day or two. Not that I was going to dig any postholes, but you have to have some excuse for showing up at a neighbor’s place.

  I never got a chance to ask him for that posthole digger, though. Once I got there I never even thought of it.

  Heath was sitting on the front steps of the porch and he seemed glad to see me. He came down to the car and shook my hand and said, “It’s good to see you, Calvin.” The way he said it made me feel friendly and sort of important, too—especially that Calvin business, for everyone else just calls me Cal. I’m not downright sure, in fact, that anyone in the neighborhood remembers that my name is Calvin.

  “I’d like t
o show you around the place,” he said. “We’ve done some fixing up.”

  Fixing up wasn’t exactly the word for it. The place was spic and span. It looked like some of those Pennsylvania and Connecticut farms you see in the magazines. The house and all the other buildings had been ramshackle with all the paint peeled off them and looking as they might fall down at any minute. But now they had a sprightly, solid look and they gleamed with paint. They didn’t look new, of course, but they looked as if they’d always been well taken care of and painted every year. The fences were all fixed up and painted, too, and the weeds were cut and a couple of old unsightly scrap-lumber piles had been cleaned up and burned. Heath had even tackled an old iron and machinery junk pile and had it sorted out.

  “There was a lot to do,” said Heath, “but I feel it’s worth it. I have an orderly soul. I like to have things neat.”

  Which might be true, of course, but he’d done it all in less than six months’ time. He’d come to the farm in early March and it was only August and he’d not only put in some hundred acres of crops and done all the other farm work, but he’d got the place fixed up. And that wasn’t possible, I told myself. One man couldn’t do it, not even with his wife and daughter helping—not even if he worked twenty-four hours a day and didn’t stop to eat. Or unless he could take time and stretch it out to make one hour equal three or four.

  I trailed along behind Heath and thought about the time-stretching business and was pleased at myself for thinking of it, for it isn’t often that I get foolish thoughts that are likewise pleasing. Why, I thought, with a deal like that you could stretch out any day so you could get all the work done you wanted to. And if you could stretch out time, maybe you could compress it, too, so that a trip to a dentist, for example, would only seem to take a minute.