Neighbor Read online

  We'd got to the far end of the garden and were starting to come back when Heath's wife ran around the corner of the house.

  Apparently she didn't see me at first or had forgotten I was there, for she called to him and the name she called him wasn't Reginald or Reggie, but a foreign-sounding name. I won't even try to approximate it, for even at the time I wasn't able to recall it a second after hearing it. It was like no word I'd ever heard before.

  Then she saw me and stopped running and caught her breath, and a moment later said she'd been listening in on the party line and that Bert Smith's little daughter, Ann, was terribly sick.

  "They called the doctor," she said, "but he is out on calls and he won't get there in time. Reginald," she said, "the symptoms sound like…"

  And she said another name that was like none I'd ever heard or expect to hear again.

  Watching Heath's face, I could swear I saw it pale despite his olive tinge of skin.

  "Quick!" he said. Taking me by the arm, we ran around in front to his old clunk of a car. He threw the basket of vegetables in the back seat and jumped behind the wheel. I scrambled in after him and tried to close the door, but it wouldn't close. The lock kept slipping loose and I had to hang on to the door so it wouldn't bang.

  We lit out of there like a turpentined dog and the noise that old ear made was enough to deafen one. Despite my holding on to it, the door kept banging and all the fenders rattled and there was every other kind of noise you'd expect a junk-heap car to make, with an extra two or three thrown in.

  I wanted to ask him what he planned to do, but I was having trouble framing the question in my mind and even if I had known how to phrase it I doubt he could have heard me with all the racket that the car was making.

  So I hung on as best I could and tried to keep the door from banging and all at once it seemed to me the car was making more noise than it had any call to. Just like the old haywire tractor made more noise than any tractor should. Too much noise, by far, for the way that it was running. Just like on the tractor, there was no engine vibration and despite all the banging and the clanking we were making time. As I've said, our valley roads are none too good, but even so I swear there were places we hit seventy and we went around sharp comers where, by rights, we should have gone into the ditch at the speed that we were going, but the car just seemed to settle down and hug the road and we never even skidded.

  We pulled up in front of Bert's place and Heath jumped and ran up the walk, with me following him.

  Amy Smith came to the door and I could see that she'd been crying, and she looked a little surprised to see the two of us. We stood there for a moment without saying anything, until Heath spoke to her and here is a funny thing: Heath wearing a pair of ragged overalls and a sweat-stained shirt he didn't have a hat and his hair was all rumpled up, but there was a single instant when it seemed to me that he was dressed in an expensive business suit and that he took off hat and bowed to Amy.

  "I understand", he said, "that the little girl is sick. Maybe I can help."

  I don't know if Amy had seen the same thing that I had seemed to see, but she opened the door and stood to one side so that we could enter.

  "In there," she said.

  "Thank you, ma'am," said Heath, and went into the room.

  Amy and I stood there for a moment, then she turned to and I could see the tears in her eyes again. "Cal, she's awful sick," she said.

  I nodded miserably, for now the spell was gone and common sense was coming back again and I wondered at the madness of this farmer who thought that he could help a little girl who was terribly sick. And at my madness for standing there, without even going in the room with him.

  But just then Heath came out of the room and closed the door softly behind him. "She's sleeping now," he said to Amy. "She'll be all right."

  Then, without another word, he walked out of the door. I hesitated a moment, looking at Amy, wondering what to do. And it was pretty plain there was nothing I could do. So followed him.

  We drove back to his farm at a sober rate of speed, but the car banged and thumped just as bad as ever. "Runs real good," I yelled at him.

  He smiled a bit. "I keep it tinkered up," he yelled back at me.

  When we got to his place, I got out of his car and walked over to my own. "You forgot the vegetables," he called after me. So I went back to get them.

  "Thanks a lot," I said.

  "Any time," he told me.

  I looked straight at him, then, and said: "It sure would be fine if we could get some rain. It would mean a lot to us. A soaking rain right now would save the corn."

  "Come again," he told me. "It was good to talk with you."

  And that night it rained, all over the valley, a steady, soaking rain, and the corn was saved. And Ann got well.

  The doctor, when he finally got to Bert's, said that she had passed the crisis and was already on the mend. One of those virus things, he said. A lot of it around. Not like the old days, he said, before they got to fooling around with all their miracle drugs, mutating viruses right and left. Used to be, he said, a doctor knew what he was treating, but he don't know any more.

  I don't know if Bert or Amy told Doc about Heath, although I imagine that they didn't. After all, you don't tell a doctor that a neighbour cured your child. And there might have been someone who would have been orhery enough to try to bring a charge against Heath for practicing medicine without a licence, although that would have been pretty hard to prove. But the story got around the valley and there was a lot of talk. Heath, I heard, had been a famous doctor in Vienna before he'd made his getaway. But I didn't believe it. I don't even believe those who started the story believed it, but that's the way it goes in a neighbourhood like ours.

  That story, and others, made quite a flurry for a month or so, but then it quieted down and you could see that the Heaths had become one of us and belonged to the valley. Bert went over and had quite a talk with Heath and the women-folks took to calling Mrs. Heath on the telephone, with some of those who were listening in breaking in to say a word or two, thereby initiating Mrs. Heath into the round-robin telephone conversations that are going on all the time on our valley party line, with it getting so that you have to bust in on them and tell them to get off the line when you want to make an important call.

  We had Heath out with us on our coon hunts that fall and some of the young bloods started paying attention to Heath's daughter. It was almost as if the Heaths were old-time residents.

  As I've said before, we've always been real fortunate in getting in good neighbours.

  When things are going well, time has a way of flowing along so smoothly that you aren't conscious of its passing, and that was the way it was in the valley.

  We had good years, but none of us paid much attention to that. You don't pay much attention to the good times, you get so you take them for granted. It's only when bad times come along that you look back and realize the good times you have had.

  A year or so ago I was just finishing up the morning chores when a car with a New York licence pulled up at the barnyard gate. It isn't very often we see an out-of-state licence plate in the valley, so I figured that it probably was someone who had gotten lost and had stopped to ask directions. There was a man and woman in the front seat and three kids and a dog in the back seat and the car was new and shiny.

  I was carrying the milk up from the barn and when the man got out I put the pails down on the ground and waited for him.

  He was a youngish sort of fellow and he looked intelligent and he had good manners. He told me his name was Rickard and that he was a New York newspaperman on vacation and had dropped into the valley on his way out west to check some information.

  It was the first time, so far as I knew, that the valley had ever been of any interest news-wise and I said so. I said we never did much here to get into the news.

  "It's no scandal," Rickard told me, "if that is what you're thinking. It's just a matter of statistics."
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  There are a lot of times when I don't catch a situation as quickly as I should, being a sort of deliberate type, but it seems to me now that as soon as he said statistics I could see it coming.

  "I did a series of farm articles a few months back," said Rickard, "and to get my information I had to go through a lot of government statistics. I never got so sick of anything in my entire life."

  "And?" I asked, not feeling too well myself.

  "I found some interesting things about this valley," he went on. "I remember that I didn't catch it for a while. Went on past the figures for a ways. Almost missed the significance, in fact. Then I did a doubletake and backed up and looked at them again. The full story wasn't in that report, of course. Just a hint of something. So I did some more digging and came up with other facts."

  I tried to laugh it off, but he wouldn't let me.

  "Your weather, for one thing," he said. "Do you realize you've had perfect weather for the past ten years?"

  "The weather's been pretty good," I admitted.

  "It wasn't always good. I went back to see."

  "That's right," I said. "It's been better lately."

  "Your crops have been the best they've ever been in the last ten years."

  "Better seed," I said. "Better ways of farming."

  He grinned at me. "You guys haven't changed your way of farming in the last quarter century." And he had me there, of course.

  "There was an army worm invasion two years ago," he said. "It hit all around you, but you got by scot-free."

  "We were lucky. I remember we said so at the time."

  "I checked health records," he said. "Same thing once again. For ten solid years. No measles, no chickenpox, no pneumonia. No nothing. One death in ten full years—complications attendant on old age."

  "Old Man Parks," I said. "He was going on to ninety. Fine old gentleman."

  "You see," said Rickard. I did see. The fellow had the figures. He had tracked it down, this thing we hadn't even realized, and he had us cold.

  "What do you want me to do about it?" I asked.

  "I want to talk to you about a neighbour."

  "I won't talk about any of my neighbours. Why don't you talk to him yourself?"

  "I tried to, but he wasn't home. Fellow down the road said he'd gone into town. Whole family had gone into town."

  "Reginald Heath," I said. There wasn't much sense in playing dumb with Rickard, for he knew all the angles.

  "That's the man. I talked to folks in town. Found out he'd never had to have any repair work done on any of his machinery or his car. Has the same machinery he had when he started farming. And it was worn out then."

  "He takes good care of it," I told him. "He keeps it tinkered up."

  "Another thing," said Rickard. "Since he's been here he hasn't bought a drop of gasoline."

  I'd know the rest of it, of course, although I'd never stopped to think about it. But I didn't know about the gasoline. I must have shown my surprise, for Rickard grinned at me.

  "What do you want?" I asked.

  "A story."

  "Heath's the man to talk to. I don't know a thing to help you."

  And even when I said it I felt easy in my mind. I seemed to have an instinctive faith that Heath could handle the situation, that he'd know just what to do.

  But after breakfast I couldn't settle down to work. I was pruning the orchard, a job I'd been putting off for a year or two and that badly needed doing. I kept thinking of that business of Heath not buying gasoline and that night I'd found the tractor ploughing by itself and how smooth both the car and tractor ran despite all the noise they made.

  So I laid down my pruning hook and shears and struck out across the fields. I knew the Heath family was in town, but I don't think it would have made any difference to me if they'd been at home. I think I would have gone just the same. For more than ten years now, I realized, I'd been wondering about that tractor and it was time that I found out.

  I found the tractor in the machine shed and I thought maybe I'd have some trouble getting into it. But I didn't have a bit. I slipped the catches and the hood lifted up and I found exactly what I had thought I'd find, except that I hadn't actually worked out in my mind the picture of what I'd find underneath that hood.

  It was just a block of some sort of shining metal that looked almost like a cube of heavy glass. It wasn't very big, but it had a massive look about it, as if it might have been a heavy thing to lift. You could see the old bolt holes where the original internal combustion engine had been mounted and a heavy piece of some sort of metal had been fused across the frame to seat that little power plant. And up above the shiny cube was an apparatus of some sort. I didn't take the time to find out how it worked, but I could see that it was connected to the exhaust and I knew it was a dingus that disguised the power plant. You know how in electric trains they have it fixed up so that the locomotive goes chuff-chuff and throws out a stream of smoke. Well, that was what that contraption was. It threw out little puffs of smoke and made a tractor noise.

  I stood there looking at it and I wondered why it was, if Heath had an engine that worked better than an internal combustion engine, he should have gone to so much trouble to hide the fact he had it. If I'd had a thing like that, I knew, I'd make the most of it. I'd get someone to back me and go into production and in no time at all I'd be stinking rich. And there'd been nothing in the world to prevent Heath from doing that. But instead he'd fixed the tractor so it looked and sounded like an ordinary tractor and he'd fixed his car to make so much noise that it hid the fact it had a new type motor. Only he had overdone it. He'd made both the car and tractor make more noise than they should. And he'd missed an important bet in not buying gasoline. In his place I'd bought the stuff, just the way you should, and thrown it away or burned it to get rid of it.

  It almost seemed to me that Heath might have had something he was hiding all these years, that he'd tried deliberately to keep himself unnoticed. As if he might really have been a refugee from the Iron Curtain—or from somewhere else.

  I put the hood back in place again and snapped the catches shut and when I went out I was very careful to shut the machine shed door securely.

  I went back to my pruning and I did quite a bit of thinking and while I was doing it I realized that I'd been doing this same thinking, piecemeal, ever since that night I'd found the tractor running by itself. Thinking of it in snatches and not trying to correlate all my thinking and that way it hadn't added up to much, but now it did and I suppose I should have been a little scared.

  But I wasn't scared. Reginald Heath was a neighbour, and a good one, and we'd gone hunting and fishing together and we'd helped one another with haying and threshing and one thing and another and I liked the man as well as anyone I had ever known. Sure, he was a little different and he had a funny kind of tractor and a funny kind of car and he might even have a way of stretching time and since he'd come into the valley we'd been fortunate in weather and in health. All true, of course, but nothing to be scared of. Nothing to be scared of, once you knew the man.

  For some reason or other I remembered the time several years before when I'd dropped by of a summer evening. It was hot and the Heath family had brought chairs out on the lawn because it was cooler there. Heath got me a chair and we sat and talked, not about anything in particular, but whatever came into our heads.

  There was no moon, but there were a lot of stars and they were the prettiest I have ever seen them. I called Heath's attention to them and, just shooting off my mouth, I told him what little I'd picked up about astronomy.

  "They're a long ways off," I said. "So far off that their light takes years to reach us. And all of them are suns. A lot of them bigger than our sun." Which was about all I knew about the stars.

  Heath nodded gravely. "There's one up there", he said, "that I watch a lot. That blue one, over there. Well, sort of blue, anyhow. See it? See how it twinkles. Like it might be winking at us. A friendly sort of star."
r />   I pretended that I saw the one he was pointing at, although I wasn't sure I did, there were so many of them and a lot of them were twinkling.

  Then we got to talking about something else and forgot about the stars. Or at least I did.

  Right after supper, Bert Smith came over and said that Rickard had been around asking him some questions and that he'd been down to Jingo's place and that he'd said he'd see Heath just as soon as Heath got back from town.

  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 a 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.