Over the River and Through the Woods Read online

  Old Mose loaded up the stove so the kitchen would stay warm and he tucked the thing in once again, then got his milk pails and went down to the barn.

  He fed the sheep and pigs and horses and he milked the cows. He hunted eggs and shut the chicken house. He pumped a tank of water.

  Then he went back to the house.

  It was dark now and he lit the oil lamp on the table, for he was against electricity. He’d refused to sign up when REA had run out the line and a lot of the neighbors had gotten sore at him for being uncooperative. Not that he cared, of course.

  He had a look at the thing upon the bed. It didn’t seem to be any better, or any worse, for that matter. If it had been a sick lamb or an ailing calf, he could have known right off how it was getting on, but this thing was different. There was no way to tell.

  He fixed himself some supper and ate it and wished he knew how to feed the thing. And he wished, too, that he knew how to help it. He’d got it under shelter and he had it warm, but was that right or wrong for something like this? He had no idea.

  He wondered if he should try to get some help, then felt squeamish about asking help when he couldn’t say exactly what had to be helped. But then he wondered how he would feel himself if he were in a far, strange country, all played out and sick, and no one to get him any help because they didn’t know exactly what he was.

  That made up his mind for him and he walked over to the phone. But should he call a doctor or a veterinarian? He decided to call the doctor because the thing was in the house. If it had been in the barn, he would have called the veterinarian.

  He was on a rural line and the hearing wasn’t good and he was halfway deaf, so he didn’t use the phone too often. He had told himself at times it was nothing but another aggravation and there had been a dozen times he had threatened to have it taken out. But now he was glad he hadn’t.

  The operator got old Doctor Benson and they couldn’t hear one another too well, but Mose finally made the doctor understand who was calling and that he needed him and the doctor said he’d come.

  With some relief, Mose hung up the phone and was just standing there, not doing anything, when he was struck by the thought that there might be others of these things down there in the woods. He had no idea what they were or what they might be doing or where they might be going, but it was pretty evident that the one upon the bed was some sort of stranger from a very distant place. It stood to reason that there might be more than one of them, for far traveling was a lonely business and anyone—or anything—would like to have some company along.

  He got the lantern down off the peg and lit it and went stumping out the door. The night was as black as a stack of cats and the lantern light was feeble, but that made not a bit of difference, for Mose knew this farm of his like the back of his hand.

  He went down the path into the woods. It was a spooky place, but it took more than woods at night to spook Old Mose. At the place where he had found the thing, he looked around, pushing through the brush and holding the lantern high so he could see a bigger area, but he didn’t find another one of them.

  He did find something else, though—a sort of outsize birdcage made of metal lattice work that had wrapped itself around an eight-inch hickory tree. He tried to pull it loose, but it was jammed so tight that he couldn’t budge it.

  He sighted back the way it must have come. He could see where it had plowed its way through the upper branches of the trees, and out beyond were stars, shining bleakly with the look of far away.

  Mose had no doubt that the thing lying on his bed beside the kitchen stove had come in this birdcage contraption. He marveled some at that, but he didn’t fret himself too much, for the whole thing was so unearthly that he knew he had little chance of pondering it out.

  He walked back to the house and he scarcely had the lantern blown out and hung back on its peg than he heard a car drive up.

  The doctor, when he came up to the door, became a little grumpy at seeing Old Mose standing there.

  “You don’t look sick to me,” the doctor said. “Not sick enough to drag me clear out here at night.”

  “I ain’t sick,” said Mose.

  “Well, then,” said the doctor, more grumpily than ever, “what did you mean by phoning me?”

  “I got someone who is sick,” said Mose. “I hope you can help him. I would have tried myself, but I don’t know how to go about it.”

  The doctor came inside and Mose shut the door behind him.

  “You got something rotten in here?” asked the doctor.

  “No, it’s just the way he smells. It was pretty bad at first, but I’m getting used to it by now.”

  The doctor saw the thing lying on the bed and went over to it. Old Mose heard him sort of gasp and could see him standing there, very stiff and straight. Then he bent down and had a good look at the critter on the bed.

  When he straightened up and turned around to Mose, the only thing that kept him from being downright angry was that he was so flabbergasted.

  “Mose,” he yelled, “what is this?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mose. “I found it in the woods and it was hurt and wailing and I couldn’t leave it there.”

  “You think it’s sick?”

  “I know it is,” said Mose. “It needs help awful bad. I’m afraid it’s dying.”

  The doctor turned back to the bed again and pulled the blanket down, then went and got the lamp so that he could see. He looked the critter up and down, and he prodded it with a skittish finger, and he made the kind of mysterious clucking sound that only doctors make.

  Then he pulled the blanket back over it again and took the lamp back to the table.

  “Mose,” he said, “I can’t do a thing for it.”

  “But you’re a doctor!”

  “A human doctor, Mose. I don’t know what this thing is, but it isn’t human. I couldn’t even guess what is wrong with it, if anything. And I wouldn’t know what could be safely done for it even if I could diagnose its illness. I’m not even sure it’s an animal. There are a lot of things about it that argue it’s a plant.”

  Then the doctor asked Mose straight out how he came to find it and Mose told him exactly how it happened. But he didn’t tell him anything about the birdcage, for when he thought about it, it sounded so fantastic that he couldn’t bring himself to tell it. Just finding the critter and having it here was bad enough, without throwing in the birdcage.

  “I tell you what,” the doctor said. “You got something here that’s outside all human knowledge. I doubt there’s ever been a thing like this seen on Earth before. I have no idea what it is and I wouldn’t try to guess. If I were you, I’d get in touch with the university up at Madison. There might be someone there who could get it figured out. Even if they couldn’t they’d be interested. They’d want to study it.”

  Mose went to the cupboard and got the cigar box almost full of silver dollars and paid the doctor. The doctor put the dollars in his pocket, joshing Mose about his eccentricity.

  But Mose was stubborn about his silver dollars. “Paper money don’t seem legal, somehow,” he declared. “I like the feel of silver and the way it clinks. It’s got authority.”

  The doctor left and he didn’t seem as upset as Mose had been afraid he might be. As soon as he was gone, Mose pulled up a chair and sat down beside the bed.

  It wasn’t right, he thought, that the thing should be so sick and no one to help—no one who knew any way to help it.

  He sat in the chair and listened to the ticking of the clock, loud in the kitchen silence, and the crackling of the wood burning in the stove.

  Looking at the thing lying on the bed, he had an almost fierce hope that it could get well again and stay with him. Now that its birdcage was all banged up, maybe there’d be nothing it could do but stay. And he hoped it would, for already the house felt less lonely.

  Sitting in the chair between the stove and bed, Mose realized how lonely it had been. It had not been quite so
bad until Towser died. He had tried to bring himself to get another dog, but he never had been able to. For there was no dog that would take the place of Towser and it had seemed unfaithful to even try. He could have gotten a cat, of course, but that would remind him too much of Molly; she had been very fond of cats, and until the time she died, there had always been two or three of them underfoot around the place.

  But now he was alone. Alone with his farm and his stubbornness and his silver dollars. The doctor thought, like all the rest of them, that the only silver Mose had was in the cigar box in the cupboard. There wasn’t one of them who knew about the old iron kettle piled plumb full of them, hidden underneath the floorboards of the living room. He chuckled at the thought of how he had them fooled. He’d give a lot to see his neighbors’ faces if they could only know. But he was not the one to tell them. If they were to find it out, they’d have to find it out themselves.

  He nodded in the chair and finally he slept, sitting upright, with his chin resting on his chest and his crossed arms wrapped around himself as if to keep him warm.

  When he woke, in the dark before the dawn, with the lamp flickering on the table and the fire in the stove burned low, the alien had died.

  There was no doubt of death. The thing was cold and rigid and the husk that was its body was rough and drying out—as a corn stalk in the field dries out, whipping in the wind once the growing had been ended.

  Mose pulled the blanket up to cover it, and although this was early to do the chores, he went out by lantern light and got them done.

  After breakfast, he heated water and washed his face and shaved, and it was the first time in years he’d shaved any day but Sunday. Then he put on his one good suit and slicked down his hair and got the old jalopy out of the machine shed and drove into town.

  He hunted up Eb Dennison, the town clerk, who also was the secretary of the cemetery association.

  “Eb,” he said, “I want to buy a lot.”

  “But you’ve got a lot,” protested Eb.

  “That plot,” said Mose, “is a family plot. There’s just room for me and Molly.”

  “Well, then,” asked Eb, “why another one? You have no other members of the family.”

  “I found someone in the woods,” said Mose. “I took him home and he died last night. I plan to bury him.”

  “If you found a dead man in the woods,” Eb warned him, “you better notify the coroner and sheriff.”

  “In time I may,” said Mose, not intending to. “Now how about that plot?”

  Washing his hands of the affair entirely, Eb sold him the plot.

  Having bought his plot, Mose went to the undertaking establishment run by Albert Jones.

  “Al,” he said, “there’s been a death out at the house. A stranger I found out in the woods. He doesn’t seem to have anyone and I aim to take care of it.”

  “You got a death certificate?” asked Al, who subscribed to none of the niceties affected by most funeral parlor operators.

  “Well, no, I haven’t.”

  “Was there a doctor in attendance?”

  “Doc Benson came out last night.”

  “He should have made you out one. I’ll give him a ring.”

  He phoned Doctor Benson and talked with him a while and got red around the gills. He finally slammed down the phone and turned on Mose.

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull off,” he fumed, “but Doc tells me this thing of yours isn’t even human. I don’t take care of dogs or cats or—”

  “This ain’t no dog or cat.”

  “I don’t care what it is. It’s got to be human for me to handle it. And don’t go trying to bury it in the cemetery, because it’s against the law.”

  Considerably discouraged, Mose left the undertaking parlor and trudged slowly up the hill toward the town’s one and only church.

  He found the minister in his study working on a sermon. Mose sat down in a chair and bumbled his battered hat around and around in his work-scarred hands.

  “Parson,” he said, “I’ll tell you the story from first to last,” and he did. He added, “I don’t know what it is. I guess no one else does, either. But it’s dead and in need of decent burial and that’s the least that I can do. I can’t bury it in the cemetery, so I suppose I’ll have to find a place for it on the farm. I wonder if you could bring yourself to come out and say a word or two.”

  The minister gave the matter some deep consideration.

  “I’m sorry, Mose,” he said at last. “I don’t believe I can. I am not sure at all the church would approve of it.”

  “This thing may not be human,” said Old Mose, “but it is one of God’s critters.”

  The minister thought some more, and did some wondering out loud, but made up his mind finally that he couldn’t do it.

  So Mose went down the street to where his car was waiting and drove home, thinking about what heels some humans are.

  Back at the farm again, he got a pick and shovel and went into the garden, and there, in one corner of it, he dug a grave. He went out to the machine shed to hunt up some boards to make the thing a casket, but it turned out that he had used the last of the lumber to patch up the hog pen.

  Mose went to the house and dug around in a chest in one of the back rooms which had not been used for years, hunting for a sheet to use as a winding shroud, since there would be no casket. He couldn’t find a sheet, but he did unearth an old white linen tablecloth. He figured that would do, so he took it to the kitchen.

  He pulled back the blanket and looked at the critter lying there in death and a sort of lump came into his throat at the thought of it—how it had died so lonely and so far from home without a creature of its own to spend its final hours with. And naked, too, without a stitch of clothing and with no possession, with not a thing to leave behind as a remembrance of itself.

  He spread the tablecloth out on the floor beside the bed and lifted the thing and laid it on the tablecloth. As he laid it down, he saw the pocket in it—if it was a pocket—a sort of slitted flap in the center of what could be its chest. He ran his hand across the pocket area. There was a lump inside it. He crouched for a long moment beside the body, wondering what to do.

  Finally he reached his fingers into the flap and took out the thing that bulged. It was a ball, a little bigger than a tennis ball, made of cloudy glass—or, at least, it looked like glass. He squatted there, staring at it, then took it to the window for a better look.

  There was nothing strange at all about the ball. It was just a cloudy ball of glass and it had a rough, dead feel about it, just as the body had.

  He shook his head and took it back and put it where he’d found it and wrapped the body securely in the cloth. He carried it to the garden and put it in the grave. Standing solemnly at the head of the grave, he said a few short words and then shoveled in the dirt.

  He had meant to make a mound above the grave and he had intended to put up a cross, but at the last he didn’t do either one of these. There would be snoopers. The word would get around and they’d be coming out and hunting for the spot where he had buried this thing he had found out in the woods. So there must be no mound to mark the place and no cross as well. Perhaps it was for the best, he told himself, for what could he have carved or written on the cross?

  By this time it was well past noon and he was getting hungry, but he didn’t stop to eat, because there were other things to do. He went out into the pasture and caught up Bess and hitched her to the stoneboat and went down into the woods.

  He hitched her to the birdcage that was wrapped around the tree and she pulled it loose as pretty as you please. Then he loaded it on the stoneboat and hauled it up the hill and stowed it in the back of the machine shed, in the far corner by the forge.

  After that, he hitched Bess to the garden plow and gave the garden a cultivating that it didn’t need so it would be fresh dirt all over and no one could locate where he’d dug the grave.

  He was just finishing the
plowing when Sheriff Doyle drove up and got out of the car. The sheriff was a soft-spoken man, but he was no dawdler. He got right to the point.

  “I hear,” he said, “you found something in the woods.”

  “That I did,” said Mose.

  “I hear it died on you.”

  “Sheriff, you heard right.”

  “I’d like to see it, Mose.”

  “Can’t. I buried it. And I ain’t telling where.”

  “Mose,” the sheriff said, “I don’t want to make you trouble, but you did an illegal thing. You can’t go finding people in the woods and just bury them when they up and die on you.”

  “You talk to Doc Benson?”

  The sheriff nodded. “He said it wasn’t any kind of thing he’d ever seen before. He said it wasn’t human.”

  “Well, then,” said Mose, “I guess that lets you out. If it wasn’t human, there could be no crime against property. There’s been no one around to claim they owned the thing, is there?”

  The sheriff rubbed his chin. “No, there hasn’t. Maybe you’re right. Where did you study law?”

  “I never studied law. I never studied nothing. I just use common sense.”

  “Doc said something about the folks up at the university might want a look at it.”

  “I tell you, Sheriff,” said Mose. “This thing came here from somewhere and it died. I don’t know where it came from and I don’t know what it was and I don’t hanker none to know. To me it was just a living thing that needed help real bad. It was alive and it had its dignity and in death it commanded some respect. When the rest of you refused it decent burial, I did the best I could. And that is all there is to it.”

  “All right, Mose,” the sheriff said, “if that’s how you want it.”

  He turned around and stalked back to the car. Mose stood beside old Bess hitched to her plow and watched him drive away. He drove fast and reckless as if he might be angry.

  Mose put the plow away and turned the horse back to the pasture and by now it was time to do chores again.

  He got the chores all finished and made himself some supper and after supper sat beside the stove, listening to the ticking of the clock, loud in the silent house, and the crackle of the fire.