All Flesh Is Grass Read online

  “Not a thing,” I said. “Only what I told you. I talked with someone on the phone. They offered me a job.”

  “And you took the job?”

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t, but I may. I could use a job. But what they—whoever it was—had to say didn’t make much sense.”

  “They?”

  “Well, either there were three of them—or one who used three different voices. Strange as it may sound to you, it seemed to me as if it were one person who used different voices.”

  He picked up the glass and gulped at it again. He held it up to the light and saw in what seemed to be astonishment that it was nearly empty. He hoisted himself out of the chair and went to get the bottle. He slopped liquor in his glass and held the bottle out to me.

  “I haven’t started yet,” I told him.

  He put the bottle on the desk and sat down again.

  “O.K.,” he said, “you’ve come and talked with me. It’s all right to take the job. Pick up your money and get out of here. More than likely Nancy’s out there waiting. Take her to a show or something.”

  “And that’s all?” I asked.

  “That is all,” he said.

  “You changed your mind,” I told him.

  “Changed my mind?”

  “You were about to tell me something. Then you decided not to.”

  He looked at me levelly and hard. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “It really makes no difference.”

  “It does to me,” I told him. “Because I can see you’re scared.”

  I thought he might get sore. Most men do when you tell them they are scared.

  He didn’t. He just sat there, his face unchanging.

  Then he said: “Start on that drink, for Christ’s sake. You make me nervous, just roosting there and hanging onto it.”

  I had forgotten all about the drink. I had a slug.

  “Probably,” he said, “you are thinking a lot of things that aren’t true. You more than likely think that I’m mixed up in some dirty kind of business. I wonder, would you believe me if I told you I don’t really know what kind of business I’m mixed up in.”

  “I think I would,” I said. “That is, if you say so.”

  “I’ve had a lot of trouble in life,” he said, “but that’s not unusual. Most people do have a lot of trouble, one way or the other. Mine came in a bunch. Trouble has a way of doing that.”

  I nodded, agreeing with him.

  “First,” he said, “my wife left me. You probably know all about that. There must have been a lot of talk about it.”

  “It was before my time,” I said. “I was pretty young.”

  “Yes, I suppose it was. Say this much for the two of us, we were civilized about it. There wasn’t any shouting and no nastiness in court. That was something neither of us wanted. And, then, on top of that I was facing business failure. The bottom went out of the farm machinery business and I feared that I might have to shut down the plant. There were a lot of other small farm machinery firms that simply locked their doors. After fifty or sixty or more years as going, profitable concerns, they were forced out of business.”

  He paused, as if he wanted me to say something. There wasn’t anything to say.

  He took another drink, then began to talk again. “I’m a fairly stupid man in a lot of ways. I can handle a business. I can keep it going if there’s any chance to keep it going and I can wring a profit from it. I suppose that you could say I’m rather astute when it comes to business matters. But that’s the end of it. In the course of my lifetime I have never really had a big idea or a new idea.”

  He leaned forward, clasping his hands together and putting them on the desk.

  “I’ve thought about it a lot,” he said, “this thing that happened to me. I’ve tried to see some reason in it and there is no reason. It’s a thing that should not have happened, not to a man like me. There I was, on the verge of failure, and not a thing that I could do about it. The problem was quite simple, really. For a number of good economic reasons, less farm machinery was being sold. Some of the big concerns, with big sales departments and good advertising budgets, could ride out a thing like that. They had some elbow room to plan, there were steps that they could take to lessen the effects of the situation. But a small concern like mine didn’t have the room or the capital reserve. My firm, and others, faced disaster. And in my case, you understand, I didn’t have a chance. I had run the business according to old and established practices and time-tested rules, the same sort of good, sound business practices that had been followed by my grandfather and my father. And these practices said that when your sales dwindled down to nothing you were finished. There were other men who might have been able to figure out a way to meet the situation, but not me. I was a good businessman, but I had no imagination. I had no ideas. And then, suddenly, I began to get ideas. But they were not my own ideas. It was as if the ideas of some other person were being transplanted to my brain.

  “You understand,” he said, “that an idea sometimes comes to you in the matter of a second. It just pops from nowhere. It has no apparent point of origin. Try as you may, you cannot trace it back to anything you did or heard or read. Somehow, I suppose, if you dug deep enough, you’d find its genesis, but there are few of us who are trained to do that sort of digging. But the point is that most ideas are no more than a germ, a tiny starting point. An idea may be good and valid, but it will take some nursing. It has to be developed. You must think about it and turn it around and around and look at it from every angle and weigh it and consider it before you can mold it into something useful.

  “But this wasn’t the way with these ideas that I got. They sprang forth full and round and completely developed. I didn’t have to do any thinking about them. They just popped into my mind and I didn’t need to do another thing about them. There they were, all ready for one’s use. I’d wake up in the morning and I’d have a new idea, a new mass of knowledge in my brain. I’d go for a walk and come back with another. They came in bunches, as if someone had sown a crop of them inside my brain and they had lain there for a while and then begun to sprout.”

  “The gadgets?” I said.

  He looked at me curiously. “Yes, the gadgets. What do you know about them?”

  “Nothing,” I told him. “I just knew that when the bottom fell out of the farm machinery business you started making gadgets. I don’t know what kind of gadgets.”

  He didn’t tell me what kind of gadgets. He went on talking about those strange ideas. “I didn’t realize at first what was happening. Then, as the ideas came piling in on me, I knew there was something strange about it. I knew that it was unlikely that I’d think of any one of them, let alone the many that I had. More than likely I’d never have thought of them at all, for I have no imagination and I am not inventive. I tried to tell myself that it was just barely possible I might have thought of two or three of them, but even that would have been most unlikely. But of more than two or three of them I knew I was not capable. I was forced, finally, to admit that I had been the recipient of some sort of outside help.”

  “What kind of outside help?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Even now I don’t.”

  “But it didn’t stop you from using these ideas.”

  “I am a practical man,” he said. “Intensely practical. I suppose some people might even say hard-headed. But consider this: the business was gone. Not my business, mind you, but the family business, the business my grandfather had started and my father had handed on to me. It wasn’t my business; it was a business I held in trust. There is a great distinction. You could see a business you had built yourself go gurgling down the drain and still stand the blow of it, telling yourself that you had been successful once and you could start over and be successful once again. But it’s different with a family business. In the first place, there is the shame. And in the second place, you can’t be sure that you can recoup. You were no success to start with. Success had been hand
ed to you and you’d merely carried on. You never could be sure that you could start over and build the business back. In fact, you’re so conditioned that you’re pretty sure you couldn’t.”

  He quit speaking and in the silence I could hear the ticking of a clock, faint and far off, but I couldn’t see the clock and I resisted the temptation to turn my head to see if I could find it. For I had the feeling that if I turned my head, if I stirred at all, I’d break something that lay within the room. As if I stood in a crowded china shop, where all the pieces were precarious and tilted, fearing to move, for if one piece were dislodged, all of them would come crashing down.

  “What would you have done?” asked Sherwood.

  “I’d have used anything I had,” I said.

  “That’s what I did,” said Sherwood. “I was desperate. There was the business, this house, Nancy, the family name—all of it at stake. I took all of those ideas and I wrote them down and I called in my engineers and draftsmen and production people and we got to work. I got the credit for it all, of course. There was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t tell them I wasn’t the one who’d dreamed up all those things. And you know, strange as it may sound, that’s the hardest part of all. That I have to go on taking credit for all those things I didn’t do.”

  “So that is that,” I said. “The family business saved and everything is fine. If I were you, I wouldn’t let a guilt complex bother me too much.”

  “But it didn’t stop,” he said. “If it had, I’d have forgotten it. If there’d just been this single spurt of help to save the company, it might have been all right. But it kept right on. As if there might be two of me—the real, apparent Gerald Sherwood, the one sitting at this desk, and another one who did the thinking for me. The ideas kept on coming and some of them made a lot of sense and some made no sense at all. Some of them, I tell you, were out of this world, literally out of this world. They had no point of reference, they didn’t seem to square with any situation. And while one could sense that they had potential, while there was a feeling of great importance in the very texture of them, they were entirely useless.

  “And it was not only the ideas; it was knowledge also. Bits and bursts of knowledge. Knowledge about things in which I had no interest, things I had never thought of. Knowledge about certain things I’m certain no man knows about. As if someone took a handful of fragmented knowledge, a sort of grab-bag, junk-heap pile of knowledge and dumped it in my brain.”

  He reached out for the bottle and filled his glass. He gestured at me with the bottle neck and I held out my glass. He filled it to the brim.

  “Drink up,” he said. “You got me started and now you hear me out. Tomorrow morning I’ll ask myself why I told you all of this. But tonight it seems all right.”

  “If you don’t want to tell me. If it seems that I am prying…”

  He waved a hand at me. “All right,” he said, “if you don’t want to hear it. Pick up your fifteen hundred.”

  I shook my head. “Not yet. Not until I know how come you’re giving it to me.”

  “It’s not my money. I’m just acting as an agent.”

  “For this other man? For this other you?”

  He nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “I wonder how you guessed.”

  I gestured at the phone without a dial.

  He grimaced. “I’ve never used the thing,” he said. “Until you told me about the one you found waiting in your office, I never knew anyone who had. I make them by the hundreds…”

  “You make them!”

  “Yes, of course I do. Not for myself. For this second self. Although,” he said, leaning across the desk and lowering his voice to a confidential tone, “I’m beginning to suspect it’s not a second self.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  He leaned slowly back in the chair. “Damned if I know,” he said. “There was a time I thought about it and wondered at it and worried over it, but there was no way of knowing. I just don’t bother any more. I tell myself there may be others like me. Maybe I am not alone—at least, it’s good to think so.”

  “But the phone?” I asked.

  “I designed the thing,” he said. “Or perhaps this other person, if it is a person, did. I found it in my mind and I put it down on paper. And I did this, mind you, without knowing what it was or what it was supposed to do. I knew it was a phone of some sort, naturally. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, see how it could work. And neither could any of the others who put it into production at the plant. By all the rules of reason, the damn thing shouldn’t work.”

  “But you said there were a lot of other things that seemed to have no purpose.”

  “A lot of them,” he said, “but with them I never drew a blueprint, I never tried to make them. But the phone, if that is what you want to call it, was a different proposition. I knew that I should make them and how many might be needed and what to do with them.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “I shipped them to an outfit in New Jersey.”

  It was utterly insane.

  “Let me get this straight,” I pleaded. “You found the blueprints in your head and you knew you should make these phones and that you should send them to some place in New Jersey. And you did it without question?”

  “Oh, certainly with question. I felt somewhat like a fool. But consider this: this second self, this auxiliary brain, this contact with something else had never let me down. It had saved my business, it had provided good advice, it had never failed me. You can’t turn your back on something that has played good fairy to you.”

  “I think I see,” I said.

  “Of course you do,” he told me. “A gambler rides his luck. An investor plays his hunches. And neither luck nor hunch are as solid and consistent as this thing I have.”

  He reached out and picked up the dialless phone and looked at it, then set it down again. “I brought this one home,” he said, “and put it on the desk. All these years I’ve waited for a call, but it never came.”

  “With you,” I told him, “there is no need of any phone.”

  “You think that’s it?” he asked.

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “I suppose it is,” he said. “At times it’s confusing.”

  “This Jersey firm?” I asked. “You corresponded with them?”

  He shook his head. “Not a line. I just shipped the phones.”

  “There was no acknowledgement?”

  “No acknowledgement,” he said. “No payment. I expected none. When you do business with yourself…”

  “Yourself! You mean this second self runs that New Jersey firm?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Christ, I don’t know anything. I’ve lived with it all these years and I tried to understand, but I never understood.”

  And now his face was haunted and I felt sorry for him.

  He must have noticed that I felt sorry for him. He laughed and said, “Don’t let me get you down. I can take it. I can take anything. You must not forget that I’ve been well paid. Tell me about yourself. You’re in real estate.”

  I nodded. “And insurance.”

  “And you couldn’t pay your phone bill.”

  “Don’t waste sympathy on me,” I said. “I’ll get along somehow.”

  “Funny thing about the kids,” he said. “Not many of them stay here. Not much to keep them here, I guess.”

  “Not very much,” I said.

  “Nancy is just home from Europe,” he told me. “I’m glad to have her home. It got lonesome here with no one. I haven’t seen much of her lately. College and then a fling at social work and then the trip to Europe. But she tells me now that she plans to stay a while. She wants to do some writing.”

  “She should be good at it,” I said. “She got good marks in composition when we were in high school.”

  “She has the writing bug,” he said. “Had half a dozen things published in, I guess you call them little magazines. The ones that come
out quarterly and pay you nothing for your work except half a dozen copies. I’d never heard of them before. I read the articles she wrote, but I have no eye for writing. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. Although I suppose it has to have a certain competence to have been accepted. But if writing keeps her here with me, I’ll be satisfied.”

  I got out of my chair. “I’d better go,” I said. “Maybe I have stayed longer than I should.”

  He shook his head. “No, I was glad to talk with you. And don’t forget the money. This other self, this whatever-you-may-call-it told me to give it to you. I gather that it’s in the nature of a retainer of some sort.”

  “But this is double talk,” I told him, almost angrily. “The money comes from you.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “It comes from a special fund that was started many years ago. It didn’t seem quite right that I should reap all benefit from all of these ideas which were not really mine. So I began paying ten per cent of profits into a special fund…”

  “Suggested, more than likely, by this second self.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think you are right, although it was so long ago that I cannot truly say. But in any case, I set up the fund and through the years have paid out varying amounts at the direction of whoever it may be that shares my mind with me.”

  I stared at him, and it was rude of me, I know. But no man, I told myself, could sit as calmly as Sherwood sat and talk about an unknown personality that shared his mind with him. Even after all the years, it still would not be possible.

  “The fund,” said Sherwood, quietly, “is quite a tidy sum, even with the amounts I’ve paid out of it. It seems that since this fellow came to live with me, everything I’ve touched has simply turned to money.”

  “You take a chance,” I said, “telling this to me.”

  “You mean that you could tell it around about me?”

  I nodded. “Not that I would,” I said.

  “I don’t think you will,” he said. “You’d get laughed at for your trouble. No one would believe you.”

  “I don’t suppose they would.”

  “Brad,” he said, almost kindly, “don’t be a complete damn fool. Pick up that envelope and put it in your pocket. Come back some other time and talk with me—any time you want. I have a hunch there may be a lot of things we’ll want to talk about.”