Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer SSC (22 page)

"Absalom,"
he said, choking in his throat, "you don't know how I been wanting this
chance to ask your humble pardon."

Then Mr. Absalom
all of a sudden reached and took that skinny hand in his big one.

"You made me
so savage mad, saying I was a witch-man," Mr. Troy said. "If you'd let
me talk, I'd have told you the blight was in my downhill corn, too. It only
just spared the uphill patches. You can come and look—"

"
Troy
,
I don't need to look," Mr. Absalom made out to reply him. "Your
word's as good to me as the yellow gold. I never rightly thought you did any
witch-stuff, not even when I said it to you."

"I'm so
dog-sorry I dug this ditch," Mr. Troy went on. "I hated it, right
when I had the spade in my hand. Ain't my nature to be spiteful, Absalom."

"No,
Troy
,
Ain't no drop of spite blood in you."

"But you
built this bridge, Absalom, to show you never favored my cutting you off from
me—"

Mr. Troy stopped
talking, and wiped his brown face with the hand Mr. Absalom didn't have hold
of.

"
Troy
,"
said Mr. Absalom, "I'm just as glad as you are about all this. But don't
credit me with that bridge-idea. This carpenter here, he thought it up."

"And now
I'll be going," spoke up the carpenter in his gentle way.

They both looked
on him. He'd hoisted his tool chest up on his shoulder again, and he smiled at
them, and down at Little Anse. He put his hand on Little Anse's head, just half
a second long.

"Fling away
those crutches," he said. "You don't need them now."

All at once,
Little Anse flung the crutches away, left and right. He stood up straight and
strong. Fast as any boy ever ran on this earth, he ran to his daddy.

The carpenter was
gone. The place he'd been at was empty.

But, looking
where he'd been, they weren't frightened, the way they'd be at a haunt or
devil-thing. Because they all of a sudden all three knew Who the carpenter was
and how He's always with us, the way He promised in the far-back times; and how
He'll do ary sort of job, if it can bring peace on earth and good will to men,
among nations or just among neighbors.

It was Little Anse
who remembered the whole chorus of the song—

"Shoo, John, I know that song! We sung
it last night at church for Christmas Eve!"   

"I know it too, John!"
  

"Me! Me too!"   

"All right then, why don't you children
join in and help me sing it?"   

Go tell
it on the mountain,
 
Tell it on the hills and
everywhere,
 
Go tell it on the mountain
 
That Jesus Christ was born!  
 

All day I'd
climbed through mountain country. Past Rebel Creek I'd climbed, and through
Lost Cove, and up and down the slopes of Crouch and Hog Ham and Skeleton Ridge,
and finally as the sun hunted the world's edge, I looked over a high saddleback
and down on
Flornoy
College
.

Flornoy's up in
the hills, plain and poor, but it does good teaching. Country boys who mightn't
get past common school else can come and work off the most part of their board
and keep and learning. I saw a couple of brick buildings, a row of cottages,
and barns for the college farm in the bottom below, with then a paved road to
Hilberstown maybe eight, nine miles down valley. Climbing down was another
sight farther, and longer work than you'd think, and when I got to the level it
was past sundown and the night showed its stars to me.

Coming into the
back of the college grounds, I saw a light somewhere this side of the
buildings, and then I heard two voices quarreling at each other.

"You leave
my lantern be," bade one voice, deep and hacked.

"I wasn't
going to blow it out, Moon-Eye," the other voice laughed, but sharp and
mean. "I just joggled up against it."

"Look out I
don't joggle up against you, Rixon Pengraft."

"Maybe
you're bigger than I am, but there's such a thing as the difference between a
big man and a little one."

Then I was close
and saw them, and they saw me. Scholars at Flornoy, I reckoned by the light of
the old lantern one of them toted. He was tall, taller than I am, with broad,
hunched shoulders, and in the lantern-shine his face looked good in a long,
big-nosed way. The other fellow was plumpy-soft, and smoked a cigar that made
an orangey coal in the night.

The cigar-smoking
one turned toward where I came along with my silver-strung guitar in one hand
and my possible-sack in the other.

"What you
doing around here," he said to me. Didn't ask it, said it.

"I'm looking
for Professor Deal," I replied him. "Any objections?"

He grinned his
teeth white around the cigar. The lantern-shine flickered on them. "None I
know of. Go on looking."

He turned and
moved off in the night. The fellow with the lantern watched him go, then spoke
to me.

"I'll take
you to Professor Deal's. My name's Anderson Newlands. Folks call me
Moon-Eye."

"Folks call
me John," I said. "What does Moon-Eye mean?"

He smiled, tight,
over the lantern glow. "It's hard for me to see in the night-time, John. I
was in the Korean war, I got wounded and had a fever, and my eyes began to
trouble me. They're getting better, but I need a lantern any night but when
it's full moon."

We walked along.
"Was that Rixon Pengraft fellow trying to give you a hard time?" I
asked.

"Trying,
maybe. He—well, he wants something I'm not really keeping away from him, he
just thinks I am."

That's all
Moon-Eye Newlands said about it, and I didn't inquire him what he meant. He
went on: "I don't want any fuss with Rixon, but if he's bound to have one
with me—" Again he stopped his talk. "Yonder's Professor Deal's
house, the one with the porch. I'm due there some later tonight, after
supper."

He headed off
with his lantern, toward the brick building where the scholars slept. On the
porch, Professor Deal came out and made me welcome. He's president of Flornoy,
strong-built, middling tall, with white hair and a round hard chin like a
water-washed rock.

"Haven't
seen you since the State Fair," he boomed out, loud enough to talk to the
seventy, eighty Flornoy scholars all at once. "Come in the house, John,
Mrs. Deal's nearly ready with supper. I want you to meet Dr. McCoy."

I came inside and
rested my guitar and possible-sack by the door. "Is he a medicine doctor
or a teacher doctor?" I asked.

"She's a lady.
Dr. Anda Lee McCoy. She observes how people think and how far they see."

"An
eye-doctor?"

"Call her an
inner-eye doctor, John. She studies what those
Duke
University
people call
ESP—extra-sensory perception."

I'd heard of
that. A fellow named
Rhine
says folks can some way tell
what other folks think to themselves. He tells it that everybody reads minds a
little bit, and some folks read them a right much. Might be you've seen his
cards, marked five ways—square, cross, circle, star, wavy lines. Take five of
each of those cards and you've got a pack of twenty-five. Somebody shuffles
them like for a game and looks at them, one after another. Then somebody else,
who can't see the cards, in the next room maybe, tries to guess what's on them.
Ordinary chance is for one right guess out of five. But, here and there, it
gets called another sight oftener.

"Some old
mountain folks would name that witch-stuff," I said to Professor Deal.

"Hypnotism
was called witch-craft, until it was shown to be true science," he said
back. "Or telling what dreams mean, until Dr. Freud overseas made it
scientific. ESP might be a recognized science some day."

"You hold
with it, do you, Professor?"

"I hold with
anything that's proven," he said. "I'm not sure about ESP yet. Here's
Mrs. Deal."

She's a
comfortable, clever lady, as white-haired as he is. While I made my manners,
Dr. Anda Lee McCoy came from the back of the house.

"Are you the
ballad-singer?" she asked me.

I'd expected no
doctor lady as young as Dr. Anda Lee McCoy, nor as pretty-looking. She was
small and slim, but there was enough of her. She stood straight and wore good
city clothes, and had lots of yellow hair and a round happy face and
straight-looking blue eyes.

"Professor
Deal bade me come see him," I said. "He couldn't get Mr. Bascom Lamar
Lunsford to decide something or other about folk songs and tales."

"I'm glad
you've come," she welcomed me.

Turned out Dr.
McCoy knew Mr. Bascom Lamar Lunsford and thought well of him. Professor Deal
had asked for him first, but Mr. Bascom was in
Washington
,
making records of his songs for the Library of Congress. Some folks can't vote
which they'd rather hear, Mr. Bascom's five-string banjo or my guitar; but he
sure enough knows more old time songs than I do. A few more.

Mrs. Deal went to
the kitchen to see was supper near about cooked. We others sat down in the
front room. Dr. McCoy asked me to sing something, so I got my guitar and gave
her "Shiver in the Pines."

"Pretty,"
she praised. "Do you know a song about killing a captain at a lonesome
river ford?"

I thought.
"Some of it, maybe. It's a Virginia song, I think. You relish that song,
Doctor?"

"I wasn't
thinking of my own taste. A student here—a man named Anderson Newlands—doesn't
like it at all."

Mrs. Deal called
us to supper, and while we ate, Dr. McCoy talked.

"I'll tell
you why I asked for someone like you to help me, John," she began.
"I've got a theory, or a hypothesis. About dreams."

"Not quite
like Freud," put in Professor Deal, "though he'd be interested if he
was alive and here."

"It's
dreaming the future," said Dr. McCoy.

"Shoo,"
I said, "that's no theory, that's fact. Bible folks did it. I've done it
myself. Once, during the war—"

But that was no
tale to tell, what I dreamed in war time and how true it came out. So I stopped,
while Dr. McCoy went on.

"There are
records of prophecies coming true, even after the prophets died. And another
set of records fit in, about images appearing like ghosts. Most of these are
ancestors of somebody alive today. Kinship and special sympathy, you know.
Sometimes these images, or ghosts, are called from the past by using diagrams
and spells. You aren't laughing at me, John?"

"No, ma'am.
Things like that aren't likely to be a laughing matter."

"Well, what
if dreams of the future come true because somebody goes forward in time while
he sleeps or drowses?" she asked us. "That ghost of Nostradamus,
reported not long ago—what if Nostradamus himself was called into this present
time, and then went back to his own century to set down a prophecy of what he'd
seen?"

If she wanted an
answer, I didn't have one for her. All I said was: "Do you want to call
somebody from the past, ma'am? Or maybe go yourself into a time that's
coming?"

She shook her
yellow head. "Put it one way, John, I'm not psychic. Put it another way,
the scientific way, I'm not adapted. But this young man Anderson Newlands is
the best adapted I've ever found."

She told how some
Flornoy students scored high at guessing the cards and their markings. I was
right interested to hear that Rixon Pengraft called them well, though Dr. McCoy
said his mind got on other things—I reckoned his mind got on her; pretty thing
as she was, she could take a man's mind. But Anderson Newlands, Moon-Eye
Newlands, guessed every card right off as she held the pack, time after time,
with nary miss.

"And he
dreams of the future, I know," she said. "If he can see the future,
he might call to the past."

"By the
diagrams and the words?" I inquired her. "How about the science
explanation for that?"

It so happened
she had one. She told it while we ate our custard pie.

First, that idea
that time's the fourth dimension. You're six feet tall, twenty inches wide,
twelve inches thick and thirty-five years old; and the thirty-five years of you
reach from where you were born one place, across the land and maybe over the
sea where you've traveled, and finally to right where you are now, from
thousands of miles ago. Then the idea that just a dot here in this second of
time we're living in can be a wire back and back and forever back, or a
five-inch line is a five-inch bar reaching forever back thataway, or a circle
is a tube, and so on. It did make some sense to me, and I asked Dr. McCoy what
it added up to.

It added up to
the diagram witch-folks draw, with circles and six-pointed stars and letters
from an alphabet nobody on this earth can spell out. Well, that diagram might
be a cross-section, here in our three dimensions, of something reaching
backward or forward, a machine to travel you through time.

"You certain
sure about this?" I inquired Dr. McCoy at last. And she smiled, then she
frowned, and shook her yellow head again.

"I'm only
guessing," she said, "as I might guess with the ESP cards. But I'd
like to find out whether the right man could call his ancestor out of the
past."

"I still
don't figure out about those spoken spell words the witch-folks use," I
said.

"A special
sound can start a machine," said Professor Deal. "I've seen such
things."

"Like the
words of the old magic square?" asked Dr. McCoy. "The one they use in
spells to call up the dead?"

She got a pencil
and scrap of paper, and wrote it out:

"I've
been seeing that thing a many years," I said. "Witch-folks use it,
and it's in witch-books like
 
The
Long Lost Friend
."

"You'll
notice," said Dr. McCoy, "that it reads the same, whether you start
at the upper left and work down word by word, or at the lower right and read
the words one by one upward; or if you read it straight down or straight
up."

Professor Deal
looked, too. "The first two words—SATOR and AREPO—are reversals of the
last two. SATOR for ROTAS, and AREPO for OPERA."

"I've
heard that before," I braved up to say. "The first two words being
the last two turned around. But the third, fourth and fifth are all right—I've
heard tell that TENET means
 
faith
 
and OPERA is
 
works
, and ROTAS something
about wheels."

"But SATOR
and AREPO are more than just reversed words," Professor Deal said.
"I'm no profound Latinist, but I know that SATOR means a sower—a
planter—or a beginner or creator."

"
Creator
,"
Dr. McCoy jumped on his last word. "That would fit into this if it's a
real sentence."

"A sentence,
and a palindrome," nodded Professor Deal. "Know what a palindrome is,
John?"

I
knew that, too, from somewhere. "A sentence that reads the same back and
forward," I told him. "Like Napoleon saying,
 
Able was I ere I saw Elba
. Or
the first words Mother Eve heard in the Garden of Eden,
 
Madam, I'm Adam
. Those are old
grandma jokes to pleasure young children."

"If these
words are a sentence, they're more than a palindrome," said Dr. McCoy.
"They're a double palindrome, because they read the same from any place
you start—backward, forward, up or down. Fourfold meaning would be fourfold
power as a spell or formula."