Way Station (6 page)
If, Enoch thought, I could only teach her the pasimology of my galactic people-then we could talk, the two of us, almost as well as with the flow of words on the human tongue. Given the time, he thought, it might not be too hard, for there was a natural and a logical process to the galactic sign language that made it almost instinctive once one had caught the underlying principle.
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Throughout the Earth as well, in the early days; there had been sign languages, and none so well developed as that one which obtained among the aborigines of North America, so that an Amerindian, no matter what his tongue, could express himself among many other tribes.
But even so the sign language of the Indian was, at best, a crutch that allowed a man to hobble when he couldn’t run. Whereas that of the galaxy was in itself a language, adaptable to many different means and methods of expression. It had been developed through millennia, with many different peoples making contributions, and through the centuries it had been refined and shaken down and polished until today it was a communications tool that stood on its own merits.
There was need for such a tool, for the galaxy was Babel. Even the galactic science of pasimology, polished as it might be, could not surmount all the obstacles, could not guarantee, in certain cases, the basic minimum of communication. For not only were there millions of tongues, but those other languages as well which could not operate on the principle of sound because the races were incapable of sound. And even sound itself failed of efficiency when the race talked in ultrasonics others could not hear. There was telepathy, of course, but for every telepath there were a thousand races that had telepathic blocks. There were many who got along on sign languages alone and others who could communicate only by a written or pictographic system, including some who carried chemical blackboards built into their bodies. And there was that sightless, deaf, and speechless race from the mystery stars of the far side of the galaxy who used what was perhaps the most complicated of all the galactic languages-a code of signals routed along their nervous systems.
Enoch had been at the job almost a century, and even so, he thought, with the aid of the universal sign language and the semantic translator, which was little more than a pitiful (although complicated) mechanical contrivance, he still was hard put at times to know what many of them said.
Lucy Fisher picked up a cup that was standing by her side-a cup fashioned of a strip of folded birch bark-and dipped it in the spring. She held it out to Enoch and he stepped close to take it, kneeling down to drink from it. It was not entirely water-tight, and water ran from it down across his arm, wetting the cuff of shirt and jacket.
He finished drinking and handed back the cup. She took it in one hand and reached out the other, to brush across his forehead with the tip of gentle fingers in what she might have thought of as a benediction.
He did not speak to her. Long ago he had ceased talking to her, sensing that the movement of his mouth, making sounds she could not hear, might be embarrassing.
Instead he put out a hand and laid his broad palm against her cheek, holding it there for a reassuring moment as a gesture of affection. Then he got to his feet and stood staring down at her and for a moment their eyes looked into the other’s eyes and then turned away.
He crossed the little stream that ran down from the spring and took the trail that led from the forest’s edge across the field, heading for the ridge. Halfway up the slope, he turned around and saw that she was watching him. He held up his hand in a gesture of farewell and her hand gestured in reply.
It had been, he recalled, twelve years or more ago that he first had seen her, a little fairy person of ten years or so, a wild thing running in the woods. They had become friends, he recalled, only after a long time, although he saw her often, for she roamed the hills and valley as if they were a playground for her-which, of course, they were.
Through the years he had watched her grow and had often met her on his daily walks, and between the two of them had grown up an understanding of the lonely and the outcast, but understanding based on something more than that-on the fact that each had a world that was their own and worlds that had given them an insight into something that others seldom saw. Not that either, Enoch thought, ever told the other, or tried to tell the other, of file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt (19 of 103) [1/19/03 4:01:51 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt these private worlds, but the fact of these private worlds was there, in the consciousness of each, providing a firm foundation for the building of a friendship.
He recalled the day he’d found her at the place where the pink lady’s-slippers grew, just kneeling there and looking at them, not picking any of them, and how he’d stopped beside her and been pleased she had not moved to pick them, knowing that in the sight of them, the two, he and she, had found a joy and a beauty that was beyond possession.
He reached the ridgetop and turned down the grass-grown road that led down to the mailbox.
And he’d not been mistaken back there, he told himself, no matter how it may have seemed on second look. The butterfly’s wing had been torn and crumpled and drab from the lack of dust. It had been a crippled thing and then it had been whole again and had flown away.
Winslowe Grant was on time.
Enoch, as he reached the mailbox, sighted the dust raised by his old jalopy as it galloped along the ridge. It had been a dusty year, he thought, as he stood beside the box. There had been little rain and the crops had suffered. Although, to tell the truth, there were few crops on the ridge these days. There had been a time when comfortable small farms had existed, almost cheek by jowl, all along the road, with the barns all red and the houses white. But now most of the farms had been abandoned and the houses and the barns were no longer red or white, but gray and weathered wood, with all the paint peeled off and the ridgepoles sagging and the people gone.
It would not be long before Winslowe would arrive and Enoch settled down to wait. The mailman might be stopping at the Fisher box, just around the bend, although the Fishers, as a rule, got but little mail, mostly just the advertising sheets and other junk that was mailed out indiscriminately to the rural boxholders. Not that it mattered to the Fishers, for sometimes days went by in which they did not pick up their mail. If it were not for
Lucy, they perhaps would never get it, for it was mostly Lucy who thought to pick it up.
The Fishers were, for a fact, Enoch told himself, a truly shiftless outfit. Their house and all the buildings were ready to fall in upon themselves and they raised a grubby patch of corn that was drowned out, more often than not, by a flood rise of the river. They mowed some hay off a bottom meadow and they had a couple of raw-boned horses and a half-dozen scrawny cows and a flock of chickens. They had an old clunk of a car and a still hipen out somewhere in the river bottoms and they hunted and fished and trapped and were generally no-account. Although, when one considered it, they were not bad neighbors. They tended to their business and never bothered anyone except that periodically they went around, the whole tribe of them, distributing pamphlets and tracts through the neighborhood for some obscure fundamentalist sect that Ma Fisher had become a member of at a tent revival meeting down in Millville several years before.
Winslowe didn’t stop at the Fisher box, but came boiling around the bend in a cloud of dust. He braked the panting machine to a halt and turned off the engine.
“Let her cool a while,” he said.
The block crackled as it started giving up its heat.
“You made good time today,” said Enoch.
“Lots of people didn’t have any mail today,” said Winslowe. “Just went sailing past their boxes.”
He dipped into the pouch on the seat beside him and brought out a bundle tied together with a bit of string for Enoch-several daily papers and two journals.
“You get a lot of stuff,” said Winslowe, “but hardly ever letters.”
“There is no one left,” said Enoch, “who would want to write to me.”
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“But,” said Winslowe, “you got a letter this time.”
Enoch looked, unable to conceal surprise, and could see the end of an envelope peeping from between the journals.
“A personal letter,” said Winslowe, almost smacking his lips. “Not one of them advertising ones. Nor a business one.”
Enoch tucked the bundle underneath his arm, beside the rifle stock.
“Probably won’t amount to much,” he said.
“Maybe not,” said Winsl!we, a sly glitter in his eyes. He pulled a pipe and pouch from his pocket and slowly filled the pipe. The engine block continued its crackling and popping. The sun beat down out of a cloudless sky. The vegetation alongside the road was coated with dust and an acrid smell rose from it.
“Hear that ginseng fellow is back again,” said Winslowe, conversationally, but unable to keep out a conspiratorial tone. “Been gone for three, four days.”
“Maybe off to sell his sang.”
“You ask me,” the mailman said, “he ain’t hunting sang. He’s hunting something else.”
“Been at it,” Enoch said, “for a right smart time.”
“First of all,” said Winslowe, “there’s barely any market for the stuff and even if there was, there isn’t any sang. Used to be a good market years ago. Chinese used it for medicine, I guess. But now there ain’t no trade with China. I remember when I was a boy we used to go hunting it. Not easy to find, even then. But most days a man could locate a little of it.”
He leaned back in the seat, puffing serenely at his pipe.
“Funny goings on,” he said.
“I never saw the man,” said Enoch.
“Sneaking through the woods,” said Winslowe. “Digging up different kinds of plants. Got the idea myself he maybe is a sort of magic-man.
Getting stuff to make up charms and such. Spends a lot of his time yarning with the Fisher tribe and drinking up their likker. You don’t hear much of it these days, but I still hold with magic. Lots of things science can’t explain. You take that Fisher girl, the dummy, she can charm off warts.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Enoch.
And more than that, he thought. She can fix a butterfly.
Winslowe hunched forward in his seat.
“Almost forgot,” he said. “I have something else for you.”
He lifted a brown paper parcel from the floor and handed it to Enoch.
“This ain’t mail,” he said. “It’s something that I made for you.”
“Why, thank you,” Enoch said, taking it from him.
“Go ahead,” Winslowe said, “and open it up.” Enoch hesitated.
“Ah, hell,” said Winslowe, “don’t be bashful.”
Enoch tore off the paper and there it was, a full-figure wood carving of himself. It was in a blond, honey-colored wood and some twelve inches tall. It shone like golden crystal in the sun. He was walking, with his rifle tucked beneath his arm and a wind was blowing, for he was leaning slightly into it and there were wind-flutter ripples on his jacket and his trousers.
Enoch gasped, then stood staring at it.
“Wins,” he said, “that’s the most beautiful piece of work I have ever seen.”
“Did it,” said the mailman, “out of that piece of wood you gave me last winter. Best piece of whittling stuff I ever ran across. Hard and without hardly any grain. No danger of splitting or of nicking or of shreping. When you make a cut, you make it where you want to and it stays the way you cut it. And it takes polish as you cut. Just rub it up a little is all you need to do.”
“You don’t know,” said Enoch, “how much this means to me.”
“Over the years,” the mailman told him, “you’ve given me an awful lot of wood. Different kinds of wood no one’s ever seen before. All of it top-grade stuff and beautiful. It was time I was carving something for you.”
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“And you,” said Enoch, “have done a lot for me. Lugging things from town.”
“Enoch,” Winslowe said, “I like you. I don’t know what you are and I
ain’t about to ask, but anyhow I like you.”
“I wish that I could tell you what I am,” said Enoch. “Well,” said
Winslowe, moving over to plant himself behind the wheel, “it don’t matter much what any of us are, just so we get along with one another. If some of the nations would only take a lesson from some small neighborhood like ours-a lesson in how to get along-the world would be a whole lot better.”
Enoch noped gravely. “It doesn’t look too good, does it?”
“It sure don’t,” said the mailman, starting up the car.
Enoch stood and watched the car move off, down the bill, building up its cloud of dust as it moved along.
Then he looked again at the wooden statuette of himself.
It was as if the wooden figure were walking on a hilltop, naked to the full force of the wind and bent against the gale.
Why? He wondered. What was it the mailman had seen in him to portray him as walking in the wind?
He laid the rifle and the mail upon a patch of dusty grass and carefully rewrapped the statuette in the piece of paper. He’d put it, he decided, either on the mantelpiece or, perhaps better yet, on the coffee table that stood beside his favorite chair in the corner by the desk. He wanted it, he admitted to himself, with some quiet embarrassment, where it was close at hand, where he could look at it or pick it up any time he wished. And he wondered at the deep, heart-warming, soul-satisfying pleasure that he got from the mailman’s gift.