Clifford D. Simak - Aliens for Neighbors 08 - Neighbor.pdf - Clifford D.Simak - chomaroma

Neighbour

Clifford D Simak

Coon Valley is a pleasant place, but there's no denying it's sort of off the beaten track and it's not a

place where you can count on getting rich because the farms are small and a lot of the ground is rough.

You can farm the bottom lands, but the hill- sides are only good for pasture and the roads are just dirt

roads, impassable at certain times of year.

The old-timers, like Bert Smith and Jingo Harris and myself, are well satisfied to stay here, for we

grew up with the country and we haven't any illusions about getting rich and we'd feel strange and

out-of-place anywhere but in the valley. But there are others, newcomers, who move in and get

discouraged after a while and up and move away, so there usually is a farm or two, standing idle, waiting

to be sold.

We are just plain dirt farmers, with emphasis on the dirt, for we can't afford a lot of fancy machinery

and we don't go in for blooded stock--but there's nothing wrong with us; we're just everyday, the kind of

people you meet all over these United

States. Because we're out of the way and some of the families have lived here for so long, I suppose

you could say that we have gotten clannish. But that doesn't mean we don't like outside folks; it just

means we've lived so long together that we've got to know and like one another and are satisfied with

things just as they are.

We have radios, of course, and we listen to the programmes and the news, and some of us take daily

papers, but I'm afraid that we may be a bit provincial, for it's fairly hard to get us stirred up much about

world happenings. There's so much o interest right here in the valley we haven't got the time to worr.

about all those outside things. I imagine you'd call us conser~ ative, for most of us vote Republican

without even wonderin why and there's none of us who has much time for all thi government interference

in the farming business.

The valley has always been a pleasant place--not only th land, but the people in it, and we've always

been fortunate i the new neighbours that we' get. Despite new ones coming i every year or so, we've

never had a really bad one and th~ means a lot to us.

But we always worry a little when one of the new ones up an, moves away and we speculate among

ourselves, wonderin what kind of people will buy or rent the vacant farm.

The old Lewis farm had been abandoned for a long time, th buildings all run down and gone to ruin

and the fields gor back to grass. A dentist over at Hopkins Corners had rented for several years and run

some cattle in it, driving out on weel ends to see how they were doing. We used to wonder every no' and

then if anyone would ever farm the place again, but final] we quit wondering, for the buildings had fallen

into such di: repair that we figured no one ever would. I went in one day an talked to the banker at

Hopkins Corners, who had the rentin of the place, and told him I'd like to take it over if the denti~ ever

gave it up. But he told me the owners, who lived i

Chicago then, were anxious to sell rather than to rent i although he didn't seem too optimistic that

anyonewould buy i

Then one spring a new family moved onto the farm and :' time we learned it had been sold and that the

new family's nan was Heath--Reginald Heath. And Bert Smith said to m

"Reginald! That's a hell of a name for a farmer !" But that w; all he said.

Jingo Harris stopped by one day, coming home from tow: when he saw Heath out in the yard, to pass

the time of day. was a neighbourly thing to do, of course, and Heath seem glad to have him stop,

although Jingo said he seemed to be a

funny kind of man to be a farmer.

"He's a foreigner," Jingo told me. "Sort of dark. Like he might be a Spaniard or from one of those

other countries. I don't know how he got that Reginald. Reginald is English and Heath's no Englishman."

Later on we heard that the Heaths weren't really Spanish, but were Rumanians or Bulgarians and that

they were refugees from the Iron Curtain.

But Spanish, or Rumanian, or Bulgarian, the Heaths were workers. There was Heath and his wife and

a half-grown girl and all three of them worked all the blessed time. They paid attention to their business

and didn't bother anyone and because of this we liked them, although we didn't have much to do with

them. Not that we didn't want to or that they didn't want us to; it's just that in a community like ours new

folks sort of have to grow in instead of being taken in.

Heath had an old beaten-up, wired-together tractor that made a lot of noise, and as soon as the soil

was dry enough to plough he started out to turn over the fields that through the years had grown up to

grass. I used to wonder if he worked all night long, for many times when I went to bed I heard the tractor

running. Although that may not be as late as it sounds to city dwellers, for here in the valley we go to bed

early--and get up early, too.

One night after dark I set out to hunt some cows, a couple of fence-jumping heifers that gave me lots

of trouble. Just let a man come in late from work and tired and maybe it's raining a little and dark as the

inside of a cat and those two heifers would turn up missing and I'd have to go and hunt them. I tried all

the different kinds of pokes and none of them did any good. When a heifer gets to fence-jumping there

isn't much that can be done with her.

So I lit a lantern and set out to hunt for them, but I hunted for two hours and didn't find a trace of

them. I had just about decided to give up and go back home when I heard the soun~ a tractor running

and realized that I was just above the field of the old Lewis place. To get home I'd have to go ri past the

field and I figured it might be as well to wait whe reached the field until the tractor came around and ask

He if he had seen the heifers.

It was a dark night, with thin clouds hiding the stars an~ wind blowing high in the treetops and there

was a smell of n in the air. Heath, I figured, probably was staying out extra 1~ to finish up the field ahead

of the coming rain, althougt remember that I thought he was pushing things just a lit hard. Already he was

far ahead of all the others in the vall with his ploughing.

So I made my way down the steep hillside and waded 1 creek at a shallow place I knew and while I

was doing thi heard the tractor make a complete round of the field. I look for the headlight, but I didn't

see it and I thought probably 1 trees had hidden it from me.

I reached the edge of the field and climbed through the fen walking out across the furrows to intercept

the tractor. I he~ it make the turn to the east of me and start down the fi~ toward me and although I

could hear the noise of it, the wasn't any light.

I found the last furrow and stood there waiting, sort wondering, not too alarmed as yet, how Heath

managed drive the rig without any light. I thought that maybe he had c eyes and could see in the dark and

although it seemed fun] later when I remembered it, the idea that a man might have › eyes did not seem

funny then.

The noise kept getting louder and it seemed to be comi: pretty close, when all at once the tractor

rushed out of the da and seemed to leap at me. I guess I must have been afraid th it would run over me,

for I jumped back a yard or two, with r heart up in my neck. But I needn't have bothered, for I was o of

the way to start with.

The tractor went on past me and I waved the lantern and yelled for Heath to stop and as I waved the

lantern the light was thrown onto the rear of the tractor and I saw that there was no one on it.

A hundred things went through my mind, but the one idea that stuck was that Heath had fallen off the

tractor and might be lying injured, somewhere in the field.

I ran after the tractor, thinking to shut it down before it got loose and ran into a tree or something, but

by the time I reached it, it had reached a turn and it was making that turn as neatly as if it had been broad

daylight and someone had been driving it.

I jumped up on the drawbar and grabbed the seat, hauling myself, up. I reached out a hand, grabbing

for the throttle, but with my hand upon the metal I didn't pull it back. The tractor had completed the turn

now and was going down the furrowm and there was something else.

Take an old tractor, now--one that wheezed and coughed and hammered and kept threatening to fall

apart, like this one did--and you are bound to get a lot of engine vibration. But in this tractor there was

no vibration. It ran along as smooth as a high-priced car and the only jolts you got were when the wheels

hit a bump or slight gully in the field.

I stood there, hanging on to the lantern with one hand and clutching the throttle with the other, and I

didn't do a thing. I just rode down to the point where the tractor started to make another turn. Then I

stepped off and went on home. I didn't hunt for Heath lying in the field, for I knew he wasn't there.

I suppose I wondered how it was possible, but I didn't really fret myself too much trying to figure it all

out. I imagine, in the first place, I was just too numb. You may worry a lot about little things that don't

seem quite right, but when you run into a big thing, like that self-operating tractor, you sort of give up

automatically, knowing that it's too big for your brain to handle, that it's something you haven't got a

chance of solving or live with. So your mind rejects it.

I got home and stood out in the barnyard for a moment, listening. The wind was blowing fairly hard by

then and the first drops of rain were falling, but every now and then, when the wind would quiet down, I

could hear the tractor.

I went inside the house and Helen and the kids were all in bed and sound asleep, so I didn't say

anything about it that night. And the next morning, when I had a chance to think about it, I didn't say

anything at all. Mostly, I suppose, because I knew no one would believe me and that I'd have to take a

lot of kidding about automatic tractors.

Heath got his ploughing done and his crops in, well ahead of everyone in the valley. The crops came

up in good shape and we had good growing weather; then along in June we got a spell of wet, and

everyone got behind with corn ploughing because you can't go out in the field when the ground is soggy.

All of us ohored around our places, fixing fences and doing other odd jobs, cussing out the rain and

watching the weeds grow like mad in the unploughed field.

All of us, that is, except Heath. His corn was clean as a whistle and you had to hunt to find a weed.

Jingo stopped by one day and asked him how he managed, but Heath just laughed a little, in that quiet

way of his, and talked of something else.

The first apples finally were big enough for green-apple pies and there is no one in the country makes

better green-apple pies than Helen. She wins prizes with her pies every year at the county fair and she is

proud of them.

One day she wrapped up a couple of pies and took them over to the Heaths. It's a neighbourly way

we have of doing in the valley, with the women running back and forth from one neighbour to another

with their cooking. Each of them has some dish she likes to show off to the neighbours and it's a sort of

harmless way of bragging.

Helen and the Heaths got along just swell. She was late in getting home and I was starting supper, with

the kids yelling they were hungry when-do-we-eat-around-here, when she finally showed up.

She was full of talk about the Heaths--how they had fixed up the house, you never would have thought

anyone could do so much to such a terribly run-down place as they had, and about the garden they

had--especially about the garden. It was a big one, she said, and beautifully taken care of and it was full

of vegetables she had never seen before. The funniest things you ever saw, she said. Not the ordinary

kind of vegetables.

We talked some about those vegetables, speculating that maybe the Heaths had brought the seeds out

with them from behind the Iron Curtain, although so far as I could remember, vegetables were

vegetables, no matter where you were. They grew the same things in Russia or Rumania or Timbuktu as

we did. And, anyhow, by this time I was getting a little sceptical about that story of their escaping from

Rumania.

But we didn't have the time for much serious speculation on the Heaths, although there was plenty of

casual gossip going around the neighbourhood. Haying came along and then the small-grain harvest and

everyone was busy. The hay was good and the small-grain crop was fair, but it didn't look like we'd get

much corn. For we hit a drought. That's the way it goesm too much rain in June, not enough in August.

We watched the corn and watched the sky and felt hopeful when a cloud showed up, but the clouds

never meant a thing. It just seems at times that God isn't on your side.

Then one morning Jingo Harris showed up and stood around, first on one foot, then the other, talking

to me while I worked on an old corn binder that was about worn out and which it didn't look nohow I'd

need to use that year.

"Jingo," I said, after I'd watched him fidget for an hour or more,"~-a gt>~ some~X/mg an your ~ffm~:'

He blurted it out then. "Heath got rain last night," he said.

"No one else did," I told him.

"I guess you're right," said Jingo. "Heath's the only one."

He told me how he'd gone to cut through Heath's north cornfield, carrying back a couple of balls of

binder twine he'd borrowed from Bert Smith. It wasn't until he'd crawled through the fence that he

noticed the field was wet, soaked by a heavy rain.

"It must have happened in the night," he said.

He thought it was funny, but figured maybe there had been a shower across the lower end of the

valley, although as a rule rains travel up and down the valley, not across it. But when he had crossed the

corner of the field and crawled through the fence, he noticed it hadn't rained at all. So he went back and

walked around the field and the rain had fallen on the field, but nowhere else. It began at the fence and

ended at the fence.

When he'd made a circuit of the field he sat down on one of the balls of twine and tried to get it all

thought out, but it made no sense--furthermore, it was plain unbelievable.

Jingo is a thorough man. He likes to have all the evidence and know all there is to know before he

makes up his mind. So he went over to Heath's second corn patch, on the west side of the valley. And

once again he found that it had rained on that field--on the field, but not around the field.

"What do you make of it ?" Jingo asked me and I said I didn't know. I came mighty close to telling him

about the unmanned tractor, but I thought better of it. After all, there was no point in getting the

neighbourhood stirred up.

After Jingo left I got in the car and drove over to the Heath farm, intending to ask him if he could loan

me his posthole digger for a day or two. Not that I was going to dig any post- holes, but you have to

have some excuse for showing up at a neighbour's place.

I never got a chance to ask him for that posthole digger, though. Once I got there I never even thought

of it.

Heath was sitting on the front steps of the porch and he seemed glad to see me. He came down to the

car and shook my hand and said, "It's good to see you, Calvin." The way he said it made me feel friendly

and sort of important, too--especially that Calvin business, for everyone else just calls me Cal. I'm not

downright sure, in fact, that anyone in the neighbourhood remembers that my name is Calvin.

"I'd like to show you around the place," he said. "We've done some fixing up."

Fixing up wasn't exactly the word for it. The place was spick- and-span. It looked like some of those

Pennsylvania and

Connecticut farms you see in the magazines. The house and all the other buildings had been

ramshackle with all the paint peeled off them and looking as if they might fall down at any minute. But

now they had a sprightly, solid look and they gleamed with paint. They didn't look new, of course, but

they looked as if they'd always been well taken care of and painted every year. The fences were all fixed

up and painted, too, and I the weeds were cut and a couple of old unsightly scrap-lumber piles had been

cleaned up and burned. Heath had even tackled an old iron and machinery junk pile and had it sorted

out.

"There was a lot to do," said Heath, "but I feel it's worth it. I have an orderly soul. I like to have things

neat."

Which might be true, of course, but he'd done it all in less than six months' time. He'd come to the farm

in early March and it was only August and he'd not only put in some hundred acres of crops and done all

the other farm work, but he'd got the place fixed up. And that wasn't possible, I told myself. One man

couldn't do it, not even with his wife and daughter helping--not even if he worked twenty-four hours a

day and didn't stop to eat. Or unless he could take time and stretch it out to make one hour equal three

or four.

I trailed along behind Heath and thought about that time- stretching business and was pleased at myself

for thinking of it, for it isn't often that I get foolish thoughts that are likewise pleasing. Why, I thought, with

a deal like that you could stretch out any day so you could get all the work done you wanted to.

And if you could stretch out time, maybe you could compress it, too, so that a trip to a dentist, for

example, would only seem to take a minute.

Heath took me out to the garden and Helen had been right.

There were the familiar vegetables, of course---cabbages and tomatoes and squashes and all the other

kinds that are found in every garden--but in addition to this there were as many others I had never seen

before. He told me the names of them and they seemed to be queer names then, although now it seems a

little strange to think they once had sounded queer, for now everyone in the valley grows these

vegetables and it seems like we have always had them.

As we talked he pulled up and picked some of the strange vegetables and put them in a basket he had

brought along.

"You'll want to try them all," he said. "Some of them you may not like at first, but there are others that

you will. This one you eat raw, sliced like a tomato, and this one is best boiled, although you can bake it,

too .... "

I wanted to ask him how he'd come on the vegetables and where they had come from, but he didn't

give me a chance; he kept on telling me about them and how to cook them and that this one was a winter

keeper and that one you could can and he gave me one to eat raw and it was rather good.

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.

"qui~k!" tt~ %lx~t%~ ~I~ ~,bb~6 m~ 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 look 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. ;lust 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 bt 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

Clifford D. Simak - Aliens for Neighbors 08 - Neighbor.pdf

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