Cemetery World

Chapter 8

He had shown me the fields, with the shocked corn and the pumpkins golden in the sun; the garden, with a few of the vegetables still there, but most of them harvested; the hogs brought in from the woods, fat on acorns and penned for butchering; the cattle and the sheep knee-deep in the meadow grass; the smokehouse ready for the hams and the slabs of bacon; the iron house, in which was stored neatly sorted stacks of different kinds of salvaged metals; the hen house, the tool house, the smithy, and the barns, and now we sat, the two of us, perched on the top rail of a weathered fence.

"How long," I asked him, "have you been here-not you, of course, but the people in this hollow?"

He turned his wrinkled old patriarch face toward me, the mild blue eyes, the beard like so much white silk hanging on his chest. "That's a foolish question to ask of one," he said. "We always have been here. Little clusters of us living all up and down the valley. A few living alone, but not many of them; we mostly live together; a few families that have stuck together farther back than man can remember. Some move away, of course; find a better place, or what they think is a better place. There are not many of us; there never have been many of us. Some women do not bear; many of the youngsters do not live. It is said that there is an ancient sickness in us. I do not know. There are many things said, old tales from the past, but one cannot tell if they are true or not."

He planted his heels more firmly on the second rail, rested his arms across his knees. His hands were twisted with age. The knuckles stood out like lumps, the fingers stiffly bent. The veins along the backs of his hands stood out in a blue prominence that was startling.

"You get along with the Cemetery people?" Tasked.

He considered for a moment before he answered; he was the kind of man, I thought, who always considered well before he answered. "Mostly," he finally said. "Over the years they have crept closer to us, taking over land that, when I was a boy, was wild. Couple of times I've gone and talked to that there fellow.. " He groped for the name.

"Bell," I said, "Maxwell Peter Bell."

"That's the one," he said. "I go and talk with him, for all the good it does. He is smooth as oil. He smiles but there is nothing behind the smile. He is sure; he is big and powerful and we are small and weak. You are crowding us again, I tell him, you are moving in on us and there is no need, there is a lot of other land that you can use, a lot of empty land that no one else is using. And he says but you aren't using it and I tell him that we need it, we need it even if we put no plow or hoes to it, we need the land for elbowroom, we've always had a lot of elbowroom, we feel crowded if it isn't there, we feel smothered. And then he says but you have no title to it and I ask him what is a title and he tries to tell me what title is and it all is foolishness. I ask him does he have title to it and he never answers. You come from out there somewhere, mister, maybe you can tell me does he have title to it."

"I doubt it very much," I said.

"We get along all right with them, I guess," he said. "Some of us work for Cemetery every now and then, digging graves, mowing grass, pruning trees and bushes, trimming around the headstones. There's a lot of work to keeping a burying ground looking trim and neat. They use us just now and then, extra hands when the work gets ahead of them. We could work a whole lot more, I guess, if we wanted to, but what's the use of working? We got all we want; there's not much they can offer for our work. Some fancy cloth, at times, but we have all the cloth we need from sheep, enough to cover nakedness, enough to keep us warm. Some fancy likker, but we got all the moonshine that we need and I'm not sure it isn't better than Cemetery likker. Moonshine, if you know your business, has authority and it's got a funny kind of taste a man gets partial to. Pots and pans, of course, but how many pots and pans does a woman need?

"It isn't that we are lazy and no account," he said. "We keep right busy. We farm and fish and hunt. We go out to mine old metal. There are a lot of places, most of them a right long piece from here, where there are mounds that have metal in them. We use it to make our tools and shooting irons. Traders come in from the west or south every now and then to trade their powder and lead for our meal and wool and moonshine-other things, of course, but mostly lead and powder."

He stopped talking and we sat close together, on the top rail, in the mellow sunshine. The trees were flaming bonfires frozen into immobility; the fields were tawny, dotted with cornshocks, spotted by the gold of scattered pumpkins. Down the hill from us, at the smithy, someone was hammering and a curl of smoke trailed up from the forge. Smoke, too, streamed up from the chimneys of the closest houses. A door slammed and I saw Cynthia had come out. She was wearing an apron and carried a pan. She went out into the yard and emptied the contents of the pan into a barrel that was standing there. I waved at her and she waved at me, then went back into the house, the door slamming behind her.

The old man saw me looking at the barrel. "Swill barrel," he said. "We dump potato peelings and sour milk and cabbage leaves into it, all the stuff out of the kitchen we don't need. We feed it to the hogs. Don't tell me you never saw a swill barrel."

"I never knew until right now," I said, "there was such a thing."»"I misbelieve," the old man said, "that I rightly caught the place you came from and what you might be doing there."

I told him about Alden and tried to explain what our purpose was. I'm not sure he understood.

He waved toward the barnyard where Bronco had been planted a good part of the day. "You mean that there contraption works for you."

"Very hard," I said, "and most intelligently. It is a sensitive. It is soaking in the idea of the barn and haystack, of the pigeons on the roof, the calves running in their pens, the horses standing in the sun. It will give us what we need to make music and…"

"Music? You mean like fiddle music?"

"Yes," I said. "It could be fiddle music."

He shook his head, half in confusion, half in disbelief.

"There is one thing I have been wanting to ask you," I said. "About this thing the hunters call the Ravener."

"I don't rightly know," he said, "if I can tell you much of it. It got to be called the Ravener and I've often wondered why that was. It never ravens any that I've heard of. Only-danger would be if you were right spang in its path. It doesn't show up often. Mostly far away and no one knowing of it until after it is gone. Last night was the first time it ever came within shouting distance of us. No one I ever heard of ever went to look for it or to track it down. There are some things better left alone."

He hadn't told me all he could, I knew, and I had a hunch that he was not about to, but I tried him, anyhow.

"But there must be stories. Perhaps stories from the olden time. Have you ever heard it might be a war machine?"

He looked at me, startled and afraid. "What machine?" he asked. "What war?"

"You mean that you don't know," I asked, "about the war that destroyed Earth? About how the people went away?"

He didn't answer directly, but from what he said I knew he didn't know-the history of the planet had been lost in the mists of centuries.

"There are many stories," he said, "and many of them true and perhaps others of them false. And no man in his right mind will hunt too closely into them. There is the census-taker, the one who counts the ghosts, and I thought that he was only another story until the day I met him. And there's the story of the immortal man and him I've never met, although there are folks who claim they have. There is magic and there is sorcery, but in this place we have neither one of them and we have no wish to. We live a good life and we want it to stay that way and we pay little attention to all the stories that we hear."

"But there must be books," I said.

"Once there might have been," he told me. "I have heard of them, but I've never seen one. I don't know anyone who has. We have none here; I think we never had. Exactly, can you tell me, what are books?"

I tried to tell him and although I am sure he did not entirely understand, he seemed somewhat wonder-struck. And to mask his lack of understanding, he carefully changed the subject.

"Your machine down there," he said, "will be at the hoe-down? It will watch and listen?"

"Indeed it will," I said. "It is kind of you to have us."

"There'll be a lot of people, from all up and down the hollow. They'll begin showing up as soon as the sun is set. There'll be music and dancing and big tables will be set with many things to eat. Do you, on your Alden, have gatherings such as this?"

"If not exactly hoedowns," I said, "other events that are very similar."

We went on sitting and I got to thinking that it had been a good day. We had tramped the, fields and had husked some ears out of one of the cornshocks so the old man could show me what fine corn they raised; we had leaned our arms on the pigpen fence and watched the grunting porkers, nosing through the rubble on the feeding floor for a morsel they had missed; we had stood around and watched a man work the forge until a plow blade was glowing red, then take it out with tongs and place it on an anvil, with the sparks flying when he hammered it; we had. strolled through the coolness of the barn and listened to the pigeons cooing in the loft above; we had talked lazily, as unhurried men will talk, and it had all been very good.

The door of the house opened and a woman stuck her head out. "Henry," she called. "Henry, where are you?"

The old man climbed slowly off the fence. "That is me they want," he grumbled. "No telling what it is. It might be anything. These women get the strangest notions about chores that they want done. You just take it easy while I go see what it is."

I watched him amble down the slope and go into the house. The sun was warm on my back and I knew that I should get down off the fence and move around a bit or find something I could do. I must look silly, I thought, perched upon the fence, and I felt a sense of guilt at not having anything to do nor wanting anything to do. But I felt a strange disinclination to do anything at all. It was the first time in my life I'd not had things piled up and waiting to be done. And I found, with some disgust, that I enjoyed it.

Bronco still was planted in the barnyard, with all his sensors out, and there'd been no sign of Cynthia since she'd gone out to the swill barrel. I wondered where Elmer might be; I'd not seen him all day long. And even as I wondered, I saw him come around the barn. Apparently he saw me almost at once, for he angled up the slope toward me. He came up close before he spoke and he kept his voice low and I sensed that he was troubled.

"I've been out looking at the tracks," he said, "and there is no doubt about it. The thing last night was a war machine. I found some tread marks and there's nothing here that leaves tread marks like that except a war machine. I followed the swath it made and I saw that it turned west. There are a lot of places back in the mountains where a war machine could hide."

"Why would it want to hide?"

"I can't imagine," Elmer said. "There is no way of telling how a war machine would think. Human brain and machine brain and they've had ten thousand years to evolve into something else. Fletch, given that much time, what could a brain like that become?"

"Maybe nothing," I said. "Maybe something very strange. If a war machine survived destruction, what would it become? What motive would it have to stay alive? How would it view an environment so different from the one for which it had been made? One strange thing, though. The people here seem to have no fear of it. It's just something they don't understand and the world seems to be filled with things they don't understand."

"They're a strange lot," Elmer said. "I don't like looks of them. I don't like the feel of any part of it. It strikes me as unlikely those three young coon-hunting bucks would have come strolling in on us last night without some sort of reason. They had to cut across the track made by the war machine to do it."

"Curiosity," I said. "Not much happens here. When something does, like us showing up, they have to find out about it."

"Sure, I know," said Elmer, "but that's not all of it."

"Anything specific?"

"No, nothing like that. Nothing that I can pin down. Just a feeling in the guts. Fletch, let's get out of here."

"I want to stay for the hoedown. So Bronco can get it on the tapes. Soon as it is over, we will leave."