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 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.’
I reached out my hand and picked up the money. I stuffed it in my
pocket.
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said.
‘Don’t mention it,’ he told me. He raised a hand. ‘Be seeing you,’ he
said.
4
I WENT slowly down the hall and there was no sign of Nancy, nor was she
on the porch, where I had half expected to find her waiting for me. She had
said yes, that I would see her later, that we had a lot to talk about, and I
had thought, of course, that she meant tonight. But she might not have meant
tonight. She might have meant some other time than this. Or she might have
wafted and then grown tired of waiting. After all, I had spent a long time
with her father.
The moon had risen in a cloudless sky and there was not a breath of
breeze. The great oaks stood like graven monuments and the summer night was
filled with the glittering of moonbeams. I walked down the stairs and stood
for a moment at their foot and it seemed for all the world that I was
standing in a circle of enchantment. For this, I thought, could not be the
old, familiar earth, this place of ghostly, brooding oaken sentinels, this
air so drenched with moonlight, this breathless, waiting silence hanging
over all, and the faint, other-world perfume that hung above the soft
blackness of the ground.
Then the enchantment faded and the glitter went away and I was back
once more in the world I knew.
There was a chill in the summer air. Perhaps a chill of disappointment,
the chill of being booted out of fairyland, the chill of knowing there was
another place I could not hope to stay. I felt the solid concrete of the
walk underneath my feet and I could see that the shadowed oaks were only
oaks and not graven monuments.
I shook myself, like a dog coming out of water, and my wits came back
together and I went on down the walk. As I neared the car, I fumbled in my
pocket for my keys, walking around on the driver’s side and opening the
door.
I was halfway in the seat before I saw her sitting there, next to the
other door.
‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that you were never coming. What did you and
Father find to talk so long about?
‘A number of things,’ I told her. ‘None of them important.’
‘Do you see him often?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not often.’ Somehow I didn’t want to tell her this was
the first time I had ever talked with him.
I groped in the dark and found the lock and slid in the key.
‘A drive,’ I said. ‘Perhaps some place for a drink.’
‘No, please,’ she said. ‘I’d rather sit and talk.’
I settled back into the seat.
‘It’s nice tonight,’ she said. ‘So quiet. There are so few places that
are really quiet.’
‘There’s a place of enchantment,’ I told her, ‘just outside your porch.
I walked into it, but it didn’t last. The air was full of moonbeams and
there was a faint perfume…’
‘That was the flowers,’ she said.
‘What flowers?
‘There’s a bed of them in the curve of the walk. All of them those
lovely flowers that your father found out in the woods somewhere.’
‘So you have them too,’ I said. ‘I guess everyone in the village has a
bed of them.’
‘Your father,’ she said, ‘was one of the nicest men I ever knew. When I
was a little girl he always gave me flowers. I’d go walking past and he’d
pick a flower or two for me.’
Yes, I thought, I suppose he could be called a nice man. Nice and
strong and strange, and yet, despite his strength and strangeness, a very
gentle man. He had known the ways of flowers and of all other plants. His
tomato plants, I remembered, had grown big and stout and of a dark, deep
green, and in the spring everyone had come to get tomato plants from him.
And there had been that day he’d gone down Dark Hollow way to deliver
some tomato plants and cabbage and a box full of perennials to the widow
Hicklin and had come back with half a dozen strange, purple-blossomed wild
flowers, which he had dug up along the road and brought home, their roots
wrapped carefully in a piece of burlap.
He had never seen such flowers before and neither, it turned out, had
anybody else. He had planted them in a special bed and had tended them with
care and the flowers had responded gratefully underneath his hands. So that
today there were few flower beds in the village that did not have some of
those purple flowers, my father’s special flowers.
‘Those flowers of his,’ asked Nancy. ‘Did he ever find what kind of
flowers they were?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘he didn’t.’
‘He could have sent one of them to the university or someplace. Someone
could have told him exactly what he’d found.’
‘He talked of it off and on. But he never got around to really doing
it. He always kept so busy. There were so many things to do. The greenhouse
business keeps you on the run.’
‘You didn’t like it, Brad?’