no-account as they were. I helped them with their moonshine, both in the
making and the drinking and once in a while the pepling. I went fishing with
them and hunting with them and I sat around and talked and they showed me a
place or two where I might find some ginseng-‘sang’ is what they call it. I
imagine a social scientist might find a gold mine in the Fishers. There is
one girl-a deaf-mute, but a pretty thing, and she can charm off warts …”
“I recognize the type,” said Hardwicke. “I was born and raised in the
southern mountains.”
“They were the ones who told me about the team and mower. So one day I
went up in that corner of the Wallace pasture and did some digging. I found
a horse’s skull and some other bones.”
“But no way of knowing if it was one of the Wallace horses.”
“Perhaps not,” said Lewis. “But I found part of the mower as well. Not
much left of it, but enough to identify.”
“Let’s get back to the history,” suggested Hardwicke. “After the
father’s death, Enoch stayed on at the farm. He never left it?”
Lewis shook his head. “He lives in the same house. Not a thing’s been
changed. And the house apparently has aged no more than the man.”
“You’ve been in the house?”
“Not in it. At it. I will tell you how it was.”
3
He had an hour. He knew he had an hour, for he had timed Enoch Wallace
during the last ten days. And from the time he left the house until he got
back with his mail, it had never been less than an hour. Sometimes a little
longer, when the mailman might be late, or they got to talking. But an hour,
Lewis told himself, was all that he could count on.
Wallace had disappeared down the slope of ridge, heading for the point
of rocks that towered above the bluff face, with the Wisconsin River running
there below. He would climb the rocks and stand there, with the rifle tucked
beneath his arm, to gaze across the wilderness of the river valley. Then he
would go back down the rocks again and trudge along the wooded path to
where, in proper season, the pink lady’s-slippers grew, and from there up
the hill again to the spring that gushed out of the hillside just below the
ancient field that had lain fallow for a century or more, and then along the
slope until he hit the almost overgrown road and so down to the mailbox.
In the ten days that Lewis had watched him, his route had never varied.
It was likely, Lewis told himself, that it had not varied through the years.
Wallace did not hurry. He walked as if he had all the time there was. And he
stopped along the way to renew acquaintances with old friends of his-a tree,
a squirrel, a flower. He was a rugged man and there still was much of the
soldier in him-old tricks and habits left from the bitter years of
campaigning under many leaders. He walked with his head held high and his
shoulders back and he moved with the easy stride of one who had known hard
marches.
Lewis came out of the tangled mass of trees that once had been an
orchard and in which a few trees, twisted and gnarled and gray with age,
still bore their pitiful and bitter crop of apples.
He stopped at the edge of the copse and stood for a moment to stare up
at the house on the ridge above, and for a single instant it seemed to him
the house stood in a special light, as if a rare and more distilled essence
of the sun had crossed the gulf of space to shine upon this house and to set
it apart from all other houses in the world. Bathed in that light, the house
was somehow unearthly, as if, indeed, it might be set apart as a very
special thing. And then the light, if it ever had been there, was gone and
the house shared the common sunlight of the fields and woods.
Lewis shook his head and told himself that it had been foolishness, or
perhaps a trick of seeing. For there was no such thing as special sunlight
and the house was no more than a house, although wondrously preserved.
It was the kind of house one did not see too often in these days. It
was rectangular, long and narrow and high, with old-fashioned gingerbread
along the eaves and gables. It had a certain gauntness that had nothing to
do with age; it had been gaunt the day it had been built-gaunt and plain and
strong, like the people that it sheltered. But gaunt as it might be, it
stood prim and neat, with no peeling paint, with no sign of weathering, and
no hint of decay.
Against one end of it was a smaller building, no more than a shed, as
if it were an alien structure that had been carted in from some other place
and shoved against its end, covering the side door of the house. Perhaps the
door, thought Lewis, that led into the kitchen. The shed undoubtedly had
been used as a place to hang outdoor clothing and to leave overshoes and
boots, with a bench for milk cans and buckets, and perhaps a basket in which
to gather eggs. From the top of it extended some three feet of stovepipe.
Lewis went up to the house and around the shed and there, in the side
of it, was a door ajar. He stepped up on the stoop and pushed the door wide
open and stared in amazement at the room.
For it was not a simple shed. It apparently was the place where Wallace
lived.
The stove from which the stovepipe projected stood in one corner, an
ancient cookstove, smaller than the old-fashioned kitchen range. Sitting on
its top was a coffeepot, a frying pan, and a griple. Hung from hooks on a
board behind it were other cooking implements. Opposite the stove, shoved
against the wall, was a three-quarter-size four-poster bed, covered with a
lumpy quilt, quilted in one of the ornate patterns of many pieces of
many-colored cloth, such as had been the delight of ladies of a century
before. In another corner was a table and a chair, and above the table, hung
against the wall, a small open cupboard in which were stacked some dishes.
On the table stood a kerosene lantern, battered from much usage, but with
its chimney clean, as if it had been washed and polished as recently as this
morning.
There was no door into the house, no sign there had ever been a door.
The clapboard of the house’s outer wall ran unbroken to form the fourth wall
of the shed.
This was incredible, Lewis told himself-that there should be no door,
that Wallace should live here, in this shed, when there was a house to live
in. As if there were some reason he should not occupy the house, and yet
must stay close by it. Or perhaps that he might be living out a penance of
some sort, living here in this shed as a medieval hermit might have lived in
a woodland hut or in a desert cave.
He stood in the center of the shed and looked around him, hoping that
he might find some clue to this unusual circumstance. But there was nothing,
beyond the bare, hard fact of living, the very basic necessities of
living-the stove to cook his food and heat the place, the bed to sleep on,
the table to eat on, and the lantern for its light. Not even so much as an
extra hat (although, come to think of it, Wallace never wore a hat) or an
extra coat.
No sign of magazines or papers, and Wallace never came home from the
mailbox empty-handed. He subscribed to the New York Times, the Wall Street
Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Washington Star, as well as
many scientific and technical journals. But there was no sign of them here,
nor of the many books he bought. No sign, either, of the bound record books.
Nothing at all on which a man could write.
Perhaps, Lewis told himself, this shed, for some baffling reason, was
no more than a show place, a place staged most carefully to make one think
that this was where Wallace lived. Perhaps, after all, he lived in the
house. Although, if that were the case, why all this effort, not too
successful, to make one think he didn’t?
Lewis turned to the door and walked out of the shed. He went around the
house until he reached the porch that led up to the front door. At the foot
of the steps, he stopped and looked around. The place was quiet. The sun was