And it would go on, he thought, much longer than it already had gone
on-for many centuries more, for a thousand years, perhaps. And at the end of
that thousand years, what would he know then?
Although, perhaps, he thought, the knowing was not the most important
part of it.
And none of it, he knew, might come to pass, for there was interference
now. There were watchers, or at least a watcher, and before too long whoever
it might be might start closing in. What he’d do or how he’d meet the
threat, he had no idea until that moment came. It was something that had
been almost bound to happen. It was something he had been prepared to have
happen all these years. There was some reason to wonder, he knew, that it
had not happened sooner.
He had told Ulysses of the danger of it that first day they’d met. He’d
been sitting on the steps that led up to the porch, and thinking of it now,
he could remember it as clearly as if it had been only yesterday.
6
He was sitting on the steps and it was late afternoon. He was watching
the great white thunderheads that were piling up across the river beyond the
Iowa hills. The day was hot and sultry and there was not a breath of moving
air. Out in the barnyard a half a dozen bedraggled chickens scratched
listlessly, for the sake, it seemed, of going through the motions rather
than from any hope of finding food. The sound of the sparrows’ wings, as
they flew between the gable of the barn and the hedge of honeysuckle that
bordered the field beyond the road, was a harsh, dry sound, as if the
feathers of their wings had grown stiff with heat.
And here he sat, he thought, staring at the thunderheads when there was
work to do-corn to be plowed and hay to be gotten in and wheat to reap and
shock.
For despite whatever might have happened, a man still had a life to
live, days to be gotten through the best that one could manage. It was a
lesson, he reminded himself, that he should have learned in all its fullness
in the last few years. But war, somehow, was different from what had
happened here. In war you knew it and expected it and were ready when it
happened, but this was not the war. This was the peace to which he had
returned. A man had a right to expect that in the world of peace there
really would be peace fencing out the violence and the horror.
Now he was alone, as he’d never been alone before. Now, if ever, could
be a new beginning; now, perhaps, there had to be a new beginning. But
whether it was here, on the homestead acres, or in some other place, it
still would be a beginning of bitterness and anguish.
He sat on the steps, with his wrists resting on his knees, and watched
the thunderheads piling in the west. It might mean rain and the land could
use the rain-or it might be nothing, for above the merging river valleys the
air currents were erratic and there was no way a man could tell where those
clouds might flow.
He did not see the traveler until he turned in at the gate. He was a
tall and gangling one and his clothes were dusty and from the appearance of
him he had walked a far way. He came up the path and Enoch sat waiting for
him, watching him, but not stirring from the steps.
“Good day, sir,” Enoch finally said. “It’s a hot day to be walking. Why
don’t you sit a while.”
“Quite willingly,” said the stranger. “But first, I wonder, could I
have a drink of water?”
Enoch got up to his feet. “Come along,” he said. “I’ll pump a fresh one
for you.”
He went down across the barnyard until he reached the pump. He unhooked
the dipper from where it hung upon a bolt and handed it to the man. He
grasped the handle of the pump and worked it up and down.
“Let it run a while,” he said. “It takes a time for it to get real
cool.”
The water splashed out of the spout, running on the boards that formed
the cover of the well. It came in spurts as Enoch worked the handle.
“Do you think,” the stranger asked, “that it is about to rain?”
“A man can’t tell,” said Enoch. “We have to wait and see.”
There was something about this traveler that disturbed him. Nothing,
actually, that one could put a finger on, but a certain strangeness that was
vaguely disquieting. He watched him narrowly as he pumped and decided that
probably this stranger’s ears were just a bit too pointed at the top, but
put it down to his imagination, for when he looked again they seemed to be
all right.
“I think,” said Enoch, “that the water should be cold by now.”
The traveler put down the dipper and waited for it to fill. He offered
it to Enoch. Enoch shook his head.
“You first. You need it worse than I do.”
The stranger drank greedily and with much slobbering.
“Another one?” asked Enoch.
“No, thank you,” said the stranger. “But I’ll catch another dipperful
for you if you wish me to.”
Enoch pumped, and when the dipper was full the stranger handed it to
him. The water was cold and Enoch, realizing for the first time that he had
been thirsty, drank it almost to the bottom.
He hung the dipper back on its bolt and said to the man, “Now, let’s
get in that sitting.”
The stranger grinned. “I could do with some of it,” he said. Enoch
pulled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his face. “The air gets
close,” he said, “just before a rain.”
And as he mopped his face, quite supenly he knew what it was that had
disturbed him about the traveler. Despite his bedraggled clothes and his
dusty shoes, which attested to long walking, despite the heat of this
time-before-a-rain, the stranger was not sweating. He appeared as fresh and
cool as if he had been lying at his ease beneath a tree in springtime.
Enoch put the bandanna back into his pocket and they walked back to the
steps and sat there, side by side.
“You’ve traveled a far way,” said Enoch, gently prying.
“Very far, indeed,” the stranger told him. “I’m a right smart piece
from home.”
“And you have a far way yet to go?”
“No,” the stranger said, “I believe that I have gotten to the place
where I am going.”
“You mean …” asked Enoch, and left the question hanging. “I mean
right here,” said the stranger, “sitting on these steps. I have been looking
for a man and I think that man is you. I did not know his name nor where to
look for him, but yet I knew that one day I would find him.”
“But me,” Enoch said, astonished. “Why should you look for me?”
“I was looking for a man of many different parts. One of the things
about him was that he must have looked up at the stars and wondered what
they were.”
“Yes,” said Enoch, “that is something I have done. On many nights,
camping in the field, I have lain in my blankets and looked up at the sky,
looking at the stars and wondering what they were and how they’d been put up
there and, most important of all, why they had been put up there. I have
heard some say that each of them is another sun like the sun that shines on
Earth, but I don’t know about that. I guess there is no one who knows too
much about them.”
“There are some,” the stranger said, “who know a deal about them.”
“You, perhaps,” said Enoch, mocking just a little, for the stranger did
not look like a man who’d know much of anything.
“Yes, I,” the stranger said. “Although I do not know as much as many
others do.”
“I’ve sometimes wondered,” Enoch said, “if the stars are other suns,
might there not be other planets and other people, too.”
He remembered sitting around the campfire of a night, jawing with the
other fellows to pass away the time. And once he’d mentioned this idea of
maybe other people on other planets circling other suns and the fellows all
had jeered him and for days afterward had made fun of him, so he had never
mentioned it again. Not that it mattered much, for he had no real belief in
it himself; it had never been more than campfire speculation.
And now he’d mentioned it again and to an utter stranger. He wondered
why he had.
“You believe that?” asked the stranger.
Enoch said, “It was just an idle notion.”