Ben Samuels was a match for the house. He was quite an old man, in his late seventies, though occasional trips to civilization and the rejuvenation treatments taken there had kept him healthy and relatively unwanted. His arms were still well-muscled, his legs quick, his chest unsunken. His face was sharply angled, filled with wrinkles, though he said he had had those since he was a young man in the woods and that he would not let the doctors remove them on his annual visits to the city. His hands were large, gnarled, scarred with the many wounds of a lifetime as a woodsman. In sum, he appeared to be hacked from the same pine as his home.
And like his cabin, he was more inside than he appeared to be from out. He was a quiet man who read a lot. His avoidance of people was not engendered by a dislike of men, but by a sadness at watching what men did to each other in the course of their lives. Though he wondered about Sebastian having a truck of his own, he never asked questions about that, for he was sure that a story of human suffering lay behind it, and he did not want to hear what they had done to the idiot to make him run away. Those were the stories he had left the cities to forget.
Most often, Ben Samuels would be on his porch when they came, and they would sit down on the wide expanse of steps beside him, watching him whittle. Or he might have his pad and pencils again, sketching. He was good at rendering realistically. Sebastian never ceased to be amazed at the accuracy of the scene transformed to paper. It seemed to the idiot that there must be some mechanism within Samuels’ hand which resorted to a memory tape of the scene to be drawn when the old man told it to, making the lines in a ,carefully pre-planned pattern. Sebastian generally accepted the existence of computers and memory tapes. He had never been able to understand men, however.
“Slept late again,” Samuels would say.
Sebastian would nod. It was the old man’s only admonition, for he was certain a man wasted if he didn’t go to bed and rise early and labor while awake.
“The forest didn’t get so big by sleeping.”
“Or the stars,” Sebastian would say.
Samuels would turn and look at him oddly, as if he were staring at a different person than he had thought a moment ago. “True enough.”
“How is it with you?” Samuels would ask Noname.
“Cold this morning,” the small creature replied.
“Cold? This? Just you wait for winter! It comes early up here, and it stays late. And then we’ll see if those heating coils in the truck will keep you warm! Never trust to manufacture when you can build more reliably yourself.”
The reason Samuels wanted Sebastian to sleep early and rise early was so that the daylight hours could be put to the purpose of constructing a permanent home to see them through the winter. But the winter was an eternity away as far as Sebastian was concerned. Tomorrow was the future, or perhaps only this afternoon. After an inspection of the truck and the way the rear had been converted into a semblance of a home, the old man decided the heating coils would probably keep the idiot and the puppet warmer than the cabin kept him. He had ceased to be so adamant about the necessity for a cabin, but he still mentioned it whenever he could.
Now, when Sebastian did not respond, he launched into a story about the deepest snow he had seen in all the years he had lived here, and both the idiot and the puppet grinned and settled down to listen. Ben Samuels told fine stories, even if all parts of them weren’t told on a level you could understand.
Toward evening, if they did not stay to eat with Samuels, Sebastian and Noname would return to the truck, where the idiot would switch on the single light against the growing darkness. Every time, as the yellow glow appeared, he would remember that without the old woodsman they would have no light or heat. Very likely, they would have been apprehended by now, or died of exposure. Samuels had found them a mile down the highway from here, the battery dead. Sebastian knew nothing of that, and had sat stubbornly in the driver’s seat some four hours before the old man found them, waiting for the truck to want to start again. Samuels had charged them from his own Rover and led them back to the trees and his cabin. Now he charged the battery every four or five days, whenever it got low again.