Over the River and through the Woods
Clifford D. Simak
The two children came trudging down the lane in applecanning time, when the first goldenrods were blooming and the wild asters large in bud. They looked, when she first saw them, out the kitchen window, like children who were coming home from school, for each of them was carrying a bag in which might have been their books. Like Charles and James, she thought, like Alice and Maggie – but the time when those four had trudged the lane on their daily trips to school was in the distant past. Now they had children of their own who made their way to school.
She turned back to the stove to stir the cooking apples, for which the wide-mouthed jars stood waiting on the table, then once more looked out the kitchen window. The two of them were closer now and she could see that the boy was the older of the two – ten, perhaps, and the girl no more than eight.
They might be going past, she thought, although that did not seem too likely, for the lane led to this farm and to nowhere else.
The turned off the lane before they reached the barn and came sturdily trudging up the path that led to the house. There was no hesitation in them; they knew where they were going.
She stepped to the screen door of the kitchen as they came onto the porch and they stopped before the door and stood looking up at her.
The boy said: ‘You are our grandma. Papa said we were to say at once that you were our grandma.’
‘But that’s not…,’ she said, and stopped. She had been about to say that it was impossible that she was not their grandma. And, looking down into the sober, childish faces, she was glad that she had not said the words.
‘I am Ellen,’ said the girl, in a piping voice.
‘Why, that is strange,’ the woman said. ‘That is my name, too.’
The boy said, ‘My name is Paul.’
She pushed open the door for them and they came in, standing silently in the kitchen, looking all about them as if they’d never seen a kitchen.
‘It’s just like Papa said,’ said Ellen. ‘There’s the stove and the churn and…’
The boy interrupted her. ‘Our name is Forbes,’ he said.
This time the woman couldn’t stop herself. ‘Why, that’s impossible,’ she said. ‘That is our name, too.’
The boy nodded solemnly. ‘Yes, we knew it was.’
‘Perhaps,’ the woman said, ‘you’d like some milk and cookies.’
‘Cookies!’ Ellen squealed, delighted.
‘We don’t want to be any trouble,’ said the boy. ‘Papa said we were to be no trouble.’
‘He said we should be good,’ piped Ellen.
‘I am sure you will be,’ said the woman, ‘and you are no trouble.’
In a little while, she thought, she’d get it straightened out.
She went to the stove and set the kettle with the cooking apples to one side, where they would simmer slowly.
‘Sit down at the table,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the milk and cookies.’
She glanced at the clock, ticking on the shelf. Four o’clock, almost. In just a little while the men would come in from the fields. Jackson Forbes would know what to do about this; he had always known.
They climbed up on two chairs and sat there solemnly, staring all about them, at the ticking clock, at the wood stove with the fire glow showing through its draft, at the wood piled in the wood box, at the butter churn standing in the corner.
They set their bags on the floor beside them, and they were strange bags, she noticed. They were made of heavy cloth or canvas, but there were no drawstrings or no straps to fasten them. But they were closed, she saw, despite no straps or strings.
‘Do you have some stamps?’ asked Ellen.
‘Stamps?’ asked Mrs Forbes.
‘You must pay no attention to her,’ said Paul. ‘She should not have asked you. She asks everyone and Mama told her not to.’
‘But stamps?’
‘She collects them. She goes around snitching letters that other people have. For the stamps on them, you know.’
‘Well now,’ said Mrs Forbes, ‘there may be some old letters. We’ll look for them later on.’
She went into the pantry and got the earthen jug of milk and filled a plate with cookies from the jar. When she came back they were sitting there sedately, waiting for the cookies.
‘We are here just for a little while,’ said Paul. ‘Just a short vacation. Then our folks will come and get us and take us back again.’
Ellen nodded her head vigorously. ‘That’s what they told us when we went. When I was afraid to go.’
‘You were afraid to go?’
‘Yes. It was all so strange.’
‘There was so little time,’ said Paul. ‘Almost none at all. We had to leave so fast.’
‘And where are you from?’ asked Mrs Forbes. ‘Why,’ said the boy, ‘just a little ways from here. We walked just a little ways and of course we had the map. Papa gave it to us and he went over it carefully with us…’
‘You’re sure your name is Forbes?’
Ellen bobbed her head. ‘Of course it is,’ she said. ‘Strange,’ said Mrs Forbes. And it was more than strange, for there were no other Forbes in the neighborhood except her children and her grandchildren and these two, no matter what they said, were strangers.
They were busy with the milk and cookies and she went back to the stove and set the kettle with the apples back on the front again, stirring the cooking fruit with a wooden spoon.
‘Where is Grandpa?’ Ellen asked.
‘Grandpa’s in the field. He’ll be coming in soon. Are you finished with your cookies?’
‘All finished,’ said the girl.
‘Then we’ll have to set the table and get the supper cooking. Perhaps you’d like to help me.’
Ellen hopped down off the chair. ‘I’ll help,’ she said. ‘And I,’ said Paul, ‘will carry in some wood. Papa said I should be helpful. He said I could carry in the wood and feed the chickens and hunt the eggs and…’
‘Paul,’ said Mrs Forbes, ‘it might help if you’d tell me what your father does.’
‘Papa,’ said the boy, ‘is a temporal engineer.’
The two hired men sat at the kitchen table with the checkerboard between them. The two older people were in the living room.
‘You never saw the likes of it,’ said Mrs Forbes. ‘There was this piece of metal and you pulled it and it ran along another metal strip and the bag came open. And you pulled it the other way and the bag was closed.’
‘Something new,’ said Jackson Forbes. ‘There may be many new things we haven’t heard about, back here in the sticks. There are inventors turning out all sorts of things.’
‘And the boy,’ she said, ‘has the same thing on his trousers. I picked them up from where he threw them on the floor when he went to bed and I folded them and put them on the chair. And I saw this strip of metal, the edges jagged-like. And the clothes they wear. That boy’s trousers are cut off above the knees and the dress that the girl was wearing was so short…’
‘They talked of plains,’ mused Jackson Forbes, ‘but not the plains we know. Something that is used, apparently, for folks to travel in. And rockets – as if there were rockets every day and not just on the Earth.’
‘We couldn’t question them, of course,’ said Mrs Forbes. ‘There was something about them, something that I sensed.’
Her husband nodded. ‘They were frightened, too.’
‘You are frightened, Jackson?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but there are no other Forbes. Not close, that is. Charlie is the closest and he’s five miles away. And they said they walked just a little piece.’
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘What can we do?’
‘I don’t rightly know,’ he said. ‘Drive in to the county seat and talk with the sheriff, maybe. These children must be lost. There must be someone looking for them.’
‘But they don’t act as if they’re lost,’ she told him. ‘They knew they were coming here. They knew we would be here. They told me I was their grandma and they asked after you and they called you Grandpa. And they are so sure. They don’t act as if we’re strangers. They’ve been told about us. They said they’d stay just a little while and that’s the way they act. As if they’d just come for a visit.’
‘I think,’ said Jackson Forbes, ‘that I’ll hitch up Nellie after breakfast and drive around the neighborhood and ask some questions. Maybe there’ll be someone who can tell me something.’
‘The boy said his father was a temporal engineer. That just don’t make sense. ‘Temporal means the worldly power and authority and…’