The thing kept right on feeling friendly toward him.
So he put out his hands and tried to push the bushes apart so he could squeeze in and see what it was. If he could get close to it, he thought, he could strike the matches in his pocket and get a better look at it.
“Stop,” said the friendliness and at the word he stopped, although he wasn’t sure at all that he had heard the word.
“Don’t look too closely at us,” said the friendliness, and Johnny was just a little flustered at that, for he hadn’t been looking at anything at all—not too closely, that is.
“All right,” he said. “I won’t look at you.” And he wondered if it was some sort of a game, like hide-and-seek that he played at school.
“After we get to be good friends,” said the thing to Johnny, “we can look at one another and it won’t matter then, for we’ll know what one another is like inside and not pay attention to how we look outside.”
And Johnny, standing there, thought how they must look awful, not to want him to see them, and the thing said to him, “We would look awful to you. You look awful to us.”
“Maybe, then,” said Johnny, “it’s a good thing I can’t see in the dark.”
“You can’t see in the dark?” it asked and Johnny said he couldn’t and there was silence for a while, although Johnny could hear it puzzling over how come he couldn’t see when it was dark.
Then it asked if he could do something else and he couldn’t even understand what it tried to say and finally it seemed to figure out that he couldn’t do whatever it had asked about.
“You are afraid,” said the thing. “There is no need to fear us.”
And Johnny explained that he wasn’t afraid of them, whatever they might be, because they were friendly, but that he was afraid of what might happen if Uncle Eb and Aunt Em should find he had sneaked out. So they asked him a lot about Uncle Eb and Aunt Em and he tried to explain, but they didn’t seem to understand, but seemed to think he was talking about government. He tried to explain how it really was, but he was pretty sure they didn’t understand at all.
Finally, being polite about it so he wouldn’t hurt their feelings, he said he had to leave and since he’d stayed much longer than he’d planned, he ran all the way home.
He got into the house and up to bed all right and everything was fine, but the next morning Aunt Em found the matches in his pocket and gave him a lecture about the danger of burning down the barn. To reinforce the lecture, she used a switch on his legs and try as hard as he could to be a man about it, she laid it on so hard that he jumped up and down and screamed.
He worked through the day weeding the garden and just before dark went to get the cows.
He didn’t have to go out of his way to go past the blackberry patch, for the cows were in that direction, but he knew well enough that if they hadn’t been, he’d gone out of his way, for he’d been remembering all day the friendliness he’d found there.
It was still daylight this time, just shading into night, and he could see that the thing, whatever it might be, was not alive, but simply a hunk of metal, like two sauce dishes stuck together, with a rim running around its middle just like there’d be a rim if you stuck two dishes together. It looked like old metal that had been laying around for a long time and you could see where it was pitted like a piece of machinery will get when it stands out in the weather.
It had crushed a path for quite a ways through the blackberry thicket and had plowed up the ground for twenty feet or so, and, sighting back along the way it had come, Johnny could see where it had hit and smashed the top of a tall poplar.
It spoke to him, without words, the way it had the night before, with friendliness and fellowship, although Johnny wouldn’t know that last word, never having run across it in his school books.
It said, “You may look at us a little now. Look at us quick and then away. Don’t look at us steadily. Just a quick look and then away. That way you get used to us. A little at a time.”
“Where are you?” Johnny asked.
“Right here,” they said.
“Inside of there?” asked Johnny.
“Inside of here,” they said.
“I can’t see you, then,” said Johnny. “I can’t see through metal.”
“He can’t see through metal,” said one of them.
“He can’t see when the star is gone,” said the other.
“He can’t see us, then,” they said, the both of them.
“You might come out,” said Johnny.
“We can’t come out,” they said. “We’d die if we came out.”
“I can’t ever see you, then.”
“You can’t ever see us, Johnny.”
And he stood there, feeling terribly lonely because he could never see these friends of his.
“We don’t understand who you are,” they said. “Tell us who you are.”
And because they were so kind and friendly, he told them who he was and how he was an orphan and had been taken in by his Uncle Eb and Aunt Em, who really weren’t his aunt and uncle. He didn’t tell them how Uncle Eb and Aunt Em treated him, whipping him and scolding him and sending him to bed without his supper, but this, too, was well as the things he told them, was there for them to sense and now there was more than friendliness, more than fellowship. Now there was compassion and something that was their equivalent of mother love.
“He’s just a little one,” they said, talking to one another.
They reached out to him and seemed to take him in their arms and hold him tight against them and Johnny went down on his knees without knowing it and held out his arms to the thing that lay there among the broken bushes and cried out to them, as if there was something there that he might grasp and hold—some comfort that he had always missed and longed for and now finally had found. His heart cried out the thing that he could not say, the pleading that would not pass his lips and they answered him.
“No, we’ll not leave you, Johnny. We can’t leave you, Johnny.”
“You promise?” Johnny asked.
Their voice was a little grim. “We do not need to promise, Johnny. Our machine is broken and we cannot fix it. One of us is dying and the other soon will die.”
Johnny knelt there, with the words sinking into him, with the realization sinking into him and it seemed more than he could bear that, having found two friends, they were about to die.
“Johnny,” they said to him.
“Yes,” said Johnny, trying not to cry.
“You will trade with us?”
“Trade?”
“A way of friendship with us. You give us something and we give you something.”
“But,” said Johnny. “But I haven’t …”
Then he knew he had. He had the pocket knife. It wasn’t much, with its broken blade, but it was all he had.
“That is fine,” they said. “That is exactly right. Lay it on the ground, close to the machine.”
He took the knife out of his pocket and laid it against the machine and even as he watched something happened, but it happened so fast he couldn’t see how it worked, but, anyhow, the knife was gone and there was something in its place.
“Thank you, Johnny,” they said. “It was nice of you to trade with us.”
He reached out his hand and took the thing they’d traded him and even in the darkness it flashed with hidden fire. He turned it in the palm of his hand and saw that it was some sort of jewel, many-faceted, and that the glow came from inside of it and that it burned with many different colors.
It wasn’t until he saw how much light came from it that he realized how long he’d stayed and how dark it was and when he saw that he jumped to his feet and ran, without waiting to say goodbye.
It was too dark now to look for the cows and he hoped they had started home alone and that he could catch
up with them and bring them in. He’d tell Uncle Eb that he’d had a hard time rounding them up. He’d tell Uncle Eb that the two heifers had broken out of the fence and he had to get them back. He’d tell Uncle Eb—he’d tell—he’d tell—
His breath gasped with his running and his heart was thumping so it seemed to shake him and fear rode on his shoulders—fear of the awful thing he’d done—of this final unforgivable thing after all the others, after not going to the spring to get the water, after missing the two heifers the night before, after the matches in his pocket.
He did not find the cows going home alone—he found them in the barnyard and he knew that they’d been milked and he knew he’d stayed much longer and that it was far worse than he had imagined.
He walked up the rise to the house, shaking now with fear. There was a light in the kitchen and he knew that they were waiting.
He came into the kitchen and they sat at the table, facing him, waiting for him, with the lamplight on their faces and their faces were so hard that they looked like graven stone.
Uncle Eb stood up, towering toward the ceiling, and you could see the muscles stand out on his arms, with the sleeves rolled to the elbow.
He reached for Johnny and Johnny ducked away, but the hand closed on the back of his neck and the fingers wrapped around his throat and lifted him and shook him with a silent savagery.
“I’ll teach you,” Uncle Eb was saying through clenched teeth. “I’ll teach you. I’ll teach you …”
Something fell upon the floor and rolled toward the corner, leaving a trail of fire as it rolled along the floor.
Uncle Eb stopped shaking him and just stood there holding him for an instant, then dropped him to the floor.
“That fell out of your pocket,” said Uncle Eb. “What is it?”
Johnny backed away, shaking his head.
He wouldn’t tell what it was. He’d never tell. No matter what Uncle Eb might do to him, he’d never tell. Not even if he killed him.
Uncle Eb stalked the jewel, bent swiftly and picked it up. He carried it back to the table and dropped it there and bent over, looking at it, sparkling in the light.
Aunt Em leaned forward in her chair to look at it.
“What in the world!” she said.
They bent there for a moment, staring at the jewel, their eyes bright and shining, their bodies tense, their breath rasping in the silence. The world could have come to an end right then and there and they’d never noticed.
Then they straightened up and turned to look at Johnny, turning away from the jewel as if it didn’t interest them any longer, as if it had had a job to do and had done that job and no longer was important. There was something wrong with them—no, not wrong, but different.
“You must be starved,” Aunt Em said to Johnny. “I’ll warm you up some supper. Would you like some eggs?”
Johnny gulped and nodded.
Uncle Eb sat down, not paying any attention to the jewel at all.
“You know,” he said, “I saw a jackknife uptown the other day. Just the kind you want …”
Johnny scarcely heard him.
He just stood there, listening to the friendliness and love that hummed through all the house.
The Whistling Well
First published in 1980 in the original anthology Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley, who at the time was Clifford Simak’s agent, this story is one that relies heavily on its author’s boyhood. I suspect that as an intelligent and imaginative boy living in a countryside filled with mysterious hollows, cliffs, and caves, with extensive reaches of dark forest, and vistas from which one could see the Wisconsin River flowing from its deep-cut valley to the even larger Mississippi, Cliff developed the habit of looking at his own life, and at the people and places around him, and saying—as adventurous children do—“This is boring, but what if …” I think he wandered the forests and ridges and peopled them, in his mind, with Native Americans and goblins and soldiers and, as his world expanded, with aliens and, yes, dinosaurs.
There actually was a whistling well on Cliff’s grandfather’s farm.
—dww
He walked the ridge, so high against the sky, so windswept, so clean, so open, so far-seeing. As if the very land itself, the soil, the stone, were reaching up, standing on tiptoe, to lift itself, stretching toward the sky. So high that one, looking down, could see the backs of hawks that swung in steady hunting circles above the river valley.
The highness was not all. There was, as well, the sense of ancientness and the smell of time. And the intimacy, as if this great high ridge might be transferring to him its personality. A personality, he admitted to himself, for which he had a liking, a thing that he could wrap, as a cloak, around himself.
And through it all, he heard the creaking of the rocker as it went back and forth, with the hunched and shriveled, but still energetic, old lady crouched upon it, rocking back and forth, so small, so dried up, so emaciated that she seemed to have shrunken into the very structure of the chair, her feet dangling, not reaching the floor. Like a child in a great-grandfather chair. Her feet not touching, not even reaching out a toe to make the rocker go. And, yet, the rocker kept on rocking, never stopping. How the hell, Thomas Parker asked himself, had she made the rocker go?
He had reached the ultimate point of the ridge where steep, high limestone cliffs plunged down toward the river. Cliffs that swung east and from this point continued along the river valley, a stony rampart that fenced in the ridge against the deepness of the valley.
He turned and looked back along the ridge and there, a mile or so away, stood the spidery structure of the windmill, the great wheel facing west, toward him, its blades a whir of silver movement in the light of the setting sun.
The windmill, he knew, was clattering and clanking, but from this distance, he could hear no sound of it, for the strong wind blowing from the west so filled his ears that he could pick up no sound but the blowing of the wind. The wind whipped at his loose jacket and made his pants legs ripple and he could feel its steady pressure at his back.
And, yet, within his mind, if not within his ears, he still could hear the creaking of the rocker, moving back and forth within that room where a bygone gentility warred against the brusqueness of present time. The fireplace was built of rosy brick, with white paneling placed around the brick, the mantel loaded with old figurines, with framed photographs from another time, with an ornate, squatty clock that chimed each quarter hour. There had been furniture of solid oak, a threadbare carpet on the floor. The drapes at the large bow windows, with deep window seats, were of some heavy material, faded over the years to a nondeterminate coloring. Paintings with heavy gilt frames hung on the walls, but the gloom within the room was so deep that there was no way of seeing what they were.
The woman-of-all-work, the companion, the housekeeper, the practical nurse, the cook, brought in the tea, with bread-and-butter sandwiches piled on one plate and delicate cakes ranged on another. She had set the tray on the table in front of the rocking old lady and then had gone away, back into the dark and mysterious depths of the ancient house.
The old lady spoke in her brittle voice, “Thomas,” she said, “if you will pour. Two lumps for me, no cream.”
Awkwardly, he had risen from the horsehair chair. Awkwardly he had poured. He had never poured before. There was a feeling that he should do it charmingly and delicately and with a certain genteel flair, but he did not have the flair. He had nothing that this house or this old lady had. His was another world.
He had been summoned here, imperatively summoned, in a crisp little note on paper that had a faint scent of lavender, the script of the writing more bold than he would have expected, the letters a flowing dignity in old copperplate.
I shall expect you, she had written, on the afternoon of the 17th. We have matters to discuss.
A summons from the
past and from seven hundred miles away and he had responded, driving his beaten-up, weather-stained, lumbering camper through the flaming hills of a New England autumn.
The wind still tugged and pushed at him, the windmill blades still a swirl of movement and below him, above the river, the small, dark shape of the circling hawk. Autumn then, he told himself, and here another autumn, with the trees of the river valley, the trees of other far-off vistas, taking on the color of the season.
The ridge itself was bare of trees, except for a few that still clustered around the sites of homesteads, the homesteads now gone, burned down or weathered away or fallen with the passage of the years. In time long past, there might have been trees, but more than a hundred years ago, if there had been any, they had fallen to the ax to clear the land for fields. The fields were still here, but no longer fields; they had known no plow for decades.
He stood at the end of the ridge and looked back across it, seeing all the miles he had tramped that day, exploring it, getting to know it, although why he felt he should get to know it, he did not understand. But there was some sort of strange compulsion within him that, until this moment, he had not even questioned.
Ancestors of his had trod this land, had lived on it and slept on it, had procreated on it, had known it as he, in a few short days, would never know it. Had known it and had left. Fleeing from some undefinable thing. And that was wrong, he told himself, that was very wrong. The information he’d been given had been somehow garbled. There was nothing here to flee from. Rather, there was something here to live for, to stay for—the closeness to the sky, the cleansing action of the wind, the feeling of intimacy with the soil, the stone, the air, the storm, the very sky itself.
Here his ancestors had walked the land, the last of many who had walked it. For millions of years unknown, perhaps unsuspected, creatures had walked along this ridge. The land was unchanging, geologically ancient, a sentinel of land standing as a milepost amidst other lands that had been forever changing. No great mountain-building surges had distorted it, no glacial action had ground it down, no intercontinental seas had crept over it. For hundreds of millions of years, it had been a freestanding land. It had stayed as it was through all that time, with only the slow and subtle changes brought about by weathering.