All Flesh Is Grass Part 5

"I think I see," I said.

"Of course you do," he told me. "A gambler rides his luck. An investor plays his hunches. And neither luck nor hunch are as solid and consistent as this thing I have."

He reached out and picked up the dialless phone and looked at it, then set it down again. "I brought this one home," he said, "and put it on the desk. All these years I've waited for a call, but it never came."

"With you," I told him, "there is no need of any phone."

"You think that's it?" he asked.

"I'm sure of it."

"I suppose it is," he said. "At times it's confusing."

"This Jersey firm?" I asked. "You corresponded with them?"

He shook his head. "Not a line. I just s.h.i.+pped the phones."

"There was no acknowledgement?"

"No acknowledgement," he said. "No payment. I expected none. When you do business with yourself..."

"Yourself! You mean this second self runs that New Jersey firm?

"I don't know," he said. "Christ, I don't know anything. I've lived with it all these years and I tried to understand, but I never understood."

And now his face was haunted and I felt sorry for him.

He must have noticed that I felt sorry for him. He laughed and said. "Don't let me get you down. I can take it. I can take anything. You must not forget that I've been well paid. Tell me about yourself. You're in real estate."

I nodded. "And insurance."

"And you couldn't pay your phone bill."

"Don't waste sympathy on me," I said. "I'll get along somehow."

"Funny thing about the kids," he said. "Not many of them stay here. Not much to keep them here, I guess."

"Not very much," I said.

"Nancy is just home from Europe," he told me. "I'm glad to have her home. It got lonesome here with no one. I haven't seen much of her lately. College and then a fling at social work and then the trip to Europe. But she tells me now that she plans to stay a while. She wants to do some writing."

"She should be good at it," I said. "She got good marks in composition when we were in high school."

"She has the writing bug," he said. "Had half a dozen things published in, I guess you call them little magazines. The ones that come out quarterly and pay you nothing for your work except half a dozen copies. I'd never heard of them before. I read the articles she wrote, but I have no eye for writing. I don't know if it's good or bad. Although I suppose it has to have a certain competence to have been accepted. But if writing keeps her here with me, I'll be satisfied."

I got out of my chair. "I'd better go," I said. "Maybe I have stayed longer than I should."

He shook his head. "No, I was glad to talk with you. And don't forget the money. This other self, this whatever-you-may-call-it told me to give it to you. I gather that it's in the nature of a retainer of some sort."

"But this is double talk," I told him, almost angrily. "The money comes from you."

"Not at all," he said. "It comes from a special fund that was started many years ago. It didn't seem quite right that I should reap all benefit from all of these ideas which were not really mine. So I began paying ten per cent profits into a special fund..."

"Suggested, more than likely, by this second self?

"Yes," he said. "I think you are right, although it was so long ago that I cannot truly say. But in any case, I set up the fund and through the years have paid out varying amounts at the direction of whoever it may be that shares my mind with me."

I stared at him, and it was rude of me, I know. But no man, I told myself, could sit as calmly as Sherwood sat and talk about an unknown personality that shared his mind with him.

Even after all the years, it still would not be possible.

"The fund," said Sherwood, quietly, "is quite a tidy sum, even with the amounts I've paid out of it. It seems that since this fellow came to live with me, everything I've touched has simply turned to money."

"You take a chance," I said, "telling this to me."

"You mean that you could tell it around about me?

I nodded. "Not that I would," I said.

"I don't think you will," he said. "You'd get laughed at for your trouble. No one would believe you."

"I don't suppose they would."

"Brad," he said, almost kindly, "don't be a complete d.a.m.n fool. Pick up that envelope and put it in your pocket. Come back some other time and talk with me-any time you want. I have a hunch there may be a lot of things we'll want to talk about."

I reached out my hand and picked up the money. I stuffed it in my pocket.

"Thank you, sir," I said.

"Don't mention it," he told me. He raised a hand. "Be seeing you," he said.

4.

I WENT slowly down the hall and there was no sign of Nancy, nor was she on the porch, where I had half expected to find her waiting for me. She had said yes, that I would see her later, that we had a lot to talk about, and I had thought, of course, that she meant tonight. But she might not have meant tonight. She might have meant some other time than this. Or she might have wafted and then grown tired of waiting. After all, I had spent a long time with her father.

The moon had risen in a cloudless sky and there was not a breath of breeze. The great oaks stood like graven monuments and the summer night was filled with the glittering of moonbeams. I walked down the stairs and stood for a moment at their foot and it seemed for all the world that I was standing in a circle of enchantment. For this, I thought, could not be the old, familiar earth, this place of ghostly, brooding oaken sentinels, this air so drenched with moonlight, this breathless, waiting silence hanging over all, and the faint, other-world perfume that hung above the soft blackness of the ground.

Then the enchantment faded and the glitter went away and I was back once more in the world I knew.

There was a chill in the summer air. Perhaps a chill of disappointment, the chill of being booted out of fairyland, the chill of knowing there was another place I could not hope to stay. I felt the solid concrete of the walk underneath my feet and I could see that the shadowed oaks were only oaks and not graven monuments.

I shook myself, like a dog coming out of water, and my wits came back together and I went on down the walk. As I neared the car, I fumbled in my pocket for my keys, walking around on the driver's side and opening the door.

I was halfway in the seat before I saw her sitting there, next to the other door.

"I thought," she said, "that you were never coming. What did you and Father find to talk so long about?

"A number of things," I told her. "None of them important."

"Do you see him often?"

"No," I said. "Not often. " Somehow I didn't want to tell her this was the first time I had ever talked with him.

I groped in the dark and found the lock and slid in the key.

"A drive," I said. "Perhaps some place for a drink."

"No, please," she said. "I'd rather sit and talk."

I settled back into the seat.

"It's nice tonight," she said. "So quiet. There are so few places that are really quiet."

"There's a place of enchantment," I told her, "just outside your porch. I walked into it, but it didn't last. The air was full of moonbeams and there was a faint perfume..."

"That was the flowers," she said.

"What flowers?

"There's a bed of them in the curve of the walk. All of them those lovely flowers that your father found out in the woods somewhere."

"So you have them too," I said. "I guess everyone in the village has a bed of them."

"Your father," she said, "was one of the nicest men I ever knew. When I was a little girl he always gave me flowers. I'd go walking past and he'd pick a flower or two for me."

Yes, I thought, I suppose he could be called a nice man. Nice and strong and strange, and yet, despite his strength and strangeness, a very gentle man. He had known the ways of flowers and of all other plants. His tomato plants, I remembered, had grown big and stout and of a dark, deep green, and in the spring everyone had come to get tomato plants from him.

And there had been that day he'd gone down Dark Hollow way to deliver some tomato plants and cabbage and a box full of perennials to the widow Hicklin and had come back with half a dozen strange, purple-blossomed wild flowers, which he had dug up along the road and brought home, their roots wrapped carefully in a piece of burlap.

He had never seen such flowers before and neither, it turned out, had anybody else. He had planted them in a special bed and had tended them with care and the flowers had responded gratefully underneath his hands. So that today there were few flower beds in the village that did not have some of those purple flowers, my father's special flowers.

"Those flowers of his," asked Nancy. "Did he ever find what kind of flowers they were?"

"No," I said, "he didn't."

"He could have sent one of them to the university or someplace. Someone could have told him exactly what he'd found."

"He talked of it off and on. But he never got around to really doing it. He always kept so busy. There were so many things to do. The greenhouse business keeps you on the run."

"You didn't like it, Brad?"

"I didn't really mind it. I'd grown up with it and I could handle it. But I didn't have the knack. Stuff wouldn't grow for me."

She stretched, touching the roof with balled fists.

"It's good to be back," she said. "I think I'll stay a while. I think Father needs to have someone around."

"He said you planned to write."

"He told you that?"

"Yes," I said. "he did. He didn't act as if he shouldn't."

"Oh, I don't suppose it makes any difference. But it's a thing that you don't talk about-not until you're well along on it. There are so many things that can go wrong with writing. I don't want to be one of those pseudo-literary people who are always writing something they never finish, or talking about writing something that they never start."

"And when you write," I asked, "what will you write about?"

"About right here," she said. "About this town of ours."

"Millville?

"Why, yes, of course," she said. "About the village and its people."

"But," I protested, "there is nothing here to write about."

She laughed and reached out and touched my arm. "There's so much to write about," she said. "So many famous people. And such characters."

"Famous people?" I said, astonished.

"There are," she said, "Belle Simpson Knowles, the famous novelist, and Ben Jackson, the great criminal lawyer, and John M. Hartford, who heads the department of history at..."

"But those are the ones who left," I said. "There was nothing here for them. They went out and made names for themselves and most of them never set foot in Millville again, not even for a visit."

"But," she said, "they got their start here. They had the capacity for what they did before they ever left this village. You stopped me before I finished out the list. There are a lot of others. Millville, small and stupid as it is, has produced more great men and women than any other village of its size."

"You're sure of that?" I asked, wanting to laugh at her earnestness, but not quite daring to.

"I would have to check," she said, "but there have been a lot of them."

"And the characters," I said. "I guess you're right. Millville has its share of characters. There are Stiffy Grant and Floyd Caldwell and Mayor Higgy..."

"They aren't really characters," said Nancy. "Not the way you think of them. I shouldn't have called them characters to start with. They're individualists. They've grown up in a free and easy atmosphere. They've not been forced to conform to a group of rigid concepts and so they've been themselves. Perhaps the only truly unfettered human beings who still exist today can be found in little villages like this."

In all my life I'd never heard anything like this. n.o.body had ever told me that Higgy Morris was an individualist. He wasn't. He was just a big stuffed s.h.i.+rt. And Hiram Martin was no individualist. Not in my book, he wasn't. He was just a schoolyard bully who had grown up into a stupid cop.

"Don't you think so?" Nancy asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I have never thought about it."

And I thought-for G.o.d's sake, her education's showing, her years in an eastern college, her fling at social work in the New York welfare centre, her year-long tour of Europe. She was too sure and confident, too full of theory and of knowledge. Millville was her home no longer. She had lost the feel and sense of it, for you do not sit off to one side and a.n.a.lyse the place that you call your home. She still might call this village home, but it was not her home. And had it ever been, I wondered? Could any girl (or boy) call a bone-poor village home when they lived in the one big house the village boasted, when their father drove a Cadillac, and there was a cook and maid and gardener to care for house and yard? She had not come home; rather she had come back to a village that would serve her as a social research area. She would sit up here on her hilltop and subject the village to inspection and a.n.a.lysis and she'd strip us bare and hold us up, flayed and writhing, for the information and amus.e.m.e.nt of the kind of people who read her kind of book.

"I have a feeling," she said, "that there is something here that the world could use, something of which there is not a great deal in the world. Some sort of catalyst that sparks creative effort, some kind of inner hunger that serves to trigger greatness."