Way Station, Page 2

  “You told me these people wouldn’t talk to strangers. You seem to have learned a lot.”

  “It took two years to do it. I infiltrated them. I bought a beat-up car and drifted into Millville and I let it out that I was a ginseng hunter.”

  “A what?”

  “A ginseng hunter. Ginseng is a plant.”

  “Yes, I know. But there’s been no market for it for years.”

  “A small market and an occasional one. Exporters will take on some of it. But I hunted other medicinal plants as well and pretended an extensive knowledge of them and their use. ‘Pretended’ isn’t actually the word; I boned up plenty on them.”

  “The kind of simple soul,” said Hardwicke, “those folks could understand. A sort of cultural throwback. And inoffensive, too. Perhaps not quite right in the head.”

  Lewis nodded. “It worked even better than I thought. I just wandered around and people talked to me. I even found some ginseng. There was one family in particular—the Fisher family. They live down in the river bottoms below the Wallace farm, which sits on the ridge above the bluffs. They’ve lived there almost as long as the Wallace family, but a different stripe entirely. The Fishers are a coon-hunting, catfishing, moonshine-cooking tribe. They found a kindred spirit in me. I was just as shiftless and no-account as they were. I helped them with their moonshine, both in the making and the drinking and once in a while the peddling. I went fishing with them and hunting with them and I sat around and talked and they showed me a place or two where I might find some ginseng—‘sang’ is what they call it. I imagine a social scientist might find a gold mine in the Fishers. There is one girl—a deaf-mute, but a pretty thing, and she can charm off warts…”

  “I recognize the type,” said Hardwicke. “I was born and raised in the southern mountains.”

  “They were the ones who told me about the team and mower. So one day I went up in that corner of the Wallace pasture and did some digging. I found a horse’s skull and some other bones.”

  “But no way of knowing if it was one of the Wallace horses.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Lewis. “But I found part of the mower as well. Not much left of it, but enough to identify.”

  “Let’s get back to the history,” suggested Hardwicke. “After the father’s death, Enoch stayed on at the farm. He never left it?”

  Lewis shook his head. “He lives in the same house. Not a thing’s been changed. And the house apparently has aged no more than the man.”

  “You’ve been in the house?”

  “Not in it. At it. I will tell you how it was.”

  3

  He had an hour. He knew he had an hour, for he had timed Enoch Wallace during the last ten days. And from the time he left the house until he got back with his mail, it had never been less than an hour. Sometimes a little longer, when the mailman might be late, or they got to talking. But an hour, Lewis told himself, was all that he could count on.

  Wallace had disappeared down the slope of ridge, heading for the point of rocks that towered above the bluff face, with the Wisconsin River running there below. He would climb the rocks and stand there, with the rifle tucked beneath his arm, to gaze across the wilderness of the river valley. Then he would go back down the rocks again and trudge along the wooded path to where, in proper season, the pink lady’s-slippers grew, and from there up the hill again to the spring that gushed out of the hillside just below the ancient field that had lain fallow for a century or more, and then along the slope until he hit the almost overgrown road and so down to the mailbox.

  In the ten days that Lewis had watched him, his route had never varied. It was likely, Lewis told himself, that it had not varied through the years. Wallace did not hurry. He walked as if he had all the time there was. And he stopped along the way to renew acquaintances with old friends of his—a tree, a squirrel, a flower. He was a rugged man and there still was much of the soldier in him—old tricks and habits left from the bitter years of campaigning under many leaders. He walked with his head held high and his shoulders back and he moved with the easy stride of one who had known hard marches.

  Lewis came out of the tangled mass of trees that once had been an orchard and in which a few trees, twisted and gnarled and gray with age, still bore their pitiful and bitter crop of apples.

  He stopped at the edge of the copse and stood for a moment to stare up at the house on the ridge above, and for a single instant it seemed to him the house stood in a special light, as if a rare and more distilled essence of the sun had crossed the gulf of space to shine upon this house and to set it apart from all other houses in the world. Bathed in that light, the house was somehow unearthly, as if, indeed, it might be set apart as a very special thing. And then the light, if it ever had been there, was gone and the house shared the common sunlight of the fields and woods.

  Lewis shook his head and told himself that it had been foolishness, or perhaps a trick of seeing. For there was no such thing as special sunlight and the house was no more than a house, although wondrously preserved.

  It was the kind of house one did not see too often in these days. It was rectangular; long and narrow and high, with old-fashioned gingerbread along the eaves and gables. It had a certain gauntness that had nothing to do with age; it had been gaunt the day it had been built—gaunt and plain and strong, like the people that it sheltered. But gaunt as it might be, it stood prim and neat, with no peeling paint, with no sign of weathering, and no hint of decay.

  Against one end of it was a smaller building, no more than a shed, as if it were an alien structure that had been carted in from some other place and shoved against its end, covering the side door of the house. Perhaps the door, thought Lewis, that led into the kitchen. The shed undoubtedly had been used as a place to hang outdoor clothing and to leave overshoes and boots, with a bench for milk cans and buckets, and perhaps a basket in which to gather eggs. From the top of it extended some three feet of stovepipe.

  Lewis went up to the house and around the shed and there, in the side of it, was a door ajar. He stepped up on the stoop and pushed the door wide open and stared in amazement at the room.

  For it was not a simple shed. It apparently was the place where Wallace lived.

  The stove from which the stovepipe projected stood in one corner, an ancient cookstove, smaller than the old-fashioned kitchen range. Sitting on its top was a coffeepot, a frying pan, and a griddle. Hung from hooks on a board behind it were other cooking implements. Opposite the stove, shoved against the wall, was a three-quarter-size four-poster bed, covered with a lumpy quilt, quilted in one of the ornate patterns of many pieces of many-colored cloth, such as had been the delight of ladies of a century before. In another corner was a table and a chair, and above the table, hung against the wall, a small open cupboard in which were stacked some dishes. On the table stood a kerosene lantern, battered from much usage, but with its chimney clean, as if it had been washed and polished as recently as this morning.

  There was no door into the house, no sign there had ever been a door. The clapboard of the house’s outer wall ran unbroken to form the fourth wall of the shed.

  This was incredible, Lewis told himself—that there should be no door, that Wallace should live here, in this shed, when there was a house to live in. As if there were some reason he should not occupy the house, and yet must stay close by it. Or perhaps that he might be living out a penance of some sort, living here in this shed as a medieval hermit might have lived in a woodland hut or in a desert cave.

  He stood in the center of the shed and looked around him, hoping that he might find some clue to this unusual circumstance. But there was nothing, beyond the bare, hard fact of living, the very basic necessities of living—the stove to cook his food and heat the place, the bed to sleep on, the table to eat on, and the lantern for its light. Not even so much as an extra hat (although, come to think of it, Wallace never wore a hat) or an extra coat.

  No sign of magazines or papers, and Wallace never came hom
e from the mailbox empty-handed. He subscribed to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Washington Star, as well as many scientific and technical journals. But there was no sign of them here, nor of the many books he bought. No sign, either, of the bound record books. Nothing at all on which a man could write.

  Perhaps, Lewis told himself, this shed, for some baffling reason, was no more than a show place, a place staged most carefully to make one think that this was where Wallace lived. Perhaps, after all, he lived in the house. Although, if that were the case, why all this effort, not too successful, to make one think he didn’t?

  Lewis turned to the door and walked out of the shed. He went around the house until he reached the porch that led up to the front door. At the foot of the steps, he stopped and looked around. The place was quiet. The sun was midmorning-high and the day was warming up and this sheltered corner of the earth stood relaxed and hushed, waiting for the heat.

  He looked at his watch and he had forty minutes left, so he went up the steps and across the porch until he came to the door. Reaching out his hand, he grasped the knob and turned—except he didn’t turn it; the knob stayed exactly where it was and his clenched fingers went half around it in the motion of a turn.

  Puzzled, he tried again and still he didn’t turn the knob. It was as if the knob was covered with some hard, slick coating, like a coat of brittle ice, on which the fingers slipped without exerting any pressure on the knob.

  He bent his head close to the knob and tried to see if there were any evidence of coating, and there was no evidence. The knob looked perfectly all right—too all right, perhaps. For it was clean, as if someone had wiped and polished it. There was no dust upon it, and no weather specks.

  He fried a thumbnail on it, and the thumbnail slipped but left no mark behind it. He ran his palm over the outer surface of the door and the wood was slick. The rubbing of the palm set up no friction. The palm slid along the wood as if the palm were greased, but there was no sign of grease. There was no indication of anything to account for the slickness of the door.

  Lewis moved from the door to the clapboard and the clapboard also was slick. He tried palm and thumbnail on it and the answer was the same. There was something covering this house which made it slick and smooth—so smooth that dust could not cling upon its surface nor could weather stain it.

  He moved along the porch until he came to a window, and now, as he stood facing the window, he realized something he had not noticed before, something that helped make the house seem gaunter than it really was. The windows were black. There were no curtains, no drapes, no shades; they were simply black rectangles, like empty eyes staring out of the bare skull of the house.

  He moved closer to the window and put his face up to it, shading the sides of his face, next to the eyes, with his upheld hands to shield out the sunlight. But even so, he could not see into the room beyond. He stared, instead, into a pool of blackness, and the blackness, curiously enough, had no reflective qualities. He could not see himself reflected in the glass. He could see nothing but the blackness, as if the light hit the window and was absorbed by it, sucked in and held by it. There was no bouncing back of light once it had hit that window.

  He left the porch and went slowly around the house, examining it as he went. The windows were all blank, black pools that sucked in the captured light, and all the exterior was slick and hard.

  He pounded the clapboard with his fist, and it was like the pounding of a rock. He examined the stone walls of the basement where they were exposed, and the walls were smooth and slick. There were mortar gaps between the stones and in the stones themselves one could see uneven surfaces, but the hand rubbed across the wall could detect no roughness.

  An invisible something had been laid over the roughness of the stone, just enough of it to fill in the pits and uneven surfaces. But one could not detect it. It was almost as if it had no substance.

  Straightening up from his examination of the wall, Lewis looked at his watch. There were only ten minutes left. He must be getting on.

  He walked down the hill toward the tangle of old orchard. At its edge he stopped and looked back, and now the house was different. It was no longer just a structure. It wore a personality, a mocking, leering look, and there was a malevolent chuckle bubbling inside of it, ready to break out.

  Lewis ducked into the orchard and worked his way in among the trees. There was no path and beneath the trees the grass and weeds grew tall. He ducked the drooping branches and walked around a tree that had been uprooted in some windstorm of many years before.

  He reached up as he went along, picking an apple here and there, scrubby things and sour, taking a single bite out of each one of them, then throwing it away, for there was none of them that was fit to eat, as if they might have taken from the neglected soil a certain basic bitterness.

  At the far side of the orchard he found the fence and the graves that it enclosed. Here the weeds and grass were not so high and the fence showed signs of repair made rather recently, and at the foot of each grave, opposite the three crude native limestone headstones, was a peony bush, each a great straggling mass of plants that had grown, undisciplined, for years.

  Standing before the weathered picketing, he knew that he had stumbled on the Wallace family burial plot.

  But there should have been only the two stones. What about the third?

  He moved around the fence to the sagging gate and went into the plot. Standing at the foot of the graves, he read the legends on the stones. The carving was angular and rough, giving evidence of having been executed by unaccustomed hands. There were no pious phrases, no lines of verse, no carvings of angels or of lambs or of other symbolic figures such as had been customary in the 1860s. There were just the names and dates.

  On the first stone: Amanda Wallace 1821–1863

  And on the second stone: Jedediah Wallace 1816–1866

  And on the third stone—

  4

  “Give me that pencil, please,” said Lewis.

  Hardwicke quit rolling it between his palms and handed it across.

  “Paper, too?” he asked.

  “If you please,” said Lewis.

  He bent above the desk and drew rapidly.

  “Here,” he said, handing back the paper.

  Hardwicke wrinkled his brow.

  “But it makes no sense,” he said. “Except for that figure underneath.”

  “The figure eight, lying on its side. Yes, I know. The symbol for infinity.”

  “But the rest of it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lewis. “It is the inscription on the tombstone. I copied it…”

  “And you know it now by heart.”

  “I should. I’ve studied it enough.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” said Hardwicke. “Not that I’m an authority. I really know little at all in this field.”

  “You can put your mind at rest. It’s nothing that anyone knows anything about. It bears no resemblance, not even the remotest, to any language or any known inscription. I checked with men who know. Not one, but a dozen of them. I told them I’d found it on a rocky cliff. I am sure that most of them think I am a crackpot. One of those people who are trying to prove that the Romans or the Phoenicians or the Irish or whatnot had pre-Colombian settlements in America.”

  Hardwicke put down the sheet of paper.

  “I can see what you mean,” he said, “when you say you have more questions now than when you started. Not only the question of a young man more than a century old, but likewise the matter of the slickness of the house and the third gravestone with the undecipherable inscription. You say you’ve never talked with Wallace?”

  “No one talks to him. Except the mailman. He goes out on his daily walks and he packs this gun.”

  “People are afraid to talk with him?”

  “Because of the gun, you mean.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose that was in the
back of my mind. I wondered why he carried it.”

  Lewis shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve tried to tie it in, to find some reason he always has it with him. He has never fired the rifle so far as I can find. But I don’t think the rifle is the reason no one talks with him. He’s an anachronism, something living from another age. No one fears him, I am sure of that. He’s been around too long for anyone to fear him. Too familiar. He’s a fixture of the land, like a tree or boulder. And yet no one feels quite comfortable with him, either. I would imagine that most of them, if they should come face to face with him, would feel uncomfortable. For he’s something they are not—something greater than they are and at the same time a good deal less. As if he were a man who had walked away from his own humanity. I think that, secretly, many of his neighbors may be a bit ashamed of him, shamed because he has, somehow, perhaps ignobly, side-stepped growing old, one of the penalties, but perhaps, as well, one of the rights of all humankind. And perhaps this secret shame may contribute in some part to their unwillingness to talk about him.”

  “You spent a good deal of time watching him?”

  “There was a time I did. But now I have a crew. They watch on regular shifts. We have a dozen spots we watch from, and we keep shifting them around. There isn’t an hour, day in, day out, that the Wallace house isn’t under observation.”

  “This business really has you people bugged.”

  “I think with reason,” Lewis said. “There is still one other thing.”

  He bent over and picked up the brief case he had placed beside his chair. Unsnapping it, he took out a sheaf of photographs and handed them to Hardwicke.

  “What do you make of these?” he asked.

  Hardwicke picked them up. Suddenly he froze. The color drained out of his face. His hands began to tremble and he laid the pictures carefully on the desk. He had looked at only the top one; not any of the others.

  Lewis saw the question in his face.