Neighbour

Coon Valley is a pleasant place, but there's no denying it's sort
of off the beaten track and it's not a place where you can count
on getting rich because the farms are small and a lot of the
ground is rough. You can farm the bottom lands, but the hill-
sides are only good for pasture and the roads are just dirt roads,
impassable at certain times of year.
    The old-timers, like Bert Smith and Jingo Harris and myself,
are well satisfied to stay here, for we grew up with the country
and we haven't any illusions about getting rich and we'd feel
strange and out-of-place anywhere but in the valley. But there
are others, newcomers, who move in and get discouraged after a
while and up and move away, so there usually is a farm or two,
standing idle, waiting to be sold.
    We are just plain dirt farmers, with emphasis on the dirt, for
we can't afford a lot of fancy machinery and we don't go in for
blooded stock--but there's nothing wrong with us; we're just
everyday, the kind of people you meet all over these United
States. Because we're out of the way and some of the families
have lived here for so long, I suppose you could say that we
have gotten clannish. But that doesn't mean we don't like
outside folks; it just means we've lived so long together that
we've got to know and like one another and are satisfied with
things just as they are.
    We have radios, of course, and we listen to the programmes
and the news, and some of us take daily papers, but I'm afraid
that we may be a bit provincial, for it's fairly hard to get us
229

               Neighbour

stirred up much about world happenings. There's so much o
interest right here in the valley we haven't got the time to worr.
about all those outside things. I imagine you'd call us conser~
ative, for most of us vote Republican without even wonderin
why and there's none of us who has much time for all thi
government interference in the farming business.
    The valley has always been a pleasant place--not only th
land, but the people in it, and we've always been fortunate i
the new neighbours that we' get. Despite new ones coming i
every year or so, we've never had a really bad one and th~
means a lot to us.
    But we always worry a little when one of the new ones up an,
moves away and we speculate among ourselves, wonderin
what kind of people will buy or rent the vacant farm.
    The old Lewis farm had been abandoned for a long time, th
buildings all run down and gone to ruin and the fields gor
back to grass. A dentist over at Hopkins Corners had rented
for several years and run some cattle in it, driving out on weel
ends to see how they were doing. We used to wonder every no'
and then if anyone would ever farm the place again, but final]
we quit wondering, for the buildings had fallen into such di:
repair that we figured no one ever would. I went in one day an
talked to the banker at Hopkins Corners, who had the rentin
of the place, and told him I'd like to take it over if the denti~
ever gave it up. But he told me the owners, who lived i
Chicago then, were anxious to sell rather than to rent i
although he didn't seem too optimistic that anyonewould buy i
    Then one spring a new family moved onto the farm and :'
time we learned it had been sold and that the new family's nan
was Heath--Reginald Heath. And Bert Smith said to m
"Reginald! That's a hell of a name for a farmer !" But that w;
all he said.
    Jingo Harris stopped by one day, coming home from tow:
when he saw Heath out in the yard, to pass the time of day.
was a neighbourly thing to do, of course, and Heath seem~
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               Neighbour

 glad to have him stop, although Jingo said he seemed to be a
 funny kind of man to be a farmer.
     "He's a foreigner," Jingo told me. "Sort of dark. Like he
 might be a Spaniard or from one of those other countries. I
 don't know how he got that Reginald. Reginald is English and
 Heath's no Englishman."
     Later on we heard that the Heaths weren't really Spanish,
 but were Rumanians or Bulgarians and that they were refugees
 from the Iron Curtain.
    But Spanish, or Rumanian, or Bulgarian, the Heaths were
workers. There was Heath and his wife and a half-grown girl
and all three of them worked all the blessed time. They paid
attention to their business and didn't bother anyone and
because of this we liked them, although we didn't have much to
do with them. Not that we didn't want to or that they didn't
want us to; it's just that in a community like ours new folks
sort of have to grow in instead of being taken in.
    Heath had an old beaten-up, wired-together tractor that
made a lot of noise, and as soon as the soil was dry enough to
plough he started out to turn over the fields that through the
years had grown up to grass. I used to wonder if he worked all
night long, for many times when I went to bed I heard the
tractor running. Although that may not be as late as it sounds
to city dwellers, for here in the valley we go to bed early--and
get up early, too.
    One night after dark I set out to hunt some cows, a couple of
fence-jumping heifers that gave me lots of trouble. Just let a
man come in late from work and tired and maybe it's raining a
little and dark as the inside of a cat and those two heifers would
turn up missing and I'd have to go and hunt them. I tried all the
different kinds of pokes and none of them did any good. When
a heifer gets to fence-jumping there isn't much that can be done
with her.
    So I lit a lantern and set out to hunt for them, but I hunted
for two hours and didn't find a trace of them. I had just about
                231

              Neighbour

decided to give up and go back home when I heard the soun~
a tractor running and realized that I was just above the
field of the old Lewis place. To get home I'd have to go ri
past the field and I figured it might be as well to wait whe
reached the field until the tractor came around and ask He
if he had seen the heifers.
    It was a dark night, with thin clouds hiding the stars an~
wind blowing high in the treetops and there was a smell of n
in the air. Heath, I figured, probably was staying out extra 1~
to finish up the field ahead of the coming rain, althougt
remember that I thought he was pushing things just a lit
hard. Already he was far ahead of all the others in the vall
with his ploughing.
    So I made my way down the steep hillside and waded 1
creek at a shallow place I knew and while I was doing thi
heard the tractor make a complete round of the field. I look
for the headlight, but I didn't see it and I thought probably 1
trees had hidden it from me.
    I reached the edge of the field and climbed through the fen
walking out across the furrows to intercept the tractor. I he~
it make the turn to the east of me and start down the fi~
toward me and although I could hear the noise of it, the
wasn't any light.
    I found the last furrow and stood there waiting, sort
wondering, not too alarmed as yet, how Heath managed
drive the rig without any light. I thought that maybe he had c
eyes and could see in the dark and although it seemed fun]
later when I remembered it, the idea that a man might have ›
eyes did not seem funny then.
    The noise kept getting louder and it seemed to be comi:
pretty close, when all at once the tractor rushed out of the da
and seemed to leap at me. I guess I must have been afraid th
it would run over me, for I jumped back a yard or two, with r
heart up in my neck. But I needn't have bothered, for I was o
of the way to start with.
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               Neighbour
     The tractor went on past me and I waved the lantern and
 yelled for Heath to stop and as I waved the lantern the light
 was thrown onto the rear of the tractor and I saw that there
 was no one on it.
     A hundred things went through my mind, but the one idea
 that stuck was that Heath had fallen off the tractor and might
 be lying injured, somewhere in the field.
     I ran after the tractor, thinking to shut it down before it got
 loose and ran into a tree or something, but by the time I reached
 it, it had reached a turn and it was making that turn as neatly as
 if it had been broad daylight and someone had been driving
 it.
    I jumped up on the drawbar and grabbed the seat, hauling
myself, up. I reached out a hand, grabbing for the throttle, but
with my hand upon the metal I didn't pull it back. The tractor
had completed the turn now and was going down the furrowm
and there was something else.
    Take an old tractor, now--one that wheezed and coughed
and hammered and kept threatening to fall apart, like this one
did--and you are bound to get a lot of engine vibration. But in
this tractor there was no vibration. It ran along as smooth as a
high-priced car and the only jolts you got were when the wheels
hit a bump or slight gully in the field.
    I stood there, hanging on to the lantern with one hand and
clutching the throttle with the other, and I didn't do a thing. I
just rode down to the point where the tractor started to make
another turn. Then I stepped off and went on home. I didn't
hunt for Heath lying in the field, for I knew he wasn't there.
    I suppose I wondered how it was possible, but I didn't really
fret myself too much trying to figure it all out. I imagine, in the
first place, I was just too numb. You may worry a lot about
little things that don't seem quite right, but when you run into a
big thing, like that self-operating tractor, you sort of give up
automatically, knowing that it's too big for your brain to
handle, that it's something you haven't got a chance of solving.
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              Neighbour

live with. So your mind rejects it.
    I got home and stood out in the barnyard for a moment,
listening. The wind was blowing fairly hard by then and the
first drops of rain were falling, but every now and then, when
the wind would quiet down, I could hear the tractor.
    I went inside the house and Helen and the kids were all in
bed and sound asleep, so I didn't say anything about it that
night. And the next morning, when I had a chance to think
about it, I didn't say anything at all. Mostly, I suppose, because
I knew no one would believe me and that I'd have to take a lot
of kidding about automatic tractors.

    Heath got his ploughing done and his crops in, well ahead of
everyone in the valley. The crops came up in good shape and we
had good growing weather; then along in June we got a spell of
wet, and everyone got behind with corn ploughing because you
can't go out in the field when the ground is soggy. All of us
ohored around our places, fixing fences and doing other odd
jobs, cussing out the rain and watching the weeds grow like
mad in the unploughed field.
    All of us, that is, except Heath. His corn was clean as a
whistle and you had to hunt to find a weed. Jingo stopped by
one day and asked him how he managed, but Heath just laughed
a little, in that quiet way of his, and talked of something else.
    The first apples finally were big enough for green-apple pies
and there is no one in the country makes better green-apple
pies than Helen. She wins prizes with her pies every year at the
county fair and she is proud of them.
    One day she wrapped up a couple of pies and took them over
to the Heaths. It's a neighbourly way we have of doing in the
valley, with the women running back and forth from one
neighbour to another with their cooking. Each of them has
some dish she likes to show off to the neighbours and it's a sort
of harmless way of bragging.
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               Neighbour

    Helen and the Heaths got along just swell. She was late in
getting home and I was starting supper, with the kids yelling
they were hungry when-do-we-eat-around-here, when she finally
showed up.
    She was full of talk about the Heaths--how they had fixed up
the house, you never would have thought anyone could do so
much to such a terribly run-down place as they had, and about
the garden they had--especially about the garden. It was a big
one, she said, and beautifully taken care of and it was full of
vegetables she had never seen before. The funniest things you
ever saw, she said. Not the ordinary kind of vegetables.
    We talked some about those vegetables, speculating that
maybe the Heaths had brought the seeds out with them from
behind the Iron Curtain, although so far as I could remember,
vegetables were vegetables, no matter where you were. They
grew the same things in Russia or Rumania or Timbuktu as we
did. And, anyhow, by this time I was getting a little sceptical
about that story of their escaping from Rumania.
    But we didn't have the time for much serious speculation on
the Heaths, although there was plenty of casual gossip going
around the neighbourhood. Haying came along and then the
small-grain harvest and everyone was busy. The hay was good
and the small-grain crop was fair, but it didn't look like we'd
get much corn. For we hit a drought. That's the way it goesm
too much rain in June, not enough in August.
    We watched the corn and watched the sky and felt hopeful
when a cloud showed up, but the clouds never meant a thing. It
just seems at times that God isn't on your side.
    Then one morning Jingo Harris showed up and stood
around, first on one foot, then the other, talking to me while I
worked on an old corn binder that was about worn out and
which it didn't look nohow I'd need to use that year.
    "Jingo," I said, after I'd watched him fidget for an hour or
m~x~,"~-a gt>~ some~X/mg an your ~ffm~:'
  He blurted it out then. "Heath got rain last night," he said.
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              Neighbour

 "No one else did," I told him.
"I guess you're right," said Jingo. "Heath's the only one."
He told me how he'd gone to cut through Heath's north
cornfield, carrying back a couple of balls of binder twine he'd
borrowed from Bert Smith. It wasn't until he'd crawled through
the fence that he noticed the field was wet, soaked by a heavy
rain.
 "It must have happened in the night," he said.
    He thought it was funny, but figured maybe there had been a
shower across the lower end of the valley, although as a rule
rains travel up and down the valley, not across it. But when he
had crossed the corner of the field and crawled through the
fence, he noticed it hadn't rained at all. So he went back and
walked around the field and the rain had fallen on the field, but
nowhere else. It began at the fence and ended at the fence.
    When he'd made a circuit of the field he sat down on one of
the balls of twine and tried to get it all thought out, but it made
no sense--furthermore, it was plain unbelievable.
    Jingo is a thorough man. He likes to have all the evidence
and know all there is to know before he makes up his mind. So
he went over to Heath's second corn patch, on the west side of
the valley. And once again he found that it had rained on that
field--on the field, but not around the field.
    "What do you make of it ?" Jingo asked me and I said I
didn't know. I came mighty close to telling him about the
unmanned tractor, but I thought better of it. After all, there was
no point in getting the neighbourhood stirred up.
    After Jingo left I got in the car and drove over to the Heath
farm, intending to ask him if he could loan me his posthole
digger for a day or two. Not that I was going to dig any post-
holes, but you have to have some excuse for showing up at a
neighbour's place.
    I never got a chance to ask him for that posthole digger,
though. Once I got there I never even thought of it.
  Heath was sitting on the front steps of the porch and he
                 236

              Neighbour

seemed glad to see me. He came down to the car and shook my
hand and said, "It's good to see you, Calvin." The way he said
it made me feel friendly and sort of important, too--especially
that Calvin business, for everyone else just calls me Cal. I'm
not downright sure, in fact, that anyone in the neighbourhood
remembers that my name is Calvin.
    "I'd like to show you around the place," he said. "We've
done some fixing up."
    Fixing up wasn't exactly the word for it. The place was spick-
and-span. It looked like some of those Pennsylvania and
Connecticut farms you see in the magazines. The house and all
the other buildings had been ramshackle with all the paint
peeled off them and looking as if they might fall down at any
minute. But now they had a sprightly, solid look and they
gleamed with paint. They didn't look new, of course, but they
looked as if they'd always been well taken care of and painted
every year. The fences were all fixed up and painted, too, and
              I
the weeds were cut and a couple of old unsightly scrap-lumber
piles had been cleaned up and burned. Heath had even tackled
an old iron and machinery junk pile and had it sorted out.
    "There was a lot to do," said Heath, "but I feel it's worth it. I
have an orderly soul. I like to have things neat."
    Which might be true, of course, but he'd done it all in less
than six months' time. He'd come to the farm in early March
and it was only August and he'd not only put in some hundred
acres of crops and done all the other farm work, but he'd got
the place fixed up. And that wasn't possible, I told myself. One
man couldn't do it, not even with his wife and daughter
helping--not even if he worked twenty-four hours a day and
didn't stop to eat. Or unless he could take time and stretch it
out to make one hour equal three or four.
    I trailed along behind Heath and thought about that time-
stretching business and was pleased at myself for thinking of it,
for it isn't often that I get foolish thoughts that are likewise
pleasing. Why, I thought, with a deal like that you could stretch
237

              Neighbour

out any day so you could get all the work done you wanted to.
And if you could stretch out time, maybe you could compress
it, too, so that a trip to a dentist, for example, would only seem
to take a minute.
    Heath took me out to the garden and Helen had been right.
There were the familiar vegetables, of course---cabbages and
tomatoes and squashes and all the other kinds that are found in
every garden--but in addition to this there were as many others
I had never seen before. He told me the names of them and
they seemed to be queer names then, although now it seems a
little strange to think they once had sounded queer, for now
everyone in the valley grows these vegetables and it seems like
we have always had them.
    As we talked he pulled up and picked some of the strange
vegetables and put them in a basket he had brought along.
    "You'll want to try them all," he said. "Some of them you
may not like at first, but there are others that you will. This one
you eat raw, sliced like a tomato, and this one is best boiled,
although you can bake it, too .... "
    I wanted to ask him how he'd come on the vegetables and
where they had come from, but he didn't give me a chance; he
kept on telling me about them and how to cook them and that
this one was a winter keeper and that one you could can and he
gave me one to eat raw and it was rather good.
    We'd got to the far end of the garden and were starting to
come back when Heath's wife ran around the corner of the
house.
     Apparently she didn't see me at first or had forgotten I was
 there, for she called to him and the name she called him wasn't
 Reginald or Reggie, but a foreign-sounding name. I won't even
 try to approximate it, for even at the time I wasn't able to recall
 it a second after hearing it. It was like no word I'd ever heard
 before.
     Then she saw me and stopped running and caught her breath,
 and a moment later said she'd been listening in on the party
 238

              Neighbour

line and that Bert Smith's little daughter, Ann, was terribly sick.
    "They called the doctor," she said, "but he is out on calls
and he won't get there in time."
 "Reginald," she said, "the symptoms sound like .... "
    And she said another name that was like none I'd ever heard
or expect to hear again.
    Watching Heath's face, I could swear I saw it pale despite his
olive tinge of skin.
"qui~k!" tt~ %lx~t%~ ~I~ ~,bb~6 m~ by the arm.
we ran around in front to his old clunk of a car. He threw
the basket of vegetables in the back seat and jumped behind the
wheel. I scrambled in after him and tried to close the door, but
it wouldn't close. The look kept slipping loose and I had to
hang on to the door so it wouldn't bang.
    We lit out of there like a turpentined dog and the noise that
old ear made was enough to deafen one. Despite my holding
on to it, the door kept banging and all the fenders rattled and
there was every other kind of noise you'd expect a junk-heap
car to make, with an extra two or three thrown in.
    I wanted to ask him what he planned to do, but I was having
trouble framing the question in my mind and even if I had
known how to phrase it I doubt he could have heard me with
all the racket that the car was making.
    So I hung on as best I could and tried to keep the door from
banging and all at once it seemed to me the car was making
more noise than it had any call to. Just like the old haywire
tractor made more noise than any tractor should. Too much
noise, by far, for the way that it was running. ;lust like on the
tractor, there was no engine vibration and despite all the
banging and the clanking we were making time. As I've said,
our valley roads are none too good, but even so I swear there
were places we hit seventy and we went around sharp comers
where, by rights, we should have gone into the ditch at the
speed that we were going, but the car just seemed to settle down
and hug the road and we never even skidded.
                 239

               Neighbour

    We pulled up in front of Bert's place and Heath jumped
and ran up the walk, with me following him.
    Amy Smith came to the door and I could see that she'd bt
crying, and she looked a little surprised to see the two of us
    We stood there for a moment without saying anything, tl
Heath spoke to her and here is a funny thing: Heath
wearing a pair of ragged overalls and a sweat-stained shirt
he didn't have a hat and his hair was all rumpled up, but th
was a single instant when it seemed to me that he was w,
dressed in an expensive business suit and that he took off
hat and bowed to Amy.
    "I understand", he said, "that the little girl is sick. Mayl~
can help."
    I don't know if Amy had seen the same thing that I h
seemed to see, but she opened the door and stood to one side
that we could enter.
  "In there," she said.
  "Thank you, ma'am," said Heath, and went into the roo~
      Amy and I stood there for a moment, then she turned to
and I could see the tears in her eyes again.  "Cal, she's awful sick," she said.
    I nodded miserably, for now the spell was gone and comm~
sense was coming back again and I wondered at the madness
this farmer who thought that he could help a little girl who w
terribly sick. And at my madness for standing there, witho
even going in the room with him.
    But just then Heath came out of the room and closed tl
door softly behind him.
"She's sleeping now," he said to Amy. "She'll be all right
Then, without another word, he walked out of the door.
hesitated a moment, looking at Amy, wondering what to d~
And it was pretty plain there was nothing I could do. So
followed him.
    We drove back to his farm at a sober rate of speed, but t[
car banged and thumped just as bad as ever.
                240

              Nelghbour

  "Runs real good," I yelled at him.
  He smiled a bit.
  "I keep it tinkered up," he yelled back at me.
    When we got to his place, I got out of his car and walked
over to my own.
  "You forgot the vegetables," he called after me.
  So I went back to get them.
  "Thanks a lot," I said.
  "Any time," he told me.
    I looked straight at him, then, and said: "It sure would be
fine if we could get some rain. It would mean a lot to us. A
soaking rain right now would save the corn."
  "Come again," he told me. "It was good to talk with you."
     And that night it rained, all over the valley, a steady, soaking
rain, and the corn was saved. And Ann got well.
    The doctor, when he finally got to Bert's, said that she had
passed the crisis and was already on the mend. One of those
virus things, he said. A lot of it around. Not like the old days,
he said, before they got to fooling around with all their miracle
drugs, mutating viruses right and left. Used to be, he said, a
doctor knew what he was treating, but he don't know any
more.
    I don't know if Bert or Amy told Doc about Heath, although
I imagine that they didn't. After all, you don't tell a doctor that
a neighbour cured your child. And there might have been
someone who would have been orhery enough to try to bring a
charge against Heath for practising medicine without a licence,
although that would have been pretty hard to prove. But the
story got around the valley and there was a lot of talk. Heath, I
heard, had been a famous doctor in Vienna before he'd made
his getaway. But I didn't believe it. I don't even believe those
who started the story believed it, but that's the way it goes in a
neighbourhood like ours.
 That story, and others, made quite a flurry for a month or so,
                241

              Neighbour

but then it quieted down and you could see that the Heaths had
become one of us and belonged to the valley. Bert went over
and had quite a talk with Heath and the women-folks took to
calling Mrs. Heath on the telephone, with some of those who
were listening in breaking in to say a word or two, thereby
initiating Mrs. Heath into the round-robin telephone con-
versations that are going on all the time on our valley party line,
with it getting so that you have to bust in on them and tell them
to get off the line when you want to make an important call.
We had Heath out with us on our coon hunts that fall and some
of the young bloods started paying attention to Heath's
daughter. It was almost as if the Heaths were old-time residents.
    As I've said before, we've always been real fortunate in
getting in good neighbours.
    When things are going well, time has a way of flowing along
so smoothly that you aren't conscious of its passing, and that
was the way it was in the valley.
    We had good years, but none of us paid much attention to
that. You don't pay much attention to the good times, you get
so you take them for granted. It's only when bad times come
along that you look back and realize the good times you have
had.

    A year or so ago I was just finishing up the morning chores
when a car with a New York licence pulled up at the barnyard
gate. It isn't very often we see an out-of-state licence plate in
the valley, so I figured that it probably was someone who had
gotten lost and had stopped to ask directions. There was a man
and woman in the front seat and three kids and a dog in the
back seat and the car was new and shiny.
    I was carrying the milk up from the barn and when the man
got out I put the pails down on the ground and waited for him.
    He was a youngish sort of fellow and he looked intelligent
and he had good manners.
He told me his name was Rickard and that he was a New
242

               Neighbour

York newspaperman on vacation and had dropped into the
valley on his way out west to check some information.
    It was the first time, so far as I knew, that the valley had ever
been of any interest newswise and I said so. I said we never did
much here to get into the news.
    "It's no scandal," Rickard told me, "if that is what you're
thinking. It's just a matter of statistics."
    There are a lot of times when I don't catch a situation as
quickly as I should, being a sort of deliberate type, but it seems
to me now that as soon as he said statistics I could see it
coming.
    "I did a series of farm articles a few months back," said
Rickard, "and to get my information I had to go through a lot
of government statistics. I never got so sick of anything in my
entire life."
  "And ?" I asked, not feeling too well myself.
    "I found some interesting things about this valley," he went
on. "I remember that I didn't catch it for a while. Went on past
the figures for a ways. Almost missed the significance, in fact.
Then I did a double-take and backed up and looked at them
again. The full story wasn't in that report, of course. Just a hint
of something. So I did some more digging and came up with
other facts."
 I tried to laugh it off, but he wouldn't let me.
     "Your weather, for one thing," he said. "Do you realize
you've had perfect weather for the past ten years ?"
  "The weather's been pretty good," I admitted.
  "It wasn't always good. I went back to see."
  "That's right," I said. "It's been better lately."
    "Your crops have been the best they've ever been in the last
ten years."
 "Better seed," I said. "Better ways of farming."
    He grinned at me. "You guys haven't changed your way of
farming in the last quarter century."
 And he had me there, of course.
                243

1
i

              Neighbour

    "There was an army worm invasion two years ago," he said.
"It hit all around you, but you got by scot-free."
  "We were lucky. I remember we said so at the time."
    "I checked health records," he said. "Same thing once again.
For ten solid years. No measles, no chickenpox, no pneumonia.
No nothing. One death in ten full years---complications atten-
dant on old age."
    "Old Man Parks," I said. "He was going on to ninety. Fine
old gentleman."
  "You see," said Rickard.
 I did see.
    The fellow had the figures. He had tracked it down, this
thing we hadn't even realized, and he had us cold.
  "What do you want me to do about it?" I asked.
  "I want to talk to you about a neighbour."
    "I won't talk about any of my neighbours. Why don't you
talk to him yourself?"
    "I tried to, but he wasn't home. Fellow down the road said
he'd gone into town. Whole family had gone into town."
    "Reginald Heath," I said. There wasn't much sense in
playing dumb with Rickard, for he knew all the angles.
    "That's the man. I talked to folks in town. Found out he'd
never had to have any repair work done on any of his machinery
or his car. Has the same machinery he had when he started
farming. And it was worn out then."
    "He takes good care of it," I told him. "He keeps it tinkered
up."
    "Another thing," said Rickard. "Since he's been here he
hasn't bought a drop of gasoline."
    I'd know the rest of it, of course, although I'd never stopped
to think about it. But I didn't know about the gasoline. I must
have shown my surprise, for Rickard grinned at me.
  "What do you want?" I asked.
  "A story."
 "Heath's the man to talk to. I don't know a thing to help you."
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    And even when I said it I felt easy in my mind. I seemed to
have an instinctive faith that Heath could handle the situation,
that he'd know just what to do.
    But after breakfast I couldn't settle down to work. I was
pruning the orchard, a job I'd been putting off for a year or
two and that badly needed doing. I kept thinking of that
business of Heath not buying gasoline and that night I'd found
the tractor ploughing by itself and how smooth both the car
and tractor ran despite all tile noise they made.
    So I laid down my pruning hook and shears and struck out
across the fields. I knew the Heath family was in town, but I
don't think it would have made any difference to me if they'd
been at home. I think I would have gone just the same. For
more than ten years now, I realized, I'd been wondering about
that tractor and it was time that I found out.
    I found the tractor in the machine shed and I thought maybe
I'd have some trouble getting into it. But I didn't have a bit. I
slipped the catches and the hood lifted up and I found exactly
what I had thought I'd find, except that I hadn't actually
worked out in my mind the picture of what I'd find underneath
that hood.
    It was just a block of some sort of shining metal that looked
almost like a cube of heavy glass. It wasn't very big, but it had a
massive look about it, as if it might have been a heavy thing to lift.
    You could see the old bolt holes where the original internal
combustion engine had been mounted and a heavy piece of
some sort of metal had been fused across the frame to seat that
little power plant. And up above the shiny cube was an
apparatus of some sort. I didn't take the time to find out how it
worked, but I could see that it was connected to the exhaust and
I knew it was a dingus that disguised the power plant. You
know how in electric trains they have it fixed up so that the
locomotive goes chuff-chuffand throws out a stream of smoke.
Well, that was what that contraption was. It threw out little
puffs of smoke and made a tractor noise.
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    I stood there looking at it and I wondered why it was, if
Heath had an engine that worked better than an internal
combustion engine, he should have gone to so much trouble to
hide the fact he had it. If I'd had a thing like that, I knew, I'd
make the most of it. I'd get someone to back me and go into
production and in no time at all I'd be stinking rich. And
there'd been nothing in the world to prevent Heath from doing
that. But instead he'd fixed the tractor so it looked and sounded
like an ordinary tractor and he'd fixed his car to make so much
noise that it hid the fact it had a new type motor. Only he had
overdone it. He'd made both the car and tractor make more
noise than they should. And he'd missed an important bet in
not buying gasoline. In his place I'd bought the stuff, just the
way you should, and thrown it away or burned it to get rid of it.
    It almost seemed to me that Heath might have had something
he was hiding all these years, that he'd tried deliberately to
keep himself unnoticed. As if he might really have been a
refugee from the Iron Curtain--or from somewhere else.
    I put the hood back in place again and snapped the catches
shut and when I went out I was very careful to shut the machine
shed door securely.
    I went back to my pruning and I did quite a bit of thinking
and while I was doing it I realized that I'd been doing this same
thinking, piecemeal, ever since that night I'd found the tractor
running by itself. Thinking of it in snatches and not trying to
correlate all my thinking and that way it hadn't added up to
much, but now it did and I suppose I should have been a little
scared.
    But I wasn't scared. Reginald Heath was a neighbour, and a
good one, and we'd gone hunting and fishing together and we'd
helped one another with haying and threshing and one thing
and another and I liked the man as well as anyone I had ever
known. Sure, he was a little different and he had a funny kind of
tractor and a funny kind of car and he might even have a way of
stretching time and since he'd come into the valley we'd been
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fortunate in weather and in health. All true, of course, but
nothing to be scared of. Nothing to be scared of, once you
knew the man.
    For some reason or other I remembered the time several years
before when I'd dropped by of a summer evening. It was hot
and the Heath family had brought chairs out on the lawn
because it was cooler there. Heath got me a chair and we sat and
talked, not about anything in particular, but whatever came
into our heads.
    There was no moon, but there were a lot of stars and they
were the prettiest I have ever seen them.
    I called Heath's attention to them and, just shooting off my
mouth, I told him what little rd picked up about astronomy.
    "They're a long ways off," I said. "So far off that their light
takes years to reach us. And all of them are suns. A lot of them
bigger than our sun."
 Which was about all I knew about the stars.
 Heath nodded gravely.
    "There's one up there", he said, "that I watch a lot. That
blue one, over there. Well, sort of blue, anyhow. See it ? See
how it twinkles. Like it might be winking at us. A friendly sort
of star."
    I pretended that I saw the one he was pointing at, although I
wasn't sure I did, there were so many of them and a lot of them
were twinkling.
    Then we got to talking about something else and forgot about
the stars. Or at least I did.

    Right after supper, Bert Smith came over and said that
Rickard had been around asking him some questions and that
he'd been down to Jingo's place and that he'd said he'd see
Heath just as soon as Heath got back from town.
 Bert was a bit upset about it, so I tried to calm him down.
    "These city folks get excited easy," I told him. "There's
nothing to it."
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    I didn't worry much about it because I felt sure that Heath
could handle things and even if Rickard did write a story for
the New York papers it wouldn't bother us. Coon Valley is a
long piece from New York.
 I figured we'd probably seen and heard the last from Rickard.
 But in all my life, I've never been more wrong.
 About midnight or so I woke up with Helen shaking me.
 "There's someone at the door," she said. "Go see who it is."
    So I shucked into my overalls and shoes and lit the lamp and
went downstairs to see.
    While I'd been getting dressed there'd been some knocking
at the door, but as soon as I lit the lamp it quit.
    I went to the door and opened it and there stood Rickard
and he wasn't near as chipper as he'd been in the morning.
"Sorry to get you up," he said, "but it seems that I'm lost."
"You can't be lost," I told him. "There isn't but one road
through the valley. One end of it ties up to Sixty and the other
to Eighty-five. You follow the valley read and you're bound to
hit one or the other of them."
    "I've been driving", he told me, "for the last four hours and I
can't find either of them."
    "Look," I said, "all you do is drive one way or the other.
You can't get off the road. Fifteen minutes either way and
you're on a state highway."
    I was exasperated with him, for it seemed a silly thing to do.
And I don't take kindly to being routed out at midnight.
    "But I tell you I'm lost," he said in a sort of desperation and
I could see that he was close to panic. "The wife is getting
scared and the kids are dead on their feet .... "
    "All right," I told him. "Let me get on my shirt and tie my
shoes. I'll get you out of here."
    He told me he wanted to get to Sixty, so I got out my car and
told him to follow me. I was pretty sore about it, but I figured
the only thing to do was to help him out. He'd upset the valley
and the sooner out the better.
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              Neighbour

    I drove for thirty minutes before I began to get confused
myself. That was twice as long as it should have taken to get
out to the highway. But the road looked all right and there
seemed to be nothing wrong, except for the time it took. So I
kept on going. At the end of forty-five minutes we were back in
front of my place again.
    I couldn't figure it out for the life of me. I got out of my car
and went back to Rickard's car.
 "You see what I mean," he said.
 "We must have got turned around," I said.
 His wife was almost hysterical.
    "What's going on?" she asked me in a high, shrill voice.
"What is going on around here?"
    "We'll try again," I said. "We'll drive slower this time so we
don't make the same mistake."
    I drove slower and this time it took an hour to get back to
the farm. So we tried for Eighty-five and forty minutes later
were right back where we started.
    "I give up," I told them. "Get out and come in. We'll fix up
some beds. You can spend the night and we'll get you out come
light."
     I cooked up some coffee and found stuff to make sandwiches
while Helen fixed up beds to take care of the five of them.
  "The dog can sleep out here in the kitchen," she said.
  I got an apple box and quilt and fixed the dog a bed.
    The dog was a nice little fellow, a wirehair who was full of
fun, and the Rickard kids were about as fine a bunch of kids as
you'd find anywhere.
    Mrs. Rickard was all set to have hysterics, but Helen got her
to drink some coffee and I wouldn't let them talk about not
being able to get out.
"Come daylight," I told them, "and there'll be nothing to it."
After breakfast they were considerably calmed down and
seemed to have no doubt they could find Number Sixty. So
they started out alone, but in an hour were back again. I took
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              Neighbour

my car and started out ahead of them and I don't rain,
admitting I could feel bare feet walking up and down my spin~
    I watched closely and all at once I realized that somehow w
were headed back into the valley instead of heading out of il
So I stopped the car and we turned our cars around an4
headed back in the right direction. But in ten minutes we wer.
turned around again. We tried again and this time we fairl3
crawled, trying to spot the place where we got turned around
But we could never spot it.
    We went back to my place and I called up Bert and Jing›
and asked them to come over.
    Both of them tried to lead the Rickards out, one at a time
then the two of them together, but they were no better at it thar
I was. Then I tried it alone, without the Rickards following me
and I had no trouble at all. I was out to highway Sixty and bac~
in half an hour. So we thought maybe the jinx was broken and 1
tried to lead out the Rickard car, but it was no soap.
    By mid-afternoon we knew the answer. Any of the natives
could get out of the valley, but the Rickards couldn't.
    Helen put Mrs. Rickard to bed and fed her some sedative
and I went over to see Heath.
    He was glad to see me and he listened to me, but all the time
I was talking to him I kept remembering how one time I had
wondered if maybe he could stretch out time. When I had
finished he was silent for a while, as if he might have been
going over some decision just to be certain that it was right.
    "It's a strange business, Calvin," he said finally, "and it
doesn't seem right the Rickards should be trapped in this
valley if they don't want to stay here.
    "Yet, it's a fortunate thing for us, actually. Rickard was
planning on writing a story about us and if he'd written as he
planned to, there'd been a lot of attention paid us. There would
have been a crowd of people coming in--other newspapermen
and government men and people from the universities and the
idly curious. They'd have upset our lives and some of them
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               Neighbour

 taking it somewhat better and the Rickard kids were happy
 with the outdoor life and the Rickard dog was busily engaged
 in running all the valley rabbits down to skin and bones.
    "There's the old Chandler place up at the head of the
valley," said Jingo. "No one's been living there for quite a
while, but it's in good shape. It could be fixed up so it was
comfortable."
    "But I can't stay here," protested Rickard. "I can't settle
down here."
    "Who said anything about settling down ?" asked Bert. "You
just got to wait it out. Some day whatever is wrong will get
straightened out and then you can get away."  "But my job," said Rickard.
    Mrs. Rickard spoke up then. You could see she didn't like
the situation any better than he did, but she had that queer,
practical, everyday logic that a woman at times surprises a man
by showing. She knew that they were stuck here in the valley
and she was out to make the best of it.
      "Remember that book you're always threatening to write ?"
she asked. "Maybe this is it."  That did it.
    Rickard mooned around for a while, making up his mind,
although it already was made up. Then he began talking about
the peace in the valley--the peace and quietness and the lack of
hurry--just the place to write a book.
    The neighbours got together and fixed up the house on the
old Chandler place and Rickard called his office and made
some excuse and got a leave of absence and wrote a letter to his
bank, transferring whatever funds he had. Then he settled
down to write.
    Apparently in his phone calls and his letter-writing he never
even hinted at the real reason for his staying--perhaps because
it would have sounded downright silly--for there was no
ruckus over his failure to go back.
 The valley settled down to its normal life again and it felt
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              Neighbour

good after all the uproar. The neighbours shopped for the
Rickards and carried out from town all the groceries and other
things they needed and once in a while Rickard took the car
and had a try at finding the state highways.
    But mostly he wrote and in about a year he sold this book of
his. ProbaNy you have read it: You Could Hear the Silence.
Made him a hunk of money. But his New York publishers still
are going slowly mad trying to understand why he steadfastly
refuses to stir out of the valley. He has refused lecture tours,
has declined dinners in his honour and turned down all the
other glitter that goes with writing a best seller.
    The book didn't change Rickard at all. By the time he sold it
he was well liked in the valley and seemed to like everyonem
except possibly Heath. He stayed rather cold to Heath. He used
to do a lot of walking, to get exercise, he said, although I think
that he thought up most of his book out on those walks. And
he'd stop by and chew the fat when he was out on those walks
and that way everyone got to know him. He used to talk a lot
about when he could get out of the valley and all of us were
beginning to feel sorry that a time would come when he would
leave, for the Rickards had turned out to be good neighbours.
There must be something about the valley that brings out the
best there is in everyone. As I have said before, we have yet to
get a bad neighbour and that is something most neighbourhoods
can't say.

    One day I had stopped on my way from town to talk a while
with Heath and as we stood talking, up the road came Rickard.
You could see he wasn't going anywhere, but was just out for a
walk.
    He stopped and talked with us for a few minutes, then
suddenly he said, "You know, we've made up our minds that
we would like to stay here."
 "Now, that is fine," said Heath.
 "Grace and I were talking about it the other night," said
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              Neighbour

Rickard. "About the time when we could get out of here. Then
suddenly we stopped our talking and looked at one another
and we knew right then and there we didn't want to leave. It's
been so peaceful and the kids like the school here so much
better than in the city and the people are so fine we couldn't
bear to leave."
    'Tm glad to hear you say that," Heath told him. "But it
seems to me you've been sticking pretty close. You ought to
take the wife and kids in town to see a show." And that was it. It was as simple as all that.
    Life goes on in the valley as it always has, except it's even
better now. All of us are healthy. We don't even seem to get
colds any more. When we need rain we get it and when there's
need of sun the sun is sure to shine. We aren't getting rich, for
you can't get rich with all this Washington interference, but
we're making a right good living. Rickard is working on his
second book and once in a while I go out at night and try to
locate the star Heath showed me that evening long ago.
    But we still get some publicity now and then. The other night
I was listening to my favourite newscaster and he had an item
he had a lot of fun with.
    "Is there really such a place as Coon Valley ?" he asked and
you could hear the chuckle just behind the words. "If there is,
the government would like to know about it. The maps insist
there is and there are statistics on the books that say it's a place
where there is no sickness, where the climate is ideal, where
there's never a crop failure--a land of milk and honey.
Investigators have gone out to seek the truth of this and they
can't find the place, although people in nearby communities
insist there's such a valley. Telephone calls have been made to
people listed as residents of the valley, but the calls can't be
completed. Letters have been written to them, but the letters are
returned to the sender for one or another of the many reasons
the post office has for non-delivery. Investigators have waited
in nearby trading centres, but Coon Valley people never came
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               Neighbour

to town while the investigators were there. If there is such a
place and if the things the statistics say of it are true, the
government would be very interested, for there must be data in
the valley that could be studied and applied to other sectors.
We have no way of knowing whether this broadcast can reach
the valley--if it is any more efficient than investigators or
telephone or the postal service. But if it does--and if there is
such a place as Coon Valley--and if one of its residents should
be listening, won't he please speak up !"
    He chuckled then, chuckled very briefly, and went on to tell
the latest rumour about Khrushchev.
    I shut off the radio and sat in my chair and thought about the
times when for several days no one could find his way out of the
valley and of the other times when the telephones went dead for
no apparent reason. And I remembered how we'd talked about
it among ourselves and wondered if we should speak to Heath
about it, but had in each case decided not to, since we felt that
Heath knew what he was doing and that we could trust his
judgment.
    It's inconvenient at times, of course, but there are a lot of
compensations. There hasn't been a magazine salesman in the
valley for more than a dozen years--nor an insurance salesman,
either.