“That’s the thing that puzzles me,” said Hardwicke. “How could a man live for 124 years in one locality without becoming a celebrity that the world would hear about? Can you imagine what the newspapers could do with a thing like this?”
Lewis said, “I shudder when I think about it.”
“You haven’t told me how.”
“This,” said Lewis, “is a bit hard to explain. You’d have to know the country and the people in it. The southwestern corner of Wisconsin is bounded by two rivers, the Mississippi on the west, the Wisconsin on the north. Away from the rivers there is flat, broad prairie land, rich land, with prosperous farms and towns. But the land that runs down to the river is rough and rugged; high hills and bluffs and deep ravines and cliffs, and there are certain areas forming bays or pockets that are isolated. They are served by inadequate roads and the small, rough farms are inhabited by a people who are closer, perhaps, to the pioneer days of a hundred years ago than they are to the twentieth century. They have cars, of course, and radios, and someday soon, perhaps, even television. But in spirit they are conservative and clannish. Not all the people, of course. Not even many of them. But these little isolated neighborhoods.
“At one time there were a lot of farms in these isolated pockets, but today a man can hardly make a living on a farm of that sort. Slowly the people are being squeezed out of the areas by economic circumstances. They sell their farms for whatever they can get for them and move somewhere else, to the cities mostly, where they can make a living.”
Hardwicke nodded. “And the ones that are left, of course, are the most conservative and clannish.”
“Right. Most of the land now is held by absentee owners who make no pretense of farming it. They may run a few head of cattle on it, but that is all. It’s not too bad as a tax write-off for someone who needs that sort of thing. And in the land-bank days a lot of the land was put into the bank.”
“You’re trying to tell me these backwoods people are engaged in a conspiracy of silence?”
LEWIS HESITATED. “Perhaps not anything as formal as that. It is just their way of doing things, a holdover from the old, stout pioneer philosophy. They minded their own business. They didn’t want folks interfering with them and they interfered with no one else. If a man wanted to live to be a thousand, it might be a thing of wonder, but it was his own damn business. And if he wanted to live alone and be let alone while he was doing it, that was his business, too. They might talk about it among themselves, but to no one else. They’d resent it if some outsider tried to talk about it.
“After a time, I suppose, they came to accept the fact that Wallace kept on being young while they were growing old. New generations accepted it because their elders saw in it nothing too unusual—and, anyhow, no one saw much of Wallace. He kept strictly to himself.
“And in the nearby areas the thing, when it was thought of at all, grew to be just another crazy tale that wasn’t worth looking into. Maybe just a joke among those folks down Dark Hollow way. A man might look ridiculous if he went prying into it.”
“But your man looked into it.”
“Yes. Don’t ask me why.”
“Yet he wasn’t assigned to follow up the job.”
“He was needed somewhere else. And, besides, he was known back there.”
“And you?”
“It took two years of work.”
“But now you know the story.”
“Not all of it. There are more questions now than there were to start with.”
“You’ve seen this man.”
“Many times,” said Lewis. “But I’ve never talked with him. I don’t think he’s ever seen me. He takes a walk each day before he goes to get the mail. He never moves off the place, you see. The mailman brings out the little stuff he needs. A bag of flour, a pound of bacon, a dozen eggs, cigars and sometimes liquor.”
“But that must be against the postal regulations.”
“Of course it is. But mailmen have been doing it for years. The mailmen probably are the only friends he has ever had.”
“I take it this Wallace doesn’t do much farming.”
“None at all. He has a little vegetable garden, but that is all he does. The place has gone back pretty much to wilderness.”
“But he has to live. He must get money somewhere.”
“He does,” said Lewis. “Every five or ten years or so he ships off a fist full of gems to an outfit in New York.”
“Legal?”
“If you mean, is it hot, I don’t think so. If someone wanted to make a case of it, I suppose there are illegalities.”
“And you don’t mind?”
“I CHECKED on this firm,” said Lewis, “and they were rather nervous. For one thing, they’d been stealing Wallace blind. I told them to keep on buying. I told them that if anyone came around to check, to refer them straight to me. I told them to keep their mouths shut and not change anything.”
“You don’t want anyone to scare him off,” said Hardwicke.
“You’re damned right I don’t. I want everything to stay just the way it is. And before you ask me where the stones come from, I’ll tell you I don’t know.”
“He maybe has a mine.”
“That would be quite a mine. Diamonds and rubies and emeralds, all out of the same mine.”
“I would suspect, even at the prices that he gets from them, he picks up a fair income.”
Lewis nodded. “Apparently he only sends a shipment in when he runs out of cash. He wouldn’t need too much. He lives rather simply to judge from the grub he buys. But he subscribes to a lot of daily papers and news magazines and to dozens of scientific journals. He buys a lot of books.”
“Technical books?”
“Some of them, of course, but mostly keeping up with new developments. Physics and chemistry and biology—all that sort of stuff.”
“But I don’t . . .”
“Of course you don’t. Neither do I. He’s no scientist. Or at least he has no formal education in the sciences. Back in the days when he went to school there wasn’t much of it—not in the sense of today’s scientific education. And whatever he learned then would be fairly worthless now in any event. He went through grade school—one of those one-room country schools—and spent one winter at what was called an academy that operated for a year or two down in Millville village. In case you don’t know, that was considerably better than par back in the 1850s. He was, apparently, a fairly bright young man.”
Hardwicke shook his head. “It sounds incredible. You’ve checked on all of this?”
“As well as I could. I had to go at it gingerly. I wanted no one to catch on. And one thing I forgot—he does a lot of writing. He buys these big bound record books, in lots of a dozen at the time. He buys ink by the pint.”
HARDWICKE GOT up from his desk and paced up and down the room.
“Lewis,” he said, “if you hadn’t shown me your credentials and if I hadn’t checked on them, I’d figure all of this to be a very tasteless joke.”
He went back and sat down again. He picked up the pencil and started rolling it between his palms once more.
“You’ve been on the case two years,” he said. “You have no ideas?”
“Not a one,” said Lewis. “I’m entirely baffled. That is why I’m here.”
“Tell me more of his history. After the war, that is.”
“His mother died,” said Lewis, “while he was away. His father and the neighbors buried her right there on the farm. That was the way a lot of people did it then. Young Wallace got a furlough, but not in time to get home for the funeral. There wasn’t much embalming done in those days and the traveling was slow. Then he went back to the war. So far as I can find, it was his only furlough. The old man lived alone and worked the farm, batching it and getting along all right. From what I can pick up, he was a good farmer, an exceptionally good farmer for his day. He subscribed to some farm journals and was progressive in his ideas. He paid attention to such th
ings as crop rotation and the prevention of erosion. The farm wasn’t much of a farm by modern standards, but it made him a living and a little extra he managed to lay by.
“Then Enoch came home from the war and they farmed the place together for a year or so. The old man bought a mower—one of those horse-drawn contraptions with a sickle bar to cut hay or grain. It was the progressive thing to do. It beat a scythe all hollow.
“Then one afternoon the old man went out to mow a hayfield. The horses ran away. Something must have scared them. Enoch’s father was thrown off the seat and forward, in front of the sickle bar. It was not a pretty way to die.”
Hardwicke made a grimace of distaste. “Horrible,” he said.
“Enoch went out and gathered up his father and got the body to the house. Then he took a gun and went hunting for the horses. He found them down in the corner of the pasture and he shot the two of them, and he left them. I mean exactly that. For years their skeletons lay there in the pasture, where he’d killed them. They were still hitched to the mower until the harness rotted.
“Then he went back to the house and laid his father out. He washed him and he dressed him in the good black suit and laid him on a board, then went out to the barn and carpentered a coffin. And after that, he dug a grave beside his mother’s grave. He finished it by lantern light, then went back to the house and sat up with his father. When morning came, he went to tell the nearest neighbor and that neighbor notified the others and someone went to get a preacher. Late in the afternoon they had the funeral and Enoch went back to the house. He has lived there ever since, but he never farmed the land. Except the garden, that is.”
“YOU TOLD me these people wouldn’t talk to strangers. You seem to have learned a good deal about their peculiar hermit.”
“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.”
II
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 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. 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. For an 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 it, indeed, 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. 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 was 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 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, 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. It was an ancient cook stove, smaller than the old-fashion
ed kitchen range. Sitting on its top was a coffee pot, 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 that had been the delight of ladies of a century before. In another corner was a table and a chair. Above the table, against the wall, hung 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, the wick neatly trimmed.
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 as though he were 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. Just the very basic necessities—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 home 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, nor anything to write with.
The Complete Serials Page 84
