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Grotto of the Dancing Deer
And Other Stories
The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volume Four
Introduction by David W. Wixon
Introduction
The Language of Clifford D. Simak
“The day the barn caved in, Pa was ready to admit flat out that there was something to what Butch’s Pa had said. It was all Ma could do to keep him from going up the road to see Andy Carter and talk to him by hand.”
—Clifford D. Simak, in “No Life of Their Own”
One of the most notable features of the works, and particularly the earliest short stories, of Clifford D. Simak was his frequent use of colloquial language; in fact, sometimes his characters became so “colloquial” as to suggest parody. And such usages were particularly jarring when they came from the mouths of people working in a highly technological environment like outer space (see “Mr. Meek Plays Polo” for one example). To modern ears and eyes, such language appears completely unrealistic. Who would believe that future people would be so primitive, so uneducated?
Some of these usages, I would suggest, were deliberate, exaggerations intended to remind us that the future would still have a place for people with simple lives reflecting simple mores, even if they had to handle complicated technologies. How better to show that the character typically found in down-home, unsophisticated country dwellers would continue to be around in the future?
It should not be thought that such language represented how Simak himself spoke. Keep in mind that he was a teacher for several years before he went into journalism, that he worked in journalism at a high level for more than 45 years, and that he wrote and sold both fiction and nonfiction. (The nonfiction books, as well as the long-running series he created for his newspaper, were of a scientific nature.) And I will attest, from personal experience, that neither Cliff nor his brother spoke in such fashion.
It seems likely that Cliff, during his youth in a rural area of the early twentieth century, knew people who spoke in a rough fashion, and that when portraying similar types he exaggerated their distinctive speech for effect. But that’s all it was: a tool used to make a point in the stories. Clifford Simak had learned not to let an apparent lack of polish, the veneer of a “civilized” lifestyle, mislead him into rejecting the value of those people, their abilities, and their humanity.
So when Bat Ears Brady says (in “Junkyard”) that “‘there’s been planets … I wouldn’t of minded so much being marooned on, but this ain’t one of them. This here place is the tail end of creation’”—don’t let it blind you to the man’s common sense and inherent dignity.
To modern readers, Simak’s use of a variety of now-dated phrases—phrases that might once have been familiar to midwestern Americans, but that have now passed out of common usage—may seem strange.
For example, the expression tin shinny appears in several of Cliff’s early stories. It refers to a hockey-like game boys used to play in the streets using tree branches and a flattened tin can. And although one theory states that the word shinny comes from an old Scottish game, the spirit of the American game—and of Cliff’s use of the phrase—can best be understood if you think of what a sharply struck flattened tin can might do to one’s shins. If you played tin shinny, you knew how to take your lumps and give some back; you could play rough.
The Internet aids modern readers (I count myself one) who find themselves puzzled, even taken aback, when they first run across some of the language Cliff used in his fiction. And although I called myself a “modern reader” a moment ago, I don’t have to resort to my computer to understand the meaning underlying the title of “Party Line.” I’m old enough to have experienced a party line, and to understand that Cliff, in using the phrase, was making an analogy between the situation in the story and the era when rural telephone subscribers often had to share a single (hard-wired, as they say now) telephone line strung out from the nearest small town into the countryside. The consequence: Everyone on that line could, if they wished (and they often did), listen in on the conversations of their neighbors.
And when Cliff refers to “an old whippoorwill chunking up the hollow” (seen in other iterations as “chugging”) in his novel Why Call Them Back from Heaven?, he is simply using now-dated rural speech to describe the sound made by that species of bird calling in the night from somewhere up in the farther reaches of a small valley. (He also utilizes a word that mimics the sound, a literary device occurring in many of his stories.)
Better known, perhaps, is the phrase Dadburn the kid, which Gramp Stevens mutters on the first page of the short story “City.” Cliff specifically pointed at that expression when pulling “City” and its related stories into book form (City), painting with some amusement the puzzlement it brought to the doggy historians of the far future, who clearly did not inherit humankind’s extensive stock of mild expletives.
The phrases By Lord!, Thank Lord!, and I be damned! appeared frequently in his earlier stories, but were eventually laid aside. My first, widely separated, readings of those phrases in Cliff’s stories made me think that some typesetter had omitted the words the or will, but once I began to reread a lot of that older fiction over a short span of time, I realized that the same wording came up too many times to be mere mistakes: The phrases popped up the way Cliff wrote them, and perhaps that was the way they were said in the time and place of Cliff’s youth. (I myself grew up with the phrase used to, as in We used to go to the lake, Cliff’s variation of that phrase in “Earth for Inspiration, They never use to come back, irritated me more than I would expect because of that missing D.
Other expressions include Indian sign, which once meant calling down a curse or hex on someone; tying a tin can to someone, which meant firing them from their job; and the frequent references to the word radium in Cliff’s early stories seem to be pre-Atomic Age references to atomic power.
Clifford D. Simak was already a professional newspaperman when he began to write fiction, and that fact explains much of the dialogue found in his earliest stories. For instance, he tended not to use contractions—they were not often used by journalists—which makes his earliest attempts at dialogue seem stilted, at least at some times.
Another reason Cliff’s dialogue was bad in those early days was that he simply had no practice at writing dialogue—you don’t do that in newspapers, usually. So he learned to do dialogue by reading other people’s stories. And back in the 1930s, much of that was dreadful.
But Cliff learned.
David W. Wixon
Over the River and Through the Woods
The great message in the stories of Clifford D. Simak is that simple country people—and equally simple nonhuman beings—can be more understanding, and less afraid, in the face of the strange and the alien than many would think or expect; that the lessons learned in their apparently humdrum lives are as good as most to help them deal with something new. In other words, the value system we know as “common sense” retains its worth in a changing world.
“Over the River and Through the Woods” originally appeared in the May 1965 issue of Amazing Stories, and it’s a sweet reflection of Cliff Simak’s love for his maternal grandmother, Ellen Parker.
—dww
I
The two children came trudging down the lane in apple-canning time, when the first goldenrods were blooming and the wild asters large in bud. They looked, when she first saw them, out the kitchen window, like children who w
ere coming home from school, for each of them was carrying a bag in which might have been their books. Like Charles and James, she thought, like Alice and Maggie—but the time when those four had trudged the lane on their daily trips to school was in the distant past. Now they had children of their own who made their way to school.
She turned back to the stove to stir the cooking apples, for which the wide-mouthed jars stood waiting on the table, then once more looked out the kitchen window. The two of them were closer now and she could see that the boy was the older of the two—ten, perhaps, and the girl no more than eight.
They might be going past, she thought, although that did not seem too likely, for the lane led to this farm and to nowhere else.
They turned off the lane before they reached the barn and came sturdily trudging up the path that led to the house. There was no hesitation in them; they knew where they were going.
She stepped to the screen door of the kitchen as they came onto the porch and they stopped before the door and stood looking up at her.
The boy said: “You are our grandma. Papa said we were to say at once that you were our grandma.”
“But that’s not …” she said, and stopped. She had been about to say that it was impossible, that she was not their grandma. And, looking down into the sober, childish faces, she was glad that she had not said the words.
“I am Ellen,” said the girl, in a piping voice.
“Why, that is strange,” the woman said. “That is my name, too.”
The boy said, “My name is Paul.”
She pushed open the door for them and they came in, standing silently in the kitchen, looking all about them as if they’d never seen a kitchen.
“It’s just like Papa said,” said Ellen. “There’s the stove and the churn and …”
The boy interrupted her. “Our name is Forbes,” he said.
This time the woman couldn’t stop herself. “Why, that’s impossible,” she said. “That is our name, too.”
The boy nodded solemnly. “Yes, we knew it was.”
“Perhaps,” the woman said, “you’d like some milk and cookies.”
“Cookies!” Ellen squealed, delighted.
“We don’t want to be any trouble,” said the boy. “Papa said we were to be no trouble.”
“He said we should be good,” piped Ellen.
“I am sure you will be,” said the woman, “and you are no trouble.”
In a little while, she thought, she’d get it straightened out.
She went to the stove and set the kettle with the cooking apples to one side, where they would simmer slowly.
“Sit down at the table,” she said. “I’ll get the milk and cookies.”
She glanced at the clock, ticking on the shelf. Four o’clock, almost. In just a little while the men would come in from the fields. Jackson Forbes would know what to do about this; he had always known.
They climbed up on two chairs and sat there solemnly, staring all about them, at the ticking clock, at the wood stove with the fire glow showing through its draft, at the wood piled in the wood box, at the butter churn standing in the corner.
They set their bags on the floor beside them, and they were strange bags, she noticed. They were made of heavy cloth or canvas, but there were no drawstrings or straps to fasten them. But they were closed, she saw, despite no straps or strings.
“Do you have some stamps?” asked Ellen.
“Stamps?” asked Mrs. Forbes.
“You must pay no attention to her,” said Paul. “She should not have asked you. She asks everyone and Mama told her not to.”
“But stamps?”
“She collects them. She goes around snitching letters that other people have. For the stamps on them, you know.”
“Well now,” said Mrs. Forbes, “there may be some old letters. We’ll look for them later on.”
She went into the pantry and got the earthen jug of milk and filled a plate with cookies from the jar. When she came back they were sitting there sedately, waiting for the cookies.
“We are here just for a little while,” said Paul. “Just a short vacation. Then our folks will come and get us and take us back again.”
Ellen nodded her head vigorously. “That’s what they told us when we went. When I was afraid to go.”
“You were afraid to go?”
“Yes. It was all so strange.”
“There was so little time,” said Paul. “Almost none at all. We had to leave so fast.”
“And where are you from?” asked Mrs. Forbes.
“Why,” said the boy, “just a little ways from here. We walked just a little ways and of course we had the map. Papa gave it to us and he went over it carefully with us …”
“You’re sure your name is Forbes?”
Ellen bobbed her head. “Of course it is,” she said.
“Strange,” said Mrs. Forbes. And it was more than strange, for there were no other Forbes in the neighborhood except her children and her grandchildren and these two, no matter what they said, were strangers.
They were busy with the milk and cookies and she went back to the stove and set the kettle with the apples back on the front again, stirring the cooking fruit with a wooden spoon.
“Where is Grandpa?” Ellen asked.
“Grandpa’s in the field. He’ll be coming in soon. Are you finished with your cookies?”
“All finished,” said the girl.
“Then we’ll have to set the table and get the supper cooking. Perhaps you’d like to help me.”
Ellen hopped down off the chair. “I’ll help,” she said.
“And I,” said Paul, “will carry in some wood. Papa said I should be helpful. He said I could carry in the wood and feed the chickens and hunt the eggs and …”
“Paul,” said Mrs. Forbes, “it might help if you’d tell me what your father does.”
“Papa,” said the boy, “is a temporal engineer.”
II
The two hired men sat at the kitchen table with the checkerboard between them. The two older people were in the living room.
“You never saw the likes of it,” said Mrs. Forbes. “There was this piece of metal and you pulled it and it ran along another metal strip and the bag came open. And you pulled it the other way and the bag was closed.”
“Something new,” said Jackson Forbes. “There may be many new things we haven’t heard about, back here in the sticks. There are inventors turning out all sorts of things.”
“And the boy,” she said, “has the same thing on his trousers. I picked them up from where he threw them on the floor when he went to bed and I folded them and put them on the chair. And I saw this strip of metal, the edges jagged-like. And the clothes they wear. That boy’s trousers are cut off above his knees and the dress that the girl was wearing was so short …”
“They talked of plains,” mused Jackson Forbes, “but not the plains we know. Something that is used, apparently, for folks to travel in. And rockets—as if there were rockets every day and not just on the Earth.”
“We couldn’t question them, of course,” said Mrs. Forbes. “There was something about them, something I sensed.”
Her husband nodded. “They were frightened, too.”
“You are frightened, Jackson?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but there are no other Forbes. Not close, that is. Charlie is the closest and he’s five miles away. And they said they walked just a little piece.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked. “What can we do?”
“I don’t rightly know,” he said. “Drive in to the county seat and talk with the sheriff, maybe. These children must be lost. There must be someone looking for them.”
“But they don’t act as if they’re lost,” she told him. “They knew they were coming here. The
y knew we would be here. They told me I was their grandma and they asked after you and they called you Grandpa. And they are so sure. They don’t act as if we’re strangers. They’ve been told about us. They said they’d stay just a little while and that’s the way they act. As if they’d just come for a visit.”
“I think,” said Jackson Forbes, “that I’ll hitch up Nellie after breakfast and drive around the neighborhood and ask some questions. Maybe there’ll be someone who can tell me something.”
“The boy said his father was a temporal engineer. That just don’t make sense. Temporal means the worldly power and authority and …”
“It might be some joke,” her husband said. “Something that the father said in jest and the son picked up as truth.”
“I think,” said Mrs. Forbes, “I’ll go upstairs and see if they’re asleep. I left their lamps turned low. They are so little and the house is strange to them. If they are asleep, I’ll blow out the lamps.”
Jackson Forbes grunted his approval. “Dangerous,” he said, “to keep lights burning of the night. Too much chance of fire.”
III
The boy was asleep, flat upon his back—the deep and healthy sleep of youngsters. He had thrown his clothes upon the floor when he had undressed to go to bed, but now they were folded neatly on the chair, where she had placed them when she had gone into the room to say goodnight.
The bag stood beside the chair and it was open, the two rows of jagged metal gleaming dully in the dim glow of the lamp. Within its shadowed interior lay the dark forms of jumbled possessions, disorderly, and helter-skelter, no way for a bag to be.
She stooped and picked up the bag and set it on the chair and reached for the little metal tab to close it. At least, she told herself, it should be closed and not left standing open. She grasped the tab and it slid smoothly along the metal tracks and then stopped, its course obstructed by an object that stuck out.
She saw it was a book and reached down to rearrange it so she could close the bag. And as she did so, she saw the title in its faint gold lettering across the leather backstrap—Holy Bible.
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