Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer SSC

by John the Balladeer (v1. 1)

  "Troy, I don't need to look," Mr. Absalom made out to reply him. "Your word's as good to me as the yellow gold. I never rightly thought you did any witch-stuff, not even when I said it to you."

  "I'm so dog-sorry I dug this ditch," Mr. Troy went on. "I hated it, right when I had the spade in my hand. Ain't my nature to be spiteful, Absalom."

  "No, Troy, Ain't no drop of spite blood in you."

  "But you built this bridge, Absalom, to show you never favored my cutting you off from me—"

  Mr. Troy stopped talking, and wiped his brown face with the hand Mr. Absalom didn't have hold of.

  "Troy," said Mr. Absalom, "I'm just as glad as you are about all this. But don't credit me with that bridge-idea. This carpenter here, he thought it up."

  "And now I'll be going," spoke up the carpenter in his gentle way.

  They both looked on him. He'd hoisted his tool chest up on his shoulder again, and he smiled at them, and down at Little Anse. He put his hand on Little Anse's head, just half a second long.

  "Fling away those crutches," he said. "You don't need them now."

  All at once, Little Anse flung the crutches away, left and right. He stood up straight and strong. Fast as any boy ever ran on this earth, he ran to his daddy.

  The carpenter was gone. The place he'd been at was empty.

  But, looking where he'd been, they weren't frightened, the way they'd be at a haunt or devil-thing. Because they all of a sudden all three knew Who the carpenter was and how He's always with us, the way He promised in the far-back times; and how He'll do ary sort of job, if it can bring peace on earth and good will to men, among nations or just among neighbors.

  It was Little Anse who remembered the whole chorus of the song—

  "Shoo, John, I know that song! We sung it last night at church for Christmas Eve!"

  "I know it too, John!"

  "Me! Me too!"

  "All right then, why don't you children join in and help me sing it?"

  Go tell it on the mountain,

  Tell it on the hills and everywhere,

  Go tell it on the mountain

  That Jesus Christ was born!

  Old Devlins Was A-Waiting

  All day I'd climbed through mountain country. Past Rebel Creek I'd climbed, and through Lost Cove, and up and down the slopes of Crouch and Hog Ham and Skeleton Ridge, and finally as the sun hunted the world's edge, I looked over a high saddleback and down on Flornoy College.

  Flornoy's up in the hills, plain and poor, but it does good teaching. Country boys who mightn't get past common school else can come and work off the most part of their board and keep and learning. I saw a couple of brick buildings, a row of cottages, and barns for the college farm in the bottom below, with then a paved road to Hilberstown maybe eight, nine miles down valley. Climbing down was another sight farther, and longer work than you'd think, and when I got to the level it was past sundown and the night showed its stars to me.

  Coming into the back of the college grounds, I saw a light somewhere this side of the buildings, and then I heard two voices quarreling at each other.

  "You leave my lantern be," bade one voice, deep and hacked.

  "I wasn't going to blow it out, Moon-Eye," the other voice laughed, but sharp and mean. "I just joggled up against it."

  "Look out I don't joggle up against you, Rixon Pengraft."

  "Maybe you're bigger than I am, but there's such a thing as the difference between a big man and a little one."

  Then I was close and saw them, and they saw me. Scholars at Flornoy, I reckoned by the light of the old lantern one of them toted. He was tall, taller than I am, with broad, hunched shoulders, and in the lantern-shine his face looked good in a long, big-nosed way. The other fellow was plumpy-soft, and smoked a cigar that made an orangey coal in the night.

  The cigar-smoking one turned toward where I came along with my silver-strung guitar in one hand and my possible-sack in the other.

  "What you doing around here," he said to me. Didn't ask it, said it.

  "I'm looking for Professor Deal," I replied him. "Any objections?"

  He grinned his teeth white around the cigar. The lantern-shine flickered on them. "None I know of. Go on looking."

  He turned and moved off in the night. The fellow with the lantern watched him go, then spoke to me.

  "I'll take you to Professor Deal's. My name's Anderson Newlands. Folks call me Moon-Eye."

  "Folks call me John," I said. "What does Moon-Eye mean?"

  He smiled, tight, over the lantern glow. "It's hard for me to see in the night-time, John. I was in the Korean war, I got wounded and had a fever, and my eyes began to trouble me. They're getting better, but I need a lantern any night but when it's full moon."

  We walked along. "Was that Rixon Pengraft fellow trying to give you a hard time?" I asked.

  "Trying, maybe. He—well, he wants something I'm not really keeping away from him, he just thinks I am."

  That's all Moon-Eye Newlands said about it, and I didn't inquire him what he meant. He went on: "I don't want any fuss with Rixon, but if he's bound to have one with me—" Again he stopped his talk. "Yonder's Professor Deal's house, the one with the porch. I'm due there some later tonight, after supper."

  He headed off with his lantern, toward the brick building where the scholars slept. On the porch, Professor Deal came out and made me welcome. He's president of Flornoy, strong-built, middling tall, with white hair and a round hard chin like a water-washed rock.

  "Haven't seen you since the State Fair," he boomed out, loud enough to talk to the seventy, eighty Flornoy scholars all at once. "Come in the house, John, Mrs. Deal's nearly ready with supper. I want you to meet Dr. McCoy."

  I came inside and rested my guitar and possible-sack by the door. "Is he a medicine doctor or a teacher doctor?" I asked.

  "She's a lady. Dr. Anda Lee McCoy. She observes how people think and how far they see."

  "An eye-doctor?"

  "Call her an inner-eye doctor, John. She studies what those Duke University people call ESP—extra-sensory perception."

  I'd heard of that. A fellow named Rhine says folks can some way tell what other folks think to themselves. He tells it that everybody reads minds a little bit, and some folks read them a right much. Might be you've seen his cards, marked five ways—square, cross, circle, star, wavy lines. Take five of each of those cards and you've got a pack of twenty-five. Somebody shuffles them like for a game and looks at them, one after another. Then somebody else, who can't see the cards, in the next room maybe, tries to guess what's on them. Ordinary chance is for one right guess out of five. But, here and there, it gets called another sight oftener.

  "Some old mountain folks would name that witch-stuff," I said to Professor Deal.

  "Hypnotism was called witch-craft, until it was shown to be true science," he said back. "Or telling what dreams mean, until Dr. Freud overseas made it scientific. ESP might be a recognized science some day."

  "You hold with it, do you, Professor?"

  "I hold with anything that's proven," he said. "I'm not sure about ESP yet. Here's Mrs. Deal."

  She's a comfortable, clever lady, as white-haired as he is. While I made my manners, Dr. Anda Lee McCoy came from the back of the house.

  "Are you the ballad-singer?" she asked me.

  I'd expected no doctor lady as young as Dr. Anda Lee McCoy, nor as pretty-looking. She was small and slim, but there was enough of her. She stood straight and wore good city clothes, and had lots of yellow hair and a round happy face and straight-looking blue eyes.

  "Professor Deal bade me come see him," I said. "He couldn't get Mr. Bascom Lamar Lunsford to decide something or other about folk songs and tales."

  "I'm glad you've come," she welcomed me.

  Turned out Dr. McCoy knew Mr. Bascom Lamar Lunsford and thought well of him. Professor Deal had asked for him first, but Mr. Bascom was in Washington, making records of his songs for the Library of Congress. Some folks can't vote which th
ey'd rather hear, Mr. Bascom's five-string banjo or my guitar; but he sure enough knows more old time songs than I do. A few more.

  Mrs. Deal went to the kitchen to see was supper near about cooked. We others sat down in the front room. Dr. McCoy asked me to sing something, so I got my guitar and gave her "Shiver in the Pines."

  "Pretty," she praised. "Do you know a song about killing a captain at a lonesome river ford?"

  I thought. "Some of it, maybe. It's a Virginia song, I think. You relish that song, Doctor?"

  "I wasn't thinking of my own taste. A student here—a man named Anderson Newlands—doesn't like it at all."

  Mrs. Deal called us to supper, and while we ate, Dr. McCoy talked.

  "I'll tell you why I asked for someone like you to help me, John," she began. "I've got a theory, or a hypothesis. About dreams."

  "Not quite like Freud," put in Professor Deal, "though he'd be interested if he was alive and here."

  "It's dreaming the future," said Dr. McCoy.

  "Shoo," I said, "that's no theory, that's fact. Bible folks did it. I've done it myself. Once, during the war—"

  But that was no tale to tell, what I dreamed in war time and how true it came out. So I stopped, while Dr. McCoy went on.

  "There are records of prophecies coming true, even after the prophets died. And another set of records fit in, about images appearing like ghosts. Most of these are ancestors of somebody alive today. Kinship and special sympathy, you know. Sometimes these images, or ghosts, are called from the past by using diagrams and spells. You aren't laughing at me, John?"

  "No, ma'am. Things like that aren't likely to be a laughing matter."

  "Well, what if dreams of the future come true because somebody goes forward in time while he sleeps or drowses?" she asked us. "That ghost of Nostradamus, reported not long ago—what if Nostradamus himself was called into this present time, and then went back to his own century to set down a prophecy of what he'd seen?"

  If she wanted an answer, I didn't have one for her. All I said was: "Do you want to call somebody from the past, ma'am? Or maybe go yourself into a time that's coming?"

  She shook her yellow head. "Put it one way, John, I'm not psychic. Put it another way, the scientific way, I'm not adapted. But this young man Anderson Newlands is the best adapted I've ever found."

  She told how some Flornoy students scored high at guessing the cards and their markings. I was right interested to hear that Rixon Pengraft called them well, though Dr. McCoy said his mind got on other things—I reckoned his mind got on her; pretty thing as she was, she could take a man's mind. But Anderson Newlands, Moon-Eye Newlands, guessed every card right off as she held the pack, time after time, with nary miss.

  "And he dreams of the future, I know," she said. "If he can see the future, he might call to the past."

  "By the diagrams and the words?" I inquired her. "How about the science explanation for that?"

  It so happened she had one. She told it while we ate our custard pie.

  First, that idea that time's the fourth dimension. You're six feet tall, twenty inches wide, twelve inches thick and thirty-five years old; and the thirty-five years of you reach from where you were born one place, across the land and maybe over the sea where you've traveled, and finally to right where you are now, from thousands of miles ago. Then the idea that just a dot here in this second of time we're living in can be a wire back and back and forever back, or a five-inch line is a five-inch bar reaching forever back thataway, or a circle is a tube, and so on. It did make some sense to me, and I asked Dr. McCoy what it added up to.

  It added up to the diagram witch-folks draw, with circles and six-pointed stars and letters from an alphabet nobody on this earth can spell out. Well, that diagram might be a cross-section, here in our three dimensions, of something reaching backward or forward, a machine to travel you through time.

  "You certain sure about this?" I inquired Dr. McCoy at last. And she smiled, then she frowned, and shook her yellow head again.

  "I'm only guessing," she said, "as I might guess with the ESP cards. But I'd like to find out whether the right man could call his ancestor out of the past."

  "I still don't figure out about those spoken spell words the witch-folks use," I said.

  "A special sound can start a machine," said Professor Deal. "I've seen such things."

  "Like the words of the old magic square?" asked Dr. McCoy. "The one they use in spells to call up the dead?"

  She got a pencil and scrap of paper, and wrote it out:

  "I've been seeing that thing a many years," I said. "Witch-folks use it, and it's in witch-books like The Long Lost Friend."

  "You'll notice," said Dr. McCoy, "that it reads the same, whether you start at the upper left and work down word by word, or at the lower right and read the words one by one upward; or if you read it straight down or straight up."

  Professor Deal looked, too. "The first two words—SATOR and AREPO—are reversals of the last two. SATOR for ROTAS, and AREPO for OPERA."

  "I've heard that before," I braved up to say. "The first two words being the last two turned around. But the third, fourth and fifth are all right—I've heard tell that TENET means faith and OPERA is works, and ROTAS something about wheels."

  "But SATOR and AREPO are more than just reversed words," Professor Deal said. "I'm no profound Latinist, but I know that SATOR means a sower—a planter—or a beginner or creator."

  "Creator," Dr. McCoy jumped on his last word. "That would fit into this if it's a real sentence."

  "A sentence, and a palindrome," nodded Professor Deal. "Know what a palindrome is, John?"

  I knew that, too, from somewhere. "A sentence that reads the same back and forward," I told him. "Like Napoleon saying, Able was I ere I saw Elba. Or the first words Mother Eve heard in the Garden of Eden, Madam, I'm Adam. Those are old grandma jokes to pleasure young children."

  "If these words are a sentence, they're more than a palindrome," said Dr. McCoy. "They're a double palindrome, because they read the same from any place you start—backward, forward, up or down. Fourfold meaning would be fourfold power as a spell or formula."

  "But what's the meaning?" I wanted to know again.

  She began to write on a paper. "SATOR," she said out loud, "the creator. Whether that's the creator of some machine, or the Creator of all things . . . I suppose it's a machine-creator."

  "I reckon the same," I agreed her, "because this doesn't sound to me the kind of way the Creator of all things does His works."

  Mrs. Deal smiled and excused herself. We could talk and talk, she said, but she had sewing to do.

  "AREPO," Professor Deal kind of hummed to himself. "I wish I had a Latin dictionary, though even then I might not find it. Maybe that's a corruption of repo or erepo—to crawl or climb—a vulgar form of the word—"

  I said nothing. I didn't think Professor Deal would say anything vulgar in front of a lady. But all Dr. McCoy remarked him was: "AREPO—wouldn't that be a noun ablative? By means of?"

  "Write it down like that," nodded Professor Deal. "By means of creeping, climbing, by means of great effort. And TENET is the verb to hold. He holds, the creator holds."

  "OPERA is works, and ROTAS is wheels," Dr. McCoy tried to finish up, but this time Professor Deal shook his head.

  "ROTAS probably is accusative plural, in apposition." He cleared his throat, long and loud. "Maybe I never will be sure, but let's read it something like this: The creator, by means of great effort, holds the wheels for his works."

  I'd not said a word in all this scholar-talk, till then. TENET Might still be faith," I offered them. "Faith's needed to help the workings. Folks without faith might call the thing foolishness."

  "That's sound psychology," said Professor Deal.

  "And it fits in with the making of spells," Dr. McCoy added on. "Double meanings, you know. Maybe there are double meanings all along, or triple or fourfold meanings, and all of them true." She read from her paper. "The creator
, by means of great effort, holds the wheels for his works."

  "It might even refer to the orbits of planets," said Professor Deal.

  "Where do I come in?" I asked. "Why was I bid here?"

  "You can sing something for us," Dr. McCoy replied me, "and you can have faith."

  A knocking at the door, and Professor Deal went to let the visitor in. Moon-Eye Newlands walked into the house, lifted his lantern chimney and blew out his light, He looked tall, the way he'd looked when first I met him in the outside dark, and he wore a hickory shirt and blue duckins pants. He smiled, friendly, and moon-eyed or not, he looked first of all at Dr. McCoy, clear and honest and glad to see her.

  "You said you wanted me to help you, Doctor," he greeted her.

  "Thank you, Mr. Newlands," she said, gentler and warmer than I'd heard her so far.

  "You can call me Moon-Eye, like the rest," he told her.

  He was a college scholar, and she was a doctor lady, but they were near about the same age. He'd been off to the Korean War, I remembered.

  "Shall we go out on the porch?" she asked us. "Professor Deal said I could draw my diagram there. Bring your guitar, John."

  We went out. Moon-Eye lighted his lantern again, and Dr. McCoy knelt down to draw with a piece of chalk.

  First she made the word square, in big letters:

  Around these she made a triangle, a good four feet from base to point. And another triangle across it, pointing the other way, so that the two made what learned folks call the Star of David. Around that, a big circle, with writing along the edge of it, and another big circle around that, to close in the writing. I put my back to a porch post. From where I sat I could read the word square all right, but of the writing around the circle I couldn't spell ary letter.

  "Folks," said Moon-Eye, "I still can't say I like this."

  Kneeling where she drew, Dr. McCoy looked up at him with her blue eyes. "You said you'd help if you could."