Out of Their Minds by Clifford D. Simak Read Free Book Online

to that school program tonight,” he said. “There’ll be a lot of people there. Some of them you’ll know. Last day of school and the kids will all perform—get up and say some pieces or maybe sing a song or put on little plays. And afterwards there’ll be a basket social to raise money for new library books. We still hang on to the old ways here; the years haven’t changed us much. And we manage to have our own good times. A basket social at the school tonight and a couple of weeks from now there’ll be a strawberry festival down at the Methodist church. Both of them good places to meet old friends of yours.”
    â€œI’ll make it if I can,” I promised. “Both the program and the festival.”
    â€œYou’ve got some mail,” he told me. “It has been piling up for a week or two. I still am postmaster here. The post office has been right here in this store for almost a hundred years. But there’s talk of taking it away from us, consolidating it with the office over at Lancaster and sending it out from there by rural route. Government isn’t satisfied leaving things alone. They got to always be trying to make things over. Improving service, they call it. I can’t see, for the life of me, what’s wrong with the kind of service we been giving the folks of Pilot Knob for the last hundred years or so.”
    â€œI had expected you might have a bundle of mail for me,” I said. “I had it forwarded, but I didn’t hurry to get here. I took my time and stopped at several places I wanted to look over.”
    â€œYou’ll be going out to have a look at the old farm, the place you used to live?”
    â€œI don’t think I will,” I said. “I’d see too many changes.”
    â€œFamily by the name of Ballard lives there now,” he said. “They have a couple of boys, grown men almost. Do a lot of drinking, those two boys, and sometimes are a problem.”
    I nodded. “You say this motel is down by the river?”
    â€œThat’s right. You drive down past the schoolhouse and the church to where the road bends to the left. A little ways beyond you will see the sign. Says River Edge Motel. I’ll get your mail for you.”

4
    The large manila envelope had Philip Freeman’s return address written in a scrawling hand across its upper left-hand corner. I sat in the chair by the open window, turning it slowly in my hand, wondering why Philip should be writing or sending anything to me. I knew the man, of course, and liked him, but we never had been close. The only link between us was our mutual affection and respect for the grand old man who had died some weeks before in an auto accident.
    Through the window came the talking of the river, the muttered conversation it held with the countryside as it went sliding through the land. The sound of its talk, as I sat there listening, brought back in memory the times when my father and I had sat on its bank and fished—always with my father, but never by myself. For the river potentially was too dangerous for a boy of ten. The creek, of course, was all right if I promised to be careful.
    The creek had been a friend, a shining summer friend, but the river had been magic. And it was magic still, I thought, a magic compounded of boyhood dreams and time. And finally here I was again beside it; here I would live beside it for a time and now I realized that I was afraid, deep inside myself, that living close beside it I would get to know it so well that the magic would be lost and it would become just another river running down another land.
    Here were quiet and peace, I thought—the kind of quiet and peace that could be found in only a few other backwater corners of the earth. Here a man might find the time and space to think, undisturbed by the intrusion of the static that was given off by the rumblings of world commerce and global politics. Here was a