Way Station by Clifford D. Simak Read Free Book Online

try to conjure up the beauty that would be his again in June, but decided that there’d be little point to it, for they were well hipen in an isolated place, and nothing could have harmed them. There had been a time, a hundred years ago, when they had bloomed on every hill and he had come trailing home with great armloads of them, which his mother had put in the great brown jug she had, and for a day or two the house had been filled with the heaviness of their rich perfume. But they were hard to come by now. The trampling of the pastured cattle and flower-hunting humans had swept them from the hills.
    Some other day, he told himself, some day before first frost, he would visit them again and satisfy himself that they’d be there in the spring.
    He stopped a while to watch a squirrel as it frolicked in an oak. He squatted down to follow a snail which had crossed his path. He stopped beside a massive tree and examined that pattern of the moss that grew upon the trunk. And he traced the wanderings of a silent, flitting songbird as it fluttered tree to tree.
    He followed the path out of the woods and along the edge of field until he came to the spring that bubbled from the hillside.
    Sitting beside the spring was a woman and he recognized her as Lucy
    Fisher, the deaf-mute daughter of Hank Fisher, who lived down in the river bottoms.
    He stopped and watched her and thought how full she was of grace and beauty, the natural grace and beauty of a primitive and lonely creature.
    She was sitting by the spring and one hand was uplifted and she held in it, at the tips of long and sensitive fingers, something that glowed with color. Her head was held high, with a sharp look of alertness, and her body was straight and slender, and it also had that almost startled look of quiet alertness.
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    Enoch moved slowly forward and stopped not more than three feet behind her, and now he saw that the thing of color on her fingertips was a butterfly, one of those large gold and red butterflies that come with the end of summer. One wing of the insect stood erect and straight, but the other was bent and crumpled and had lost some of the dust that lent sparkle to the color.
    She was, he saw, not actually holding the butterfly. It was standing on one fingertip, the one good wing fluttering very slightly every now and then to maintain its balance.
    But he had been mistaken, he saw, in thinking that the second wing was injured, for now he could see that somehow it had been simply bent and distorted in some way. For now it was straightening slowly and the dust (if it ever had been gone) was back on it again, and it was standing up with the other wing.
    He stepped around the girl so that she could see him and when she saw him there was no start of surprise. And that, he knew would be quite natural, for she must be accustomed to it-someone coming up behind her and supenly being there.
    Her eyes were radiant and there was, he thought, a holy look upon her face, as if she had experienced some ecstasy of the soul. And he found himself wondering again, as he did each time he saw her, what it must be like for her, living in a world of two-way silence, unable to communicate.
    Perhaps not entirely unable to communicate, but at least barred from that free flow of communication which was the birthright of the human animal.
    There had been, he knew, several attempts to establish her in a state school for the deaf, but each had been a failure. Once she’d run away and wandered days before being finally found and returned to her home. And on other occasions she had gone on disobedience strikes, refusing to co-operate in any of the teaching.
    Watching her as she sat there with the butterfly, Enoch thought he knew the reason. She had a world, he thought, a world of her very own, one to which