Way Station by Clifford D. Simak Read Free Book Online Page B

translator, which was little more than a pitiful (although complicated) mechanical contrivance, he still was hard put at times to know what many of them said.
    Lucy Fisher picked up a cup that was standing by her side-a cup fashioned of a strip of folded birch bark-and dipped it in the spring. She held it out to Enoch and he stepped close to take it, kneeling down to drink from it. It was not entirely water-tight, and water ran from it down across his arm, wetting the cuff of shirt and jacket.
    He finished drinking and handed back the cup. She took it in one hand and reached out the other, to brush across his forehead with the tip of gentle fingers in what she might have thought of as a benediction.
    He did not speak to her. Long ago he had ceased talking to her, sensing that the movement of his mouth, making sounds she could not hear, might be embarrassing.
    Instead he put out a hand and laid his broad palm against her cheek, holding it there for a reassuring moment as a gesture of affection. Then he got to his feet and stood staring down at her and for a moment their eyes looked into the other’s eyes and then turned away.
    He crossed the little stream that ran down from the spring and took the trail that led from the forest’s edge across the field, heading for the ridge. Halfway up the slope, he turned around and saw that she was watching him. He held up his hand in a gesture of farewell and her hand gestured in reply.
    It had been, he recalled, twelve years or more ago that he first had seen her, a little fairy person of ten years or so, a wild thing running in the woods. They had become friends, he recalled, only after a long time, although he saw her often, for she roamed the hills and valley as if they were a playground for her-which, of course, they were.
    Through the years he had watched her grow and had often met her on his daily walks, and between the two of them had grown up an understanding of the lonely and the outcast, but understanding based on something more than that-on the fact that each had a world that was their own and worlds that had given them an insight into something that others seldom saw. Not that either, Enoch thought, ever told the other, or tried to tell the other, of file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt (19 of 103) [1/19/03 4:01:51 PM]
     
    file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt these private worlds, but the fact of these private worlds was there, in the consciousness of each, providing a firm foundation for the building of a friendship.
    He recalled the day he’d found her at the place where the pink lady’s-slippers grew, just kneeling there and looking at them, not picking any of them, and how he’d stopped beside her and been pleased she had not moved to pick them, knowing that in the sight of them, the two, he and she, had found a joy and a beauty that was beyond possession.
    He reached the ridgetop and turned down the grass-grown road that led down to the mailbox.
    And he’d not been mistaken back there, he told himself, no matter how it may have seemed on second look. The butterfly’s wing had been torn and crumpled and drab from the lack of dust. It had been a crippled thing and then it had been whole again and had flown away.

8
    Winslowe Grant was on time.
    Enoch, as he reached the mailbox, sighted the dust raised by his old jalopy as it galloped along the ridge. It had been a dusty year, he thought, as he stood beside the box. There had been little rain and the crops had suffered. Although, to tell the truth, there were few crops on the ridge these days. There had been a time when comfortable small farms had existed, almost cheek by jowl, all along the road, with the barns all red and the houses white. But now most of the farms had been abandoned and the houses and the barns were no longer red or white, but gray and weathered wood, with all the paint peeled off and the ridgepoles sagging and the people