Way Station

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 gone.

It would not be long before Winslowe would arrive and Enoch settled down to wait. The mailman might be stopping at the Fisher box, just around the bend, although the Fishers, as a rule, got but little mail, mostly just the advertising sheets and other junk that was mailed out indiscriminately to the rural boxholders. Not that it mattered to the Fishers, for sometimes days went by in which they did not pick up their mail. If it were not for Lucy, they perhaps would never get it, for it was mostly Lucy who thought to pick it up.

The Fishers were, for a fact, Enoch told himself, a truly shiftless outfit. Their house and all the buildings were ready to fall in upon themselves and they raised a grubby patch of corn that was drowned out, more often than not, by a flood rise of the river. They mowed some hay off a bottom meadow and they had a couple of raw-boned horses and a half-dozen scrawny cows and a flock of chickens. They had an old clunk of a car and a still hidden out somewhere in the river bottoms and they hunted and fished and trapped and were generally no-account. Although, when one considered it, they were not bad neighbors. They tended to their business and never bothered anyone except that periodically they went around, the whole tribe of them, distributing pamphlets and tracts through the neighborhood for some obscure fundamentalist sect that Ma Fisher had become a member of at a tent revival meeting down in Millville several years before.

Winslowe didn't stop at the Fisher box, but came boiling around the bend in a cloud of dust. He braked the panting machine to a halt and turned off the engine.

"Let her cool a while," he said.

The block crackled as it started giving up its heat.

"You made good time today," said Enoch.

"Lots of people didn't have any mail today," said Winslowe. "Just went sailing past their boxes."

He dipped into the pouch on the seat beside him and brought out a bundle tied together with a bit of string for Enoch-several daily papers and two journals.

"You get a lot of stuff," said Winslowe, "but hardly ever letters."

"There is no one left," said Enoch, "who would want to write to me."

"But," said Winslowe, "you got a letter this time."

Enoch looked, unable to conceal surprise, and could see the end of an envelope peeping from between the journals.

"A personal letter," said Winslowe, almost smacking his lips. "Not one of them advertising ones. Nor a business one."

Enoch tucked the bundle underneath his arm, beside the rifle stock.

"Probably won't amount to much," he said.

"Maybe not," said Winslowe, a sly glitter in his eyes. He pulled a pipe and pouch from his pocket and slowly filled the pipe. The engine block continued its crackling and popping. The sun beat down out of a cloudless sky. The vegetation alongside the road was coated with dust and an acrid smell rose from it.

"Hear that ginseng fellow is back again," said Winslowe, conversationally, but unable to keep out a conspiratorial tone. "Been gone for three, four days."

"Maybe off to sell his sang."

"You ask me," the mailman said, "he ain't hunting sang. He's hunting something else."

"Been at it," Enoch said, "for a right smart time."

"First of all," said Winslowe, "there's barely any market for the stuff and even if there was, there isn't any sang. Used to be a good market years ago. Chinese used it for medicine, I guess. But now there ain't no trade with China. I remember when I was a boy we used to go hunting it. Not easy to find, even then. But most days a man could locate a little of it."

He leaned back in the seat, puffing serenely at his pipe.

"Funny goings on," he said.

"I never saw the man," said Enoch.

"Sneaking through the woods," said Winslowe. "Digging up different kinds of plants. Got the idea myself he maybe is a sort of magic-man. Getting stuff to make up charms and such. Spends a lot of his time yarning with the Fisher tribe and drinking up their likker. You don't hear much of it these days, but I still hold with magic. Lots of things science can't explain. You take that Fisher girl, the dummy, she can charm off warts."

"So I've heard," said Enoch.

And more than that, he thought. She can fix a butterfly.

Winslowe hunched forward in his seat.

"Almost forgot," he said. "I have something else for you."

He lifted a brown paper parcel from the floor and handed it to Enoch.

"This ain't mail," he said. "It's something that I made for you."

"Why, thank you," Enoch said, taking it from him.

"Go ahead," Winslowe said, "and open it up." Enoch hesitated.

"Ah, hell," said Winslowe, "don't be bashful."

Enoch tore off the paper and there it was, a full-figure wood carving of himself. It was in a blond, honey-colored wood and some twelve inches tall. It shone like golden crystal in the sun. He was walking, with his rifle tucked beneath his arm and a wind was blowing, for he was leaning slightly into it and there were wind-flutter ripples on his jacket and his trousers.

Enoch gasped, then stood staring at it.

"Wins," he said, "that's the most beautiful piece of work I have ever seen."

"Did it," said the mailman, "out of that piece of wood you gave me last winter. Best piece of whittling stuff I ever ran across. Hard and without hardly any grain. No danger of splitting or of nicking or of shredding. When you make a cut, you make it where you want to and it stays the way you cut it. And it takes polish as you cut. Just rub it up a little is all you need to do."

"You don't know," said Enoch, "how much this means to me."

"Over the years," the mailman told him, "you've given me an awful lot of wood. Different kinds of wood no one's ever seen before. All of it top-grade stuff and beautiful. It was time I was carving something for you."

"And you," said Enoch, "have done a lot for me. Lugging things from town."

"Enoch," Winslowe said, "I like you. I don't know what you are and I ain't about to ask, but anyhow I like you."

"I wish that I could tell you what I am," said Enoch. "Well," said Winslowe, moving over to plant himself behind the wheel, "it don't matter much what any of us are, just so we get along with one another. If some of the nations would only take a lesson from some small neighborhood like ours-a lesson in how to get along-the world would be a whole lot better."

Enoch nodded gravely. "It doesn't look too good, does it?"

"It sure don't," said the mailman, starting up the car.

Enoch stood and watched the car move off, down the bill, building up its cloud of dust as it moved along.

Then he looked again at the wooden statuette of himself.

It was as if the wooden figure were walking on a hilltop, naked to the full force of the wind and bent against the gale.

Why? He wondered. What was it the mailman had seen in him to portray him as walking in the wind?