The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

  All of us, that is, except Heath. His corn was clean as a whistle and you had to hunt to find a weed. Jingo stopped by one day and asked him how he managed, but Heath just laughed a little, in that quiet way of his, and talked of something else.

  The first apples finally were big enough for green-apple pies and there is no one in the county makes better green-apple pies than Helen. She wins prizes with her pies every year at the county fair and she is proud of them.

  One day she wrapped up a couple of pies and took them over to the Heaths. It’s a neighborly way we have of doing in the valley, with the women running back and forth from one neighbor to another with their cooking. Each of them has some dish she likes to show off to the neighbors and it’s a sort of harmless way of bragging.

  Helen and the Heaths got along just swell. She was late in getting home and I was starting supper, with the kids yelling they were hungry when-do-we-eat-around-here, when she finally showed up.

  She was full of talk about the Heaths – how they had fixed up the house, you never would have thought anyone could do so much to such a terribly run-down place as they had, and about the garden they had – especially about the garden. It was a big one, she said, and beautifully taken care of and it was full of vegetables she had never seen before. The funniest things you ever saw, she said. Not the ordinary kind of vegetables.

  We talked some about those vegetables, speculating that maybe the Heaths had brought the seeds out with them from behind the Iron Curtain, although so far as I could remember, vegetables were vegetables, no matter where you were. They grew the same things in Russia or Rumania or Timbuktu as we did. And, anyhow, by this time I was getting a little skeptical about that story of their escaping from Rumania.

  But we didn’t have the time for much serious speculation on the Heaths, although there was plenty of casual gossip going around the neighborhood. Haying came along and then the small-grain harvest and everyone was busy. The hay was good and the small-grain crop was fair, but it didn’t look like we’d get much corn. For we hit a drought. That’s the way it goes – too much rain in June, not enough in August.

  We watched the corn and watched the sky and felt hopeful when a cloud showed up, but the clouds never meant a thing. It just seems at times that God isn’t on your side.

  Then one morning Jingo Harris showed up and stood around, first on one foot, then the other, talking to me while I worked on an old corn binder that was about worn out and which it didn’t look nohow I’d need to use that year.

  “Jingo,” I said, after I’d watched him fidget for an hour or more, “you got something on your mind?”

  He blurted it out then. “Heath got rain last night,” he said.

  “No one else did,” I told him.

  “I guess you’re right,” said Jingo. “Heath’s the only one.”

  He told me how he’d gone to cut through Heath’s north cornfield, carrying back a couple of balls of binder twine he’d borrowed from Bert Smith. It wasn’t until he’d crawled through the fence that he noticed the field was wet, soaked by a heavy rain.

  “It must have happened in the night,” he said.

  He thought it was funny, but figured maybe there had been a shower across the lower end of the valley, although as a rule rains travel up and down the valley, not across it. But when he had crossed the corner of the field and crawled through the fence, he noticed it hadn’t rained at all. So he went back and walked around the field and the rain had fallen on the field, but nowhere else. It began at the fence and ended at the fence.

  When he’d made a circuit of the field he sat down on one of the balls of twine and tried to get it all thought out, but it made no sense – furthermore, it was plain unbelievable.

  Jingo is a thorough man. He likes to have all the evidence and know all there is to know before he makes up his mind. So he went over to Heath’s second corn patch, on the west side of the valley. And once again, he found that it had rained on that field – on the field, but not around the field.

  “What do you make of it?” Jingo asked me and I said I didn’t know. I came mighty close to telling him about the unmanned tractor, but I thought better of it. After all, there was no point in getting the neighborhood stirred up.

  After Jingo left I got in the car and drove over to the Heath farm, intending to ask him if he could loan me his posthole digger for a day or two. Not that I was going to dig any postholes, but you have to have some excuse for showing up at a neighbor’s place.

  I never got a chance to ask him for that posthole digger, though. Once I got there I never even thought of it.

  Heath was sitting on the front steps of the porch and he seemed glad to see me. He came down to the car and shook my hand and said, “It’s good to see you, Calvin.” The way he said it made me feel friendly and sort of important, too – especially that Calvin business, for everyone else just calls me Cal. I’m not downright sure, in fact, that anyone in the neighborhood remembers that my name is Calvin.

  “I’d like to show you around the place,” he said. “We’ve done some fixing up.”

  Fixing up wasn’t exactly the word for it. The place was spick-and-span. It looked like some of those Pennsylvania and Connecticut farms you see in the magazines. The house and all the other buildings had been ramshackle with all the paint peeled off them and looking as if they might fall down at any minute. But now they had a sprightly, solid look and they gleamed with paint. They didn’t look new, of course, but they looked as if they’d always been well taken care of and painted every year. The fences were all fixed up and painted, too, and the weeds were cut and a couple of old unsightly scrap-lumber piles had been cleaned up and burned. Heath had even tackled an old iron and machinery junk pile and had it sorted out.

  “There was a lot to do,” said Heath, “but I feel it’s worth it. I have an orderly soul. I like to have things neat.”

  Which might be true, of course, but he’d done it all in less than six months’ time. He’d come to the farm in early March and it was only August and he’d not only put in some hundred acres of crops and done all the other farm work, but he’d got the place fixed up. And that wasn’t possible, I told myself. One man couldn’t do it, not even with his wife and daughter helping – not even if he worked twenty-four hours a day and didn’t stop to eat. Or unless he could take time and stretch it out to make one hour equal three or four.

  I trailed along behind Heath and thought about that time-stretching business and was pleased at myself for thinking of it, for it isn’t often that I get foolish thoughts that are likewise pleasing. Why, I thought, with a deal like that you could stretch out any day so you could get all the work done you wanted to. And if you could stretch out time, maybe you could compress it, too, so that a trip to a dentist, for example, would only seem to take a minute.

  Heath took me out to the garden and Helen had been right. There were the familiar vegetables, of course – cabbages and tomatoes and squashes and all the other kinds that are found in every garden – but in addition to this there were as many others I had never seen before. He told me the names of them and they seemed to be queer names then, although now it seems a little strange to think they once had sounded queer, for now everyone in the valley grows these vegetables and it seems like we have always had them.

  As we talked he pulled up and picked some of the strange vegetables and put them in a basket he had brought along.

  “You’ll want to try them all,” he said. “Some of them you may not like at first, but there are others that you will. This one you eat raw, sliced like a tomato, and this one is best boiled, although you can bake it, too –”

  I wanted to ask him how he’d come on the vegetables and where they had come from, but he didn’t give me a chance; he kept on telling me about them and how to cook them and that this one was a winter keeper and that one you could can and he gave me one to eat raw and it was rather good. br />
  We’d got to the far end of the garden and were starting to come back when Heath’s wife ran around the corner of the house.

  Apparently she didn’t see me at first or had forgotten I was there, for she called to him and the name she called him wasn’t Reginald or Reggie, but a foreign-sounding name. I won’t even try to approximate it, for even at the time I wasn’t able to recall it a second after hearing it. It was like no word I’d ever heard before.

  Then she saw me and stopped running and caught her breath, and a moment later said she’d been listening in on the party line and that Bert Smith’s little daughter, Ann, was terribly sick.

  “They called the doctor,” she said, “but he is out on calls and he won’t get there in time.”

  “Reginald,” she said, “the symptoms sound like –”

  And she said another name that was like none I’d ever heard or expect to hear again.

  Watching Heath’s face, I could swear I saw it pale despite his olive tinge of skin.

  “Quick!” he shouted and grabbed me by the arm.

  We ran around in front to his old clunk of a car. He threw the basket of vegetables in the back seat and jumped behind the wheel. I scrambled in after him and tried to close the door, but it wouldn’t close. The lock kept slipping loose and I had to hang onto the door so it wouldn’t bang.

  We lit out of there like a turpentined dog and the noise that old car made was enough to deafen one. Despite my holding onto it, the door kept banging and all the fenders rattled and there was every other kind of noise you’d expect a junk-heap car to make, with an extra two or three thrown in.

  I wanted to ask him what he planned to do, but I was having trouble framing the question in my mind and even if I had known how to phrase it I doubt he could have heard me with all the racket that the car was making.

  So I hung on as best I could and tried to keep the door from banging and all at once it seemed to me the car was making more noise than it had any call to. Just like the old haywire tractor made more noise than any tractor should. Too much noise, by far, for the way that it was running. Just like on the tractor, there was no engine vibration and despite all the banging and the clanking we were making time. As I’ve said, our valley roads are none too good, but even so I swear there were places we hit seventy and we went around sharp corners where, by rights, we should have gone into the ditch at the speed that we were going, but the car just seemed to settle down and hug the road and we never even skidded.

  We pulled up in front of Bert’s place and Heath jumped out and ran up the walk, with me following him.

  Amy Smith came to the door and I could see that she’d been crying, and she looked a little surprised to see the two of us.

  We stood there for a moment without saying anything, until Heath spoke to her and here is a funny thing: Heath was wearing a pair of ragged overalls and a sweat-stained shirt and he didn’t have a hat and his hair was all rumpled up, but there was a single instant when it seemed to me that he was well-dressed in an expensive business suit and that he took off a hat and bowed to Amy.

  “I understand”, he said, “that the little girl is sick. Maybe I can help.”

  I don’t know if Amy had seen the same thing that I had seemed to see, but she opened the door and stood to one side so that we could enter.

  “In there,” she said.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said Heath, and went into the room.

  Amy and I stood there for a moment, then she turned to me and I could see the tears in her eyes again.

  “Cal, she’s awful sick,” she said.

  I nodded miserably, for now the spell was gone and common sense was coming back again and I wondered at the madness of this farmer who thought that he could help a little girl who was terribly sick. And at my madness for standing there, without even going in the room with him.

  But just then Heath came out of the room and closed the door softly behind him.

  “She’s sleeping now,” he said to Amy. “She’ll be all right.”

  Then, without another word, he walked out of the door. I hesitated a moment, looking at Amy, wondering what to do. And it was pretty plain there was nothing I could do. So I followed him.

  We drove back to his farm at a sober rate of speed, but the car banged and thumped just as bad as ever.

  “Runs real good,” I yelled at him.

  He smiled a bit.

  “I keep it tinkered up,” he yelled back at me.

  When we got to his place, I got out of his car and walked over to my own.

  “You forgot the vegetables,” he called after me.

  So I went back to get them.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said.

  “Any time,” he told me.

  I looked straight at him, then, and said: “It sure would be fine if we could get some rain. It would mean a lot to us. A soaking rain right now would save the corn.”

  “Come again,” he told me. “It was good to talk with you.”

  And that night it rained, all over the valley, a steady, soaking rain, and the corn was saved.

  And Ann got well.

  The doctor, when he finally got to Bert’s, said that she had passed the crisis and was already on the mend. One of those virus things, he said. A lot of it around. Not like the old days, he said, before they got to fooling around with all their miracle drugs, mutating viruses right and left. Used to be, he said, a doctor knew what he was treating, but he don’t know any more.

  I don’t know if Bert or Amy told Doc about Heath, although I imagine that they didn’t. After all, you don’t tell a doctor that a neighbor cured your child. And there might have been someone who would have been ornery enough to try to bring a charge against Heath for practicing medicine without a license, although that would have been pretty hard to prove. But the story got around the valley and there was a lot of talk. Heath, I heard, had been a famous doctor in Vienna before he’d made his getaway. But I didn’t believe it. I don’t even believe those who started the story believed it, but that’s the way it goes in a neighborhood like ours.

  That story, and others, made quite a flurry for a month or so, but then it quieted down and you could see that the Heaths had become one of us and belonged to the valley. Bert went over and had quite a talk with Heath and the womenfolks took to calling Mrs. Heath on the telephone, with some of those who were listening in breaking in to say a word or two, thereby initiating Mrs. Heath into the round-robin telephone conversations that are going on all the time on our valley party line, with it getting so that you have to bust in on them and tell them to get off the line when you want to make an important call. We had Heath out with us on our coon hunts that fall and some of the young bloods started paying attention to Heath’s daughter. It was almost as if the Heaths were old-time residents.

  As I’ve said before, we’ve always been real fortunate in getting in good neighbors.

  When things are going well, time has a way of flowing along so smoothly that you aren’t conscious of its passing, and that was the way it was in the valley.

  We had good years, but none of us paid much attention to that. You don’t pay much attention to the good times, you get so you take them for granted. It’s only when bad times come along that you look back and realize the good times you have had.

  A year or so ago I was just finishing up the morning chores when a car with a New York license pulled up at the barnyard gate. It isn’t very often we see an out-of-state license plate in the valley, so I figured that it probably was someone who had gotten lost and had stopped to ask directions. There was a man and woman in the front seat and three kids and a dog in the back seat and the car was new and shiny.

  I was carrying the milk up from the barn and when the man got out I put the pails down on the ground and waited for him.

  He was a youngish sort of fellow and he looked intelligen
t and he had good manners.

  He told me his name was Rickard and that he was a New York newspaperman on vacation and had dropped into the valley on his way out west to check some information.

  It was the first time, so far as I knew, that the valley had ever been of any interest news-wise and I said so. I said we never did much here to get into the news.

  “It’s no scandal,” Rickard told me, “if that is what you’re thinking. It’s just a matter of statistics.”

  There are a lot of times when I don’t catch a situation as quickly as I should, being a sort of deliberate type, but it seems to me now that as soon as he said statistics I could see it coming.

  “I did a series of farm articles a few months back,” said Rickard, “and to get my information I had to go through a lot of government statistics. I never got so sick of anything in my entire life.”

  “And?” I asked, not feeling too well myself.

  “I found some interesting things about this valley,” he went on. “I remember that I didn’t catch it for a while. Went on past the figures for a ways. Almost missed the significance, in fact. Then I did a doubletake and backed up and looked at them again. The full story wasn’t in that report, of course. Just a hint of something. So I did some more digging and came up with other facts.”

  I tried to laugh it off, but he wouldn’t let me.

  “Your weather, for one thing,” he said. “Do you realize you’ve had perfect weather for the past ten years?”

  “The weather’s been pretty good,” I admitted.

  “It wasn’t always good. I went back to see.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “It’s been better lately.”

  “Your crops have been the best they’ve ever been in the last ten years.”

  “Better seed,” I said. “Better ways of farming.”