The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

  Someone, he thought!

  And who had that someone been?

  He hunched around and peered into the dark corners of the basement and he felt innumerable and many-legged imaginary insects running on his body.

  Someone had taken the back off the cabinet and leaned it against the bench and had left the screws which held the back laid neatly in a row upon the floor. Then they had jury-rigged the set and jury-rigged it far better than it had ever been before.

  If this was a jury-job, he wondered, just what kind of job would it have been if they had had the time to do it up in style?

  They hadn’t had the time, of course. Maybe they had been scared off when he had come home – scared off even before they could get the back on the set again.

  He stood up and moved stiffly away.

  First the ceiling in the morning – and now, in the evening, Abbie’s television set.

  And the ceiling, come to think of it, was not a ceiling only. Another liner, if that was the proper term for it, of the same material as the ceiling, had been laid beneath the floor, forming a sort of boxed-in area between the joists. He had struck that liner when he had tried to drill into the floor.

  And what, he asked himself, if all the house were like that, too?

  There was just one answer to it all: There was something in the house with him!

  Towser had heard that something or smelled it or in some other manner sensed it and had dug frantically at the floor in an attempt to dig it out, as if it were a woodchuck.

  Except that this, whatever it might be, certainly was no woodchuck.

  He put away the trouble light and went upstairs.

  Towser was curled up on a rug in the living room beside the easy chair and beat his tail in polite decorum in greeting to his master.

  Taine stood and stared down at the dog. Towser looked back at him with satisfied and sleepy eyes, then heaved a doggish sigh and settled down to sleep.

  Whatever Towser might have heard or smelled or sensed this morning, it was quite evident that as of this moment he was aware of it no longer.

  Then Taine remembered something else.

  He had filled the kettle to make water for the coffee and had set it on the stove. He had turned on the burner and it had worked the first time.

  He hadn’t had to kick the stove to get the burner going.

  III

  He woke in the morning and someone was holding down his feet and he sat up quickly to see what was going on.

  But there was nothing to be alarmed about; it was only Towser who had crawled into bed with him and now lay sprawled across his feet.

  Towser whined softly and his back legs twitched as he chased dream-rabbits.

  Taine eased his feet from beneath the dog and sat up, reaching for his clothes. It was early, but he remembered suddenly that he had left all of the furniture he had picked up the day before out there in the truck and should be getting it downstairs where he could start reconditioning it.

  Towser went on sleeping.

  Taine stumbled to the kitchen and looked out of the window and there, squatted on the back stoop, was Beasly, the Horton man-of-all-work.

  Taine went to the back door to see what was going on.

  “I quit them, Hiram,” Beasly told him. “She kept on pecking at me every minute of the day and I couldn’t do a thing to please her, so I up and quit.”

  “Well, come on in,” said Taine. “I suppose you’d like a bite to eat and a cup of coffee.”

  “I was kind of wondering if I could stay here, Hiram. Just for my keep until I can find something else.”

  “Let’s have breakfast first,” said Taine, “then we can talk about it.”

  He didn’t like it, he told himself. He didn’t like it at all. In another hour or so Abbie would show up and start stirring up a ruckus about how he’d lured Beasly off. Because, no matter how dumb Beasly might be, he did a lot of work and took a lot of nagging and there wasn’t anyone else in town who would work for Abbie Horton.

  “Your ma used to give me cookies all the time,” said Beasly. “Your ma was a real good woman, Hiram.”

  “Yes, she was,” said Taine.

  “My ma used to say that you folks were quality, not like the rest in town, no matter what kind of airs they were always putting on. She said your family was among the first settlers. Is that really true, Hiram?”

  “Well, not exactly first settlers, I guess, but this house has stood here for almost a hundred years. My father used to say there never was a night during all those years that there wasn’t at least one Taine beneath its roof. Things like that, it seems, meant a lot to father.”

  “It must be nice,” said Beasly, wistfully, “to have a feeling like that. You must be proud of this house, Hiram.”

  “Not really proud; more like belonging. I can’t imagine living in any other house.”

  Taine turned on the burner and filled the kettle. Carrying the kettle back, he kicked the stove. But there wasn’t any need to kick it; the burner was already beginning to take on a rosy glow.

  Twice in a row, Taine thought. This thing is getting better!

  “Gee, Hiram,” said Beasly, “this is a dandy radio.”

  “It’s no good,” said Taine. “It’s broke. Haven’t had the time to fix it.”

  “I don’t think so, Hiram. I just turned it on. It’s beginning to warm up.”

  “It’s beginning to – Hey, let me see!” yelled Taine.

  Beasly told the truth. A faint hum was coming from the tubes.

  A voice came in, gaining in volume as the set warmed up.

  It was speaking gibberish.

  “What kind of talk is that?” asked Beasly.

  “I don’t know,” said Taine, close to panic now.

  First the television set, then the stove and now the radio!

  He spun the tuning knob and the pointer crawled slowly across the dial face instead of spinning across as he remembered it, and station after station sputtered and went past.

  He tuned in the next station that came up and it was strange lingo, too – and he knew by then exactly what he had.

  Instead of a $39.50 job, he had here on the kitchen table an all-band receiver like they advertised in the fancy magazines.

  He straightened up and said to Beasly: “See if you can get someone speaking English. I’ll get on with the eggs.”

  He turned on the second burner and got out the frying pan. He put it on the stove and found eggs and bacon in the refrigerator.

  Beasly got a station that had band music playing.

  “How is that?” he asked.

  “That is fine,” said Taine.

  Towser came out from the bedroom, stretching and yawning. He went to the door and showed he wanted out.

  Taine let him out.

  “If I were you,” he told the dog, “I’d lay off that woodchuck. You’ll have all the woods dug up.”

  “He ain’t digging after any woodchuck, Hiram.”

  “Well, a rabbit, then.”

  “Not a rabbit, either. I snuck off yesterday when I was supposed to be beating rugs. That’s what Abbie got so sore about.”

  Taine grunted, breaking eggs into the skillet.

  “I snuck away and went over to where Towser was. I talked with him and he told me it wasn’t a woodchuck or a rabbit. He said it was something else. I pitched in and helped him dig. Looks to me like he found an old tank of some sort buried out there in the woods.”

  “Towser wouldn’t dig up any tank,” protested Taine. “He wouldn’t care about anything except a rabbit or a woodchuck.”

  “He was working hard,” insisted Beasly. “He seemed to be excited.”

  “Maybe the woodchuck just dug his hole under this old tank or whatever it might be.”

  “Maybe so,” B
easly agreed. He fiddled with the radio some more. He got a disk jockey who was pretty terrible.

  Taine shoveled eggs and bacon onto plates and brought them to the table. He poured big cups of coffee and began buttering the toast.

  “Dive in,” he said to Beasly.

  “This is good of you, Hiram, to take me in like this. I won’t stay no longer than it takes to find a job.”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly say –”

  “There are times,” said Beasly, “when I get to thinking I haven’t got a friend and then I remember your ma, how nice she was to me and all –”

  “Oh, all right,” said Taine.

  He knew when he was licked.

  He brought the toast and a jar of jam to the table and sat down, beginning to eat.

  “Maybe you got something I could help you with,” suggested Beasly, using the back of his hand to wipe egg off his chin.

  “I have a load of furniture out in the driveway. I could use a man to help me get it down into the basement.”

  “I’ll be glad to do that,” said Beasly. “I am good and strong. I don’t mind work at all. I just don’t like people jawing at me.”

  They finished breakfast and then carried the furniture down into the basement. They had some trouble with the Governor Winthrop, for it was an unwieldy thing to handle.

  When they finally horsed it down, Taine stood off and looked at it. The man, he told himself, who slapped paint onto that beautiful cherry wood had a lot to answer for.

  He said to Beasly: “We have to get the paint off that thing there. And we must do it carefully. Use paint remover and a rag wrapped around a spatula and just sort of roll it off. Would you like to try it?”

  “Sure, I would. Say, Hiram, what will we have for lunch?”

  “I don’t know,” said Taine. “We’ll throw something together. Don’t tell me you are hungry.”

  “Well, it was sort of hard work, getting all that stuff down here.”

  “There are cookies in the jar on the kitchen shelf,” said Taine. “Go and help yourself.”

  When Beasly went upstairs, Taine walked slowly around the basement. The ceiling, he saw, was still intact. Nothing else seemed to be disturbed.

  Maybe that television set and the stove and radio, he thought, was just their way of paying rent to me. And if that were the case, he told himself, whoever they might be, he’d be more than willing to let them stay right on.

  He looked around some more and could find nothing wrong.

  He went upstairs and called to Beasly in the kitchen.

  “Come on out to the garage, where I keep the paint. We’ll hunt up some remover and show you how to use it.”

  Beasly, a supply of cookies clutched in his hand, trotted willingly behind him.

  As they rounded the corner of the house they could hear Towser’s muffled barking. Listening to him, it seemed to Taine that he was getting hoarse.

  Three days, he thought – or was it four?

  “If we don’t do something about it,” he said, “that fool dog is going to get himself wore out.”

  He went into the garage and came back with two shovels and a pick.

  “Come on,” he said to Beasly. “We have to put a stop to this before we have any peace.”

  IV

  Towser had done himself a noble job of excavation. He was almost completely out of sight. Only the end of his considerably bedraggled tail showed out of the hole he had clawed in the forest floor.

  Beasly had been right about the tanklike thing. One edge of it showed out of one side of the hole.

  Towser backed out of the hole and sat down heavily, his whiskers dripping clay, his tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth.

  “He says that it’s about time that we showed up,” said Beasly.

  Taine walked around the hole and knelt down. He reached down a hand to brush the dirt off the projecting edge of Beasly’s tank. The clay was stubborn and hard to wipe away, but from the feel of it the tank was heavy metal.

  Taine picked up a shovel and rapped it against the tank. The tank gave out a clang.

  They got to work, shoveling away a foot or so of topsoil that lay above the object. It was hard work and the thing was bigger than they had thought and it took some time to get it uncovered, even roughly.

  “I’m hungry,” Beasly complained.

  Taine glanced at his watch. It was almost one o’clock.

  “Run on back to the house,” he said to Beasly. “You’ll find something in the refrigerator and there is milk to drink.”

  “How about you, Hiram? Ain’t you ever hungry?”

  “You could bring me back a sandwich and see if you can find a trowel.”

  “What you want a trowel for?”

  “I want to scrape the dirt off this thing and see what it is.”

  He squatted down beside the thing they had unearthed and watched Beasly disappear into the woods.

  “Towser,” he said, “this is the strangest animal you ever put to ground.”

  A man, he told himself, might better joke about it – if to do no more than keep his fear away.

  Beasly wasn’t scared, of course. Beasly didn’t have the sense to be scared of a thing like this.

  Twelve feet wide by twenty long and oval shaped. About the size, he thought, of a good-size living room. And there never had been a tank of that shape or size in all of Willow Bend.

  He fished his jackknife out of his pocket and started to scratch away the dirt at one point on the surface of the thing. He got a square inch free of dirt and it was no metal such as he had ever seen. It looked for all the world like glass.

  He kept on scraping at the dirt until he had a clean place as big as an outstretched hand.

  It wasn’t any metal. He’d almost swear to that. It looked like cloudy glass – like the milk-glass goblets and bowls he was always on the lookout for. There were a lot of people who were plain nuts about it and they’d pay fancy prices for it.

  He closed the knife and put it back into his pocket and squatted, looking at the oval shape that Towser had discovered.

  And the conviction grew: Whatever it was that had come to live with him undoubtedly had arrived in this same contraption. From space or time, he thought, and was astonished that he thought it, for he’d never thought such a thing before.

  He picked up his shovel and began to dig again, digging down this time, following the curving side of this alien thing that lay within the earth.

  And as he dug, he wondered. What should he say about this – or should he say anything? Maybe the smartest course would be to cover it again and never breathe a word about it to a living soul.

  Beasly would talk about it, naturally. But no one in the village would pay attention to anything that Beasly said. Everyone in Willow Bend knew Beasly was cracked.

  Beasly finally came back. He carried three inexpertly made sandwiches wrapped in an old newspaper and a quart bottle almost full of milk.

  “You certainly took your time,” said Taine, slightly irritated.

  “I got interested,” Beasly explained.

  “Interested in what?”

  “Well, there were three big trucks and they were lugging a lot of heavy stuff down into the basement. Two or three big cabinets and a lot of other junk. And you know Abbie’s television set? Well, they took the set away. I told them that they shouldn’t, but they took it anyway.”

  “I forgot,” said Taine. “Henry said he’d send the computer over and I plumb forgot.”

  Taine ate the sandwiches, sharing them with Towser, who was very grateful in a muddy way.

  Finished, Taine rose and picked up his shovel.

  “Let’s get to work,” he said.

  “But you got all that stuff down in the basement.”

  “That can wait,” said Taine. ?
??This job we have to finish.”

  It was getting dusk by the time they finished.

  Taine leaned wearily on his shovel.

  Twelve feet by twenty across the top and ten feet deep – and all of it, every bit of it, made of the milk-glass stuff that sounded like a bell when you whacked it with a shovel.

  They’d have to be small, he thought, if there were many of them, to live in a space that size, especially if they had to stay there very long. And that fitted in, of course, for if they weren’t small they couldn’t now be living in the space between the basement joists.

  If they were really living there, thought Taine. If it wasn’t all just a lot of supposition.

  Maybe, he thought, even if they had been living in the house, they might be there no longer – for Towser had smelled or heard or somehow sensed them in the morning, but by that very night he’d paid them no attention.

  Taine slung his shovel across his shoulder and hoisted the pick.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s go. We’ve put in a long, hard day.”

  They tramped out through the brush and reached the road.

  Fireflies were flickering off and on in the woody darkness and the street lamps were swaying in the summer breeze. The stars were hard and bright.

  Maybe they still were in the house, thought Taine. Maybe when they found out that Towser had objected to them, they had fixed it so he’d be aware of them no longer.

  They probably were highly adaptive. It stood to good reason they would have to be. It hadn’t taken them too long, he told himself grimly, to adapt to a human house.

  He and Beasly went up the gravel driveway in the dark to put the tools away in the garage and there was something funny going on, for there was no garage.

  There was no garage and there was no front on the house and the driveway was cut off abruptly and there was nothing but the curving wall of what apparently had been the end of the garage.

  They came up to the curving wall and stopped, squinting unbelieving in the summer dark.

  There was no garage, no porch, no front of the house at all. It was as if someone had taken the opposite corners of the front of the house and bent them together until they touched, folding the entire front of the building inside the curvature of the bent-together corners.