A Heritage of Stars

  “Yes,” said Monty. “Yes, you told us that.”

  “But nothing more,” said Cushing. “You never asked. Neither of you ever asked. I wonder now why I never told you.”

  “You need not tell us now,” said Nancy, gently. “We have no need to know.”

  “But now I have a need to tell you,” Cushing said. “The story is a short one. There were three of us: my mother and my grandfather—my mother’s father—and myself. My father, too, but I don’t remember him. Maybe just a little. A big man with black whiskers that tickled when he kissed me.”

  He’d not thought of it for years, not really thought of it, forcing himself not to think of it, but now, quite suddenly, he saw it clear as day. A little coulee that ran back from the Mississippi, in that land of tangled hills that lay a week’s walking to the south. A small sand-bottomed creek ran through the narrow meadowlands that lay between the sharply sloping bluffs, fed by a large spring that gushed out of the sandstone at the coulee’s head, where the hills pinched in. Beside the spring was home—a small house gray with the oldness of its wood, a soft gray that blended in with the shadow of the hills and trees so it could not be seen, if one did not know that it was there, until one almost stumbled on it. A short distance off stood two other small gray buildings as difficult to see as was the house—a dilapidated barn that housed two crowbait horses, three cows and a bull, and the chicken house, which was falling down. Below the house lay a garden and potato patch; and up a small side valley that angled out from the coulee, a small patch of corn.

  Here he had lived for his first sixteen years, and in all that time, he remembered no more than a dozen people who had come visiting. They had no nearby neighbors and the place was off the path of the wandering tribes that went up and down the river valley. The coulee mouth was only one of many mouths of similar coulees, and a small one at that, and it had no attraction for anyone who might be passing by. It had been a quiet place, drowsing through the years, but colorful, with a flood of crab apple and wild plum and cherry blossoms clothing it in softness every spring. Again in autumn the oaks and maples flamed into raging fires of brilliant red and yellow. At times the hills were covered by hepaticas, violets, trout lilies, sweet william, bloodroot, spring beauty and yellow lady’s slipper. There had been fishing in the creek, and also fishing in the river if one wanted to go that far to fish. But mostly fishing in the creek, where there might be caught, without too great an effort, the small, delicious brook trout. There had been squirrels and rabbits for the pot and, if one could move silently enough and shoot an arrow well enough, ruffed grouse and perhaps even quail, although quail were small and quick and tiny targets for a bow. But Thomas Cushing, at times, had brought home quail. He had used a bow and arrow from the time he had been big enough to toddle, having been taught its use by his grandfather, who was a master of it. In the fall the coons had come down from the hills to raid the corn patch, and though they took part of the crop, they paid heavily for it, returning in their meat and hides far more than the value of the corn they took. For there always had been coon dogs at the cabin, sometimes only one or two, sometimes many of them; and when the coons came down to raid, Tom and his grandfather had gone out with the dogs that trailed the coons and caught them or cornered them or treed them. When they had been treed, Tom had climbed the tree, with a bow in one hand and two arrows in his teeth, going slowly, searching for the coon, clinging to a limb somewhere above him and silhouetted against the night sky. It had been tricky climbing and tricky shooting, propped against the trunk of the tree to shoot. Sometimes the coon would get away and other times it wouldn’t.

  It was his grandfather whom it now seemed he could remember best—always an old man with grizzled hair and beard, sharp nose, mean and squinting eyes—for he was a mean man, but never mean with Tom. Old and tough and mean, a man who knew the woods and hills and river. A profane man who swore bitterly at his aching and arthritic joints, who cursed the fate of growing old, who brooked no foolishness and no arrogance except his own foolishness and arrogance. A fanatic when it came to tools and weapons and to domestic animals. Although a horse might be roundly cursed, it was never flogged, never mistreated, well taken care of—for a horse would be hard to replace. One might be bought, of course, if one knew where to go; or stolen, and stealing, as a rule, was easier than buying, but either took a great deal of time and effort and there was a certain danger in either of them. Weapons you must not use lightly. You shot no arrow uselessly. You shot at a mark to improve your skill; the only other time you shot was when you shot to kill. You learned to use a knife the way it should be used and you took care of knives, for knives were hard to obtain. The same thing with tools. When you were through with plowing, you cleaned and polished and greased the plow and stored it in the barn loft, for a plow must be guarded against rust—it must last through many generations. Harness for the horses was oiled and cobbled and kept in good repair. When you were finished with your hoeing, you washed and dried the hoe before putting it away. When haying was done the scythe was cleaned, sharpened, and coated with grease and hung back in its place. There could be no sloppiness, no forgetting. It was a way of life. To make do with what you had, to take care of it, to guard against its loss, to use it correctly, so that no damage would be done to it.

  His father Tom could recall only vaguely. He had always thought of him as having been lost, for that was the story he’d been told when he was old enough to understand. It seemed, however, that no one had actually known what had happened to him. One spring morning, according to the story, he had set out for the river with a fish spear in hand and a bag slung across his shoulder. It was time for the carp to spawn, coming into the shoals of the river valley’s sloughs and lakes to lay and fertilize their eggs. In the frenzy of the season they had no fear in them and were easy prey. Each year, as that year, Tom’s father had gone to the river when the carp were running, perhaps making several trips, coming home each time bowed down by the bulging sack full of carp slung across his shoulder, using the reversed spear as a walking stick to help himself along. Brought home, the carp were scaled and cleaned, cut into fillets and smoked to provide food throughout a good part of the summer months.

  But this time he did not return. By late afternoon, Tom’s mother and the old grandfather set out to search for him, Tom riding on his grandfather’s shoulder. They came back late at night, having found nothing. The next day the grandfather went out again and this time found the spear, abandoned beside a shallow lake in which the carp still rolled, and a short distance off, the sack, but nothing else. There was no sign of Tom’s father, no indication of what had happened to him. He had vanished and there was no trace of him and since that time there had been no word of him.

  Life went on much as it had before, a little harder now since there were fewer to grub a living from the land. However, they did not do too badly. There was always food to eat and wood to burn and hides to tan for clothing and for footwear. One horse died—of old age, more than likely—and the old man went away and was gone for ten days or more, then returned with two horses. He never said how he had got them and no one ever asked. They knew he must have stolen them, for he had taken nothing with him that would have served to buy them. They were young and strong and it was a good thing that he’d got the two of them, for a short time later, the other old horse died as well and two horses were needed to plow the field and gardens, haul the wood and get in the hay. By this time, Tom was old enough to help—ten years or so—and one of the things he remembered vividly was helping his grandfather skin the two dead horses. He had blubbered while he did it, trying to hide the blubbers from his grandfather and later, alone, had wept bitterly, for he had loved those horses. But it would have been a waste not to take their hides, and in their kind of life there was nothing ever wasted.

  When Tom was fourteen, his mother sickened in a hard and terrible winter when snow lay deep and blizzard after blizzard came hammering down across the hills. She had taken to her b
ed, gasping for breath, wheezing as she breathed. The two of them had taken care of her, the mean, irascible old man transformed into a soul of tenderness. They rubbed her throat with warm goose grease, kept in a bottle in a cabinet for just such an emergency, and wrapped her throat in a cherished piece of flannel cloth to help the goose grease do its work. They put hot bricks at her feet to keep her warm and the grandfather cooked a syrup of onions on the stove, keeping it at the back of the stove so it would stay warm, and fed the syrup to her to alleviate the soreness of her throat. One night, tired with watching, Tom had fallen asleep. He was wakened by the old man. “Boy,” he’d said, “your mother’s gone.” And having said that, the old man turned away so that Tom could not see his tears.

  In the first gray of morning light they went out and shoveled away the snow beneath an ancient oak where Tom’s mother had loved to sit, looking down the coulee, then built a fire to thaw the ground so they could dig a grave. In the spring, with much labor, they had hauled three huge boulders, one by one, on a stoneboat, and had placed them on the grave—to mark it and to keep it safe against the wolves that, now the frost was gone, might try to dig it up.

  Life went on again, although it seemed to Tom that something had gone out of the old grandfather. He still did a moderate amount of cussing, but some of the eloquent fire had gone out of it. He spent more time in the rocking chair on the porch than he ever had before. Tom did most of the work now, the old man dawdling about. The grandfather seemed to want to talk, as if talk might fill the emptiness that had fallen on him. Hour after hour, he and Tom would talk, sitting on the porch, or when the nights grew chill and winter came, sitting in front of the blazing fire. It was the grandfather who did most of the talking, dredging from his almost eighty years of life tales of events that had taken place many years before, not all of them, perhaps, entirely true, but each incident more than likely based on an actual happening that could have been interesting in itself without all the extra trappings. The story about the time when he had gone traipsing to the west and had killed an arrow-wounded grizzly with a knife (a story that Tom, even at his tender years, accepted with a grain of salt); the story of a classic horse-trading deal in which (as change of pace) the old man got handsomely swindled; the story about the monstrous catfish that it took three hours to land; the story about the time, on one of his fabulous trips, he became entangled in a short-lived war fought by two tribes for no reason whatsoever that could be adequately explained, fighting most likely just for the hell of it; and the story about a university (whatever a university might be) far to the north, surrounded by a wall and inhabited by a curious breed that was termed, with some contempt “egghead,” although the old man was quite content to admit that he had no idea what an egghead was, hazarding a guess that those who used the term had no idea of its meaning either, but were simply using a term of contempt that had come out of the dim and ancient past. Listening to his grandfather through the long afternoons and evenings, the boy began to see a different man, a younger man, shining through the meanness of the older man. Seeing, perhaps, that the shifty-eyed meanness was little more than a mask that he had put on as a defense against old age, which he apparently considered the final great indignity that a man was forced to undergo.

  But not for a great deal longer. In the summer that Tom was sixteen he came home at noon from plowing corn to find the old man fallen from his rocking chair, sprawling on the porch, no longer suffering any indignity other than the indignity of death, if death can be thought of as an indignity. Tom dug the grave and buried him beneath the same oak tree where the mother had been buried, and hauled boulders, smaller boulders this time, for he was the only one left to handle them, to be piled upon the grave.

  “You grew up fast,” said Monty.

  “Yes,” said Cushing, “I suppose I did.”

  “And then you took to the woods.”

  “Not right off,” said Cushing. “There was the farm, you see, and the animals. I couldn’t run off and leave the animals. They get so they depend on you. You don’t just walk away and leave them. There was this family I had heard of, on a ridge about ten miles away. It was hard scratching there. A poor spring they had to walk to for their water about a mile away. The land stony and thin. A tough clay that was hard to work. They stayed there because there were buildings to give them warmth and shelter, but there wasn’t much else. The house stood there on the ridge, swept by every wind that came along. The crops were poor and they were out where any wandering band could see them. So I went to see the family and we made a deal. They took over my farm and animals, with me getting half the increase from my livestock, if there was any increase and if I ever came back to claim it. They moved down to the coulee and I took off. I couldn’t stay. There were too many memories there. I saw too many people and I heard too many voices. I had to have something to do to keep busy. I could have stayed on the farm, of course, and there’d have been work to do, but not enough work and wondering why I did it and looking at the two graves and thinking back. I don’t believe I reasoned it out at the time. I just knew I had to walk away, but before I went, I had to be sure there was someone to care for the animals. I suppose I could just have turned them loose, but that wouldn’t have been right. They would have wondered what had happened. They get used to people and they sort of count on them. They are lost without them.

  “Nor do I think I even tried to figure out what I would do once I was free of the farm. I just took to the woods. I was well trained for it. I knew the woods and river. I had grown up with them. It was a wild, free life, but at first I drove myself. Anything to keep busy, to put the miles behind me. But finally I eased off and drifted. I had no responsibility. I could go anywhere I wished, do anything I wished. Over the course of the first year I fell in with two other runners, young twerps like myself. We made a good team. We went far south and roamed around a bit, then we wandered back. We spent some time one spring and summer along the Ohio. That’s good country to be in. But as time went on, we drifted apart. I wanted to go north and the others didn’t. I’d got to thinking about the story my grandfather told about the university and I was curious. From things I’d picked up I knew it was a place where you could learn to read and write and I thought those might be handy things to have. In one tribe down south—in Alabama, maybe, I can’t be sure—I found an old man who could read. He read the Bible mostly and did a lot of preaching. I thought what a fine thing that would be, not the Bible, you understand, nor the preaching, but being able to read.”

  “It must have seemed a good Life,” Monty said. “You enjoyed it. It helped to wipe away the memories. Buried them to some extent; softened them, perhaps.”

  Cushing nodded. “I suppose it was a good life. I still think back on it and recall how good it was, remembering the good things only. Not all of it was good.”

  “And now perhaps you want to go again just to see how good it was. To find out if it was as good as you remembered it. And the Place of Going to the Stars, of course.”

  “The Place of Stars,” said Cushing, “has haunted me ever since I found Wilson’s notes. I keep asking myself, what if there should be such a place and no one went to find it?”

  “You plan to be leaving, then?”

  “Yes, I think I will. But I’ll be back. I won’t stay away forever. Only until I’ve found the Place or know it can’t be found.”

  “You’ll be going west. Have you ever gone into the West?”

  Cushing shook his head.

  “It’s different from the woods,” said Monty. “When you get out a hundred miles or so, you come to open prairie. You’ll have to watch yourself. We have word, remember, that there is something stirring out there. Some warlord pulling some of the tribes together and going on the prod. They’ll be heading east, I would imagine, although one can never know what goes on in a nomad’s head.”

  “I’ll watch myself,” said Cushing.

  5

  The Team rolled along the boulevard, as they did each m
orning. It was their time for cogitation, for the absorption and classification of all that they had learned or sensed or otherwise acquired the day before.

  The sky was clear, without a cloud in sight, and once the star got up it would be another scorcher. Except for the birds that chirped discontentedly in the scraggly trees and the little rodents that went skittering through the tunnels in the grass, there was nothing else astir. Rank grass and lusty weeds grew in the pavement cracks. Time-grimed statuary and no-longer-operative fountains lurked in the jungle of unattended shrubbery. Beyond the statuary and the fountains the great piles of the buildings went up against the sky.

  “I have thought much upon the situation,” said #1, “and still I fail to comprehend the logic of the Ancient and Revered in pretending to be hopeful. By all the criteria that we have developed in our millennia of study throughout the galaxy, the dominant race upon this planet is lost beyond redemption. The race has gone through basically the same process that we have witnessed elsewhere. They built their civilization without realizing the inherent flaw that brought them to destruction. And yet the A and R insists that what has happened is no more than a temporary setback. He tells us that there have been many other setbacks in the history of the race and that in each case it has triumphed over them and emerged in greater strength than it knew before. I sometimes wonder if his thinking could be twisted by the loyalty he still carries in this precious race of his. Certainly one can understand his ingrained faith in these creatures, but the evidence all would indicate the faith is wrongly placed. Either he is unconsciously being intellectually dishonest or is naive beyond our estimation of him.”