Clifford Simak - Out of Their Minds

I tried to imagine what sort of life it might be, what might be its joys and its sorrows, what could be its motives; I could not imagine any of it. My blood and bone and flesh would not allow me to. For it would have to be another form of life and the gap was much too great. As well, or better, to ask a trilobite to imagine the world of the dinosaurs. If Nature were seeking for survival values in its continual winnowing of species, here finally it should have found a creature (if it could be called a creature) with a fantastically high survival value, for there would be nothing, absolutely nothing, in the physical world that could get at it.

I sat there, thinking of it, and the thoughts bounced in my skull like the mutterings of distant thunder and I was getting nowhere in my thinking. I wasn't even going around in circles. I was just bouncing back and forth, like a half-demented Yo-Yo.

With an effort I jerked myself out of all this crazy thinking and once again I heard the gurgle and the laughter and the chuckling of the river as it went running down the land in the splendor of its magic.

There was unpacking to be done, getting all the bags and boxes out of the car and hauled into the room; there was fishing waiting for me, with the canoe at the dock and the big bass lurking in the reeds and among the lily pads. And after that, getting settled down, a book that must be written.

And there was, as well, I recalled, the program and the basket social at the school tonight. I would have to be there.

Linda Bailey spotted me as soon as I walked through the school house door and came bustling over to me like a self-important hen. She was one of the few people there that I remembered and there was no way one could fail to remember her. She and her husband and her brood of grubby children had lived on the farm next door to ours and there had been few days during the entire time that we were there that Linda Bailey had not come traipsing up the road or across the fields to borrow a cup of sugar or a dab of butter or any one of a dozen other items of which she continually found herself short and which, incidentally, she never seemed to get around to paying back. She was a large, raw-boned, horsey woman and she had aged, it seemed to me, but little.

"Horace Smith!" she trumpeted. "Little Horace Smith. I'd knowed you anywhere."

She flung her arms about me and she pounded me on the back with resounding thumps while, embarrassed, I struggled to remember just what bond of affection there had been between my family and the Bailey family to justify this kind of greeting.

"So you came back again," she yelped. "You couldn't stay away. Once Pilot Knob gets into your blood, there can't no one stay away. And after being to all those places, too. To all them heathen countries. You were in Rome, weren't you?"

"I spent some time in Rome," I told her. "It's not a heathen country."

"The purple iris that I have down against the pigpen," she declared, "is from the Pope's own garden. It's not so much to look at. I've seen lots better iris—a whole lot prettier. Any other kind of iris no better than that I'd dug up and throwed out long ago. But I kept it because of the place it come from. It ain't everybody, I can tell you, that has iris from the Pope's own garden. Not that I hold with the Pope and all that foolishness, but it does make the iris sort of distinctive, don't you think it does?" "Very much," I said.

She grabbed me by the arm. "For goodness* sake," she said, "let's go over and sit down. We have so much to talk about."

She dragged me to a row of chairs and we sat down together.

"You said Rome wasn't no heathen country," she said, "but you been in heathen countries. What about them Russians? You spent a lot of time in Russia."

"I don't know," I said. "Some of the Russian people still believe in God. It's the government…"

"Land sakes alive," she said, "you sound as if you liked them Russians."

"Some of them," I said.

"I heard," she said, "that you were up Lonesome Hollow and came driving down the road past the Williams place this morning. What in the world would you be doing there?"

Was there anything, I wondered, that she didn't know about, that all Pilot Knob didn't know about? Better than tribal drums, more efficient than radio, the news went thrumming through the community—every bit of gossip, every supposition.

"I turned up the road on impulse," I told her, lying very feebly. "When I was a boy, I went squirrel hunting up there sometimes in the fall."

She looked at me suspiciously, but she didn't follow up the reason for my being there. "Maybe it's all right in daylight," she declared, "but I wouldn't, for all the money in the world, go up there after dark." She leaned closer to me and her braying voice sank to a scratchy whisper. "The place is haunted," she said, "by a pack of dogs, if you want to call them dogs. They come baying down across the hills, snarling and yapping, and when they go past there is a cold wind going with them. It's enough to freeze your soul…"

"You've heard these dogs?" I asked.

"Reared them? On many a night I've beared them, howling down the hills, but I've never been that dose to them that I've felt the wind. Nettie Campbell told me. You remember Nettie Campbell?"

I shook my head.

"Oh, of course you wouldn't. She was Nettie Graham before she married Andy Campbell. They lived at the end of the road up Lonesome Hollow. The house is deserted now. Just walked away and left. Them dogs drove them off. Maybe you saw it—saw the house, I mean."

I nodded, not too positively, for I'd not seen the house. I'd only heard of it from Lowizie Smith the night before.

"There are strange things hi these hills," said Linda Bailey. "Things a body, in his right mind, would not believe. It comes, I suppose, from being such wild country. A lot of other places are all settled down, with not a tree left standing and all the land in fields. But this is still wild country. I guess it will always be."

The schoolroom was beginning to fill up now and I saw George Duncan making his way through the crowd toward me. I stood up to greet him and held out my hand.

"I hear you got settled in all right," he said. "I knew you'd like the place. I phoned Streeter and told him to look after you. He said you were out fishing. Catch anything worthwhile?"

"A couple of bass," I told him. "I'll do better once I get to know the river."

"I think the program is about to start," he said. "Ill see you later on. There are a lot of people here you should say hello to."

The program got underway. The teacher, Kathy Adams, played the old dilapidated organ and different groups of kids came up and sang some songs and others spoke their pieces and a bunch of eighth grade pupils put on a little play that Kathy Adams proudly announced they had worked out themselves.

It all, in its stumbling way, was entirely delightful and I sat there remembering when I had gone to school in this very building and had taken part in exactly such a program. I tried to remember the names of some of the teachers I had had and it was only toward the end of the program that I remembered one of them had been named

Miss Stein, a strange, angular, flighty person with an abundance of red hair and most easily upset by some of the pranks we were always thinking up. I wondered where Miss Stein might be this very evening and how life had treated her. Better, I hoped, than some of us kids had treated her when we had gone to school.

Linda Bailey tugged at my jacket sleeve and spoke in a grating whisper. "Them kids are good, ain't they?"

I nodded that they were.

"This Miss Adams is a right good teacher," Linda Bailey whispered. "I'm afraid that she won't stay here long. This little school of ours can't expect to keep someone as good as her."