Clifford Simak - A Death in the House - And Other Stories

“What has happened now?” he asked.

“It’s King and Martin, Mr. Dean. They aren’t coming out this year.”

Dean clucked sympathetically, but somewhat hollowly, as if his heart was not quite in it. “Let me see,” he said. “If I remember rightly, those two were very good last year. King was in the line and Martin quarterback.”

Higgins exploded in righteous indignation. “Who ever heard of a quarterback deciding he wouldn’t play no more? And not just an ordinary boy, but one of the very best. He made all-conference last year.”

“You’ve talked to them, of course?”

“I got down on my knees to them,” said the coach. “I asked them did they want that I should lose my job. I asked is there anything you got against me. I told them they were letting down the school. I told them we wouldn’t have a team without them. They didn’t laugh at me, but—”

“They wouldn’t laugh at you,” said Dean. “Those boys are gentlemen. In fact, all the youngsters in school—”

“They’re a pack of sissies!” stormed the coach.

Dean said gently, “That is a matter of opinion. There have been moments when I also wasn’t able to attach as much importance to football as it seemed to me I should.”

“But that’s different,” argued the coach. “When a man grows up, naturally he will lose some interest. But these are kids. This just isn’t healthy. These young fellows should be out there pawing up the earth. All kids should have a strong sense of competition. And even if they don’t, there’s the financial angle. Any outstanding football man has a chance, when he goes to college—”

“Our kids don’t need athletic subsidies,” said Dean, a little sharply. “They’re getting more than their share of scholastic scholarships.”

“If we had a lot more material,” moaned Higgins, “King and Martin wouldn’t mean so much. We wouldn’t win too often, but we still would have a team. But as it is—do you realize, Mr. Dean, that there have been fewer coming out each year? Right now, I haven’t more than enough—”

“You’ve talked to King and Martin. You’re sure they won’t reconsider?”

“You know what they told me? They said football interfered with studies!”

The way Higgins said it, it was rank heresy.

“I guess, then,” Dean said cheerfully, “that we’ll just have to face it.”

“But it isn’t normal,” the coach protested. “There aren’t any kids who think more of studies than they do of football. There aren’t any kids so wrapped up in books—”

“There are,” said Dean. “There are a lot, right here at Millville. You should take a look at the grade averages over the past ten years, if you don’t believe it.”

“What gets me is that they don’t act like kids. They act like a bunch of adults.” The coach shook his head, as if to say it was all beyond him. “It’s a dirty shame. If only some of those big bruisers would turn out, we’d have the makings of a team.”

“Here, also,” Dean reminded him, “we have the makings of men and women that Millville in the future may very well be proud of.”

The coach got up angrily. “We won’t win a game,” he warned. “Even Bagley will beat us.”

“That is something,” Dean observed philosophically, “that shan’t worry me too much.”

He sat quietly at his desk and listened to the hollow ringing of the coach’s footsteps going down the corridor, dimming out with distance.

And he heard the swish and rumble of a janitorial servo-mechanism wiping down the stairs. He wondered where Stuffy was. Fiddling around somewhere, no doubt. With all the scrubbers and the washers and wipers and other mechanical contraptions, there wasn’t too much to take up Stuffy’s time. Although Stuffy, in his day, had done a lot of work—he’d been on the go from dark to dark, a top-notch janitor.

If it weren’t for the labor shortage, Stuffy would have been retired several years ago. But they didn’t retire men any more the way they had at one time. With Man going to the stars, there now was more than the human race could do. If they had been retiring men, Dean thought, he himself would be without a job.

And there was nothing he would have hated more than that. For Millville High was his. He had made it his. For more than fifty years, he’d lived for Millville High, first as a young and eager teacher, then as principal, and now, the last fifteen years or so, as its superintendent.

He had given everything he had. And it had given back. It had been wife and child and family, a beginning and an end. And he was satisfied, he told himself—satisfied on this Friday of a new school year, with Stuffy puttering somewhere in the building and no football team--or, at least, next to none.

He rose from the desk and stood looking out the window. A student, late in going home, was walking across the lawn. Dean thought he knew her, although of late his eyes had not been so good for distance.

He squinted at her harder, almost certain it was Judy Charleson. He’d known her grandfather back in the early days and the girl, he thought, had old Henry Charleson’s gait. He chuckled, thinking back. Old Charleson, he recalled, had been a slippery one in a business deal. There had been that time he had gotten tangled up in the deal for tube-liners to be used by a starship outfit …

He jerked his mind away, tried to wipe out his thinking of the old days. It was a sign of advancing age, the dawn of second childhood.

But however that might be, old Henry Charleson was the only man in Millville who had ever had a thing to do with starships—except Lamont Stiles.

Dean grinned a little, remembering Lamont Stiles and the grimness in him and how he’d amounted to something after many years, to the horrified exasperation of many people who had confidently prophesied he’d come to no good end.

And there was no one now, of course, who knew, or perhaps would ever know, what kind of end Lamont Stiles had finally come to. Or if, in fact, he’d come to an end as yet.

Lamont Stiles, Dean thought, might this very moment be striding down the street of some fantastic city on some distant world.

And if that were so, and if he came home again, what would he bring this time?

The last time he’d come home—the only time he ever had come home—he had brought the Sitters, and they were a funny lot.

Dean turned from the window and walked back to the desk. He sat down and pulled the papers back in front of him. But he couldn’t get down to work. That was the way it often was. He’d start thinking of the old days, when there were many friends and many things to do, and get so involved in thinking that he couldn’t settle down to work.

He heard the shuffle coming along the hall and shoved the papers to one side. He could tell that it was Stuffy, from the familiar shuffle, coming by to pass the time of day.

Dean wondered at the quiet anticipation he felt within himself. Although it was not so strange, once one considered it. There weren’t many left like Stuffy, not many he could talk with.

It was odd with the old, he thought. Age dissolved or loosened the ties of other days. The old died or moved away or were bound by infirmities. Or they drew within themselves, into a world of their own, where they sought a comfort they could find no longer in the outer world.

Stuffy shuffled to the doorway, stopped and leaned against the jamb. He wiped his drooping yellow mustaches with a greasy hand.

“What’s ailing the coach?” he asked. “He went busting out of here like he was turpentined.”

“He has no football team,” said Dean. “Or he tells me that he hasn’t any.”

“He cries early every season,” Stuffy said. “It’s just an act.”