The Man From the Valley Read online

  “You think so? I thought so, too...” His voice trailed off. Somehow he did not look so sufficient, so sure.

  Another pause, then Arn asked, “Anything you’d like to discuss? Any gleanings after your first field day?”

  “I think so.”

  She told him.

  He listened attentively as she gave her opinion that the plateau people did not need a mobile library in the same way that the valley needed it.

  “They could walk,” she argued. “I walked myself today when the jeep and Ringo were not...” She bit her lip in annoyance.

  He smiled the lopsided smile again, but made no reference to Ginny. “The plateau people are as entitled to service as the valley folk, though I admit you have a point, Miss Staples. Perhaps you could give less time to the plateau.”

  “I had decided to do that, anyway.” In her absorption she did not see his raised brows and faintly amused expression. “What I really felt would be better,” she submitted, “was their own library center, just a room would do. I worked in one room in Drayhill, before I came up to London.” All at once, unbidden, her cheeks were burning furiously. She was glad the schedule was on the table so that she could bend over it. London. A railway station. This man and a woman. A girl’s derisive laugh.

  She waited for his remembering disparaging words, but either he had not looked back as she had when she had spoken of London or he had taken pity on her discomfort.

  “Where could that room be situated?” he asked practically. “Not here at Homeward Bound, or Backdown might think I have too many fingers in the pie.”

  “Pickpocket?”

  “There’s insufficient space, you must know that. Joe only hewed himself a bachelor cot. No, the entire building would be needed, a wishful legatee might object. But I forgot.” His smile was crooked again. “There are other ideas now in the wind.”

  Terese felt uncomfortable for Ginny, but made no comment. “No,” resumed Arn, “I think we must shelve a library center until we’re more affluent. Joe might have told you that our community chest has its limits?”

  “He said the coffers didn’t ring.”

  “That’s right.” The man was looking at her schedule again, nodding approval as his eyes followed the stops she had written down for the rest of the week, Twains’, the Veneer Mill, the lumber camps, Chappy’s Distillery, the Graysons’... Flack’s. His finger on the printed sheet stopped short.

  “Flack’s?” His voice rang sharply, now he did not drawl.

  “He’s one of the independent timbermen, isn’t he? Joe said you had allowed others to come in.”

  “I have allowed them, a strict monopoly is never a good thing. Oh, I know what you’re thinking, that I’m a self-admitted monopoly, I believe your term was king, but never in business, Miss Staples. I’ve never practised that.”

  She sat waiting for him to go on, and when he didn’t she asked, “What’s wrong with Flack’s ... I think it was at Flack’s you stopped short?”

  He took up his pen and deliberately scored through the library call she had marked down. “You don’t go there!” he said.

  “But...”

  “Yes, Miss Staples?”

  “You allowed this person, this Flack, in.” Her voice was confused. If a man was permitted to join a community surely he had a right to...

  “As soon as his lease is up I’m getting him out.”

  “Mr. Dawson, I don’t understand.”

  “There’s no call for you to do so, only a call for you to comply.” His voice was brusque.

  “Comply to the monopoly,” she flashed back. She could not help herself. Perhaps in all the walks of life, the walk of a librarian was the most democratic, the most human. Books were universal, they belonged to everybody—even to Mr. Flack. But perhaps Mr. Flack had not dug in his pockets as the others had. A little scornfully, Terese suggested, “You are excluding this man because he hasn’t contributed?”

  “Don’t be a fool. Lots of the Backdowners haven’t thrown in—either they’ve been up against it, or just not got around to it, but to suggest we would exclude them for that reason is either bad taste or crass stupidity.”

  “Then...?” she asked in bewilderment.

  “I hoped you would accept my word, but it seems you will not. All right, I’ll tell you. Flack’s no good, I’m sorry he ever came here, I’ll be glad when he gets out.”

  “Are you ordering me not to call at this camp?”

  “Yes, Miss Staples.”

  “But it’s against my principle, my library principle. Books are for everybody.”

  “Not Backdown books. They’re for all Backdown—bar Flack.”

  “I understand your order, but not your reason.”

  “You’re not entitled to an explanation, but I’ll give it to you. Flack is no good. I said that before and I say it again. He’s just no good. Perhaps that means little to you, you may not have run up against such people. Well, I have, to my—to our misfortune. But so long as I can help it I won’t again. So”—with finality—“we delete Flack.” He scored the sheet once more.

  Before she could comment, and indeed Terese was still unsatisfied and inclined to do so, he said, “Chappy! Now, here’s a different distillery. Oh, yes, Miss Staples, Flack runs through the whole gamut of sins. But Chappy’s only deal with the good oil, with the eucalyptus. You’ll have my blessing and a tang in your nostrils like nothing else on earth when you call there.”

  Terese said unwillingly, her rebel inclinations still on the side of Flack even if he did go in for something more potent than gum leaves, “Joe told me that he and your father came down originally to distil the eucalyptus oil.”

  “And found a sapphire instead.” Arn Dawson smiled. “Yes, that’s true, but not as true as the weekend grubbers down the creek bed would like to believe. It was considerable, but not riches. But, then, no gem stone is really wealth, Miss Staples, in spite of size and value, the only true wealth is...”

  She observed his serious expression, and, still rankling over the Flack instruction, finished before he could, “The only true wealth is tolerance; giving instead of taking.” She said it deliberately.

  His face had darkened at her interruption. “Explain yourself, please.”

  “Mr. Flack,” she complied. “His exclusion. His—his victimization.”

  “Victimization? Good grief!”

  “But,” she reminded him, “he also is a Backdowner, presumably he would be paying you a land fee, in which case...”

  “Yes, paying was the original idea,” Dawson agreed, “though I see by my returns that he has given paying a holiday during my absence. All to the good, now I’ll have a legitimate reason to evict him before the end of his lease.”

  “But books and reading are things apart,” Terese persisted defiantly. “I still can’t see why...”

  She got on no farther. The man on the other side of the table had risen.

  “Come, Miss Staples, we’ll go down to the Chappys’ and breathe some unpolluted air.”

  There was no arguing with Arn Dawson. He put his big fingers, impersonal and quite light for all their strength and size, under her elbow, and impelled her out of the house, and led her to his wagon. The next moment they were weaving farther down the valley in a direction that Terese had not ventured as yet.

  The green world she had invaded yesterday they invaded again, only there was a difference, a difference she could not pinpoint until Arn Dawson showed her. It was a sameness in the trees, not only a sameness in variety but in type. They were all an identical gum. “Sometimes a valley will do this,” Arn said, “a white gum will build up a stronghold, or a blue gum will not admit a stranger. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, and when the gum that has taken over has a high-yield eucalyptus, then the distillers rush in. Here’s Chappy’s now, very humble as you see, but they move quite often to keep the traveling time between the trees and the still to a minimum, in which case they don’t worry about the exterior of the house.”<
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  The shack indeed was humble, but the smiling woman who greeted Terese and asked her inside had made it home.

  Terese smiled at the vase containing, of all things, crimson gum tips.

  “No, we never get tired of them,” nodded Mrs. Chappy.

  The shack was surprisingly comfortable. “Why not?” teased Arn, who was evidently on easy terms with the Chappys, “with a forty-gallon drum of oil, just two weeks’ work, selling at over eighty pounds.”

  “But what work,” reminded Mrs. Chappy. “Show Miss Staples, Arn.”

  Terese followed him down to where Lou Chappy and his son were working on the still.

  When she had been introduced Terese learned that it took a day to cut the leaf, but another day to cut the wood to keep the still boiling.

  “The vapor is piped off and condensed,” Arn showed her, “the oil is scooped off in jars.”

  “Yes,” grinned Lou ruefully, “our sort of oil doesn’t gush up from the ground.”

  But the ground smelled of it, everywhere smelled of it, clean, pungent, refreshing.

  They returned to the wagon, and the Chappys waved them off. At the next bend of the mountain Terese noticed a turnoff. She peered out at the board and saw inscribed, “Flack.”

  “Is that...” she began.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “But—but it’s printed by the same hand that painted the rest of the signs.”

  “It had better be,” shrugged Arn, “when he lives there.”

  “Gavin?”

  “Yes. Poor Gavin.” Arn dropped into a lower gear to take a stiff grade.

  There were questions on Terese’s lips. Why was Gavin “poor Gavin”, said with kindliness and tolerance, even with affection, yet Flack’s a place out of bounds? Why was Gavin accepted yet not accepted, because to have him paint their signs was surely to accept him but to deprive him of community life, and refusing to allow the bookmobile to call there was deprivation, was non-acceptance. Was Gavin a Flack, too?

  She saw Arn Dawson glancing sharply at her, no doubt following the trend of her thoughts.

  “Anything worrying you?”

  She would not give him the satisfaction of reissuing that command not to enter Flack’s valley, so instead she said, “Yes, I was wondering if your mother ever went home again.”

  “She was home.”

  “She called her house Homeward Bound because she hoped that that was what she would be. Did she return to England?”

  “She stopped home,” he said shortly. “The other was just a name for a house. To gather an interpretation like that you must have a same idea yourself.”

  “As a matter of fact,” she admitted, “the only time I’ve ever felt homeward bound was when I was coming here.” She said it in simple sincerity ... and it showed.

  He stopped the wagon; Terese had noticed emergency runways tunneled into the mountains at regular intervals, cut at expedient spots where they might be needed. Now, cutting the engine, he turned to her.

  His eyes were so clear it was almost like looking right into the man. They were also mountain blue, as blue, she thought, as the new book van.

  “So you were homeward bound?” he probed.

  “Yes ... I mean ... that is ... well, I expect...”

  “Don’t spoil it.” He was actually smiling at her. “Don’t pull a flower to pieces to see how it, works. You were homeward bound. Just leave it at that.”

  Terese would happily have left it at that, left it with a warmth she would not have thought she could feel for this man, had he not as he started the engine again spoiled it with, “And don’t forget Flack, don’t get any ideas of your own.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Terese had intended to broach the subject of the prohibited Flack with Ginny that night ... from that uncertain beginning when she first arrived at Pickpocket when the girl had gathered her things together to sleep instead in the sleep-out then changed her mind, had grown a regular round of evening confidences, good, Terese was convinced, for both their souls ... but Ginny had cares of her own which Terese found she could not dismiss.

  She had smiled rather ruefully into the darkness. If it had been Arn Dawson on Ginny’s mind she felt sure she might have succeeded, but here was something much nearer Ginny’s heart, if not Ginny’s intentions.

  The cow. Plush’s time was near.

  “She’s going to be a handful,” groaned Ginny.

  “I’ll help you.”

  This time Ginny had not tossed a sarcasm regarding books on animal husbandry, but her unenthusiastic silence had proclaimed .as much. A little traitor thought had occurred to Terese that perhaps Ginny herself did not know as much as she would have liked on the subject, but she had cast it aside. Anything on, or to do, with the earth was a counterpart of Ginny.

  She had made a second effort to bring up the subject of Chappy’s neighbor, but Ginny had said absently, “Oh, yes, Flack,” and, not absently, “She’s always been a difficult cow.”

  So Terese learned nothing at all.

  The next day she planned to call on the lumber camps ... omitting Flack’s of course.

  She proceeded along the plateau to the spot where the track descended, then, dropping several gears, she carefully edged downward, hand ready for the siren at each bend in case another vehicle was approaching.

  She drove up the valley for another five minutes, a ceiling of green cutting out the sky now, aerial gardens of fern and vine dripping from the great trees, wallaby pads occasionally emerging from the tangle of jungle on either side of the wheel-tracks.

  Then, rounding a bend, the resinous tang of the bush was abruptly wiped out by a very different smell, a dried sawdust, hot machinery smell. At once she saw the canvas town of the lumberjacks. Some had added small gardens, a vegetable plot; several of the timber men intending to stop longer than the others had built themselves more substantial wooden chalets.

  Terese put her finger on the siren button to announce her arrival, but had no need to press it. Out of the tents, out of the huts, out of the small veneer mill and from the bush the men came as though the wind that soughed through the leaves had told them that she, and the books, were here, and after that it was the usual pleasure of meeting new people and getting to know them from the volumes they brought to the little desk to be stamped.

  Terese was drawing up the little steps when Dawson’s wagon came along the rutted track. He. climbed out, the soft felt hat pushed in the way he wore it to the back of his head. In the manner she had noticed in all the lumbermen he did not remove the hat to her but saluted instead.

  “Done the fellers proud, Miss Staples?”

  “I believe so. They certainly depleted the shelves.” She nodded to the interior of the van.

  “How many proposals?” He spoke with a bright brittleness.

  “None.”

  “You haven't done so well, then, have you? Here’s a proposal of my own. No, not the sentimental variety but a suggestion that we see the planting and look in on the veneer mill, the cutting and the timber billy. Suit you?”

  “Suits me,” said Terese.

  They did it in the correct sequence, first a valley of red cedar going under the axe.

  The thing that surprised Terese was the unhurried approach to the cutting. She watched with curiosity as the rigging was erected some eight feet from the base of a great tree and incisions made in the enormous trunk. The timber glowed creamy and wet where the axes had bitten in, and Arn Dawson said, “It’s wonderful wood, and we treat it as such, that’s why we take our time in a felling. Some cutters”—his lip curled—“lay into trees in such a manner that each falls on its neighbor and takes it with it. It’s quick, that ninepins method, but brutal.”

  Terese was suddenly conscious of a breath of movement somewhere, and looking up she saw it was the great tree. The giant was quite still again now, but it was a wary stillness, a waiting stillness, and then she saw the cedar really sway and almost in the same instant there was a flurry of b
ranches, a deafening collision, and it was all over.

  She was shown next the powerful little train, ascending the mountain above them in much the same manner that Joe had demonstrated with one palm of his hand balanced sidewise on the other. When she was offered a ride Terese shivered and declined.

  She was interested in the veneer, though, at the mill machine sawing logs into sections, stripping away the bark, then plunging the timber into boiling water.

  “Mostly rosewood,” nodded Arn. “Well, if you’ve seen enough we’ll go out to the planting.”

  They covered more wheel-ruts, the deeply scored indentations winding between trees even taller than before, trees so leaf-thick they spread a velvet darkness, the wind in them singing in such a high prolonged pitch that Terese could have believed that its notes had been imprisoned in the branches. Occasionally an overflow from one of the many waterfalls trickled quite deeply across the downgrade, but the impervious drag went through unconcerned.

  It was like coming from the night into a lighted room when the big trees stopped abruptly and the valley of little nurslings spread out bravely in their older brothers’ place. As far as Terese could see, row after row, the young, upthrusting cedar, sassafras, mahogany, oak, the rest, pushed toward the sun.

  “These are only yearlings,” said Arn. “We sow them in drills after gathering kernels from a chosen parent tree. As you see, we sow thickly; a great proportion of these babies never grow up.”

  “Do you tend them?”

  “It would be rather difficult in a nursery of this size.” He nodded to another valley, adjoining the babies, full of older nurslings. “No, moist soil, a sandy blanket, fair average good, luck, and by that I mean no flood or drought or fire, and they’ll come through. The New England is blessed by a good rainfall bringing down fire risk, yet not so much rain that it washes out. That lot there are black walnut, that row is silver ash. I always adopt myself a feller. Would you like to do that?” As he spoke he was tagging a chosen tree with an old boot lace.