The doctor turned back to the bed again and pulled the blanket down, then went and got the lamp so that he could see. He looked the critter up and down, and he prodded it with a skittish finger, and he made the kind of mysterious clucking sound that only doctors make.
Then he pulled the blanket back over it again and took the lamp back to the table.
‘Mose,’ he said. ‘I can’t do a thing for it.’
‘But you’re a doctor!’
‘A human doctor, Mose. I don’t know what this thing is, but it isn’t human. I couldn’t even guess what is wrong with it, if anything. And I wouldn’t know what could be safely done for it even if I could diagnose its illness. I’m not even sure it’s an animal. There are a lot of things about it that argue it’s a plant.’
Then the doctor asked Mose straight out how he came to find it and Mose told him exactly how it happened. But he didn’t tell him anything about the birdcage, for when he thought about it, it sounded so fantastic that he couldn’t bring himself to tell it. Just finding the critter and having it here was bad enough, without throwing in the birdcage.
‘I tell you what,’ the doctor said. ‘You got something here that’s outside all human knowledge. I doubt there’s ever been a thing like this seen on Earth before. I have no idea what it is and I wouldn’t try to guess. If I were you, I’d get in touch with the university up at Madison. There might be someone there who could get it figured out. Even if they couldn’t they’d be interested. They’d want to study it.’
Mose went to the cupboard and got the cigar box almost full of silver dollars and paid the doctor. The doctor put the dollars in his pocket, joshing Mose about his eccentricity.
But Mose was stubborn about his silver dollars. ‘Paper money don’t seem legal, somehow,’ he declared. ‘I like the feel of silver and the way it chinks. It’s got authority.’
The doctor left and he didn’t seem as upset as Mose had been afraid he might be. As soon as he was gone, Mose pulled up a chair and sat down beside the bed.
It wasn’t right, he thought, that the thing should be so sick and no one to help - no one who knew any way to help it.
He sat in the chair and listened to the ticking of the clock, loud in the kitchen silence, and the crackling of the wood burning in the stove.
Looking at the thing lying on the bed, he had an almost fierce hope that it could get well again and stay with him. Now that its birdcage was all banged up, maybe there’d be nothing it could do but stay. And he hoped it would, for already the house felt less lonely.
Sitting in the chair between the stove and bed, Mose realized how lonely it had been. It had not been quite so bad until Towser died. He had tried to bring himself to get another dog, but he never had been able to. For there was no dog that would take the place of Towser and it had seemed unfaithful even to try. He could have gotten a cat, of course, but that would remind him too much of Molly; she had been very fond of cats, and until the time she died, there had always been two or three of them underfoot around the place.
But now he was alone. Alone with his farm and his stubbornness and his silver dollars. The doctor thought, like all the rest of them, that the only silver Mose had was in the cigar box in the cupboard. There wasn’t one of them who knew about the old iron kettle piled plumb full of them, hidden underneath the floor boards of the living room. He chuckled at the thought of how he had them fooled. He’d give a lot to see his neighbors’ faces if they could only know, but he was not the one to tell them. If they were to find out, they’d have to find it out themselves.
He nodded in the chair and finally slept, sitting upright, with his chin resting on his chest and his crossed arms wrapped around himself as if to keep him warm.
When he woke, in the dark before the dawn, with the lamp flickering on the table and the fire in the stove burned low, the alien had died.
There was no doubt of death. The thing was cold and rigid and the husk that was its body was rough and drying out - as a corn stalk in the field dries out, whipping in the wind once the growing had been ended.
Mose pulled the blanket up to cover it, and although this was early to do the chores, he went out by lantern light and got them done.
After breakfast, he heated water and washed his face and shaved, and it was the first time in years he’d shaved any day but Sunday. Then he put on his one good suit and slicked down his hair and got the old jalopy out of the machine shed and drove into town.
He hunted up Eb Dennison, the town clerk, who also was the secretary of the cemetery association.
‘Eb,’ he said, ‘I want to buy a lot.’
‘But you’ve got a lot,’ protested Eb.
‘That plot,’ said Mose, ‘is a family plot. There’s just room for me and Molly.’
‘Well, then,’ asked Eb, ‘why another one? You have no other members of the family.’
‘I found someone in the woods,’ said Mose. ‘I took him home and he died last night. I plan to bury him.’
‘If you found a dead man in the woods,’ Eb warned him, ‘you better notify the coroner and sheriff,’
‘In time I may,’ said Mose, not intending to. ‘Now how about that plot?’
Washing his hands of the affair entirely, Eb sold him the plot.
Having bought his plot, Mose went to the undertaking establishment run by Albert Jones.
‘Al,’ he said, ‘there’s been a death out at the house. A stranger I found out in the woods. He doesn’t seem to have anyone and I aim to take care of it.’
‘You got a death certificate?’ asked Al, who subscribed to none of the niceties affected by most funeral parlor operators.
‘Well, no, I haven’t.’
‘Was there a doctor in attendance?’
‘Doc Benson came out last night.’
‘He should have made you out one. I’ll give him a ring.’
He phoned Doctor Benson and talked with him a while and got red around the gills. He finally slammed down the phone and turned on Mose.
‘I don’t know what you’re trying to pull off,’ he fumed, but Doc tells me this thing of yours isn’t even human. I don’t take care of dogs or cats or-’
‘This ain’t no dog or cat.’
‘I don’t care what it is. It’s got to be human for me to handle it. And don’t go trying to bury it in the cemetery, because it’s against the law.’
Considerably discouraged, Mose left the undertaking parlor and trudged slowly up the hill toward the town’s one and only church.
He found the minister in his study working on a sermon. Mose sat down in a chair and fumbled his battered hat around and around in his work-scarred hands.
‘Parson,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you the story from first to last,’ and he did. He added, ‘I don’t know what it is. I guess no one else does, either. But it’s dead and in need of decent burial and that’s the least that I can do. I can’t bury it m the cemetery, so I suppose I’ll have to find a place for it on the farm. I wonder if you could bring yourself to come out and say a word or two.’
The minister gave the matter some deep consideration.
‘I’m sorry, Mose,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t believe I can. I am not sure at all the church would approve of it.’
‘This thing may not be human,’ said Old Mose, ‘but it is one of God’s critters.’
The minister thought some more, and did some wondering out loud, but made up his mind finally that he couldn’t do it.
So Mose went down the Street to where his car was waiting and drove home, thinking about what heels some humans are.
Back at the farm again, he got a pick and shovel and went into the garden, and there, in one corner of it, he dug a grave. He went out to the machine shed to hunt up some boards to make the thing a casket, but it turned out that he had used the last of the lumber to patch up the hog pen.