We pulled up in front of Bert’s place and Heath jumped out and ran up the walk, with me following him.
Amy Smith came to the door and I could see that she’d been crying, and she looked a little surprised to see the two of us.
We stood there for a moment without saying anything, until Heath spoke to her and here is a funny thing: Heath was wearing a pair of ragged overalls and a sweat-stained shirt and he didn’t have a hat and his hair was all rumpled up, but there was a single instant when it seemed to me that he was well-dressed in an expensive business suit and that he took off a hat and bowed to Amy.
“I understand”, he said, “that the little girl is sick. Maybe I can help.”
I don’t know if Amy had seen the same thing that I had seemed to see, but she opened the door and stood to one side so that we could enter.
“In there,” she said.
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Heath, and went into the room.
Amy and I stood there for a moment, then she turned to me and I could see the tears in her eyes again.
“Cal, she’s awful sick,” she said.
I nodded miserably, for now the spell was gone and common sense was coming back again and I wondered at the madness of this farmer who thought that he could help a little girl who was terribly sick. And at my madness for standing there, without even going in the room with him.
But just then Heath came out of the room and closed the door softly behind him.
“She’s sleeping now,” he said to Amy. “She’ll be all right.”
Then, without another word, he walked out of the door. I hesitated a moment, looking at Amy, wondering what to do. And it was pretty plain there was nothing I could do. So I followed him.
We drove back to his farm at a sober rate of speed, but the car banged and thumped just as bad as ever.
“Runs real good,” I yelled at him.
He smiled a bit.
“I keep it tinkered up,” he yelled back at me.
When we got to his place, I got out of his car and walked over to my own.
“You forgot the vegetables,” he called after me.
So I went back to get them.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“Any time,” he told me.
I looked straight at him, then, and said: “It sure would be fine if we could get some rain. It would mean a lot to us. A soaking rain right now would save the corn.”
“Come again,” he told me. “It was good to talk with you.”
And that night it rained, all over the valley, a steady, soaking rain, and the corn was saved.
And Ann got well.
The doctor, when he finally got to Bert’s, said that she had passed the crisis and was already on the mend. One of those virus things, he said. A lot of it around. Not like the old days, he said, before they got to fooling around with all their miracle drugs, mutating viruses right and left. Used to be, he said, a doctor knew what he was treating, but he don’t know any more.
I don’t know if Bert or Amy told Doc about Heath, although I imagine that they didn’t. After all, you don’t tell a doctor that a neighbor cured your child. And there might have been someone who would have been ornery enough to try to bring a charge against Heath for practicing medicine without a license, although that would have been pretty hard to prove. But the story got around the valley and there was a lot of talk. Heath, I heard, had been a famous doctor in Vienna before he’d made his getaway. But I didn’t believe it. I don’t even believe those who started the story believed it, but that’s the way it goes in a neighborhood like ours.
That story, and others, made quite a flurry for a month or so, but then it quieted down and you could see that the Heaths had become one of us and belonged to the valley. Bert went over and had quite a talk with Heath and the womenfolks took to calling Mrs. Heath on the telephone, with some of those who were listening in breaking in to say a word or two, thereby initiating Mrs. Heath into the round-robin telephone conversations that are going on all the time on our valley party line, with it getting so that you have to bust in on them and tell them to get off the line when you want to make an important call. We had Heath out with us on our coon hunts that fall and some of the young bloods started paying attention to Heath’s daughter. It was almost as if the Heaths were old-time residents.
As I’ve said before, we’ve always been real fortunate in getting in good neighbors.
When things are going well, time has a way of flowing along so smoothly that you aren’t conscious of its passing, and that was the way it was in the valley.
We had good years, but none of us paid much attention to that. You don’t pay much attention to the good times, you get so you take them for granted. It’s only when bad times come along that you look back and realize the good times you have had.
A year or so ago I was just finishing up the morning chores when a car with a New York license pulled up at the barnyard gate. It isn’t very often we see an out-of-state license plate in the valley, so I figured that it probably was someone who had gotten lost and had stopped to ask directions. There was a man and woman in the front seat and three kids and a dog in the back seat and the car was new and shiny.
I was carrying the milk up from the barn and when the man got out I put the pails down on the ground and waited for him.
He was a youngish sort of fellow and he looked intelligent and he had good manners.
He told me his name was Rickard and that he was a New York newspaperman on vacation and had dropped into the valley on his way out west to check some information.
It was the first time, so far as I knew, that the valley had ever been of any interest news-wise and I said so. I said we never did much here to get into the news.
“It’s no scandal,” Rickard told me, “if that is what you’re thinking. It’s just a matter of statistics.”
There are a lot of times when I don’t catch a situation as quickly as I should, being a sort of deliberate type, but it seems to me now that as soon as he said statistics I could see it coming.
“I did a series of farm articles a few months back,” said Rickard, “and to get my information I had to go through a lot of government statistics. I never got so sick of anything in my entire life.”
“And?” I asked, not feeling too well myself.
“I found some interesting things about this valley,” he went on. “I remember that I didn’t catch it for a while. Went on past the figures for a ways. Almost missed the significance, in fact. Then I did a doubletake and backed up and looked at them again. The full story wasn’t in that report, of course. Just a hint of something. So I did some more digging and came up with other facts.”
I tried to laugh it off, but he wouldn’t let me.
“Your weather, for one thing,” he said. “Do you realize you’ve had perfect weather for the past ten years?”
“The weather’s been pretty good,” I admitted.
“It wasn’t always good. I went back to see.”
“That’s right,” I said. “It’s been better lately.”
“Your crops have been the best they’ve ever been in the last ten years.”
“Better seed,” I said. “Better ways of farming.”
He grinned at me. “You guys haven’t changed your way of farming in the last quarter-century.”
And he had me there, of course.
“There was an army worm invasion two years ago,” he said. “It hit all around you, but you got by scot-free.”
“We were lucky. I remember we said so at the time.”
“I checked the health records,” he said. “Same thing once again. For ten solid years. No measles, no chickenpox, no pneumonia. No nothing. One death in ten full years – complications attendant on old age.”