Read New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) for Free Online Page B

another building, which may have been a hoghouse, had fallen completely in upon itself. Seeing it for the first time I had the distinct impression that it had grown tired one day and simply given up.
    At one time there had been an extensive orchard back of the house but now there were only ghosts of trees, strange humped things that stood in the sun like gnarled old men. A windmill sporting a buckled tower stood with bowed head above the dying orchard and the wind that never ceased to blow across the ridge flapped the great metal vane back and forth in a futile and nerve-grating monotony.
    As I stopped the car I saw that the ravages of neglect reached even to the smallest item. Flower-beds struggled with encroaching weeds. The sloping doors that covered the outside stairway to the cellar were half rotted away and part of them had fallen in.
    A shutter hung canted at one window, at another both shutters were missing and I saw where they had fallen to the ground, with grass and weeds growing through the interstices. The porch sagged, its posts canted dangerously, and the floor creaked and shifted underneath my feet as I walked to the door.
    An old man, wearing a uniform so ancient that its black was turning green, opened the door in answer to my knock and never in my life have I seen a sight so incongruous. For this was an old worn-out Wisconsin farm and the man who stood in the door was straight out of Dickens.
    I asked for Adams and the man held the door a little wider and asked me to come in. His voice croaked harshly and sent echoes sounding through the old high-ceilinged rooms.
    The house was almost bare of furniture. There was a woodstove in the kitchen and a few old chairs and a table covered with a piece of greasy oilcloth. In what had been the wainscoated dining-room packing boxes were lined against the wall and stacks of books were piled here and there, apparently at random. The windows gaped upon the world with empty eyes, without a curtain to their name.
    In the front parlor green windowshades were drawn and the room was dark with a darkness that was deeper than the dusk.
    Foster Adams heaved his bulky body from a leather chair standing in one corner and came across the room to shake my hand. His handclasp was cold and flabby, indifferent if not bored.
    “Not many find their way here,” he said. “I am glad you came.”
    But I am sure he wasn’t. I am sure he wished I hadn’t bothered him by coming.
    We sat there in the dusk behind the drawn shades and we talked in hushed voices, for the very room whispered not to speak aloud. Foster Adams, if no more could be said for him, had perfect manners. Prim, precise, even a little fussy—and disquieting.
    It was queer, I thought, to hear the thin, high, cold and hostile whining of the wind at August noon against the sides and around the corners of the house. For there was no friendliness in hill or house. Whatever warmth they may have held had been leached away with the ruin of the acres and the callous abandonment of the buildings to wind and rain and sun.
    Yes, Adams said, he could tell me the things I wished to know. And he told them to me without recourse to note or book, speaking as if he were drawing upon personal observation, as if he were talking of a time that was contemporaneous, as if he himself had lived in fifteenth-century England.
    “Such things,” he said, “have always interested me. What kind of petticoats a woman wore or the kind of herbs that went into the pot. And even more—” he lowered his voice a trifle—“even more, the way that men have died.”
    He sat motionless in his chair and it was as if he might be listening for something that he knew was there—rats in the cellar, perhaps, or crickets in the drapes.
    “Men,” he stated, “have died in many ways.” He made it sound as if he were the first man who had ever thought or said it.
    In the silence I heard the clumping tread of the old manservant walking about in the dining-room