He agreed with her. “No, I don’t suppose I would have. Even if I had, I would not have paid too much attention to it. But when he talked to me, he made an uncommon lot of sense. As you’ve heard me say, I suppose far too often, medicine is not an exact science. There’s an awful lot of it a man can’t understand. A lot of problems he can’t begin to understand.”
“You’ve encountered those kind of problems before,” Harriet pointed out, just a shade too sharply. “And you have always said—I have heard you say it often—that someday a researcher will come up with an answer. You didn’t spend days fretting over those problems. Why can’t you stop this fretting now?”
“Because, damn it,” he told her, “here it is, right underneath my nose! There’s Ted and Herb and Burt, and a lot of others—more of them every day. There is nothing I can do about it. It’s nothing that I recognize; I’m completely in the dark. I’m tied hand and foot and I don’t like the feeling.”
“The trouble is, you are feeling guilty. You’ve got to cut that out.”
“All right,” he said. “I will cut it out.”
But he didn’t.
He did what, at the time, seemed rather silly things. He stopped at the Fanny Farmer candy shop and learned that in the last three years sales had increased by almost twenty-five percent. He phoned the two small factories at the edge of town and was told that sick leave and absenteeism had risen by almost ten percent in the last few months. At the drug store, he talked with his old friend the pharmacist, who told him that over-the-counter sales of analgesics were higher than at any time within memory.
That afternoon he phoned Dr. Herman Smith at Spring Valley. “You have a minute to talk with a competitor?” he asked.
Smith snorted. “You’re no competition,” he said. “We got that worked out years ago, remember? You work your side of the street and I work mine. We have our territories all laid out and fenced, and we have a gentleman’s agreement to do no trespassing. But I won’t let you in on any of my trade secrets, if that’s what you’re calling about.”
“Nothing like that,” said Benton. “I’ve been noticing some strange things. I’ve been wondering if you are noticing them as well.”
Smith’s voice became serious. “You sound worried, Art.”
“Not worried. Puzzled, that’s all.” He went ahead and told Smith what he had been noticing, making no mention of Abbott.
“You think it’s important?”
“I don’t know about its importance, but it’s a funny business. There seems to be no reason for it, no underlying cause. I’ve been wondering if it’s only happening here or if—”
“If you want me to, I could have a look at my records.”
“If you would,” Benton said.
“No sweat. I’ll let you know in a week or so. I’ll even draw you up some graphs to match with yours. If I find anything, that is.”
Dr. Smith didn’t take his week. In four days’ time there was a fat envelope. Opening it, Benton found not only the graphs, but statistical tables and a sheet of Xeroxed notes.
Benton had no need to take his own graphs out of the desk; he knew them now by heart. Staring at Smith’s graphs laid out on the desk top, he knew immediately they were almost identical with his own.
He sat down weakly in his chair, grasping the arms so tightly that his fingers ached.
“I was right,” he told himself. “God help us, I was right!”
When bird season opened, Benton drove out to the Ezra Pike farm for an afternoon of pheasant shooting, jotting down a mental note that before the day was over he would ask about the Barrs, who were Pike’s next-door neighbors. But he never got around to it.
Pike had a lot to show him: the pen of shoats that were becoming sleek and plump for the late-fall market; the high-quality wheat from the little patch he had grown as a hobby and which he was intending to take in to Millville to an old-time water mill to be ground into flour by a genial, half-mad hermit who was unconvinced that he lived in the twentieth century; the ritual sampling of some cider Pike had run off, using the fruit from an ancient, withered tree, the only one remaining in the country that bore the famed snow apples of another day. There was politics to talk about and the rising prices of food; the gasoline-wasting propensities of the anti-pollution equipment which had been installed on cars; the latest, rather mild scandal of the neighborhood, involving a boy barely out of his teens and a widow who was old enough to be the lad’s grandmother. They shot some pheasants, ate fresh apple pie—washing it down with milk—and talked of many things, the time passing pleasantly.
It was not until he was halfway home that Benton remembered he had not asked about the Barrs.
The following Saturday he skipped his morning office hours, loaded his gun into the car trunk, and took off for the hills, ostensibly to shoot quail. He made the quail trip several times each autumn, but when he thought about it he realized that it was not the quail he was looking for now, but the time that he could spend with the hill people.
If one had asked them what they were, they would have said that they were farmers; but precious few of them did any actual farming. Their acreages mostly stood on end, with only here and there a creek bottom or a hillside bench that was level enough for a plow to turn the soil. They planted some corn to fatten up the scrawny hogs that mostly ranged the woods for acorns, a field of potatoes at times larger than the corn patch, and a slightly smaller garden. They might at times plant other crops as well, but mostly it was corn, potatoes, and the plants in the garden. The women canned a lot of vegetables, for there was no electricity to freeze them, and even if there had been, few of the hill people could have scraped together the money for a freezer. There were strawberry beds for eating and for canning as well as wild fruits such as blackberries and raspberries. By the end of autumn, the cellars of the hill farm homes were well stocked with canned vegetables and fruits, with potatoes and “winter keeper” apples from the scraggly trees of their haphazard orchards.
As he drove, Benton fell to wondering, as he had many times before, just how the hill folk managed to live from year to year. Each family ordinarily had a cow or two, as well as a few hogs and a bedraggled flock of chickens. Most of the hogs were butchered for meat rather than sold on market, and many of the farms had smokehouses out in back in which hams and bacon were cured. Game such as rabbits, squirrels, coons, and an occasional deer—usually taken in a fine disregard of game laws—helped round out their diet. Fish from the many streams, as well as ruffed grouse and quail, were often on the table. Somehow or other they managed to eat rather well all the year round.
But they had little money. They were largely self-sufficient and they had to be, raising and gathering most of their food. They bought little at the grocery store: flour, sugar, coffee, salt … Living that way, Benton told himself, they didn’t need much money. What little they had they earned at odd jobs here and there. A few of them worked at small industrial plants in the valley, but not very many of them. He suspected that few had any taste for such work. Occasionally some of them peddled firewood to the townspeople.
But, despite all the hardships which they probably did not regard as such, they were a relatively happy, reliable, proud, and independent people, filled with dignity and inborn courtesy.
Benton had a good day, dropping in at the homes of several families that he knew. He did a little hunting, but not a great deal, getting, in all, three quail. But he did a lot of talking, sitting on the steps of the sagging verandahs of houses so old that moss grew upon the clapboard and the brick—houses there so long that they were accepted even by the environment in which they sat as a part of that environment—or as he roosted on a split-rail fence that might have been erected a hundred years before or stood in the coolness of a springhouse after he had drunk a dipper full of ice-cold buttermilk.