style="font-size:15px;"> “Maybe” the Barnacle suggested, “they’re just busybodies. There are humans like that. Psychopathic do-gooders, always sticking in their noses, never letting well enough alone.”
“I don’t think so,” I argued back at him. “If they are trying to help us, I’d guess it’s a religion with them. Like the old friars who wandered all over Europe in the early days. Like the Good Samaritan. Like the Salvation Army.”
But he wouldn’t have it that way. “They’re busybodies,” he insisted. “Maybe they come from a surplus economy, a planet where all the work is done by machines and there is more than enough of everything for everyone. Maybe there isn’t anything left for anyone to do—and you know yourself that a man has to have something to keep him occupied, something to do so he can think that he is important.”
Then along about five o’clock Jo Ann came in. It had been her day off and she hadn’t known what had happened until someone from the office phoned her. So she’d come right over.
She was plenty sore at me, and she wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to explain that at a time like this a man had to have a drink or two. She got me out of there and out back to my car and drove me to her place. She fed me black coffee and finally gave me something to eat and along about eight o’clock or so she figured I’d sobered up enough to try driving home.
* * * *
I took it easy and I made it, but I had an awful head and I remembered that I didn’t have a job. Worst of all, I was probably tagged for life as the man who had dreamed up the brownie hoax. There was no doubt that the wire services had picked up the story, and that it had made front page in most of the papers coast to coast. No doubt, the radio and television commentators were doing a lot of chuckling at it.
My cottage stands up on a sharp little rise above the lake, a sort of hog’s back between the lake and road, and there’s no road up to it. I had to leave my car alongside the road at the foot of the rise, and walk up to the place.
I walked along, my head bent a little so I could see the path in the moonlight and I was almost to the cottage before I heard a sound that made me raise my head.
And there they were.
They had rigged up a scaffold and there were four of them on it, painting the cottage madly. Three of them were up on the roof replacing the bricks that had been knocked out of the chimney. They had storm windows scattered all over the place and were furiously applying putty to them. And you could scarcely see the boat, there were so many of them slapping paint on it.
I stood there staring at them, with my jaw hanging on my breastbone, when I heard a sudden swish and stepped quickly to one side. About a dozen of them rushed by, reeling out the hose, running down the hill with it. Almost in a shorter time than it takes to tell it, they were washing the car.
They didn’t seem to notice me. Maybe it was because they were so busy they didn’t have the time to—or it might have been just that it wasn’t proper etiquette to take notice of someone when they were helping him.
* * * *
They looked a lot like the brownies that you see pictured in the children’s books, but there were differences. They wore pointed caps, all right, but when I got close to one of them who was busy puttying, I could see that it was no cap at all. His head ran up to a point, and that the tassel on the top of it was no tassel of a cap, but a tuft of hair or feathers-I couldn’t make out which. They wore coats with big fancy buttons on them, but I got the impression—I don’t know how—that they weren’t buttons, but something else entirely. And instead of the big sloppy clown-type shoes they’re usually shown as wearing, they had nothing on their feet.
They worked hard and fast; they didn’t waste a minute. They didn’t walk, but ran. And there were so many of them.
Suddenly they were finished. The boat was painted, and so was the cottage. The puttied, painted storm windows were leaned against the trees. The hose was dragged up the hill and neatly coiled again.
I saw that they were finishing and I tried to call them all together so that I could thank them, but they paid no attention to me. And when they were finished, they were gone. I was left standing, all alone—with the newly-painted cottage shining in the moonlight and the smell of paint heavy in the air.
I suppose I wasn’t exactly sober, despite the night air and all the coffee Jo Ann had poured into me. It I had been cold, stone sober I might have done it better; I might have thought of something. As it was, I’m afraid I bungled it.
I staggered into the house and the outside door seemed a little hard to shut. When I looked for the reason, I saw it had been weather-stripped.
With the lights on, I looked around—and in all the time I’d been there the place had never been so neat. There wasn’t a speck of dust on anything and all the metal shone. All the pots and pans were neatly stacked in place; all the clothing I had left strewn around had been put away; all the books were lined straight within the shelves, and the magazines were where they should be instead of just thrown anywhere.
* * * *
I managed to get into bed, and I tried to think about it; but someone came along with a heavy mallet and hit me on the head and that was the last I knew until I was awakened by a terrible rackets
I got to it as fast as I could.
“What is it now?” I snarled, which is no way to answer a phone but was the way I felt.
It was J. H. “What’s the matter with you?” he yelled. “Why aren’t you at the office? What do you mean by…”
“Just a minute, J. H.; don’t you remember? You canned me yesterday.”
“Now, Mark,” he said, “you wouldn’t hold that against me, would you? We were all excited.”
“I wasn’t excited,” I told him.
“Look,” he said, “I need you. There’s someone here to see you.”
“All right,” I said and hung up.
* * * *
I didn’t hurry any; I took my time. If J. H. needed me, if there was someone there to see me, both of them could wait. I turned on the coffee maker and took a shower; after the shower and coffee, I felt almost human.
I was crossing the yard, heading for the path down to the car when I saw something that stopped me like a shot.
There were tracks in the dust, tracks all over the place—exactly the kind of tracks I’d seen in the flower bed underneath the window at the Clayborne estate. I squatted down and looked closely at them to make sure there was no mistake and there couldn’t be. They were the self-same tracks.
They were brownie tracks!
I stayed there for a long time, squatting beside the tracks and thinking that now it was all believable because there was no longer any room for disbelief.
The nurse had been right; there had been something in the room that night Mrs. Clayborne died. It was a mercy, the old gardener had said, his thoughts and speech all fuzzed with the weariness and the basic simplicity of the very old. An act of mercy, a good deed, for the old lady had been dying hard, no hope for her.
And
