The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
My father said that the dogstar man’s wife had left long ago for a more comfortable life of her own, so during the one night I spent at the cabin I never met or saw any evidence of her. I was in sixth grade and trying to write a report on cheese as part of a unit on agriculture. I did not like agriculture, which was a vast general thing. You could not put anything in the report about how cows look, standing in a rolling field, though that is so important it should come first. From far away, they look like ciphers that someone has written with a thick brown pen, and I wished I could write my whole report using the ponderous alphabet of cows. And you could not put in anything about the hiss of milk in the pail, or the salt licks that rise in the fields like dolmens or ancient shrines, and you could not put in the peculiar appetites of goats for wind-dried bedsheets on the line and children’s sunsuits and anything scented with human use.
So I asked the teacher, Mrs. Hanson, if I could write a story about cheese, and she said, yes, but it could not be a fairy tale. The cheese must not talk or sing or dance or have adventures. The story must be about how cheese is made. I could write that story.
I did not know the first thing about how cheese is made. My father told me to go to the library and find a book that would tell me. But my mother said, “Go and watch somebody making it. That’s better than a book.” My father agreed and suggested I call the Wisconsin Wilderness processing plant to see if they gave tours.
Suddenly my parents had the same thought at the same time and said almost in unison.
“Olaf Starr makes cheese. He’d be glad to show you.”
The dogstar man had no phone, so on Saturday afternoon my father drove out to the farm. Ten inches of snow had fallen a week ago, and the cold had kept it on the ground, though the main roads were clear. My father turned off 1-90 and took the road less traveled. The dogsled track cut a deep ribbon across the white fields on either side of us, and where the road ended at the broken barn and we got out of the car, the sled track disappeared into a pine woods.
You could hear the dogs yapping and yelping. A hundred seemed a modest estimate.
“We should’ve brought our skis,” said my father.
That would have been far easier than walking in, which took us twice as long. I’d seen the outside of the dogstar man’s house in summer but not in winter, and I’d never seen the inside.
In the dog yard, seven hounds sat on the roofs of their houses and barked at us, and the hair on my neck prickled in a primitive response to danger.
“They’re tied,” said my father.
Only when I saw that they could not spring far from the stakes to which they were leashed did I begin to savor the adventure of doing something entirely new. I thought of our yard, so small and neat that when my mother bought two metal lawn chairs and a patio umbrella, my father complained of the clutter. The dogstar man’s yard was a sprawl of empty cable spools, old oil drums, ropes, ski poles, harnesses and the dogsled itself, which hung from a row of pegs on the cabin wall. The grass on the sod roof was blond.
The dogstar man, hearing the racket, opened the door. He knew my father as a man who ordered firewood from him; he was surprised to see both of us on his doorstep. His face remained perfectly impassive as my father explained our errand while I stared at Olaf Starr with the greatest interest, as if I were examining a hawk or an otter, some wild creature always seen in motion and from a distance.
A brief silence marked the end of my father’s speech, and when the dogstar man was quite certain it was the end, he nodded and motioned us into his house. It was not so much a house as a lair, a den, that an animal might make and stock with all that instinct told him would carry him through the winter. Firewood was stacked solid against one wall. Against the opposite wall stood five fifty-gallon drums of water, a shelf of dishes and crocks and large cooking pots, a treadle sewing machine, and a dozen huge bags of dog food.
From under the four burners on the surface of the wood stove shone a thin rim of fire. The flame in the oil lamp on the table danced in its glass chimney with such shifting brilliance that the air in the cabin seemed to be alive and breathing, steadily and quietly.
My father and I drew two stools up to the table.
The dogstar man took down a large crock and set it on the table between us.
The secret of cheese is patience, he said. “Cheese has taught me everything I know about life.”
He set three spoons and three brass bowls of different sizes on the table.
I traded a year s supply of firewood to a professor at the university for these. And when I got them home, I made a discovery. Listen.”
He brushed his hand over the rim of the largest and a deep hum filled the room.
He brushed the smallest and a higher hum, a fifth above the first, spun out of it. He brushed the last bowl, and it sent forth a note that completed the triad. But if I say the bowls hummed, I do not tell you how they hummed. Not like a cat or a spinning wheel, but like a planet whirling down the dark aisles of the galaxy.
“The best way to make cheese is, put it in singing bowls,” said the dogstar man. “This is also the best way to eat it. ”
He dipped a spoon into the crock and began to ladle cottage cheese from the crock into the bowls.
“Also,” he said, “the voice of the bowls quiets the dogs.”
My father, astonished into silence by all these marvels, found his voice.
“But these are singing bowls from Tibet,” he exclaimed. “I’m sure they’re worth a good deal of money. If you ever want to sell them, come to me with a price.”
“But I won’t sell them,” said the dogstar man. “I’ll trade them for something I need.”
“What do you need?” asked my father.
“Nothing now,” he said, “but next week, dog food. I buy dog food by the ton. Ground barley is good,” he mused, “and fish meal.”
He spooned cottage cheese from the crock into the bowls.
“When I was at the university, I didn’t study at all.”
“You went to the university?” exclaimed my father.
“For one year, in 1927. And when my father asked me what I was majoring in I told him I wanted to major in philosophy. Philosophy! He didn’t understand about philosophy. I told him that philosophers consider problems of time and what is the true good. I told him it was like majoring in cheese; something solid emerges from what is thin and without definition.”
The whole of our visit, he talked and talked—and not one word about how to make cheese. The next day my mother took me to the public library where the Encyclopaedia Britannica revealed to me the secret of making cheese. In my report, I mentioned rennet and casein. I did not mention singing bowls, and I did not write a story. I got my report back with praise from Mrs. Hanson written across the top: Good work, Sam! You put in a lot of information and you stuck to your subject.
The next afternoon the dogstar man appeared in my father’s music store. He admired the guitars, the accordions, the new shipment of tambourines, and asked him if he could make a whistle that the dogs could hear from a great distance.