The Beyonders Read Free Page A

Crispin, looking at the table. "I had heard the name, and asked about them at the county seat. Nobody seemed to be able to tell me anything about them." He glanced up, his blue eyes half plaintive. "As if they didn't want to tell me."
    "The Kimbers have a grand gift of keeping to themselves," Doc told him. "They come here sometimes to buy things, and once in a while I give one of them some pills, or vaccinate their children. I'd say their most interesting contribution is refusal to join any church. They argue that churches teach false things and are full of hypocrites."
    "But then they must have a substitute religion," suggested Crispin. "Religion is more or less a universal impulse."
    "They do have their own worship. Do their own preaching and baptizing. They get married by the judge at the county seat. By all reports, their baptism is at night, by the full moon."
    "I'd like to see that," said Crispin eagerly.
    Doc studied him. "Might I ask, are you single?"
    "Yes. Yes, I am."
    "Then marry a Kimber girl—and some of them are highly attractive. Then you'd be baptized yourself, under the full moon."
    "You hurry me too fast," said Crispin, smiling again. "So far I haven't even bought things I need to be moved in."
    "If you're finished here, suppose I just walk you to Longcohr's and see what you can get there." Doc raised his voice. "Slowly, what are you laying out for supper?"
    "I thought I'd stuff some eggs," she called back from the kitchen.
    "Splendid." Doc shoved his chair back. "Will you come and share those, Mr. Crispin?"
    "You'll have me outwearing my welcome. Let's see if there's something at the store that can be my share."
    They walked out in the pleasant brightness of early afternoon. Crispin gazed in all directions at once. "It's a beautiful place," he said. "The houses are fine, the colors are fine."
    "I always thought so, but I envy you the artist's eye," said Doc.
    As they walked, Doc told about Sky Notch. A population of perhaps two hundred and fifty, much fallen away since lumbering times, but still happy. Some of the residents drove to jobs in Asheville or across the Tennessee line, thirty miles or so, and others worked land here and there within easier reach. Just then, shortly after noon, there was little stir. In the evenings, people visited back and forth, on good terms. No trouble anywhere in Sky Notch, said Doc, and he was glad. That made things easier for the town board, Mayor Ballinger and the three commissioners, Bo Fletcher and Bill Longcohr and Doc himself. Most town meeting nights at the store building people dropped in for company's sake. Sometimes Gander Eye Gentry came and picked his banjo.
    "We're not big nor terribly lively, but we're not new, either," Doc summed up. "Sky Notch was here a generation before the Civil War."
    Crispin gazed appreciatively down Main Street at the empty school building and at the water tower beyond. "When did those Kimber people come?" he inquired.
    "Nobody knows. Long before Sky Notch was founded. They must have been here from the beginning, about the time the Indians left, and that was at the close of the Revolution."
    "All you say about them interests me." Duffy Parr sat in front of his station, eating a big sandwich and drinking from a bottle that maybe had blockade in it. He lifted his bottle to them. Crispin waved back as Doc led him into Longcohr's store.
    It was a low, broad cave of a place, the floor crowded with counters, the walks lined with shelves. There were stacks of canned and packaged foods, plastic containers of cleaning materials, sheafs and strewings of jeans pants, work shirts, house dresses and aprons, leather and canvas shoes. Displays included flashlights, cosmetics, cheap dishes, glass jars of pickles, hammers and saws and bags of nails. Goods of a hundred kinds heaped the shelves, leaned in corners, hung from hooks.
    "How you come on, Doc?" called William Longcohr from beside the frozen foods counter. He was softly plump, with a heavy,