The Best of Gene Wolfe

                                                             ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

                                                             Push off, and sitting well in order smite

                                                             The sounding furrows, for my purpose holds

                                                             To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

                                                             Of all the western stars, until I die.

                                                             It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;

                                                             It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

                                                             And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

The young man and the young woman stopped at a delicatessen and bought sandwiches that the young woman paid for, she saying that because the young man was driving, her self-respect (she was careful not to say honor) demanded it. They also bought a six-pack of beer that the young man paid for, he saying that his own self-respect demanded it (he too was careful not to say honor) because she had paid for the sandwiches.

Then they followed the directions Dr. Insula had given them and so came to a sandy riverbank, where they lifted the aluminum canoe from the Toyota and set sail for the little pine-covered island a hundred yards or so downstream.

There they explored the whole place and threw stones into the water, and sat listening to the wind tell of old things among the boughs of the largest pine.

And when they had cooled the beer in the leaf-brown river, and eaten the sandwiches they had brought, they paddled back to the spot where they had parked the Toyota, debating how they could tell Dr. Insula he had been mistaken about the island when they came next week—how they could tell him there was no magic there.

But when the next week came (as the next week always does) and they stood on the shadowed, creaking porch and knocked at the water-spotted oak door, an old woman crossed the street to tell them it was no use to knock.

“He passed on a week ago yesterday,” she said. “It was such a shame. He’d come out to talk to me that morning, and he was so happy because he was going to meet with his students the next day. He must have gone into his garage after that; that was where they found him.”

“Sitting in his boat,” the young woman said.

The old woman nodded. “Why, yes. I suppose you must have heard about it.”

The young man and the young woman looked at each other then, and thanked her, and walked away. Afterward they talked about it sometimes and thought about it often, but it was not until much later (when it was time for the long, long vacation that stretches from the week before Christmas to the beginning of the new semester in January and they would have to separate for nearly a month) that they discovered Dr. Insula had not been mistaken about the island after all.

AFTERWORD

I love this story. In truth, I like all the stories in this book (although not all the stories I have written), but this is a special favorite. Not because it ended the cycle I began with “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories,” but because it so resolutely refuses to be like other stories. It is its own wistful self, always, weeping as it smiles. I hope you love it, too.

REDBEARD

 I

t doesn’t matter how Howie and I became friends, except that our friendship was unusual. I’m one of those people who’ve moved into the area since . . . Since what? I don’t know; someday I’ll have to ask Howie. Since the end of the sixties or the Truman Administration or the Second World War. Since something.

Anyway, after Mara and I came with our little boy, John, we grew conscious of an older stratum. They are the people who were living here before. Howie is one of them; his grandparents are buried in the little family cemeteries that are or used to be attached to farms—all within twenty miles of my desk. Those people are still here, practically all of them, like the old trees that stand among the new houses.

By and large we don’t mix much. We’re only dimly aware of them, and perhaps they’re only dimly aware of us. Our friends are new people too, and on Sunday mornings we cut the grass together. Their friends are the children of their parents’ friends, and their own uncles and cousins; on Sunday mornings they go to the old clapboard churches.

Howie was the exception, as I said. We were driving down U.S. 27—or rather, Howie was driving and I was sitting beside him smoking a cigar and having a look around. I saw a gate that was falling down, with a light that was leaning way over, and beyond it just glimpsed, a big, old, tumbledown wooden house with young trees sprouting in the front yard. It must have had about ten acres of ground, but there was a boarded-up fried-chicken franchise on one side of it and a service station on the other.

“That’s Redbeard’s place,” Howie told me.

I thought it was a family name, perhaps an anglicization of Barbarossa. I said, “It looks like a haunted house.”

“It is,” Howie said. “For me, anyway. I can’t go in there.”

We hit a chuckhole, and I looked over at him.

“I tried a couple times. Soon as I set my foot on that step, something says, ‘This is as far as you go, buster,’ and I turn around and head home.”

After a while I asked him who Redbeard was.

“This used to be just a country road,” Howie said. “They made it a Federal Highway back about the time I was born, and it got a lot of cars and trucks and stuff on it. Now the Interstate’s come through, and it’s going back to about what it was.

“Back before, a man name of Jackson used to live there. I don’t think anybody thought he was much different, except he didn’t get married till he was forty or so. But then, a lot of people around here used to do that. He married a girl named Sarah Sutter.”

I nodded, just to show Howie I was listening.