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In the previous episode, Becky makes
progress in communicating with the alien that’s recovering from the
spaceship crash at their house on the Arizona frontier.
Before I could teach the creature about
wrangling, he was going to have to speak and understand English.
Somebody had to teach him.
It couldn't be Edith. She was busy with the
household and her patients stopping by.
It couldn't be me or Caleb. We had to work
the range.
The vaquerós and their families could
barely speak English. They could have used lesson themselves!
The job naturally fell to Becky - the best
we could manage. That was okay by her. She was a teacher type at
heart.
Despite the number of Spanish speakers on
the K-10, most people in this country spoke English. That's what he
should concentrate on learning, I reasoned. I gave her a new nickname
to go along with Buttercup, Daisy and Sunshine: Creature Teacher.
"You might as well be called that. You
been doing it all along," I said, never having made her so happy
when I carved her a doll when she was little. She admired her mom and
Miss. Wilkinson, her pretty, young schoolteacher. It was only natural
she wanted to imitate those two fine women.
Becky formally started by teaching the
creature the Alphabet Song. The sound of him singing in his gargley
voice provided me and Edith fits of laughter hours after the lessons
were done. With practice, the squeaky trill lessened and the
impossible-to-place accent gradually went away.
Sometimes as Edith made dinner, I'd watch
Becky teach. I wanted to see how her lessons worked out. It was an
important job for a youngster. We had a lot of time, interest and
goodwill invested in the creature. I couldn't bring myself to trust
her ability completely.
I expected having to ask Miss. Wilkinson to
add the creature to her class roster. I knew it wouldn't be the ideal
solution for his indoctrination. He was still weak, not fit to make a
ten-league round trip ride (24 miles, 39 kilometers) to the
schoolhouse three days a week. Anyway, there was at least ten years
worth of knowledge squirreled away in Becky's head. That had to be
worth something. Furthermore, Miss. Wilkinson said Becky was her
brightest pupil.
All-in-all she went about it in a fairly
organized manner - for a kid. Becky began one of her lessons like
this: "You are a stranger. Stranger. My name is Becky. What is
your name?"
That made me smile as I was sure the
creature didn't think of himself as a stranger.
"Stranger," the creature repeated,
pointing to himself.
"That's right. You are a stranger. My
name is Becky. I am a girl. Girl," she said again, pointing to
herself. "What is your name?"
"Graax," he said, adding a click
with his tongue at the end of his name.
"Graax," Becky repeated without
the click.
"Graax," the creature repeated
with the click.
"Is the click in your name?" she
asked.
The creature didn't reply. He didn't
understand, I gathered.
"Graax?" she said with a click
sounding unlike the one the creature voiced. A human's mouth couldn't
match the timbre of the creature's.
The creature nodded.
"I will call you Graax," she said,
decisively making the click.
"Becky," Graax said with a gargley
accent and a click, motioning toward my daughter. "Buck," he
said, motioning toward me.
"Incredible," I said as I sat
there, amazed.
The creature looked at me with what I though
was wide-eyed wonder. "No. Graax," he corrected, motioning
toward himself.
"I know," I said and chuckled.
"You're incredible Mr. Graax."
With her worn-down, bitten pencil, my
daughter drew some rough sketches on the tablet I'd bought home from
Contention City. She printed what the picture was supposed to
represent underneath the sketch.
I thought about telling her to use her
McGuffy's, but I was too tired to do anything but sit there after
working all day on the range. It had pictures in it already.
She spelled out several names for the same
pictures. A stick-figure, she labeled "BOY." Then she wrote
"CALEB" under that. A stick drawing of a girl, who looked
just like the boy (except for hair curled at the sides and a dress),
she labeled "GIRL." Then she printed "BECKY" under
it and pointed to herself. "Me," she said.
She was a natural at teaching. The way Becky
conducted class didn't baffle the creature one iota. Some people, it
would have. For even though she was bright, she was just a child and
wasn't organized.
Graax was showing hints of his genius. He
learned our language faster than he healed, his big eyes taking in
everything. His brain seemed to mull around everything fast as
lightning. It appeared to me that Becky probably could have shown him
plain old lists of words with no pictures and he'd have learned just
as fast.
That shouldn't have been a surprise, though
it was. When you're dealing with a four-foot-six creature with big
eyes and green skin, everything is surprising. Just looking at him is
surprising. You never get used to the big eyes, small mouth and high
cheekbones.
To steer a spaceship from one planet to
another, you've got to be smart. I'd never seen anyone that smart. But
I'd never met anybody like Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.
Those men might have been equal of Graax, a historical figure for both
of our worlds, like Christopher Columbus.
With the way he'd been injured and how
troubling it must have been for him to get used to our cabin, I didn't
know if I should feel sorry for him.
Then, with the way he was seeing a place
different from the one where he came from, I didn't know if I should
envy him. He was exploring a new land like my father and grandfather
had done. While that was exciting, there were simple comforts and
certainties he had to give up. Often the only profit you get from a
venture was the adventure.
Considering a society like the one he must
have come from, what could we humans have that he would want? It
wasn't practical for them to come here, the best I could see. Just
adventure and knowledge for the sake of itself. Maybe there was a
little fame for him like Columbus enjoyed at the court of King
Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella I. If his planet was anything like
Earth, people there would come out to hear him speak about what he'd
seen here.
It was a steep price to pay for notoriety.
The creature almost didn't live to tell any of his people about it. He
likely wouldn't be able to get back home. They didn't make any
conveyance like the one he crashed into Earth. He was far from home,
and others like him. Here, he'd live out the remainder of his days,
always a stranger among us.
Or was he really alone? I couldn't have
imagined any group of humans moving his crashed skyship. There must be
more of them out there somewhere.
If Ike Renner or somebody like him had found
him, or if nobody found him, the creature would have certainly died.
Either God or fate was smiling on him by having me be the one to find
him. I even brought him to a doctor.
Looking back, finding Graax touched off the
second half of my life. People had called me smart before, but I was
smart only in the way a man who is a good steward of his business and
other personal affairs is smart. The better word is
"clever." I was also blind. I had wondered what the purpose
of life was and asked other big questions before, but hadn't done much
more than ask them, ground down by diurnal routine. People might say
I'd had a good practical education. They might have debated the worth
of the knowledge I was pursuing now. But if you don't ask ever the
kinds of questions I was starting to ask then life bucks you like a
bronco and to get bucked like that ain't practical!
I started by reading John Bunyan's The
Pilgrim's Progress, which we had and I never read, and then Charles
Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which Edith suggested and ordered
from the company that provided her medical books. I knew I'd spend the
rest of my life trying to sort the two groups of ideas out. They both
had their points.
With all the risks Graax faced, I couldn't
help envying him. He was on a planet new to him, seeing things for the
first time, things men like him never seen before. While adventuring
might not get him a fat bank balance - most often those adventurers
I've read about, having lived rich lives, die poor - he lived his
strange life well.
Like Graax, I'd be willing to give up some
comforts to make a difference. There's a part of me forever at my
grandpa's knee, next to a blazing stove, listening to his tales of the
frontier days, when snow drifts reached up taller than a man, there
wasn't anything like a railroad out here and the Indians were
bloodthirsty. In my wide-eyed wonder, I'd tell myself about the big
adventure I'd have when I grew up and how I'd tell my grandkids all
about it.
Money always seemed scarce and responsibility
a burden when I got older. I responded to both of those yokes and forgot
about all other attachments.
I'd imagined if I were learning a language
from another planet, I'd find it more frustrating and intimidating than
Graax did. The two languages would be very different. You wouldn't be
able to cheat by matching what one word sounded like in one language to
what it was in another like you could do learning Spanish. You would
have to learn everything from the simple 'he', 'she', 'we', and 'be' to
the words with many more letters from the beginning and then put those
words together in ways different from what they were in your language.
Even something completely different from English or Spanish, like
Chinese or Greek, was still a human language, designed and made to be
spoken by humans. You never could say that about the garble the creature
spoke. I imagined our mouths couldn't be made to use the gargley
language Graax spoke, so it would sound like anything Graax's people
could understand. I promised myself I'd have a good talk with him when
he spoke better English. It wouldn't be long considering how quickly he
was learning.
A week later, I judged again Becky was still
doing fine with Graax's lessons. I hoped she'd gotten some of her talent
from me, so I could count on some of it when it came time to teach Graax
roping and riding.
©2003 StoriesByEmail.com
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