Free All Flesh Is Grass by Clifford D. Simak Page A

individualist. He wasn’t. He was just a big stuffed shirt. And Hiram Martin was no individualist. Not in my book, he wasn’t. He was just a schoolyard bully who had grown up into a stupid cop.
    â€œDon’t you think so?” Nancy asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “I have never thought about it.”
    And I thought—for God’s sake, her education’s showing, her years in an eastern college, her fling at social work in the New York welfare center, her year-long tour of Europe. She was too sure and confident, too full of theory and of knowledge. Millville was her home no longer. She had lost the feel and sense of it, for you do not sit off to one side and analyze the place that you call your home. She still might call this village home, but it was not her home. And had it ever been, I wondered? Could any girl (or boy) call a bone-poor village home when they lived in the one big house the village boasted, when their father drove a Cadillac, and there was a cook and maid and gardener to care for house and yard? She had not come home; rather she had come back to a village that would serve her as a social research area. She would sit up here on her hilltop and subject the village to inspection and analysis and she’d strip us bare and hold us up, flayed and writhing, for the information and amusement of the kind of people who read her kind of book.
    â€œI have a feeling,” she said, “that there is something here that the world could use, something of which there is not a great deal in the world. Some sort of catalyst that sparks creative effort, some kind of inner hunger that serves to trigger greatness.”
    â€œThat inner hunger,” I said. “There are families in town who can tell you all you want to know about that inner hunger.”
    And I wasn’t kidding. There were Millville families that at times went just a little hungry; not starving, naturally, but never having quite enough to eat and almost never the right kind of things to eat. I could have named her three of them right off, without even thinking.
    â€œBrad,” she said, “you don’t like the idea of the book.”
    â€œI don’t mind,” I said, “I have no right to mind. But when you write it, please, write it as one of us, not as someone who stands off and is a bit amused. Have a bit of sympathy. Try to feel a little like these people you write about. That shouldn’t be too hard; you’ve lived here long enough.”
    She laughed, but it was not one of her merry laughs. “I have a terrible feeling that I may never write it. I’ll start it and I’ll write away at it, but I’ll keep going back and changing it, because the people I am writing of will change, or I’ll see them differently as time goes on, and I’ll never get it written. So, you see, there’s no need to worry.”
    More than likely she was right, I thought. You had to have a hunger, a different kind of hunger, to finish up a book. And I rather doubted that she was as hungry as she thought.
    â€œI hope you do,” I said. “I mean I hope you get it written. And I know it will be good. It can’t help but be.”
    I was trying to make up for my nastiness and I think that she knew I was. But she let it pass.
    I had been childish and provincial, I told myself, to have acted as I had. What difference did it make? What possible difference could it make for me, who had stood on the street that very afternoon and felt a hatred for the geographic concept that was called the town of Millville?
    This was Nancy Sherwood. This was the girl with whom I had walked hand in hand when the world had been much younger. This was the girl I had thought of this very afternoon as I’d walked along the river, fleeing from myself.
    What was wrong, I asked myself.
    And: “Brad, what is wrong?” she asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “Is there something