Текст книги "Summer Morning, Summer Night"

Автор книги: Raymond Douglas Bradbury

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

THE WADERS

THE FEET WAITED inside the door, burning in their leather boxes. The feet waited inside a thousand doors and the day burned green and yellow and blue, the day was a great circus banner. The trees stamped their images fiercely upon clouds like summer snow. The sidewalks fried the ants and the grass quivered like a green ocean. And the feet waited, white with a winter of waiting, large and small feet, tender with six months of imprisonment, delicate and blunt feet, apprehensive and wiggling in warm darkness. And far and away and above came the muted and then the whining arguments about the season of the year, the temperature, colds, winter hardly over, or spring hardly over, rather. But this, said the whining voices, the insistent voices, was green summer, this was the day of the sun. And the feet worked their toes together and clenched the material of the socks in darkness, waiting.

There, just beyond the squeaking porch, the ferns were a green water sprinkled softly on the air. There waited the great pool of grass with its tender heads of clover and its devil weed, with its old acorns hidden, with its ant civilizations. It was toward this grass country that the feet were slowly inching. As the body of a boy on a sweltering July day yearns toward swimming holes, so the feet are drawn to oceans of oak-cooled grass and seas of minted clover and dew.

As the naked bodies of boys plunge like white stones and bobble like brown corks in the far country rivers, so the feet wish to plunge and swim in the summer lawns, refreshed.

Well, said a woman’s voice, well. A screen door opened. All right, said the voice, all right, but if you catch your death of cold, don’t come to me, sniffling.

Bang! Out the door! Over the rail! Watch the ferns! And into the lake of grass! Under the shady oaks! Off with the shoes, and now, running wet in the dew, running dry and cool under apple shade and oak shade and elm shade, a hot race over desert sidewalks, and the coolness of limes again on the far side, the touch of green ice and menthol, the feet burrowing like animals, feeling for old autumn’s leaves buried deep, feeling for a year ago’s burnt rose-petals, for anthills. The pompous, nuzzling big white toe, jamming into cool dark earth, the little toes picking at milky-purple clover buds, and now, just standing, the hot feet drowning in cool tides of grass. Time enough later, to venture tenderly out on cinder drives and rocky paths where the enemy, the shattered bottles, brown and glittering white, lie waiting to test one’s softened calluses. Time enough later for these marshmallow, winter-soft feet to slim themselves like Indian braves, paint themselves with colored dirts, bruise themselves with rocks and thorns.

Now, now, just the cool grass. The cool grass and a thousand other bare feet, running and running there.

THE DOG

HE WAS THE town. He was the town compounded and reduced, refined to its essences, its odors and its strewing.

He walked through the town or ran through the town any hour of the day or night, whenever the whim took him, when the moon drew him with its nocturnal tides or the sun brought him like a carved animal from a Swiss clock. He was small; with a handle you could have carried him like a black valise. And he was hairy as copper-wool, steel-wool, shavings and brushes. And he was never silent when he could be loud.

He came home from the cold night lake with a smell of water in his pelt. He came from the sands and shook a fine dust of it under the bed. He smelled of June rain and October maple leaves and Christmas snows and April rains. He was the weather, hot or cold. He fetched it back from wherever he was, wherever he had been. The smell of brass; he had lounged against fire station poles amid intervals of tobacco spitting and come home feverish from political conversation. The smell of marble; he had trotted through the cool tombs of the court house. The smell of oil; he had lain in the cool lubrication pit at the gas station, away from summer. Frosted like a birthday cake he entered from January. Baked like a rabbit he came in from July with world-shaking messages buried in his clock-spring hair.

But mostly he followed the Revolution; he moved in the sounds and shadowing of boys, and more often than not, his tongue slickly protruding in a smile, he wore a hand, like a white hat, moving, on his head....

THE RIVER THAT WENT TO THE SEA

EVERY NIGHT AFTER kissing mother, mashing her warm sweet hugeness into his small arms, and rubbing the abrasive cheek of father, so full of the odor of tobacco and machinery, he would run to the bathroom and stand enchanted with the secret note in his hand, poised, ready to send it on its way. And the note would read, “Dear Mermaid, I am Tom Spaulding and I live at 11 South Saint James in Green Town, Illinois and—”

Then he would press the toilet handle. The clear cool waters would gush with a throttling roar down the tile throat. At the very last moment, he would drop his secret note into the vanishing river. The waters would cease flowing. All would be quiet. The note was gone. He would stand for a moment thinking, It’s going on down to the sea, now, way on down to the sea. And then he would go to bed. I wonder if she’s reading it now, he thought, lying there. I wonder if she is.

OVER, OVER, OVER, OVER, OVER, OVER, OVER, OVER!

IN CHILDHOOD HE saw the yellow rubber ball flung over the topmost slats of the house, pause against the Illinois summer sky and come dribbling down the opposite side, while the children sang.

“Over, over, over! Over, Annie, over!”

Sometimes it sounded like a person calling a dog.

“Rover, rover, rover!” they cried. “Rover, any Rover?”

On the moist green lawn at seven in the evening when the distant clatter of dishes told of mother cleansing them in the house, as shadows were spread like carpets for them to sit on, they began to play the game.

“Pick a word?” asked Hilda, flopping her buttery coils of hair. “Umm.” She squinched her nose until the freckles were lost. “How about ‘storm’?”

The seven other children digested the word. They looked at each other with questions in their shadowsy eyes. “Yes,” someone said. “Yes,” everyone agreed. “Let’s try storm.”

“Storm, storm, storm, storm, storm, storm!” they cried. “Storm, storm, storm, storm, storm, storm, storm, storm, storm!”

Then they stopped abruptly, withheld their mirth a moment and one of them said, “What does that mean? Storm? Is it a word? It sounds so queer. That isn’t a word at all!”

THE RPOJECTOR

HE HAD THIS small motion picture projector hidden in his head and when he went to bed at night he ran films from the time the lights went out until his eyes closed and he could no longer see the oblong on the wall full of witches and castles and monsters and misty seas. He ran the films every night for years and nobody knew how talented he was. He never told a soul about his magnificent ability. It was better that way.

THE PEOPLE WITH SEVEN ARMS

“IT CAME LATE,” said Grandfather. “For Tom. It started early for you and it’s still going on. Discovering things, looking at things, smelling, sniffing, tasting things. Hearing things. It should never stop. It stops for most people, but they shouldn’t let it. Don’t let it. Keep it up all your life. I do. I do keep it up every day. Like with the lawn, and the dandelion wine. See, hear, feel, touch, smell, know, and you love. Put out your hands. God gave you seven. Your two regular ones, plus nose, mouth, eyes, ears, skin.

“When you stop knowing you stop loving and when you stop loving you’re not living, and when you’re not living, Douglas boy, you might as well be dead.”

A SERIOUS DISCUSSION (or EVIL IN THE WORLD)

“DOUGLAS,” SAID GRANDFATHER, “You must Iearn as soon as possible the difference between the real world and the world the way you would like it. The difference between the way some people teach us the world is, and the way it happens to be. For only then will you know what to expect, boy. You will see the world clear. And you won’t be a cynic, a man with a bunch of dreams still lying around in the back of the mind, that turns him sour on everything. And you won’t be a skeptic, either, really. I don’t even know if there’s a name for it, boy. You’ll just be someone that looks at the world straight off and sees it. You can even enjoy the duplicity of man, somehow. By recognizing that evil is natural to man, you should be able to cope with it better.”

THE FIREFLIES

“FIREFLIES NEVER QUITE make it back,” said Grandfather, on the bottom front porch stair.

“Make it back where?”

“My father used to say they were stars got shaken loose. On summer nights, he said, God cleaned his furnace, shook it down. Coals dropping everywhere. Run out and pick up a few, he’d say. I’d run. Come back, a light in each hand.”

“I’ll catch some,” said Douglas.

“Thanks.”

Douglas moved like a breath. There was darkness and stars in the heavens and stars on the lawn.

“They don’t even burn!”

“No. Gentle now.”

“They’ve gone out!”

“Startled.”

The fireflies were transferred to Grandfather’s cupped hands. Later, they lit up again.

“I wish I could glow like that.”

“Why, boy, you do. We all do, at times. Poets say love burns with a pure light. Here’s proof. Anything as beautiful as this must be important.”

“I don’t light up like that.”

“Saw you looking at your mother yesterday. In a dark room, bet I could read a book by your face.”

“Aw.”

“Yes, sir!” Grandfather held up the fireflies. “Better let them get back to brightening the corner where they are.” He opened his hand. They lit the air softly, flying away. “Yes, sir, love is a wonderful thing.”

“We go out in the lobby and eat popcorn or go to the toilet until it’s over, matinees.”

“You’ve got yourself an argument.”

“It’s pretty silly, some Saturdays.”

“You ever see Grandma and me on the movie screen down there?”

“Heck, no.”

“Ever seen your mother, father, yourself, your brother on that screen?”

“Not yet.”

“I’m afraid you never will. Or any of your friends or aunts or uncles, or the boarders here. On the day when the Elite theatre starts showing Grandma and me and your mother and father and all the other relatives and boarders, tell me, I’ll come down with you. We’ll stay until midnight and they sweep us out with the popcorn. In the meantime, Douglas, you keep right on marching to the restroom when things get silly on the screen. You’ve got good common sense in that head. Everybody knows love isn’t like that.”

“Charlie Henwood says he sure hopes not.”

“Maybe you’re wondering what it is, then? It’s what I said; it’s you and me and Grandma and all our children and the children of uncles and cousins, and all the boarders here. It’s how we all feel about each other most of the time, subtract the fights and meanness. Simple as that. It’s trying to live peaceably in an un-peaceable world. It’s Grandma baking a pumpkin pie and me whittling you a hickory whistle. It’s you sitting here right now listening very politely. And you and your brother going to sleep winter nights and warming your feet, one on the other. It’s your mother worrying when your father works late, and there may have been an accident. It’s all of us laughing at the dinner table. It’s Neva playing for us to sing in the parlor. It’s sitting here on the porch nights, or a game of checkers in the fall, inside. It’s so darned many things I can’t tell them all. But it’s a miracle if you find them on that silver screen downtown Saturday matinees. Almost as hard to find in the evening shows. Once a year maybe I see Grandma on the screen, or myself, or someone I know. The rest of the time it might as well be a bunch of rabbits hitting each other on the head with clubs, for all I understand the shows. Do you know why they put those kissing scenes in films? They can’t think of anything to say that means anything. It’s the trademark of an empty man. When they show you that sort of thing, Douglas, you just stroll right out of the theatre and stand on the nearest street-corner. You’ll see more real love in the popcorn man’s cat and her kittens than you’ll ever buy for a dime at the show. Don’t let it fool you. The kiss is just the first note of the first bar, played by a piccolo. What follows is either a symphony or a riot, everyone trying to get out the door.”

“What good is love?”

“Good. Well, I guess you’d call it a kind of lubricant. It stops friction. There are so many elbows to knock and feet to step on in this world. And so many people swatting each other in the face with pan-cake flippers, accidentally, of course, you need to be baptized in this first-grade oil, love, or you wouldn’t get anywhere. Your brakes would burn out on the first mile.”

THE CIRCUS

THE EMPTY MEADOW lay beyond the town.

At eight o’clock, Tom Spaulding came walking through the dusk to the edge of the meadow and stood breathing in the scents that blew from the summer grass in whispers.

“This is where it was,” he thought. “If only I could have come. If only I hadn’t had a cold and stayed in bed.”

He walked slowly to the center of the meadow. He stood sniffing, under the great chandelier of stars as all the blazing constellations caught fire and burned above him.

“Here’s where the lions were...”

The yellow smell, the smell of carpeting in sunlight, the smell of African dust, the smell of violent acid. A few quartz pebbles glittered in the dry grass like yellow animal eyes, and turned to stone once more as he bent down.

“Here’s where the elephants stood.”

The wind was large, towering above him, touching him with a cold, wrapping-around touch. The wind swayed back and forth, invisible. And the smell of the elephant was like a huge barn.

“Here’s where I’d have fed them.”

He picked up a few scattered peanut-shells, shoved them in his pocket after looking them over and over.

“And here’s where the monkeys were and the zebras and camels.” The dry bushes chattered in the wind. Summer lightning painted great luminous stripes upon the hills, soft, pale, and gone.

There hadn’t even been a circus parade. The lions had been silenced outside of town by the Lions inside of town. The elephants had been vanquished by the Elks. The calliope had been throttled and choked with red-tape and the entire circus assemblage, band, wagons, and clowns had fled before an Ark of Moose, Eagles and Oddfellows. The Kiwanis, reaching out its arm for its proverbial handshake, had had its knuckles slapped by Colonel Quartermain. Quartermain, Quartermain, the name was an unending repetition in the crowd of days, his face appeared in every window, on every street, he spoke from every monument on Memorial morning, he stood silent on Armistice Day facing East, he cried out from between the tar-black Civil War cannons on the Fourth of July. His eye was glittered at you from the clawing eagle’s head on the back of every dollar bill. His teeth smiled at you evilly in the store front cases of town dentists. His domed head glinted suggestively each time you opened the ice box and reached in for a fresh farm egg. He had fired off his mouth and sent the circus in panic to a forest beyond town. And passed a law preventing the employment of children therein when the poles were going up in the cold dawn light. Quartermain, Quartermain. Tom thought of him and knew the hatred that Douglas must know for the buzzard and the vulture and the snake.

“And here’s where the ring was and the man in the black silk hat saying, ‘Ladies ’n Gentlemen!’”

He stood at the exact center of the quiet meadow.

“And up there was where the men and ladies in pink cotton candy clothes swung on trapezes.”

Now the night wind whirled in a great merry-go-round about, stirring the odors, colors, sounds, tossing tin-cans fitfully in gusts through the grasses that swished like lions walking, and Tom staring at the sky through which papers flew and soared, dipping, to fly again. The whole meadow shook and quivered with the calliope wind and leaves spun in circles, the boy turning his hand out to them with an invisible whip. His eyes fixed the sky. Birds, crying, flew away.

The wind died.

Tom stood for only a minute longer, then his gaze dropped, his hands dropped. He walked across the meadow. He stood at its rim, and the numerous odors were richly ripened and might last, if savored carefully, if he didn’t come too often, until next year, until another late spring and summer. Even on winter nights, if you came here, if the wind was right, and the night not too full of moon, anything might happen.

“This is where it was, all right,” he said to himself.

And he walked away from the rich meadow, back into the summer night town.

THE CEMETERY (or THE TOMBYARD)

IT HAD BECOME a familiar pattern by now. Every summer, on a certain July Sunday, they packed themselves into the open air Kissel and thundered out on quiet highways, down dirt roads and through woods to Green Ravine Rest, and here on every hand, as numerous as tenpins, lay relatives, aunts and cousins who had died at night, uncles who had died at high noon, fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers who had wanted to grow up to be firemen and nurses and now were nailed into packets and crossed with stones. And always, starting four years back, Charles had run off, alone, among the horrified stones, frozen at what they represented, and he would fumble his fingers over the chiselled names, reading, with eyes shut, in silent Braille, whispering the name he touched: “B, A, N, G, L, Le, y. Bangley! Died 1924.” And on and on, more names, more wanderings. And four years ago he had happened on this one stone building in the ravine, tried the door, found it open, and entered into silence. Oh, how frightened had the aunts been, and the cousins scurrying to find him. But he had waited until he felt like it and come out, not telling where he’d hid. Saying he had simply run off. It meant a licking, but it was worth it.

He would hear them calling, far off in the tomb ravine, among the summer butterflies and the green moss echoes, shouting down the long throat of the underground tunnel, standing by the solemn, reflecting creek, hands up to mouths, calling, calling for him. And he would giggle, stifling his laughter inside, like corking water into a jug. And he would run still further away from them, among the mushroom tombstones that grew up like bits of white cheese and moonstone in the shadows of the summer day. In this land of ravine silence, his feet pattered with the sound of rain along the soft paths of grass, and the further he ran, the more numerous the names on the stones became, Belton, Sears, Roller, Smith, Brown, Davis, Braden, Jones. Lackel, Nixon, Merton, Beddoes, Spaulding. A land of names and silences. And far far away his mother and his father and his aunts and his cousins calling his name:

“Charles, Charles, Charles, Charlie, Charles!”

He stopped when he reached his particular tomb building, slipped wide the door with the broken lock and hurried in. It was a tomb like a wedding cake, fancifully ornate, impossible and lovely. It had four windows facing the directions of the compass, looking out upon moss silence and weeping trees and fluttering water shelves that lowered themselves down a shadowed hill into the tunnel. Along the path now, like a string of white butterflies, flew the girl cousins, hair yellow on the air, eyes flashing.

“Charles, Charles, Charles, Charlie!”

And after them, more serious at the game than the children, came the tall aunts, their white skirts winging on the still air, panic making them begin to stumble and whirl about. “Charles!”

SIXTY SUMMERS burned the grass and sixty autumns plucked the trees to emptiness, and sixty winters froze the creek waters and cracked the toppling stones, while winds raced cold about, and sixty springs opened up new green meadows of color where butterflies were thick as flowers, and flowers as numerous as butterflies.

And then, one autumn afternoon, with the sky iron cold and the wind hurling tins of thunderous and invisible sound through the flying trees, an old woman edged along the path, peering here or there, alone, as delicate as chaff, as yellow as the last leaf.

She paused before the tomb building and nodded and sighed. She went to the long remembered window and peered in. Dust was thickened on the outside, and this she removed with her dainty flowered handkerchief, slowly and tremblingly.

And there was the small boy, leaned against the high sill, in the silent darkness, looking at her, looking out at silence and autumn hardness and the bare earth, and this old woman returned after so long. There was his head, like a dried fruit, and the fragile, timeworn arm and delicate fingers.

“Charles,” she said to the window, standing back. “Charlie. I thought of you today. For the first time in years. How long’s it been? Sixty years. I forgot all about you. After that first year. I went to Philadelphia and forgot all about it. I thought it was only a dream. And I was married and had children and now my husband’s gone and I live alone, and I’m old, seventy years old now, Charles, and I was sitting in my house, for I came back to this only a year ago, and I looked at the sky this morning and suddenly I remembered. It was like a dream, I couldn’t believe it, so I had to come to be sure. And now I see it’s true, here you are. And I don’t know what to say.”

The small child looked out through dust and glass.

“I’m sorry, Charlie, do you hear me, I’m sorry. It’s too late, but I’m sorry. But listen, Charles, listen. My life is over and it’s just as if it never was. When you’re seventy it’s like an instant. And now I’m here to where you were and have always been, and you shouldn’t be jealous and hate me, for it comes to all of us, and now it’s coming to me.”