Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 (25 page)

 
          
    The
neighbour
lady with the eggs wrapped in a napkin, knocked on Mr. Howard's door the next
day for five minutes. When she opened the door, finally, and walked in, she
found nothing but
specules
of rug-dust floating in
the sunny air, the big halls were empty, the cellar smelled of coal and
clinkers, and the attic had nothing in it but a rat, a spider, and a faded
letter. 'Funniest thing,' she said many times in the following years, 'whatever
happened to Mr. Howard.'

 
          
    And adults, being what
they are, never observant, paid no attention to the children playing 'Poison'
on
Oak Bay Street
, in all
the following autumns. Even when the children leaped over one particular square
of cement, twisted about and glanced at the marks on it which read:

 
          
   
'M.
HOWARD — R.I.P.'

 
          
    'Who's Mr. Howard,
Billy?'

 
          
    'Aw, I guess he's the
guy who laid the cement.'

 
          
    'What does R.I.P.
mean?'

 
          
    'Aw, who knows? You're
poison!
you
stepped on it!'

 
          
    'Get along, get along,
children; don't stand in Mother's path! Get along now!'

 
          
YOU are a child in a small town. You
are, to be exact, eight years old, and it is growing late at night. Late, for
you, accustomed to bedding in at nine or nine-thirty; once in a while perhaps
begging Mom or Dad to let you stay up later to hear Sam and Henry on that strange
radio that is popular in this year of 1927. But most of the time you are in bed
and snug at this time of night.

 
          
    It is a warm summer
evening. You live in a small house on a small street in the outer part of town
where there are few street lights. There is only one store open, about a block
away; Mrs. Singer's. In the hot evening Mother has been ironing the Monday wash
and you have been intermittently begging for ice-cream and staring into the
dark.

 
          
    You and your mother are
all alone at home in the warm darkness of summer. Finally, just before it is
time for Mrs. Singer to close her store, Mother relents and tells you:

 
          
    'Run get a pint of
ice-cream and be sure she packs it tight.'

 
          
    You ask if you can get
a scoop of chocolate ice-cream on top, because you don't like vanilla, and
mother agrees. You clutch the money and run barefooted over the warm evening
cement pavement, under the apple trees and oak trees, towards the store. The
town is so quiet and far
off,
you can only hear the
crickets sounding in the spaces beyond the hot indigo trees that hold back the
stars.

 
          
    Your bare feet slap the
pavement, you cross the street and find Mrs. Singer moving ponderously about
her store, singing Yiddish melodies.

 
          
    'Pint ice-cream?' she
says.
'Chocolate on top?
Yes!'

 
          
    You watch her fumble
the metal top off the ice-cream freezer and manipulate the scoop, packing the
cardboard pint chock full with 'chocolate on top, yes!' You give the money,
receive the chill, icy pack, and rubbing it across your brow and cheek,
laughing, you thump
barefootedly
homeward. Behind
you, the lights of the lonely little store blink out and there is only a street
light shimmering on the corner, and the whole city seems to be going to sleep.
. .

 
          
    Opening the screen door
you find Mom still ironing. She looks hot and irritated, but she smiles just
the same.

 
          
    'When will Dad be home
from lodge-meeting?' you ask.

 
          
    'About eleven-thirty or
twelve,' Mother replies. She takes the ice-cream to the kitchen, divides it.
Giving you your special portion of chocolate, she dishes out some for herself
and the rest is put away, 'For Skipper and your father when they come.'

 
          
    Skipper is your
brother. He is your older brother. He's twelve and healthy, red-faced,
hawk-nosed, tawny-haired, broad-shouldered for his years, and always running.
He is allowed to stay up later than you. Not much later, but enough to make him
feel it is worth while having been born first. He is over on the other side of
town this evening to a game of kick-the-can and will be home soon. He and the
kids have been yelling, kicking, running for hours,
having
fun. Soon he will come clomping in, smelling of sweat and green grass on his
knees where he fell, and smelling very much in all ways like Skipper; which is
natural.

 
          
    You sit enjoying the
ice-cream. You are at the core of the deep quiet summer night.
Your mother and yourself and the night all around this small house
on this small street.
You lick each spoon of ice-cream thoroughly before
digging for another, and Mom puts her ironing-board away and the hot iron in
its case, and she sits in the armchair by the phonograph, eating her dessert
and saying, 'My lands, it was a hot day today. It's still hot. Earth soaks up
all the heat and lets it out at night. It'll be soggy sleeping.'

 
          
    You both sit there
listening to the summer silence. The dark is pressed down by every window and
door, there is no sound because the radio needs a new battery, and you have
played all the
Knickerbocker
Quartet records and Al
Jolson
and Two Black Crows records to exhaustion; so you
just sit on the hardwood floor by the door and look out into the dark
dark
dark
, pressing your nose
against the screen until the flesh of its tip is
moulded
into small dark squares.

 
          
    'I wonder where your
brother
is?
' Mother says after a while. Her spoon
scrapes on the dish. 'He should be home by now. It's almost nine-thirty.'

 
          
    'He'll be here,' you
say, knowing very well that he will be.

 
          
    You follow Mom out to
wash the dishes. Each sound, each
rattle
of spoon or
dish is amplified in the baked evening. Silently, you go to the living-room,
remove the couch cushions and, together, yank it open and extend it down into
the double bed that it secretly is. Mother makes the bed, punching pillows
neatly to flump them up for your head. Then, as you are unbuttoning your shirt,
she says:

 
          
    'Wait a while, Doug.'

 
          
    'Why?'

 
          
   
'Because.
I say so.'

 
          
    'You look funny, Mom.'

 
          
    Mom sits down a moment,
then stands up, goes to the door, and calls. You listen to her calling and
calling Skipper, Skipper,
Skiiiiiiiiperrrrrrr
over and over. Her calling goes out into the summer-warm dark and never comes
back. The echoes pay no attention.

 
          
   
Skipper.

 
          
   
Skipper!

 
          
    And as you sit on the
floor a coldness that is not ice-cream and not winter, and not part of summer's
heat, goes through you. You notice Mom's eyes sliding, blinking; the way she
stands undecided and is nervous.
All of these things.

 
          
    She opens the screen
door. Stepping out into the night she walks down the steps and down the front
sidewalk under the lilac bush. You listen to her moving feet.

 
          
    She calls again.
Silence.

 
          
    She calls twice more.
You sit in the room. Any moment now Skipper will reply, from down the long,
long narrow street:

 
          
    'All right, Mom! All
right, Mother! Hey!'

 
          
    But he doesn't answer.
And for two minutes you sit looking at the made-up bed, the silent radio, the
silent phonograph, at the chandelier with its crystal bobbins gleaming quietly,
at the rug with the scarlet and purple curlicues on it. You stub your toe on
the bed purposely to see if it hurts. It does.

 
          
    Whining, the screen
door opens, and Mother says,

 
          
    'Come on, Shorts. We'll
take a walk.'

 
          
   
'Where
to?'

 
          
    'Just down the block.
Come on. Better put your shoes on, though. You'll catch cold.'

 
          
    'No, I won't. I'll be
all right.'

 
          
    You take her hand.
Together you walk down
St. James
street
.
You smell lilacs in blossom; fallen apples lying crushed and odorous in the
deep grass. Underfoot, the concrete is still warm, and the crickets are
sounding louder against the darkening dark. You reach a corner, turn, and walk
towards the ravine.

 
          
    Off somewhere, a car
goes by, flashing its lights in the distance. There is such a complete lack of
life, light and activity. Here and there, back off from where you are walking
towards the ravine you see faint squares of light where people are still up. But
most of the houses, darkened, are sleeping already, and there are a few
lightless places where the occupants of a dwelling sit talking low dark talk on
their front porches. You hear a porch swing squeaking as you walk near.

 
          
    'I wish your father was
home,' says Mother. Her large hand tightens around your small one. 'Just
wait'll
I get that boy. I'll spank him within an inch of
his life.'

 
          
    A razor strop hangs in
the kitchen for this. You think of it, remember when Dad has doubled and
flourished it with muscled control over your frantic limbs. You doubt Mother
will carry out her promise.

 
          
    Now you have walked
another block and are standing by the holy black silhouette of the
German
Baptist
Church
at the Corner of Chapel Street and Glen Rock. In back of the church a hundred
yards away, the ravine begins. You can smell it. It has a dark sewer, rotten
foliage, thick green
odour
. It is a wide ravine that
cuts and twists across the town, a jungle by day, a place to let alone at
night, Mother has often declared.

 
          
    You should feel
encouraged by the nearness of the
German
Baptist
Church
,
but you are not — because the building is not illumined,
is
cold and useless as a pile of ruins on the ravine edge.

 
          
    You are only eight
years
old,
you know little of death, fear, or dread.
Death is the waxen effigy in the coffin when you were six and Grandfather
passed away — looking like a great fallen vulture in his casket, silent,
withdrawn, no more to tell you how to be a good boy, no more to comment succinctly
on politics. Death is your little sister one morning when you awaken at the age
of seven, look into her crib and see her staring up at you with a blind blue,
fixed and frozen stare until the men came with a small wicker basket to take
her away. Death is when you stand by her high-chair four weeks later and
suddenly realize she'll never be in it again, laughing and crying and making
you jealous of her because she was born. That is death.

 
          
    But this is more than
death.
This summer night wading deep in time and stars and
warm eternity.
It is an essence of all the things you will ever feel or
see or
hear
in your life again, being brought steadily
home to you all at once.

 
          
    Leaving the pavement,
you walk along a trodden, pebbled, weed-fringed path to the ravine's edge.
Crickets, in loud full drumming chorus now, are shouting to quiver the dead.
You follow obediently behind brave, fine, tall Mother who is defender of
all the
universe. You feel braveness because she goes
before, and you hang back a trifle for a moment, and then hurry on, too.
Together, then, you approach, reach and pause at the very edge of civilization.

 
          
   
The
ravine.

 
          
    Here and now, down
there in that pit of
jungled
blackness is suddenly
all the evil you will ever know. Evil you will never understand. All of the
nameless things are there. Later, when you have grown you'll be given names to
label them with. Meaningless syllables to describe the waiting nothingness.
Down there in the huddled shadow, among thick trees and trailed vines, lives
the
odour
of decay. Here, at this spot, civilization
ceases, reason ends, and a universal evil
takes
over.

 
          
    You realize you are
alone.
You and your mother.
Her hand trembles.

 
          
    Her hand
trembles
.

 
          
    Your belief in your
private world is shattered. You feel Mother tremble. Why? Is she, too,
doubtful? But she is bigger, stronger, more intelligent than
yourself
,
isn't she? Does she, too, feel that intangible menace, that groping out of
darkness, that crouching malignancy down below? Is there, then, no strength in
growing up?
no
solace in being an adult?
no
sanctuary in life?
no
flesh
citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of
midnights
? Doubts flush you. Ice-cream lives
again in your throat, stomach, spine and limbs; you are instantly cold as a
wind out of December-gone.