Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (18 page)

 
          
 
But Cora was a statue now, watching the pencil
as one watches a snail leaving an exceptional trail across a flat stone in the
early morning.

 
          
 
"
It's
noon!" cried Tom again.

 
          
 
Cora glanced up, stunned.

 
          
 
"Why, it seems only a moment ago we wrote
to that Philadelphia Coin Collecting Company, am't that right, Benjy?"
Cora smiled a smile much too dazzling for a woman fifty-five years old.
"While you wait for your vittles, Tom, just can't you build that mailbox?
Bigger than Mrs. Brabbam's, please?"

 
          
 
"I'll nail up a shoe box."

 
          
 
"Tom Gibbs." She rose pleasantly.
Her smile said. Better run.

 
          
 
better work, better do! "I want a big,
pretty mailbox. All white, for Benjy to paint our name on in black spelling. I
won't have any shoe box for my very first real letter."

 
          
 
And it was done.

 
          
 
Benjy lettered the finished mailbox: mrs. cora
gibbs, while Tom stood grumbling behind him.

 
          
 
"What's it say?"

 
          
 
"'MR. TOM GIBBS,'" Said Benjy
quietly, painting.

 
          
 
Tom blinked at it for a minute, quietly, and
then said, "I'm still hungry. Someone light the fire."

 
          
 
There were no stamps. Cora turned white. Tom
was made to hitch up the horse and drive to Green Fork to buy some red ones, a
green, and ten pink stamps with dignified gentlemen printed on them. But Cora
rode along to be certain Tom didn't hurl these first letters in the creek. When
they rode home, the first thing Cora did, face glowing, was poke in the new
mailbox.

 
          
 
"You crazy?" said Tom.

 
          
 
"No harm looking."

 
          
 
That afternoon she visited the mailbox six
times. On the seventh, a woodchuck jumped out. Tom stood laughing in the door,
pounding his knees. Cora chased him out of the house, still laughing.

 
          
 
Then she stood in the window looking down at
her mailbox right across from Mrs. Brabbam's. Ten years ago the Widow Lady had
plunked her letter box right under Cora's nose, almost, when she could as
easily have built it up nearer her own cabin. But it gave Mrs. Brabbam an
excuse to float like a flower on a river down the hill path, flip the box wide
with a great coughing and rustling, from time to time spying up to see if Cora
was watching. Cora always was. When caught, she pretended to sprinkle flowers
with an empty watering can, or pick mushrooms in the wrong season.

 
          
 
Next morning Cora was up before the sun had
warmed the strawberry patch or the wind had stirred the pines.

 
          
 
Benjy was sitting up in his cot when Cora
returned from the mailbox. "Too early," he said. "Postman won't
drive by yet."

 
          
 
"Drive by?"

 
          
 
"They come in cars this far out."

 
          
 
"Oh." Cora sat down.

 
          
 
"You sick, Aunt Cora?"

 
          
 
"No, no." She blinked. "It's
just, I don't recall in twenty years seeing no mail truck whistle by here. It
just came to me. All this time, I never seen no mailman at all."

 
          
 
"Maybe he comes when you're not
around."

 
          
 
"I'm up with the fog spunks, down with
the chickens. I never really gave it a thought, of course, but—" She
turned to look out the window, up at Mrs. Brabbam's house. "Benjy, I got a
kind of sneaking hunch." She stood up and walked straight out of the
cabin, down the dust path, Benjy following, across the thin road to Mrs.
Brabbam's mailbox. A hush was on the fields and hills. It was so early it made
you whisper.

 
          
 
"Don't break the law. Aunt Cora!"

 
          
 
"Shh! Here." She opened the box, put
her hand in like someone fumbling in a gopher hole. "And here, and
here." She rattled some letters into his cupped hands.

 
          
 
"Why, these been opened already! You open
these. Aunt Cora?"

 
          
 
"Child, I never touched them." Her
face was stunned. "This is the first time in my life I ever even let my
shadow touch this box."

 
          
 
Benjy turned the letters around and around,
cocking his head. "Why, Aunt Cora, these letters, they're ten years
old!"

 
          
 
"What!" Cora grabbed at them.

 
          
 
"Aunt Cora, that lady's been getting the
same mail every day for years. And they're not even addressed to Mrs. Brabbam,
they're to some woman named Ortega in Green Fork."

 
          
 
"Ortega, the Mexican grocery woman! All
these years," whispered Cora, staring at the worn mail in her hands.
"All these years."

 
          
 
They gazed up at Mrs. Brabbam's sleeping house
in the cool quiet morning.

 
          
 
"Oh, that sly woman, making a commotion
with her letters, making me feel small. All puffed out she was, swishing along,
reading her mail."

 
          
 
Mrs. Brabbam's front door opened.

 
          
 
"Put them back, Aunt Cora!"

 
          
 
Cora slammed the mailbox shut with time to
spare.

 
          
 
Mrs. Brabbam drifted down the path, stopping
here or there, quietly, to peer at the opening wild flowers.

 
          
 
"Morning," she said sweetly.

 
          
 
"Mrs. Brabbam, this is my nephew
Benjy."

 
          
 
"How nice." Mrs. Brabbam, with a
great swivel of her body, a flourish of her flour-white hands, rapped the
mailbox as if to shake the letters loose inside, flipped the lid, and extracted
the mail, covering her actions with her back. She made motions, and spun about
merrily, winking. "Wonderful! Why, just look at this letter from dear
Uncle George!"

 
          
 
"Well, ain't that nicer said Cora.

 
          
 
Then the breathless summer days of waiting.
The butterflies jumping orange and blue on the air, the flowers nodding about
the cabin, and the hard, constant sound of Benjy's pencil scribbling through
the afternoons. Benjy's mouth was always packed with food, and Tom was always
stomping in, to find lunch or supper late, cold, or both, or none at all.

 
          
 
Benjy handled the pencil with a delicious spread
of his bony hands, lovingly inscribing each vowel and consonant as Cora hovered
about him, making up words, rolling them on her tongue, delighted each time she
saw them roll out on the paper. But she wasn't learning to write. "It's so
much fun watching you write, Benjy. Tomorrow I'll start learning. Now take
another letter!"

 
          
 
They worked their way through ads about
Asthma, Trusses, and Magic, they joined the Rosicrucians, or at least sent for
a free Sealed Book all about the Knowledge that had been damned to oblivion.
Secrets from Hidden ancient temples and buried sanctuaries. Then there were
free packets of Giant Sunflower

 
          
 
seeds, and something about heartburn. They had
worked back to page 127 of Quarter Murder Magazine on a bright summer morning
when . . .

 
          
 
"Listen!" said Cora.

 
          
 
They listened.

 
          
 
"A car," said Benjy.

 
          
 
And up the blue hills and through the tall
fiery green pines and along the dusty road, mile by mile, came the sound of a car
riding along and along, until finally, at the bend, it came full thundering,
and in an instant Cora was out the door running, and as she ran she heard and
saw and felt many things. First, from the corner of her eye, she saw Mrs.
Brabbam gliding down the road from the other direction. Mrs. Brabbam froze when
she saw the bright green car boiling on the grade, and there was the whistle of
a silver whistle and the old man in the car leaned out just before Cora arrived
and said, "Mrs. Gibbs?" "Yes!" she cried. "Mail for
you, ma'am," he said, and held it toward her. She put out her hand, then
drew it back, remembering. "Oh," she said, "please, would you
mind, would you put it, please ... in my mailbox?" The old man squinted at
her, at the mailbox, back at her, and laughed. "Don't mind," he said,
and did just that, put the mail in the box,

 
          
 
Mrs. Brabbam stood where she was, not moving,
eyes wild. "Any mail for Mrs. Brabbam?" asked Cora.

 
          
 
"That's all." And the car dusted
away down the road.

 
          
 
Mrs. Brabbam stood with her hands clenched
together. Then, without looking in her own letter box, turned and rustled
swiftly up her path, out of sight.

 
          
 
Cora walked around her mailbox twice, not
touching it for a long time. "Benjy, I've got me some letters!" She
reached in delicately and took them out and turned them over. She put them
quietly in his hand. "Read them to me. Is my name on the front?"

 
          
 
"Yes'm." He opened the first letter
with due carefulness and read it aloud in the summer morning:

 
          
 
"'Dear Mrs. Gibbs . . .'"

 
          
 
He stopped and let her savor it, her eyes half
shut, her mouth

 
          
 
moving the words. He repeated it for artistic
emphasis and then went on: "'We are sending you our free folder, enclosed,
from the Intercontinental Mailing Schools concerning full particulars on how
you, too, can take our Correspondence Course in Sanitary Engineering—'"

 
          
 
"Benjy, Benjy, I'm so happy! Start over
again!"

 
          
 
"'Dear Mrs. Gibbs,'" he read.

 
          
 
After that the mailbox was never empty. The
world came rushing and crowding in, all the places she had never seen or heard
about or been to. Travel folders, spicecake recipes, and even a letter from an
elderly gentleman who wished for a lady "—fifty years old, gentle
disposition, money; object matrimony." Benjy wrote back, "I am already
married, but thank you for your kind and thoughtful consideration. Yours truly,
Cora Gibbs."

 
          
 
And the letters continued to pour across the
hills, coin collectors' catalogues. Dime Novelty books, Magic List Numbers,
Arthritis Charts, Flea Killer Samples. The world filled up her letter box, and
suddenly she was not alone or remote from people. If a man wrote a form letter
to Cora about the Mysteries of Ancient Maya Revealed, he was likely as not to
receive three letters from Cora in the next week, budding out their formal
meeting into a warm friendship. After one particularly hard day of writing,
Benjy was forced to soak his hand in Epsom salts.

 
          
 
By the end of the third week Mrs. Brabbam no
longer came down to her mailbox. She didn't even come out the front door of her
cabin to get the air, for Cora was always down at the road, leaning out,
smiling for the mailman.

 
          
 
All too quickly the summer was at an end, or,
at least, that part of the summer that counted most, anyway; Benjy's visit.
There was his red bandanna handkerchief on the cabin table, sandwiches folded
fresh and oniony in it, tied with a mint sprig to keep it clean to the smell;
there on the floor, freshly polished, were his shoes to get into, and there on
the chair, with his pencil which had once been long and yellow but was now
stubby and chewed, sat Benjy. Cora took hold of his chin and tilted his head,
as if she were testing a summer squash of an unfamiliar variety,