Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (19 page)

 
          
 
"Benjy, I owe you an apology. I don't
think I looked at your face once in all this time. Seems I know every wart on
your hand, every hangnail, every bump and every crinkle, but I might pass your
face in a crowd and miss you."

 
          
 
"It's no face to look at," said
Benjy shyly.

 
          
 
"But I'd know that hand in a million
hands," Cora said. "Let anyone shake my hand in a dark room, a
thousand people, and out of all those I'd say, 'Well, this one's Benjy.'"
She smiled quietly and walked away to the open door. "I been
thinking." She looked up at a distant cabin. "Ain't seen Mrs. Brabbam
in weeks. Stays in all the time now. I've got a guilty feeling. I've done a
prideful thing, a thing more sinful than she ever done me. I took the bottom
out of her life. It was a mean and spiteful thing and I'm ashamed." She
gazed up the hill toward that silent, locked place. "Benjy, would you do
me one last favor?"

 
          
 
"Yes'm."

 
          
 
"Write a letter for Mrs. Brabbam."

 
          
 
"Ma'am?"

 
          
 
''Yes, write one of those companies for a free
chart, a sample, something, and sign Mrs. Brabbam's name."

 
          
 
"All right," said Benjy.

 
          
 
"That way, in a week or a month the
postman'll come by and whistle, and I'll tell him to go up to her door,
special, and deliver it. And I'll be sure and be out in my front yard where I
can see and Mrs. Brabbam can see I see. And I'll wave my letters to her and
she'll wave her letters to me, and everybody'll smile."

 
          
 
"Yes'm," said Benjy.

 
          
 
He wrote three letters, licked the envelopes
carefully, stuck them in his pocket. "I'll mail them when I get to St.
Louis."

 
          
 
"It's been a fine summer," she said.

 
          
 
"It sure has."

 
          
 
"But, Benjy, I didn't learn to write, did
I? I was after the letters and made you write late nights, and we were so busy
sending labels and getting samples, land, it seemed there wasn't time to learn.
And that means . . ."

 
          
 
He knew what it meant. He shook her hand. They
stood in the cabin door. "Thanks," she said, "for
everything."

 
          
 
Then he was running off. He ran as far as the
meadow fence, leaped it easily, and the last she saw of him he was still
running, waving the special letters, off into the great world over the hills.

 
          
 
The letters kept coming for some six months
after Benjy went away. There would be the postman's little green car and the
sharp ice-rimed shout of good morning, or the whistle, as he clapped two or three
pink or blue envelopes into that fine mailbox.

 
          
 
And there was that special day when Mrs.
Brabbam received her first real letter.

 
          
 
After that the letters were spaced a week
apart, then a month, and finally the postman didn't say hello at all, there was
no sound of a car coming up that lonely mountain road. First a spider moved
into the mailbox, then a sparrow.

 
          
 
And Cora, while the letters still lasted,
would clutch them in her bewildered hands, staring at them quietly until the
pressure of her face muscles squeezed clear round shiny drops of water from her
eyes. She'd hold up one blue envelope. "Who's this from?"

 
          
 
"Don't know," said Tom.

 
          
 
"What's it say?" she wailed.

 
          
 
"Don't know," said Tom.

 
          
 
"What's going on in that world out there,
oh, I'll never know, I'll never know now," she said. "And this
letter, and this one, and this!" She tumbled the stacks and stacks of
letters that had come since Benjy ran off. "All the world and all the
people and all the happenings, and me not knowing. All that world and people
waiting to hear from us, and us not writing, and them not ever writing
back!"

 
          
 
And at last the day came when the wind blew
the mailbox over. In the mornings again, Cora would stand at the open door of
her cabin, brushing her gray hair with a slow brush, not speaking, looking at
the hills. And in all the years that followed she never passed the fallen
mailbox without stooping aimlessly to fumble inside and take her hand out with
nothing in it before she wandered on again into the fields.

 
          
 
The horses moved gently to a stop, and the man
and his wife gazed down into a dry, sandy valley. The woman sat lost in her
saddle; she hadn't spoken for hours, didn't know a good word to speak. She was
trapped somewhere between the hot, dark pressure of the storm-clouded Arizona
sky and the hard, granite pressure of the wind-blasted mountains. A few drops
of cool rain fell on her trembling hands.

 
          
 
She looked over at her husband wearily. He sat
his dusty horse easily, with a firm quietness. She closed her eyes and thought
of how she had been all of these mild years until today. She wanted to laugh at
the mirror she was holding up to herself, but there was no way of doing even
that; it would be somewhat insane. After all, it might just be the pushing of
this dark weather, or the telegram they had taken from the messenger on
horseback this morning, or the long journey now to town.

 
          
 
There was still an empty world to cross, and
she was cold.

 
          
 
"I'm the lady who was never going to need
religion," she said quietly, her eyes shut.

 
          
 
"What?" Berty, her husband, glanced
over at her.

 
          
 
"Nothing," she whispered, shaking
her head. In all the years, how certain she had been. Never, never would she
have need of a church. She had heard fine people talk on and on of religion and
waxed pews and calla lilies in great bronze buckets and vast bells of churches
in which the preacher rang like a clapper. She had heard the shouting kind and
the fervent, whispery kind, and they were all the same. Hers was simply not a
pew-shaped spine.

 
          
 
"I just never had a reason ever to sit in
a church," she had told people. She wasn't vehement about it. She just
walked around and lived and moved her hands that were pebble-smooth and
pebble-small. Work had polished the nails of those hands with a polish you
could never buy in a bottle. The touching of children had made them soft, and
the raising of children had made them temperately stem, and the loving of a
husband had made them gentle.

 
          
 
And now, death made them tremble.

 
          
 
"Here," said her husband. And the
horses dusted down the trail to where an odd brick building stood beside a dry
wash. The building was all glazed green windows, blue machinery, red tile, and
wires. The wires ran off on high-tension towers to the farthest directions of
the desert. She watched them go, silently, and, still held by her thoughts,
turned her gaze back to the strange storm-green windows and the burning-colored
bricks.

 
          
 
She had never slipped a ribbon in a Bible at a
certain significant verse, because though her life in this desert was a life of
granite, sun, and the steaming away of the waters of her flesh, there had never
been a threat in it to her. Always things had worked out before the necessity
had come for sleepless dawns and wrinkles in the forehead. Somehow, the very
poisonous things of life had passed her by. Death was a remote storm rumor
beyond the farthest range.

 
          
 
Twenty years had blown in tumbleweeds, away,
since she'd come West, worn this lonely trapping man's gold ring, and taken the
desert as a third, and constant, partner to their living. None of their four
children had ever been fearfully sick or near death. She had never had to get
down on her knees except for the scrubbing of an already well-scrubbed floor.

 
          
 
Now all that was ended. Here they were riding
toward a remote town because a simple piece of yellow paper had come and said
very plainly that her mother was dying.

 
          
 
And she could not imagine it—no matter how she
turned her head to see or turned her mind to look in on itself. There were no
rungs anywhere to hold to, going either up or down, and her mind, like a
compass left out in a sudden storm of sand, was suddenly blown free of all its
once-clear directions, all points of reference worn away, the needle spinning
without purpose, around, around. Even with Berty's arms on her back it wasn't
enough. It was like the end of a good play and the beginning of an evil one.
Someone she loved was actually going to die. This was impossible!

 
          
 
"I've got to stop," she said, not
trusting her voice at all, so she made it sound irritated to cover her fear.

 
          
 
Berty knew her as no irritated woman, so the
irritation did not carry over and fill him up. He was a capped jug; the
contents there for sure. Rain on the outside didn't stir the brew. He side-ran
his horse to her and took her hand gently. "Sure," he said. He
squinted at the eastern sky. "Some clouds piling up black there. We'll
wait a bit. It might rain. I wouldn't want to get caught in it."

 
          
 
Now she was irritated at her own irritation,
one fed upon the other, and she was helpless. But rather than speak and risk
the cycle's commencing again, she slumped forward and began to sob, allowing
her horse to be led until it stood and tramped its feet softly beside the red
brick building.

 
          
 
She slid down like a parcel into his arms, and
he held her as she turned in on his shoulder; then he set her down and said,
"Don't look like there's people here." He called, "Hey,
there!" and looked at the sign on the door: Danger. Bureau of Electric
Power.

 
          
 
There was a great insect humming all through
the air. It sang in a ceaseless, bumbling tone, rising a bit, perhaps falling
just a bit, but keeping the same pitch. Like a woman humming between pressed
lips as she makes a meal in the warm twilight over a hot stove. They could see
no movement within the building; there was only the gigantic humming. It was
the sort of noise you would expect the sun-shimmer to make rising from hot
railroad ties on a blazing summer day, when there is that flurried silence and
you see the air eddy and whorl and ribbon, and expect a sound from the process
but get nothing but an arched tautness of the eardrums and the tense quiet.

 
          
 
The humming came up through her heels, into
her medium-slim legs, and thence to her body. It moved to her heart and touched
it, as the sight of Berty just sitting on a top rail of the corral often did.
And then it moved on to her head and the slenderest niches in the skull and set
up a singing, as love songs and good books had done once on a time.

 
          
 
The humming was everywhere. It was as much a
part of the soil as the cactus. It was as much a part of the air as the heat.

 
          
 
"What is it?" she asked, vaguely
perplexed, looking at the building.

 
          
 
"I don't know much about it except it's a
powerhouse," said Berty. He tried the door. "It's open," he
said, surprised. "I wish someone was around." The door swung wide and
the pulsing hum came out like a breath of air over them, louder.

 
          
 
They entered together into the solemn, singing
place. She held him tightly, arm in arm.

 
          
 
It was a dim undersea place, smooth and clean
and polished, as if something or other was always coming through and coming
through and nothing ever stayed, but always there was motion and motion,
invisible and stirring and never settling. On each side of them as they
advanced were what first appeared to be people standing quietly, one after the
other, in a double line. But these resolved into round, shell-like machines
from which the humming sprang. Each black and gray and green machine gave forth
golden cables and lime-colored wires, and there were silver metal pouches with
crimson tabs and white lettering, and a pit like a washtub in which something
whirled as if rinsing unseen materials at invisible speeds. The centrifuge
raced so fast it stood still. Immense snakes of copper looped down from the
twilight ceiling, and vertical pipes webbed up from cement floor to fiery brick
wall. And the whole of it was as clean as a bolt of green lightning and smelled
similarly. There was a crackling, eating sound, a dry rustling as of paper;
flickers of blue fire shuttled, snapped, sparked, hissed where wires joined
porcelain bobbins and green glass insulation.

 
          
 
Outside, in the real world, it began to rain.

 
          
 
She didn't want to stay in this place; it was
no place to stay, with its people that were not people but dim machines and its
music like an organ caught and pressed on a low note and a high note. But the
rain washed every window and Berty said, "Looks like it'll last. Might
have to stay the night here. It's late, anyhow. I'd better get the stuff
in."

 
          
 
She said nothing. She wanted to be getting on.
Getting on to what thing in what place, there was really no way of knowing. But
at least in town she would hold onto the money and buy the tickets and hold
them tight in her hand and hold onto a train which would rush and make a great
noise, and get off the train, and get on another horse, or get into a car
hundreds of miles away and ride again, and stand at last by her dead or alive
mother. It all depended on time and breath. There were many places she would
pass through, but none of them would offer a thing to her except ground for her
feet, air for her nostrils, food for her numb mouth. And these were worse than
nothing. Why go to her mother at all, say words, and make gestures? she
wondered. What would be the use?

 
          
 
The floor was clean as a solid river under
her. When she moved forward on it, it sent echoes cracking back and forth like
small, faint gunshots through the room. Any word that was spoken came back as
from a granite cavern.

 
          
 
Behind her, she heard Berty setting down the
equipment. He spread two gray blankets and put out a little collection of
tinned foods.

 
          
 
It was night. The rain still streamed on the
high green-glazed windows, rinsing and making patterns of silk that flowed and
intermingled in soft clear curtains. There were occasional thunderclaps which
fell and broke upon themselves in avalanches of cold rain and wind hitting sand
and stone.

 
          
 
Her head lay upon a folded cloth, and no
matter how she turned it, the humming of the immense powerhouse worked up
through the cloth into her head. She shifted, shut her eyes, and adjusted
herself, but it went on and on. She sat up, patted the cloth, lay back down.

 
          
 
But the humming was there.

 
          
 
She knew without looking, by some sense deep
in herself, that her husband was awake. There was no year she could remember
when she hadn't known. It was some subtle difference in his breathing. It was
the absence of sound, rather; no sound of breathing at all, save at long,
carefully thought-out intervals. She knew then that he was looking at her in
the rainy darkness, concerned with her, taking great care of his breath.

 
          
 
She turned in the darkness. "Berty?"

 
          
 
"Yes?"

 
          
 
“I’m awake too," she said.

 
          
 
"I know," he said.

 
          
 
They lay, she very straight, very rigid, he in
a half curl, like a hand relaxed, half bent inward. She traced this dark, easy
curve and was filled with incomprehensible wonder.

 
          
 
"Berty," she asked, and paused a
long while, "how . , . how are you like you are?"

 
          
 
He waited a moment. "How do you
mean?" he said.

 
          
 
"How do you rest?" She stopped. It
sounded very bad. It sounded so much like an accusation, but it was not,
really. She knew him to be a man concerned with all things, a man who could see
in darknesses and who was not conceited because of his ability. He was worried
for her now, and for her mother's life or death, but he had a way of worrying
that seemed indifferent and irresponsible. It was neither of the two. His
concern was all in him, deep; but it lay side by side with some faith, some
belief that accepted it, made it welcome, and did not fight it. Something in
him took hold of the sorrow first, got acquainted with it, knew each of its
traceries before passing the message on to all of his waiting body. His body
held a faith like a maze, and the sorrow that struck into him was lost and gone
before it finally reached