Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 (8 page)

 
          
 
He swallowed. He wiped his eyes. He cleared
his throat.

           
 
He settled himself. Then, at last, very slowly
and firmly, he turned the drum so that it faced up toward the sky.

 
          
 
He lay next to it, his arm around it, feeling
the tremor, the touch, the muted thunder as, all the rest of the April night in
the year 1862, near the Tennessee River, not far from the Owl Creek, very close
to the church named Shiloh, the peach blossoms fell on the drum.

 
          
 
Hugh Fortnum woke to Saturday's commotions and
lay, eyes shut, savoring each m its turn.

 
          
 
Below, bacon in a skillet; Cynthia waking him
with fine cookings instead of cries.

 
          
 
Across the hall, Tom actually taking a shower.

 
          
 
Far off in the bumblebee dragonfly light,
whose voice was already damning the weather, the time, and the tides? Mrs.
Goodbody? Yes. That Christian giantess, six foot tall with her shoes off, the
gardener extraordinary, the octogenarian dietitian and town philosopher.

 
          
 
He rose, unhooked the screen and leaned out to
hear her cry, "There! Take that! This'll fix youl Hah!"

 
          
 
"Happy Saturday, Mrs. Goodbody!"

 
          
 
The old woman froze in clouds of bug spray
pumped from an immense gun.

 
          
 
"Nonsense!" she shouted. “With these
fiends and pests to watch for?"

 
          
 
"What kind this time?" called
Fortnum.

 
          
 
"I don't want to shout it to the
jaybirds, but"—she glanced suspiciously around—"what would you say if
I told you I was the first line of defense concerning flying saucers?"

 
          
 
"Fine," replied Fortnum. **There'll
be rockets between the worlds any year now."

 
          
 
“There already are!” She pumped, aiming the
spray under the hedge. “There! Take that!"

 
          
 
He pulled his head back in from the fresh day,
somehow not as high-spirited as his first response had indicated. Poor soul,
Mrs. Goodbody. Always the essence of reason. And now what? Old age?

 
          
 
The doorbell rang.

 
          
 
He grabbed his robe and was half down the
stairs when he heard a voice say, "Special delivery. Fortnum?" and
saw

 
          
 
Cynthia turn from the front door, a small
packet in her hand.

 
          
 
"Special-delivery airmail for your
son."

 
          
 
Tom was downstairs like a centipede.

 
          
 
"Wow! That must be from the Great Bayou
Novelty Greenhouse!"

 
          
 
"I wish I were as excited about ordinary
mail," observed Fortnum.

 
          
 
"Ordinaryl" Tom ripped the cord and
paper wildly. "Don't you read the back pages of Popular Mechanics? Well,
here they are!"

 
          
 
Everyone peered into the small open box.

 
          
 
"Here," said Fortnum, ''what
are?"

 
          
 
“The Sylvan Glade Jumbo-Giant Guaranteed
Growth Raise-Them-in-Your-Cellar-for-Big-Profit Mushrooms!"

 
          
 
"Oh, of course," said Fortnum.
"How silly of me."

 
          
 
Cynthia squinted. “Those little teeny
bits?"

 
          
 
" 'Fabulous growth in twenty-four
hours,’" Tom quoted from memory. " 'Plant them in your cellar . .
.'"

 
          
 
Fortnum and wife exchanged glances,

 
          
 
"Well," she admitted, "It's
better than frogs and green snakes."

 
          
 
"Sure is!" Tom ran.

 
          
 
"Oh, Tom," said Fortnum lightly.

 
          
 
Tom paused at the cellar door.

 
          
 
“Tom," said his father. "Next time,
fourth-class mail would do fine."

 
          
 
"Heck," said Tom. "They must’ve
made a mistake, thought I was some rich company. Airmail special, who can
afford that?”

 
          
 
The cellar door slammed.

 
          
 
Fortnum, bemused, scanned the wrapper a moment
then dropped it into the wastebasket. On his way to the kitchen, he opened the
cellar door.

 
          
 
Tom was already on his knees, digging with a
hand rake in the dirt.

 
          
 
He felt his wife beside him, breathing softly,
looking down into the cool dimness.

 
          
 
'Those are mushrooms, I hope. Not . . .
toadstools?"

 
          
 
Fortnum laughed. "Happy harvest,
farmer!"

 
          
 
Tom glanced up and waved.

 
          
 
Fortnum shut the door, took his wife's arm and
walked her out to the kitchen, feeling fine.

           
 
Toward noon, Fortnum was driving toward the
nearest market when he saw Roger Willis, a fellow Rotarian and a teacher of
biology at the town high school, waving urgently from the sidewalk.

 
          
 
Fortnum pulled his car up and opened the door.

 
          
 
"Hi, Roger, give you a lift?"

 
          
 
Willis responded all too eagerly, jumping in
and slamming the door.

 
          
 
"Just the man I want to see. I've put off
calling for days. Could you play psychiatrist for five minutes, God help you?'*

 
          
 
Fortnimi examined his friend for a moment as
he drove quietly on.

 
          
 
"God help you, yes. Shoot."

 
          
 
Willis sat back and studied his fingernails.
"Let's just drive a moment. There. Okay. Here's what I want to say:
Something's wrong with the world."

 
          
 
Fortnum laughed easily. 'Hasn't there always
been?"

 
          
 
"No, no, I mean . . . something
strange—something unseen —is happening."

 
          
 
"Mrs. Goodbody," said Fortnum, half
to himself, and stopped.

 
          
 
"Mrs. Goodbody?”

 
          
 
"This morning, gave me a talk on flying
saucers."

 
          
 
"No." Willis bit the knuckle of his forefinger
nervously. “Nothing like saucers. At least, I don't think. Tell me, what
exactly is intuition?"

 
          
 
“The conscious recognition of something that's
been subconscious for a long time. But don't quote this amateur
psychologist!" He laughed again.

 
          
 
"Good, good!" Willis turned, his
face lighting. He readjusted himself in the seat. "That's it! Over a long
period, things gather, right? All of a sudden, you have to spit, but you don't
remember saliva collecting. Your hands are dirty, but you don't know how they
got that way. Dust falls on you everyday and you don't feel it. But when you
get enough dust collected up, there it is, you see and name it. That's
intuition, as far as I'm concerned. Well, what kind of dust has been falling on
me? A few meteors in the sky at night? funny weather just before dawn? I don't
know. Certain colors, smells, the way the house creaks at three in the morning?
Hair prickling on my arms? All I know is, the damn dust has collected. Quite
suddenly I know."

           
 
"Yes," said Fortnum, disquieted.
"But what is it you know?"

 
          
 
Willis looked at his hands in his lap.
"I’m afraid. I'm not afraid. Then I'm afraid again, in the middle of the
day. Doctor's checked me. I'm A-one. No family problems. Joe's a fine boy, a
good son. Dorothy? She's remarkable. With her I'm not afraid of growing old or
dying."

 
          
 
"Lucky man."

 
          
 
"But beyond my luck now. Scared stiff,
really, for myself, my family; even right now, for you.”

 
          
 
"Me?" said Fortnum.

 
          
 
They had stopped now by an empty lot near the
market There was a moment of great stillness, in which Fortnum turned to survey
his friend. Willis' voice had suddenly made him cold.

 
          
 
"I'm afraid for everybody," said
Willis. “Your friends, mine, and their friends, on out of sight Pretty silly,
eh?"

 
          
 
Willis opened the door, got out and peered in
at Fortnum.

 
          
 
Fortnum felt he had to speak. "Well, what
do we do about it?"

 
          
 
Willis looked up at the sun burning blind in
the sky. "Be aware," he said slowly. “Watch everything for a few
days.”

 
          
 
"Everything?"

 
          
 
“We don't use half what God gave us, ten per
cent of the time. We ought to hear more, feel more, smell more, taste more.
Maybe there's something wrong with the way the wind blows these weeds there in
the lot Maybe it's the sun up on those telephone wires or the cicadas singing
in the elm trees. If only we could stop, look, listen, a few days, a few
nights, and compare notes. Tell me to shut up then, and I will."

 
          
 
"Good enough," said Fortnum, playing
it lighter than he felt. "I'll look around. But how do I know the thing
I'm looking for when I see it?"

 
          
 
Willis peered in at him, sincerely. “You'll
know. You've got to know. Or we're done for, all of us," he said quietly.

 
          
 
Fortnum shut the door and didn't know what to
say. He felt a flush of embarrassment creeping up his face. Willis sensed this.

 
          
 
"Hugh, do you think I'm ... off my
rocker?"

 
          
 
“Nonsense!" said Fortnum, too quickly.
"You're just nervous, is all. You should take a week off."

 
          
 
Willis nodded. "See you Monday
night?"

 
          
 
"Any time. Drop around."

           
 
"I hope I will, Hugh. I really hope I
will."

 
          
 
Then Willis was gone, hurrying across the dry
weed-grown lot toward the side entrance of the market.

 
          
 
Watching him go, Fortnum suddenly did not want
to move. He discovered that very slowly he was taking deep breaths, weighing
the silence. He licked his lips tasting the salt. He looked at his arm on the
doorsill, the sunlight burning the golden hairs. In the empty lot the wind
moved all alone to itself. He leaned out to look at the sun, which stared back
with one massive stunning blow of intense power that made him jerk his head in.
He exhaled. Then he laughed out loud. Then he drove away.

 
          
 
The lemonade glass was cool and deliciously
sweaty. The ice made music inside the glass, and the lemonade was just sour
enough, just sweet enough on his tongue. He sipped, he savored, he tilted back
in the wicker rocking chair on the twilight front porch, his eyes closed. The
crickets were chirping out on the lawn. Cynthia, knitting across from him on
the porch, eyed him curiously; he could feel her attention.

 
          
 
"What are you up to?" she said at
last.