Bradbury Stories (125 page)

“Yes, a hummingbird—hovering, settling, rising—”

“You didn't . . .?”

“Why NOT? Only a bird. One bird out of a billion,” he said self-consciously. “One little bird, one little poem. You can't deny me that.”

“One amoeba,” she repeated, tonelessly. “And then next it will be one dog, one man, one city, one continent, one universe!”

“Nonsense.” His cheek twitched. He paced the room, fingering back his dark hair. “You dramatize things. Well, after all what's one dog, even, or to go one step further, one man?”

She sighed. “It's the very thing you talked of with fear, the danger we spoke of that first time we knew your power. Remember, David, it's not really yours, it was only an accident our coming here to the valley house—”

He swore softly. “Who cares whether it was accident or Fate? The thing that counts is that I'm here, now, and they're—they're—” He paused, flushing.

“They're what?” she prompted.

“They're calling me the greatest poet who ever lived!”

“It'll ruin you.”

“Let it ruin me, then! Let's have silence, now.”

He stalked into his den and sat restlessly studying the dirt road. While in this mood, he saw a small brown dog come patting along the road, raising little dust-tufts behind.

“And a damn good poet I am,” he whispered, angrily, taking out pen and paper. He scratched out four lines swiftly.

The dog's barking came in even shrill intervals upon the air as it circled a tree and bounded a green bush. Quite unexpectedly, half over one leap across a vine, the barking ceased, and the dog fell apart in the air, inch by inch, and vanished.

Locked in his den, he composed at a furious pace, counting pebbles in the garden and changing them to stars simply by giving them mention, immortalizing clouds, hornets, bees, lightning and thunder with a few pen flourishes.

It was inevitable that some of his more secret poems should be stumbled upon and read by his wife.

Coming home from a long afternoon walk he found her with the poems lying all unfolded upon her lap.

“David,” she demanded. “What does this mean?” She was very cold and shaken by it. “This poem. First a dog. Then a cat, some sheep and—finally—a man!”

He seized the papers from her. “So what!” Sliding them in a drawer, he slammed it, violently. “He was just an old man, they were old sheep, and it was a microbe-infested terrier! The world breathes better without them!”

“But here, THIS poem, too.” She held it straight out before her, eyes widened. “A woman. Three children from Charlottesville!”

“All right, so you don't like it!” he said, furiously. “An artist has to experiment. With everything—I can't just stand still and do the same thing over and over. I've got greater plans than you think. Yes, really good, fine plans. I've decided to write about everything. I'll dissect the heavens if I wish, rip down the worlds, toy with suns if I damn please!”

“David,” she said, shocked.

“Well, I will! I will!”

“You're such a child, David. I should have known. If this goes on, I can't stay here with you.”

“You'll have to stay,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He didn't know what he meant himself. He looked around, helplessly and then declared, “I mean. I mean—if you try to go all I have to do is sit at my desk and describe you in ink . . .”

“You . . .” she said, dazedly.

She began to cry. Very silently, with no noise, her shoulders moved, as she sank down on a chair.

“I'm sorry,” he said, lamely, hating the scene. “I didn't mean to say that, Lisa. Forgive me.” He came and laid a hand upon her quivering body.

“I won't leave you,” she said, finally.

And closing her eyes, she began to think.

It was much later in the day when she returned from a shopping trip to town with bulging grocery sacks and a large gleaming bottle of champagne.

David looked at it and laughed aloud. “Celebrating, are we?”

“Yes,” she said, giving him the bottle and an opener. “Celebrating you as the world's greatest poet!”

“I detect sarcasm, Lisa,” he said, pouring drinks. “Here's a toast to the—the universe.” He drank. “Good stuff.” He pointed at hers. “Drink up. What's wrong?” Her eyes looked wet and sad about something.

She refilled his glass and lifted her own. “May we always be together. Always.”

The room tilted. “It's hitting me,” he observed very seriously, sitting down so as not to fall. “On an empty stomach I drank. Oh, Lord!”

He sat for ten minutes while she refilled his glass. She seemed very happy suddenly, for no reason. He sat scowling, thinking, looking at his pen and ink and paper, trying to make a decision. “Lisa?”

“Yes?” She was now preparing supper, singing.

“I feel in a mood. I have been considering all afternoon and—”

“And what, darling?”

“I am going to write the greatest poem in history—NOW!”

She felt her heart flutter.

“Will your poem be about the valley?”

He smirked. “No. No! Bigger than that. Much bigger!”

“I'm afraid I'm not much good at guessing,” she confessed.

“Simple,” he said, gulping another drink of champagne. Nice of her to think of buying it, it stimulated his thoughts. He held up his pen and dipped it in ink. “I shall write my poem about the universe! Let me see now . . .”

“David!”

He winced. “What?”

“Oh, nothing. Just, have some more champagne, darling.”

“Eh?” He blinked fuzzily. “Don't mind if I do. Pour.”

She sat beside him, trying to be casual.

“Tell me again. What is it you'll write?”

“About the universe, the stars, the epileptic shamblings of comets, the blind black seekings of meteors, the heated embraces and spawnings of giant suns, the cold, graceful excursions of polar planets, asteroids plummeting like paramecium under a gigantic microscope, all and everything and anything my mind lays claim to! Earth, sun, stars!” he exclaimed.

“No!” she said, but caught herself. “I mean, darling, don't do it all at once. One thing at a time—”

“One at a time.” He made a face. “That's the way I've been doing things and I'm tied to dandelions and daisies.”

He wrote upon the paper with the pen.

“What're you doing?” she demanded, catching his elbow.

“Let me alone!” He shook her off.

She saw the black words form:

“Illimitable universe, with stars and planets and suns—”

She must have screamed.

“No, David, cross it out, before it's too late. Stop it!”

He gazed at her as through a long dark tube, and her far away at the other end, echoing. “Cross it out?” he said. “Why, it's GOOD poetry! Not a line will I cross out. I want to be a GOOD poet!”

She fell across him, groping, finding the pen. With one instantaneous slash, she wiped out the words.

“Before the ink dries, before it dries!”

“Fool!” he shouted. “Let me alone!”

She ran to the window. The first evening stars were still there, and the crescent moon. She sobbed with relief. She swung about to face him and walked toward him. “I want to help you write your poem—”

“Don't need your help!”

“Are you blind? Do you realize the power of your pen!”

To distract him, she poured more champagne, which he welcomed and drank. “Ah,” he sighed, dizzily. “My head spins.”

But it didn't stop him from writing, and write he did, starting again on a new sheet of paper.

“UNIVERSE—VAST UNIVERSE—BILLION STARRED AND WIDE—”

She snatched frantically at shreds of things to say, things to stave off his writing.

“That's poor poetry,” she said.

“What do you mean ‘poor'?” he wanted to know, writing.

“You've got to start at the beginning and build up,” she explained logically. “Like a watch spring being wound or the universe starting with a molecule building on up through stars into a stellar cartwheel—”

He slowed his writing and scowled with thought.

She hurried on, seeing this. “You see, darling, you've let emotion run off with you. You can't start with the big things. Put them at the end of your poem. Build to a climax!”

The ink was drying. She stared at it as it dried. In another sixty seconds—

He stopped writing. “Maybe you're right. Just maybe you are.” He put aside the pen a moment.

“I know I'm right,” she said, lightly, laughing. “Here. I'll just take the pen and—there—”

She had expected him to stop her, but he was holding his pale brow and looking pained with the ache in his eyes from the drink.

She drew a bold line through his poem. Her heart slowed.

“Now,” she said, solicitously, “you take the pen, and I'll help you. Start out with small things and build, like an artist.”

His eyes were gray-filmed. “Maybe you're right, maybe, maybe.”

The wind howled outside.

“Catch the wind!” she cried, to give him a minor triumph to satisfy his ego. “Catch the wind!”

He stroked the pen. “Caught it!” he bellowed, drunkenly, weaving. “Caught the wind! Made a cage of ink!”

“Catch the flowers!” she commanded, excitedly. “Every one in the valley! And the grass!”

“There! Caught the flowers!”

“The hill next!” she said.

“The hill!”

“The valley!”

“The valley!”

“The sunlight, the odors, the trees, the shadows, the house and the garden, and the things inside the house!”

“Yes, yes, yes,” he cried, going on and on and on.

And while he wrote quickly she said, “David, I love you. Forgive me for what I do next, darling—”

“What?” he asked, not having heard her.

“Nothing at all. Except that we are never satisfied and want to go on beyond proper limits. You tried to do that, David, and it was wrong.”

He nodded over his work. She kissed him on the cheek. He reached up and patted her chin. “Know what, lady?”

“What?”

“I think I like you, yes, sir, I think I like you.”

She shook him. “Don't go to sleep, David, don't.”

“Want to sleep. Want to sleep.”

“Later, darling. When you've finished your poem, your last great poem, the very finest one, David. Listen to me—”

He fumbled with the pen. “What'll I say?”

She smoothed his hair, touched his cheek with her fingers and kissed him, tremblingly. Then, closing her eyes, she began to dictate.

“There lived a fine man named David and his wife's name was Lisa and—”

The pen moved slowly, achingly, tiredly forming words.

“Yes?” he prompted.

“—and they lived in a house in the garden of Eden—”

He wrote again, tediously. She watched.

He raised his eyes. “Well? What's next?”

She looked at the house, and the night outside, and the wind returned to sing in her ears and she held his hands and kissed his sleepy lips.

“That's all,” she said, “the ink is drying.”

The publishers from New York visited the valley months later and went back to New York with only three pieces of paper they had found blowing in the wind around and about the raw, scarred, empty valley.

The publishers stared at one another, blankly:

“Why, why, there was nothing left at all,” they said. “Just bare rock, not a sign of vegetation or humanity. The home he lived in—gone! The road, everything!
He
was gone! His wife,
she
was gone, too! Not a word out of them. It was like a river flood had washed through, scraping away the whole countryside! Gone! Washed out! And only three last poems to show for the whole thing!”

No further word was ever received from the poet or his wife. The Agricultural College experts traveled hundreds of miles to study the starkly denuded valley, and went away, shaking their heads and looking pale.

But it is all simply found again.

You turn the pages of his last small thin book and read the three poems.

She is there, pale and beautiful and immortal, you smell the sweet warm flash of her, young forever, hair blowing golden upon the wind.

And next to her, upon the opposite page, he stands gaunt, smiling, firm, hair like raven's hair, hands on hips, face raised to look about him.

And on all sides of them, green with an immortal green, under a sapphire sky, with the odor of fat wine grapes, with the grass knee-high and bending to touch of exploring feet, with the trails waiting for any reader who takes them, one finds the valley, and the house, and the deep rich peace of sunlight and of moonlight and many stars, and the two of them, he and she, walking through it all, laughing together, forever and forever.

W
HENEVER THE WIND CAME THROUGH THE SKY
, he and his small family would sit in the stone hut and warm their hands over a wood fire. The wind would stir the canal waters and almost blow the stars out of the sky, but Mr. Hathaway would sit contented and talk to his wife, and his wife would reply, and he would speak to his two daughters and his son about the old days on Earth, and they would all answer neatly.

It was the twentieth year after the Great War. Mars was a tomb planet. Whether or not Earth was the same was a matter for much silent debate for Hathaway and his family on the long Martian nights.

This night one of the violent Martian dust storms had come over the low Martian graveyards, blowing through ancient towns and tearing away the plastic walls of the newer, American-built city that was melting down into the sand, desolated.

The storm abated. Hathaway went out into the cleared weather to see Earth burning green on the windy sky. He put his hand up as one might reach to adjust a dimly burning globe in the ceiling of a dark room. He looked across the long-dead sea bottoms. Not another living thing on this entire planet, he thought. Just myself. And them. He looked back within the stone hut.