Bradbury, Ray - SSC 07 (48 page)

 
          
 
Fool! I thought, how could you have forgotten
this!

 
          
 
And there in Heber Finn's, during the long
hours of lacy talk that was like planting and bringing to crop a garden among
busy men, each contributing his seed or flower, and wielding the implements,
their tongues, and the raised, foam-hived glasses, their own hands softly
curled about the dear drinks, there Nick had taken into himself a mellowness.

 
          
 
And that mellowness had distilled itself down
in a slow rain that damped his smoldering nerves and put the wilderness fires
in every limb of him out. Those same showers laved his face to leave the tidal
marks of wisdom, the fines of Plato and Aeschylus there. The harvest mellowness
colored his cheeks, warmed his eyes soft, lowered his voice to a husking mist,
and spread in his chest to slow his heart to a gentle jog trot. It rained out
his arms to loosen his hard-mouthed hands on the shuddering wheel and sit him
with grace and ease in his horsehair saddle as he gentled us through the fogs
that kept us and
Dublin
apart. And
with the malt on my own tongue, fluming up my sinus with burning vapors, I had
never detected the scent of any spirits on my old friend here.

 
          
 
"Ah," said Nick again. "Yes; I
give up the others The last bit of jigsaw fell in place. Tonight, the first
night of Lent.

 
          
 
Tonight, for the first time in all the nights
I had driven with him, Nick was sober.

 
          
 
All those other one hundred and forty-odd
nights, Nick hadn't been driving careful and easy just for my safety, no, but
because of the gentle weight of mellowness sloping now on this side, now on
that side of him as we took the long, scything curves.

 
          
 
Oh, who really knows the Irish, say I, and
which half of them is which? Nick?-who is Nick?-and what in the world is he?
Which Nick's the real Nick, the one that everyone knows? I will not think on
it!

 
          
 
There is only one Nick for me. The one that
Ireland shaped herself with her weathers and waters, her seedings and
harvestings, her brans and mashes, her brews, bottlings, and ladlings-out, her
summer-grain-colored pubs astir and adance with the wind in the wheat and
barley by night, you may hear the good whisper way out in forest, on bog, as
you roll by. That's Nick to the teeth, eye, and heart, to his easygoing hands.
If you ask what makes the Irish what they are, I'd point on down the road and
tell where you turn to Heber Finn's,

 
          
 
The first night of Lent, and before you count
nine, we're in
Dublin
! I'm out of
the cab and it's puttering there at the curb and I lean in to put my money in
the hands of my driver. Earnestly, pleadingly, warmly, with all the friendly
urging in the world, I look into that fine man's raw, strange, torchlike face.
"Nick," I said.

 
          
 
"Sir!" he shouted.

 
          
 
"Do me a favor," I said,

 
          
 
"Anything!" he shouted.

 
          
 
"Take this extra money," I said,
"and buy the biggest bottle of Irish moss you can find. And just before
you pick me up tomorrow night, Nick, drink it down, drink it all. Will you do
that, Nick? Will you promise me, cross your heart and hope to die, to do
that?"

 
          
 
He thought on it, and the very thought damped
down the ruinous blaze in his face.

 
          
 
"Ya make it terrible hard on me," he
said.

 
          
 
I forced his fingers shut on the money. At
last he put it in his pocket and faced silently ahead.

 
          
 
"Good night, Nick," I said.
"See you tomorrow."

 
          
 
"God willing," said Nick.

 
          
 
And he drove away.

 
          
 
The thought was three days and three nights
growing. During the days he carried it like a ripening peach in his head. During
the nights he let it take flesh and sustenance, hung out on the silent air,
colored by country moon and country stars. He walked around and around the
thought in the silence before dawn. On the fourth morning he reached up an
invisible hand, picked it, and swallowed it whole.

 
          
 
He arose as swiftly as possible and burned all
his old letters, packed a few clothes in a very small case, and put on his
midnight
suit and a tie the shiny color of
ravens' feathers, as if he were in mourning. He sensed his wife in the door
behind him watching his little play with the eyes of a critic who may leap on
stage any moment and stop the show. When he brushed past her, he murmured,
"Excuse me."

 
          
 
"Excuse me!" she cried. "Is
that all you say? Creeping around here, planning a trip!"

 
          
 
"I didn't plan it; it happened," he
said. "Three days ago I got this premonition. I knew I was going to
die."

 
          
 
"Stop that kind of talk," she said.
"It makes me nervous."

 
          
 
The horizon was mirrored softly in his eyes.
"I hear my blood

 
          
 
running slow. Listening to my bones is like
standing in an attic hearing the beams shift and the dust settle."

 
          
 
"You're only seventy-five," said his
wife. "You stand on your own two legs, see, hear, eat, and sleep good,
don't you? What's all this talk?"

 
          
 
"It's the natural tongue of existence
speaking to me," said the old man. "Civilization's got us too far
away from our natural selves. Now you take the pagan islanders—"

 
          
 
"I won't!"

 
          
 
"Everyone knows the pagan islanders got a
feel for when it's time to die. They walk around shaking hands with friends and
give away all their earthly goods—"

 
          
 
"Don't their wives have a say?"

 
          
 
"They give some of their earthly goods to
their wives."

 
          
 
"I should think so!"

 
          
 
"And some to their friends—"

 
          
 
"I'll argue that!"

 
          
 
"And some to their friends. Then they
paddle their canoes off into the sunset and never return."

 
          
 
His wife looked high up along him as if he
were timber ripe for cutting. "Desertion!" she said.

 
          
 
“No, no, Mildred; death, pure and simple. The
Time of Going Away, they call it."

 
          
 
"Did anyone ever charter a canoe and
follow to see what those fools were up to?"

 
          
 
"Of course not," said the old man,
mildly irritated. "That would spoil everything."

 
          
 
"You mean they had other wives and pretty
friends off on another island?"

 
          
 
"No, no, it's just a man needs aloneness,
serenity, when his juices turn cold."

 
          
 
"If you could prove those fools really
died, I'd shut up." His wife squinted one eye. "Anyone ever find
their bones on those far islands?"

 
          
 
"The fact is that they just sail on into
the sunset, like animals who sense the Great Time at hand. Beyond that, I don't
wish to know."

 
          
 
"Well, / know," said the old woman.
"You been reading more articles in the National Geographic about the
Elephants' Bone-yard."

 
          
 
"Graveyard, not Boneyard!" he
shouted.

 
          
 
"Graveyard, Boneyard. I thought I burned
those magazines; you got some hid?"

 
          
 
"Look here, Mildred," he said
severely, seizing the suitcase again. "My mind points north; nothing you
say can head me south. I'm tuned to the infinite secret wellsprings of the
primitive soul."

 
          
 
"You're tuned to whatever you read last
in that bog-trotters' gazette!" She pointed a finger at him. "You
think I got no memory?"

 
          
 
His shoulders fell. "Let's not go through
the fist again, please."

 
          
 
"What about the hairy mammoth
episode?" she asked. "When they found that frozen elephant in the
Russian tundra thirty years back? You and Sam Hertz, that old fool, with your
fine idea of running off to
Siberia
to corner the world
market in canned edible hairy mammoth? You think I don't still hear you saying,
Imagine the prices members of the National Geographic Society will pay to have
the tender meat of the Siberian hairy mammoth, ten thousand years old, ten
thousand years extinct, right in their homes!' You think my scars have healed
from that?"

 
          
 
"I see them clearly," he said.

 
          
 
"You think I've forgotten the time you
went out to find the Lost Tribe of the Osseos, or whatever, in
Wisconsin
some place where you could dogtrot to town Saturday nights and tank up, and
fell in that quarry and broke your leg and laid there three nights?"

 
          
 
"Your recall," he said, "is
total"

 
          
 
"Then what's this about pagan natives and
the Time of Going Away? I'll tell you what it is—it's the Time of Staying at
Home! It's the time when fruit don't fall off the trees into your hand, you got
to walk to the store for it. And why do we walk to the store for it? Someone in
this house, I'll name no names, took the car apart like a clock some years back
and left it strewn all down the yard. I've raised auto parts in my garden ten
years come Thursday. Ten more years and all that's left of our car is little
heaps of rust. Look out that window! It's leaf-raking-and-burning time. It's
chopping-trees-and-sawing-wood-for-the-fire time. It's
clean-out-stoves-and-hang-stormdoors-and-windows time. It's shingle-the-roof
time, that's what it is, and if you think you're out to escape it, think
again!"

 
          
 
He placed his hand to his chest. "It
pains me you have so little trust in my natural sensitivity to oncoming
Doom."

 
          
 
"It pains me that National Geographies
fall in the hands of crazy old men. I see you read those pages then fall into
those dreams I always have to sweep up after. Those Geographic and Popular
Mechanics publishers should be forced to see all the half-finished rowboats,
helicopters, and one-man batwing gliders in our attic, garage, and cellar. Not
only see, but cart them home!"

 
          
 
"Chatter on," he said. "I stand
before you, a white stone sinking in the tides of Oblivion. For God's sake,
woman, can't I drag myself off to die in peace?"

 
          
 
"Plenty of time for Oblivion when I find
you stone cold across the kindling pile."

 
          
 
"Jesting Pilate!" he said. "Is
recognition of one's own mortality nothing but vanity?"

 
          
 
"You're chewing it like a plug of
tobacco."

 
          
 
"Enough!" he said. "My earthly
goods are stacked on the back porch. Give them to the Salvation Army."

 
          
 
"The Geographies too?"

 
          
 
"Yes, damn it, the Geographies! Now stand
aside!"

 
          
 
"If you're going to die, you won't need
that suitcase full of clothing," she said.

 
          
 
"Hands off, woman! It may take some few
hours. Am I to be stripped of my last creature comforts? This should be a
tender scene of parting. Instead-bitter recriminations, sarcasm, doubt strewn
to every wind."

 
          
 
"All right," she said. "Go
spend a cold night in the woods."

 
          
 
"I'm not necessarily going to the
woods."

 
          
 
"Where else is there for a man in
Illinois
to go to die?"

 
          
 
"Well," he said and paused.
"Well, there's always the open highway."

 
          
 
"And be run down, of course; I'd
forgotten that."

 
          
 
"No, no!" He squeezed his eyes shut,
then opened them again. "The empty side roads leading nowhere, everywhere,
through night forests, wilderness, to distant lakes. . . ."

 
          
 
"Now, you're not going to go rent a
canoe, are you, and paddle off? Remember the time you tipped over and almost
drowned at Fireman's Pier?"

 
          
 
"Who said anything about canoes?"

 
          
 
"You did! Pagan islanders, you said,
paddling off into the great unknown."

 
          
 
"That's the
South Seas
!
Here a man has to strike off on foot to find his natural source, seek his
natural end. I might walk north along the
Lake Michigan
shore, the dunes, the wind,
the
big breakers
there."

 
          
 
"Willie, Willie," she said softly,
shaking her head. "Oh, Willie, Willie, what will I do with you?"

 
          
 
He lowered his voice. "Just let me have
my head," he said.

 
          
 
"Yes," she said, quietly.
"Yes." And tears came to her eyes.

 
          
 
"Now, now," he said.

 
          
 
"Oh, Willie . . ." She looked a long
while at him. "Do you really think with all your heart you're not going to
live?"

 
          
 
He saw himself reflected, small but perfect,
in her eye, and looked away uneasily. "I thought all night about the
universal tide that brings man in and takes him out. Now it's morning and
good-by."

 
          
 
"Good-by?" She looked as if she'd
never heard the word before.

 
          
 
His voice was unsteady. "Of course, if
you absolutely insist I stay, Mildred—"

 
          
 
"No!" She braced herself and blew
her nose. "You feel what you feel; I can't fight that!"

 
          
 
"You sure?" he said.

 
          
 
"You're the one that's sure,
Willie," she said. "Get on along now. Take your heavy coat; the
nights are cold."

 
          
 
"But—" he said.

 
          
 
She ran and brought his coat and kissed his
cheek and drew back quickly before he could enclose her in his bear hug. He stood
there working his mouth, gazing at the big armchair by the fire. She threw open
the front door. "You got food?"

 
          
 
"I won't need . . ." He paused.
"I got a boiled ham sandwich and some pickles in my case. Just one. That's
all I figured I'd . . ."

 
          
 
And then he was out the door and down the
steps and along the path toward the woods. He turned and was going to say
something but thought better of it, waved, and went on.