Bradbury, Ray - SSC 11 (7 page)

 
          
 
His voice faded. He started to fumble the map
shut, but, before he could move, a bright thing fell through the air and hit
the paper. It rolled off into the sand and made a wet lump.

 
          
 
His wife glanced at the wet place in the sand
and then swiftly searched his face. His solemn eyes were too bright. And down
one cheek was a track of wetness.

 
          
 
She gasped. She took his hand and held it,
tight.

 
          
 
He clenched her hand very hard, his eyes shut
now, and slowly he said, with difficulty, "Wouldn't it be nice if we went
to sleep tonight and in the night, somehow, it all came back. All the
foolishness, all the noise, all the hate, all the terrible things, all the
nightmares, all the wicked people and stupid children, all the mess, all the
smallness, all the confusion, all the hope, all the need, all the love.
Wouldn't it be nice."

 
          
 
She waited and nodded her head once.

 
          
 
Then both of them started.

 
          
 
For standing between them, they knew not for
how long, was their son, an empty pop bottle in one hand.

 
          
 
The boy's face was pale. With his free hand he
reached out to touch his father's cheek, where the single tear had made its
track.

 
          
 
"You," he said. "Oh, Dad, you.
You haven't anyone to play with, either.''

 
          
 
The wife started to speak.

 
          
 
The husband moved to take the boy's hand.

 
          
 
The boy jerked back. "Silly! Oh, silly!
Silly fools! Oh, you dumb, dumb!" And, whirling, he rushed down to the
ocean and stood there crying loudly.

 
          
 
The wife rose to follow, but the husband
stopped her.

 
          
 
"No. Let him."

 
          
 
And then they both grew cold and quiet. For
the boy, below on the shore, crying steadily, now was writing on a piece of
paper and stuffing it in the pop bottle and ramming the tin cap back on and
taking the bottle and giving it a great glittering heave up in the air and out
into the tidal sea.

 
          
 
What, thought the wife, what did he write on
the note? What's in the bottle?

 
          
 
The bottle moved out in the waves.

 
          
 
The boy stopped crying.

           
 
After a long while he walked up the shore, to
stand looking at his parents. His face was neither bright nor dark, alive nor
dead, ready nor resigned; it seemed a curious mixture that simply made do with
time, weather and these people. They looked at him and beyond to the bay, where
the bottle containing the scribbled note was almost out of sight now, shining
in the waves.

 
          
 
Did he write what we wanted? thought the
woman, did he write what he heard us just wish, just say?

 
          
 
Or did he write something for only himself,
she wondered, that tomorrow he might wake and find himself alone in an empty
world, no one around, no man, no woman, no father, no mother, no fool grownups
with fool wishes, so he could trudge up to the railroad tracks and take the
handcar motoring, a solitary boy, across the continental wilderness, on eternal
voyages and picnics?

 
          
 
Is that what he wrote in the note?

 
          
 
Which?

 
          
 
She searched his colorless eyes, could not
read the answer; dared not ask.

 
          
 
Gull shadows sailed over and kited their faces
with sudden passing coolness.

 
          
 
'Time to go," someone said.

 
          
 
They loaded the wicker basket onto the rail
car. The woman tied her large bonnet securely in place with its yellow ribbon,
they set the boy's pail of shells on the floorboards, then the husband put on
his tie, his vest, his coat, his hat, and they all sat on the benches of the
car looking out at the sea where the bottled note was far out, blinking, on the
horizon.

 
          
 
"Is asking enough?" said the boy.
"Does wishing work?"

 
          
 
"Sometimes .,. too well."

 
          
 
"It depends on what you ask for."

 
          
 
The boy nodded, his eyes far away.

 
          
 
They looked back at where they had come from,
and then ahead to where they were going.

 
          
 
"Goodbye, place," said the boy, and
waved.

 
          
 
The car rolled down the rusty rails. The sound
of it dwindled, faded. The man, the woman, the boy dwindled with it in distance,
among the hills.

 
          
 
After they were gone, the rail trembled
faintly for two minutes, and ceased. A flake of rust fell. A flower nodded.

 
          
 
The sea was very loud.

 
          
 
In the April night, more than once, blossoms fell
from the orchard trees and lit with rustling taps on the drumskin. At midnight
a peach stone left miraculously on a branch through winter, flicked by a bird,
fell swift and unseen, struck once, like panic, which jerked the boy upright.
In silence he listened to his own heart ruffle away, away, at last gone from
his ears and back in his chest again.

 
          
 
After that, he turned the drum on its side,
where its great limar face peered at him whenever he opened his eyes.

 
          
 
His face, alert or at rest, was solemn. It was
indeed a solemn time and a solemn night for a boy just turned fourteen in the
peach field near the Owl Creek not far from the church at Shiloh.

 
          
 
"... thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three
..."

 
          
 
Unable to see, he stopped counting.

 
          
 
Beyond the thirty-three familiar shadows,
forty thousand men, exhausted by nervous expectation, unable to sleep for
romantic dreams of battles yet unfought, lay crazily askew in their uniforms. A
mile yet farther on, another army was strewn helter-skelter, turning slow,
basting themselves with the thought of what they would do when the time came: a
leap, a yell, a blind plunge their strategy, raw youth their protection and
benediction.

 
          
 
Now and again the boy heard a vast wind come
up, that gently stirred the air. But he knew what it was, the army here, the
army there, whispering to itself in the dark. Some men talking to others,
others murmuring to themselves, and all so quiet it was like a natural element
arisen from south or north with the motion of the earth toward dawn.

 
          
 
What the men whispered the boy could only
guess, and he guessed that it was: Me, I'm the one, I'm the one of all the rest
won't die. I'll live through it. I'll go home. The band will play. And I'll be
there to hear it

           
 
Yes, thought the boy, that's all very well for
them, they can give as good as they get I

 
          
 
For with the careless bones of the young men
harvested by night and bundled around campfires were the similarly strewn steel
bones of their rifles, with bayonets fixed like eternal lightning lost in the
orchard grass.

 
          
 
Me, thought the boy, I got only a drum, two
sticks to beat it, and no shield.

 
          
 
There wasn't a man-boy on this ground tonight
did not have a shield he cast, riveted or carved himself on his way to his
first attack, compounded of remote but nonetheless firm and fiery family
devotion, flag-blown patriotism and cocksure immortality strengthened by the
touchstone of very real gunpowder, ramrod, minnieball and flint. But without
these last the boy felt his family move yet farther off away in the dark, as if
one of those great prairie-burning trains had chanted them away never to
return, leaving him with this drum which was worse than a toy in the game to be
played tomorrow or some day much too soon.

 
          
 
The boy turned on his side. A moth brushed his
face, but it was peach blossom. A peach blossom flicked him, but it was a moth.
Nothing stayed put. Nothing had a name. Nothing was as it once was.

 
          
 
If he lay very still, when the dawn came up
and the soldiers put on their bravery with their caps, perhaps they might go
away, the war with them, and not notice him lying small here, no more than a
toy himself.

 
          
 
“Well, by God, now," said a voice.

 
          
 
The boy shut up his eyes, to hide inside
himself, but it was too late. Someone, walking by in the night, stood over him.

 
          
 
"Well," said the voice quietly,
"here's a soldier crying before the fight. Good. Get it over. Won't be
time once it all «tarts."

 
          
 
And the voice was about to move on when the
boy, startled, touched the drum at his elbow. The man above, hearing this,
stopped. The boy could feel his eyes, sense him slowly bending near. A hand
must have come down out of the night, for there was a little rat-tat as the
fingernails brushed and the man's breath fanned his face.

 
          
 
"Why, it's the drummer boy, isn't it?”

           
 
The boy nodded, not knowing if his nod was
seen. "Sir, is that you?" he said.

 
          
 
"I assume it is." The man's knees
cracked as he bent still closer.

 
          
 
He smelled as all fathers should smell, of
salt sweat, ginger tobacco, horse and boot leather, and the earth he walked
upon. He had many eyes. No, not eyes, brass buttons that watched the boy.

 
          
 
He could only be, and was, the General.

 
          
 
"What's your name, boy?" he asked.

 
          
 
"Joby," whispered the boy, starting
to sit up.

 
          
 
"All right, Joby, don't stir." A
hand pressed his chest gently, and the boy relaxed. "How long you been
with us, Joby?"

 
          
 
“Three weeks, sir."

 
          
 
"Run off from home or joined
legitimately, boy?"

 
          
 
Silence.

 
          
 
"Danm-fool question," said the
General. "Do you shave yet, boy? Even more of a danm-fool. There's your
cheek, fell right off the tree overhead. And the others here not much older.
Raw, raw, danm raw, the lot of you. You ready for tomorrow or the next day,
Joby?"

 
          
 
"I think so, sir."

 
          
 
"You want to cry some more, go on ahead.
I did the same last night."

 
          
 
''You, sure?"

 
          
 
"God's truth. Thinking of everything
ahead. Both sides figuring the other side will just give up, and soon, and the
war done in weeks, and us all home. Well, that's not how it's going to be. And
maybe that's why I cried."

 
          
 
"Yes, sir," said Joby.

 
          
 
The General must have taken out a cigar now,
for the dark was suddenly filled with the Indian smell of tobacco unlit as yet,
but chewed as the man thought what next to say.

 
          
 
"It's going to be a crazy time,"
said the General. "Counting both sides, there's a hundred thousand men,
give or take a few thousand out there tonight, not one as can spit a sparrow
off a tree, or knows a horse clod from a minnieball. Stand up, bare the breast,
ask to be a target, thank them and sit down, that's us, that's them. We should
turn tail and train four months, they should do the same. But here we are,
taken with spring fever and thinking it blood lust, taking our sulphur with
cannons instead of with molasses as it should be, going to be a hero, going to
live forever. And I can see all of them over there nodding agreement, save the
other way around. If s wrong, boy, it's wrong as a head put on hind side front
and a man marching backward through life. It will be a double massacre if one
of their itchy generals decides to picnic his lads on our grass. More innocents
will get shot out of pure Cherokee enthusiasm than ever got shot before. Owl
Creek was full of boys splashing around in the noonday sun just a few hours
ago. I fear it will be full of boys again, just floating, at sundown tomorrow,
not caring where the tide takes them."

 
          
 
The General stopped and made a little pile of
winter leaves and twigs in the darkness, as if he might at any moment strike
fire to them to see his way through the coming days when the sun might not show
its face because of what was happening here and just beyond.

 
          
 
The boy watched the hand stirring the leaves
and opened his Ups to say something, but did not say it. The General heard the
boy's breath and spoke himself.

 
          
 
"Why am I telling you this? That's what
you wanted to ask, eh? Well, when you got a bunch of wild horses on a loose
rein somewhere, somehow you got to bring order, rein them in. These lads, fresh
out of the milkshed, don't know what I know, and I can't tell them: men
actually die, in war. So each is his own army. I got to make one army of them.
And for that, boy, I need you."

 
          
 
"Me!" The boy's lips barely
twitched.

 
          
 
"Now, boy," said the General
quietly, “you are the heart of the army. Think of that You're the heart of the
army. Listen, now."

 
          
 
And, lying there, Joby listened.

 
          
 
And the General spoke on.

 
          
 
If he, Joby, beat slow tomorrow, the heart
would beat slow in the men. They would lag by the wayside. They would drowse in
the fields on their muskets. They would sleep forever, after that, in those
same fields, their hearts slowed by a drummer boy and stopped by enemy lead.

 
          
 
But if he beat a sure, steady, ever faster
rhythm, then, then their knees would come up in a long line down over that
hill, one knee after the other, like a wave on the ocean shore I Had he seen
the ocean ever? Seen the waves rolling in like a well-ordered cavalry charge to
the sand? Well, that was it, that's what he wanted, that's what was needed!
Joby was his right hand and his left He gave the orders, but Joby set the pace!

 
          
 
So bring the right knee up and the right foot
out and the left knee up and the left foot out. One following the other in good
time, in brisk time. Move the blood up the body and make the head proud and the
spine stiff and the jaw resolute. Focus the eye and set the teeth, flare the
nostrils and tighten the hands, put steel armor all over the men, for blood
moving fast in them does indeed make men feel as they'd put on steel. He must
keep at it, at it! Long and steady, steady and long! Then, even though shot or
torn, those wounds got in hot blood—in blood he'd helped stir—would feel less
pain. If their blood was cold, it would be more than slaughter, it would be
murderous nightmare and pain best not told and no one to guess.

 
          
 
The General spoke and stopped, letting his
breath slack off. Then, after a moment, he said, "So there you are, that's
it. Will you do that, boy? Do you know now you're general of the army when the
General's left behind?"

 
          
 
The boy nodded mutely.

 
          
 
"You'll run them through for me then,
boy?"

 
          
 
“Yes, sir."

 
          
 
"Good. And, God willing, many nights from
tonight, many years from now, when you're as old or far much older than me,
when they ask you what you did in this awful time, you will tell them—one part
humble and one part proud—1 was the drummer boy at the battle of Owl Creek,' or
the Tennessee River, or maybe they'll just name it after the church there. ‘I
was the drummer boy at Shiloh.’ Good grief, that has a beat and sound to it
fitting for Mr. Longfellow. 'I was the drummer boy at Shiloh.' Who will ever
hear those words and not know you, boy, or what you thought this night, or what
you'll think tomorrow or the next day when we must get up on our legs and
move!"

 
          
 
The general stood up. "Well, then. God
bless you, boy. Good night."

 
          
 
"Good night, sir."

 
          
 
And, tobacco, brass, boot polish, salt sweat
and leather, the man moved away through the grass.

 
          
 
Joby lay for a moment, staring but unable to
see where the man had gone.