The Stories of Ray Bradbury (105 page)

In the first light of dawn, half the bed lay empty.

Clara sat up, almost afraid.

It was not like Charlie to be gone so early.

Then, another thing frightened her. She sat listening, not certain what had suddenly made her tremble, but before she had a chance to find out why, she heard footsteps.

They came from a long distance away and it was quite a while before they came up the walk and up the steps and into the house. Then, silence. She heard Charlie just standing there in the parlor for a long moment, so she called out:

‘Charlie? Where you been?’

He came into the room in the faint light of dawn and sat on the bed beside her, thinking about where he had been and what he had done.

‘Walked a mile up the coast and back. All the way to those wood barricades where the new highway starts. Figured it was the least I could do, be part of the whole darn thing.’

‘The new road’s open…?’

‘Open and doing business. Can’t you tell?’

‘Yes.’ She rose slowly up in bed, tilting her head, closing her eyes for a moment, listening. ‘So that’s it? That’s what bothered me. The old road. It’s
really
dead.’

They listened to the silence outside the house, the old road gone empty and dry and hollow as a river bottom in a strange season of summers that would never stop, that would go on forever. The stream had indeed moved and changed its course, its banks, its bed, during the night. Now all you could hear were the trees in the blowing wind outside the house and the birds beginning to sing their arousal choirs in the time just before the sun really made it over the hills.

‘Be real quiet.’

They listened again.

And there, far away, some two hundred fifty or three hundred yards off across a meadow field, nearer the sea, they heard the old, the familiar, but the diminished sound of their river taking its new course, moving and flowing—it would never cease—through lengths of sprawling land away north and then on south through the hushed light. And beyond it, the sound of real water, the sea which might almost have drawn the river to come down along the shore…

Charlie Moore and his wife sat not moving for a moment longer, with that dim sound of the river across the fields moving and moving on.

‘Fred Ferguson was there before dawn,’ said Charlie in a voice that already remembered the Past. ‘Crowd of people. Highway officials and all. Everyone pitched in. Fred, why he just walked over and grabbed hold of one end. I took the other. We moved one of those wood barricades, together. Then we stood back…and let the cars through.’

It all began with the smell of chocolate.

On a steaming late afternoon of June rain, Father Malley drowsed in his confessional, waiting for penitents.

Where in all the world were they? he wondered. Immense traffics of sin lurked beyond in the warm rains. Then why not immense traffics of confession here?

Father Malley stirred and blinked.

Today’s sinners moved so fast in their cars that this old church was an ecclesiastical blur. And himself? And ancient watercolor priest, tints fading fast, trapped inside.

Let’s give it another five minutes and stop, he thought, not in panic but in the kind of quiet shame and desperation that neglect shoulders on a man.

There was a rustle from beyond the confessional grate next door.

Father Malley sat up, quickly.

A smell of chocolate sifted through the grille.

Ah, God, thought the priest, it’s a lad with his small basket of sins soon laid to rest and him gone. Well…

The old priest leaned to the grate where the candy essence lingered and where the words must come.

But, no words. No ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…’

Only strange small mouse-sounds of…
chewing
!

The sinner in the next booth, God sew up his mouth, was actually sitting in there devouring a candy bar!

‘No!’ whispered the priest, to himself.

His stomach, gathering data, rumbled, reminding him that he had not eaten since breakfast. For some sin of pride which he could not now recall, he had nailed himself to a saint’s diet all day, and now—
this
!

Next door, the chewing continued.

Father Malley’s stomach growled. He leaned hard against the grille, shut his eyes, and cried:

‘Stop that!’

The mouse-nibbling stopped.

The smell of chocolate faded.

A young man’s voice said, ‘That’s exactly why I’ve come, Father.’

The priest opened one eye to examine the shadow behind the screen.

‘
What’s
exactly why you’ve come?’

‘The chocolate, Father.’

‘The
what
?’

‘Don’t be angry, Father.’

‘Angry, hell, who’s angry?’

‘You are, Father. I’m damned and burnt before I start, by the sound of your voice.’

The priest sank back in the creaking leather and mopped his face and shook his senses.

‘Yes, yes. The day’s hot. I’m out of temper. But then, I never had much.’

‘It will cool off later in the day, Father. You’ll be fine.’

The old priest eyed the screen. ‘Who’s taking and who’s
giving
confession here?’

‘Why, you are, Father.’

‘Then, get
on
with it!’

The voice hastened forth the facts:

‘You have smelled the chocolate, Father?’

The priest’s stomach answered for him, faintly.

Both listened to the sad sound. Then:

‘Well, Father, to hit it on the head, I was and still am a…chocolate junkie.’

Old fires stirred in the priest’s eyes. Curiosity became humor, then laughed itself back to curiosity again.

‘And
that’s
why you’ve come to confession this day?’

‘That’s it, sir, or, Father.’

‘You haven’t come about sweating over your sister or blueprints for fornication or self-battles with the grand war of masturbation?’

‘I have not, Father,’ said the voice in remorse.

The priest caught the tone and said, ‘Tut, tut, it’s all right. You’ll get around to it. For now, you’re a grand relief. I’m full-up with wandering males and lonely females and all the junk they read in books and try in waterbeds and sink from sight with suffocating cries as the damn things spring leaks and all is lost. Get on. You have bruised my antennae alert. Say more.’

‘Well, Father, I have eaten, every day of my life now for ten or twelve years, one or two pounds of chocolate. I cannot leave it alone, Father. It is the end-all and be-all of my life.’

‘Sounds like a fearful affliction of lumps, acne, carbuncles, and pimples.’

‘It was. It
is
.’

‘And not exactly contributing to a lean figure.’

‘If I leaned, Father, the confessional would fall over.’

The cabinet around them creaked and groaned as the hidden figure beyond demonstrated.

‘Sit still!’ cried the priest.

The groaning stopped.

The priest was wide awake now and feeling splendid. Not in years had he felt so alive and aware of his happily curious and beating heart and fine blood that sought and found, sought and found the far corners of his cloth and body.

The heat of the day was gone.

He felt immensely cool. A kind of excitement pulsed his wrists and lingered in his throat. He leaned almost like a lover to the grille and prompted more spillage.

‘Oh, lad, you’re rare.’

‘And sad, Father, and twenty-two years old and put upon, and hate myself for eating, and need to do something about it.’

‘Have you tried chewing more and swallowing less?’

‘Oh, each night I go to bed saying: Lord, put off the crunchbars and the milk-chocolate kisses and the Hersheys. Each morning I rave out of bed and run to the liquor store not for liquor but for eight Nestlés in a row! I’m in sugar-shock by noon.’

‘That’s not so much confession as medical fact, I can see.’

‘My doctor yells at me, Father.’

‘He should.’

‘I don’t listen, Father.’

‘
You
should.’

‘My mother’s no help, she’s hog-fat and candy-wild.’

‘I hope you’re not one of those who live at home still?’

‘I loiter about, Father.’

‘God, there should be laws against boys loitering in the round shade of their mas. Is your father surviving the two of you?’

‘Somehow.’

‘And
his
weight?’

‘Irving Gross, he calls himself. Which is a joke about size and weight and not his name.’

‘With the three of you, the sidewalk’s full?’

‘No bike can pass, Father.’

‘Christ in the wilderness,’ murmured the priest, ‘starving for forty days.’

‘Sounds like a terrible diet, Father.’

‘If I knew the proper wilderness, I’d boot you there.’

‘Boot away, Father. With no help from my mom and dad, a doctor and
skinny friends who snort at me. I’m out of pocket from eating and out of mind from the same. I never dreamed I’d wind up with
you
. Beg pardon, Father, but it took a lot to drive me here. If my friends knew, if my mom, my dad, my crazy doctor knew I was here with
you
at this minute, oh what the hell!’

There was a fearful stampede of feet, a careening of flesh.

‘Wait!’

But the weight blundered out of the next-door cubby.

With an elephant trample, the young man was gone.

The smell of chocolate alone stayed behind and told all by saying nought.

The heat of the day swarmed in to stifle and depress the old priest.

He had to climb out of the confessional because he knew if he stayed he would begin to curse under his breath and have to run off to have
his
sins forgiven at some other parish.

I suffer from Peevish, O Lord, he thought. How many Hail Marys for
that
?

Come to think of it, how many for a thousand tons, give or take a ton, of chocolate?

Come back! he cried silently at the empty church aisle.

No, he won’t, not ever now, he thought, I pressed too hard.

And with that as supreme depression, he went to the parish house to tub himself cool and towel himself to distemper.

A day, two days, a week passed.

The sweltering noons dissolved the old priest back into a stupor of sweat and vinegar-gnat mean. He snoozed in his cubby or shuffled papers in the unlined library, looked out at the untended lawn and reminded himself to caper with the mower one day soon. But most of all he found himself brambling with irritability. Fornication was the minted coin of the land, and masturbation its handmaiden. Or so it seemed from the few whispers that slid through the confessional grille during the long afternoons.

On the fifteenth day of July, he found himself staring at some boys idling by on their bicycles, mouths full of Hershey bars that they were gulping and chewing.

That night he awoke thinking Power House and Baby Ruth and Love Nest and Crunch.

He stood it as long as he could and then got up, tried to read, tossed the book down, paced the dark night church, and at last, spluttering mildly, went up to the altar and asked one of his rare favors of God.

The next afternoon, the young man who loved chocolate at last came back.

‘Thank you, Lord,’ murmured the priest, as he felt the vast weight creak the other half of the confessional like a ship foundered with wild freight.

‘What?’ whispered the young voice from the far side.

‘Sorry. I wasn’t addressing you,’ said the priest.

He shut his eyes and inhaled.

The gates of the chocolate factory stood wide somewhere and its mild spice moved forth to change the land.

Then, an incredible thing happened.

Sharp words burst from Father Malley’s mouth.

‘You shouldn’t be
coming
here!’

‘What, what, Father?’

‘Go somewhere else! I can’t help. You need special work. No, no.’

The old priest was stunned to feel his own mind jump out his tongue this way. Was it the heat, the long days and weeks kept waiting by this fiend, what,
what
? But still his mouth leaped on:

‘No help here! No, no.
Go
for help—’

‘To the shrinks, you mean?’ the voice cut in, amazingly calm, considering the explosion.

‘Yes, yes, Lord save us, to those people. The—the psychiatrists.’

This last word was even more incredible. He had rarely heard himself say it.

‘Oh, God. Father, what do
they
know?’ said the young man.

What indeed, thought Father Malley, for he had long been put off by their carnival talk and to-the-rear-march chat and clamor. Good grief, why don’t I turn in my collar and buy me a beard! he thought, but went on more calmly.

‘What do they know, my son? Why, they claim to know everything.’

‘Just like the Church
used
to claim, Father?’

Silence. Then:

‘There’s a difference between claiming and knowing,’ the old priest replied, as calmly as his beating heart would allow.

‘And the Church
knows
, is that it, Father?’

‘And if it doesn’t,
I
do!’

‘Don’t get mad again, Father.’ The young man paused and sighed. ‘I didn’t come to dance angels on the head of a pin with you. Shall I start confession, Father?’

‘It’s about time!’ The priest caught himself, settled back, shut his eyes sweetly, and added. ‘Well?’

And the voice on the other side, with the tongue and the breath of a child, tinctured with silver-foiled kisses, flavored with honeycomb, moved by recent sugars and memories or more immediate Cadbury fetes and galas, began to describe its life of getting up and living with and going to bed with Swiss delights and temptations out of Hershey, Pennsylvania, or how to chew the dark skin off the exterior of a Clark bar and keep the caramel and textured interior for special shocks and celebrations. Of how
the soul asked and the tongue demanded and the stomach accepted and the blood danced to the drive of Power House, the promise of Love Nest, the delivery of Butterfinger, but most of all the sweet African murmuring of dark chocolate between the teeth, tinting the gums, flavoring the palate so you muttered, whispered, murmured, pure Congo, Zambesi, Chad in your sleep.

And the more the voice talked, as the days passed and the weeks, and the old priest listened, the lighter became the burden on the other side of the grille. Father Malley knew, without looking, that the flesh enclosing that voice was raining and falling away. The tread was less heavy. The confessional did not cry out in such huge alarms when the body entered next door.

For even with the young voice there and the young man, the smell of chocolate was truly fading and almost gone.

And it was the loveliest summer the old priest had ever known.

Once, years before, when he was a very young priest, a thing had happened that was much like this, in its strange and special way.

A girl, no more than sixteen by her voice, had come to whisper each day from the time school let out to the time autumn school renewed.

For all of that long summer he had come as close as a priest might to an alert affection for that whisper and that dear voice. He had heard her through her July attraction, her August madness, and her September disillusion, and as she went away forever in October, in tears, he wanted to cry out; Oh, stay, stay! Marry me!

But I am the groom to the brides of Christ, another voice whispered.

And he had
not
run forth, that very young priest, into the traffics of the world.

Now, nearing sixty, the young soul within him sighed, stirred, recalled, compared that old and shopworn memory with this new, somehow funny yet withal sad encounter with a lost soul whose love was not summer madness for girls in dire swimsuits, but chocolate unwrapped in secret and devoured in stealth.

‘Father,’ said the voice, late one afternoon. ‘It has been a fine summer.’

‘Strange you would say that,’ said the priest. ‘I have thought so myself.’

‘Father, I have something really awful to confess to you.’

‘I’m beyond shocking, I think.’

‘Father, I am not from your diocese.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘And, Father, forgive me, but, I—’

‘Go on.’

‘I’m not even Catholic.’

‘You’re
what
!’ cried the old man.

‘I’m not even Catholic, Father. Isn’t that awful?’

‘Awful?’

‘I mean, I’m sorry, truly I am. I’ll join the Church, if you want, Father, to make up.’

‘Join the Church, you idiot?’ shouted the old man. ‘It’s too late for that! Do you know what you’ve done? Do you know the depths of depravity you’ve plumbed? You’ve taken my time, bent my ear, driven me wild, asked advice, needed a psychiatrist, argued religion, criticized the Pope, if I remember correctly, and I
do
remember, used up three months, eighty or ninety days, and now, now,
now
you want to join the Church and “make up”?’