Bradbury Stories 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales Part 126

He remembered.

And he began to melt away. He recalled his body shriveling, his dim heart gone to stillness; the slam of some eternal door of night.

He stood very still in my arms, his eyelids flickering over the stuffs that s.h.i.+fted grotesque furnitures within his head. He must have asked himself the most terrible question of all: Who has done this thing to me?

He opened his eyes. His gaze beat at me.

You? it said.

Yes, I thought. I wished you alive this night.

You! his face and body cried.

And then, half-aloud, the final inquisition: "Why . . .?"

Now it was my turn to be blasted and riven.

Why, indeed, had I done this to him?

How had I dared to wish for this awful, this harrowing, confrontation?

What was I to do now with this man, this stranger, this old, bewildered, and frightened child? Why had I summoned him, just to send him back to soils and graves and dreadful sleeps?

Had I even bothered to think of the consequences? No. Raw impulse had shot me from home to this burial field like a mindless stone to a mindless goal. Why? Why?

My father, this old man, stood in the snow now, trembling, waiting for my pitiful answer.

A child again, I could not speak. Some part of me knew a truth I could not say. Inarticulate with him in life, I found myself yet more mute in his waking death.

The truth raved inside my head, cried along the fibers of my spirit and being, but could not break forth from my tongue. I felt my own shouts locked inside.

The moment was pa.s.sing. This hour would soon be gone. I would lose the chance to say what must be said, what should have been said when he was warm and above the earth so many years ago.

Somewhere far off across country, the bells sounded twelve-thirty on this Christmas morn. Christ ticked in the wind. Snow flaked away at my face with time and cold, cold and time.

Why? my father's eyes asked me; why have you brought me here?

"I-" and then I stopped.

For his hand had tightened on my arm. His face had found its own reason.

This was his chance, too, his final hour to say what he should have said when I was twelve or fourteen or twenty-six. No matter if I stood mute. Here in the falling snow, he could make his peace and go his way.

His mouth opened. It was hard, so dreadfully hard, for him to force the old words out. Only the ghost within the withered sh.e.l.l could dare to agonize and gasp. He whispered three words, lost in the wind.

"Yes?" I urged.

He held me tight and tried to keep his eyes open in the blizzard-night. He wanted to sleep, but first his mouth gaped and whistled again and again: ". . . I . . . .. . . . uvvv . . . . . . . . . . . . yuuuuuuuu . . .!"

He stopped, trembled, wracked his body, and tried to shout it again, failing: ". . . I . . . .. . . . vvv . . . . . . . . . . . . yyy . . . . . . . . . . . . u . . .!"

"Oh, Dad!" I cried. "Let me say it for you!"

He stood very still and waited.

"Were you trying to say I . . . love . . . you?"

"Esssss!" he cried. And burst out, very clearly, at long last: "Oh, yes!"

"Oh, Dad," I said, wild with miserable happiness, all gain and loss. "Oh, and Pa, dear Pa, I love you."

We fell together. We held.

I wept.

And from some strange dry well within his terrible flesh I saw my father squeeze forth tears which trembled and flashed on his eyelids.

And the final question was thus asked and answered.

Why have you brought me here?

Why the wish, why the gifts, and why this snowing night?

Because we had had to say, before the doors were shut and sealed forever, what we never had said in life.

And now it had been said and we stood holding each other in the wilderness, father and son, son and father, the parts of the whole suddenly interchangeable with joy.

The tears turned to ice upon my cheeks.

We stood in the cold wind and falling snow for a long while until we heard the sound of the bells at twelve forty-five, and still we stood in the snowing night saying no more-no more ever need be said-until at last our hour was done.

All over the white world the clocks of one a.m. on Christmas morn, with Christ new in the fresh straw, sounded the end of that gift which had pa.s.sed so briefly into and now out of our numb hands.

My father held me in his arms.

The last sound of the one-o'clock bells faded.

I felt my father step back, at ease now.

His fingers touched my cheek.

I heard him walking in the snow.

The sound of his walking faded even as the last of the crying faded within myself.

I opened my eyes only in time to see him, a hundred yards off, walking. He turned and waved, once, at me.

The snow came down in a curtain.

How brave, I thought, to go where you go now, old man, and no complaint.

I walked back into town.

I had a drink with Charles by the fire. He looked in my face and drank a silent toast to what he saw there.

Upstairs, my bed waited for me like a great fold of white snow.

The snow was falling beyond my window for a thousand miles to the north, five hundred miles to the east, two hundred miles west, a hundred miles to the south. The snow fell on everything, everywhere. It fell on two sets of footprints beyond the town: one set coming out and the other going back to be lost among the graves.

I lay on my bed of snow. I remembered my father's face as he waved and turned and went away.

It was the face of the youngest, happiest man I had ever seen.

With that I slept, and gave up weeping.

THE LIFEWORK OF JUAN DiAZ.

FILOMENA FLUNG THE PLANK DOOR SHUT with such violence the candle blew out; she and her crying children were left in darkness. The only things to be seen were through the window-the adobe houses, the cobbled streets, where now the gravedigger stalked up the hill, his spade on his shoulder, moonlight honing the blue metal as he turned into the high cold graveyard and was gone.

"Mamacita, what's wrong?" Filepe, her oldest son, just nine, pulled at her. For the strange dark man had said nothing, just stood at the door with the spade and nodded his head and waited until she banged the door in his face. "Mamacita?"

"That gravedigger." Filomena's hands shook as she relit the candle. "The rent is long overdue on your father's grave. Your father will be dug up and placed down in the catacomb, with a wire to hold him standing against the wall, with the other mummies."

"No, Mamacita!"

"Yes." She caught the children to her. "Unless we find the money. Yes."

"I-I will kill that gravedigger!" cried Filepe.

"It is his job. Another would take his place if he died, and another and another after him."

They thought about the man and the terrible high place where he lived and moved and the catacomb he stood guard over and the strange earth into which people went to come forth dried like desert flowers and tanned like leather for shoes and hollow as drums which could be tapped and beaten, an earth which made great cigar-brown rustling dry mummies that might languish forever leaning like fence poles along the catacomb halls. And, thinking of all this familiar but unfamiliar stuff, Filomena and her children were cold in summer, and silent though their hearts made a vast stir in their bodies. They huddled together for a moment longer and then: "Filepe," said the mother, "come." She opened the door and they stood in the moonlight listening to hear any far sound of a blue metal spade biting the earth, heaping the sand and old flowers. But there was a silence of stars "You others," said Filomena, "to bed."

The door shut. The candle flickered.

The cobbles of the town poured in a river of gleaming moon-silver stone down the hills, past green parks and little shops and the place where the coffin maker tapped and made the clock sounds of death-watch beetles all day and all night, forever in the life of these people. Up along the slide and rush of moonlight on the stones, her skirt whispering of her need, Filomena hurried with Filepe breathless at her side. They turned in at the Official Palace.

The man behind the small, littered desk in the dimly lit office glanced up in some surprise. "Filomena, my cousin!"

"Ricardo." She took his hand and dropped it. "You must help me."

"If G.o.d does not prevent. But ask."

"They-" The bitter stone lay in her mouth; she tried to get it out. "Tonight they are taking Juan from the earth."

Ricardo, who had half risen, now sat back down, his eyes growing wide and full of light, and then narrowing and going dull. "If not G.o.d, then G.o.d's creatures prevent. Has the year gone so swiftly since Juan's death? Can it truly be the rent has come due?" He opened his empty palms and showed them to the woman. "Ah, Filomena, I have no money."

"But if you spoke to the gravedigger. You are the police."

"Filomena, Filomena, the law stops at the edge of the grave."

"But if he will give me ten weeks, only ten, it is almost the end of summer. The Day of the Dead is coming. I will make, I will sell, the candy skulls, and give him the money, oh, please, Ricardo."

And here at last, because there was no longer a way to hold the coldness in and she must let it free before it froze her so she could never move again, she put her hands to her face and wept. And Filepe, seeing that it was permitted, wept, too, and said her name over and over.

"So," said Ricardo, rising. "Yes, yes. I will walk to the mouth of the catacomb and spit into it. But, ah, Filomena, expect no answer. Not so much as an echo. Lead the way." And he put his official cap, very old, very greasy, very worn, upon his head.

The graveyard was higher than the churches, higher than all the buildings, higher than all the hills. It lay on the highest rise of all, overlooking the night valley of the town.

As they entered the vast ironwork gate and advanced among the tombs, the three were confronted by the sight of the gravedigger's back bent into an ever-increasing hole, lifting out spade after spade of dry dirt onto an ever-increasing mound. The digger did not even look up, but made a quiet guess as they stood at the grave's edge.

"Is that Ricardo Albanez, the chief of police?"

"Stop digging!" said Ricardo.

The spade flashed down, dug, lifted, poured. "There is a funeral tomorrow. This grave must be empty, open and ready."

"No one has died in the town."

"Someone always dies. So I dig. I have already waited two months for Filomena to pay what she owes. I am a patient man."

"Be still more patient." Ricardo touched the moving, hunching shoulder of the bent man.

"Chief of the police." The digger paused to lean, sweating, upon his spade. "This is my country, the country of the dead. These here tell me nothing, nor does any man. I rule this land with a spade, and a steel mind. I do not like the live ones to come talking, to disturb the silence I have so nicely dug and filled. Do I tell you how to conduct your munic.i.p.al palace? Well, then. Good night." He resumed his task.

"In the sight of G.o.d," said Ricardo, standing straight and stiff, his fists at his sides, "and this woman and her son, you dare to desecrate the husband-father's final bed?"

"It is not final and not his, I but rented it to him." The spade floated high, flas.h.i.+ng moonlight. "I did not ask the mother and son here to watch this sad event. And listen to me, Ricardo, police chief, one day you will die. I will bury you. Remember that: I. You will be in my hands. Then, oh, then."

"Then what?" shouted Ricardo. "You dog, do you threaten me?"

"I dig." The man was very deep now, vanis.h.i.+ng in the shadowed grave, sending only his spade up to speak for him again and again in the cold light. "Good night, senor, senora, nino. Good night."

Outside her small adobe hut, Ricardo smoothed his cousin's hair and touched her cheek. "Filomena, ah, G.o.d."

"You did what you could."

"That terrible one. When I am dead, what awful indignities might he not work upon my helpless flesh? He would set me upside down in the tomb, hang me by my hair in a far, unseen part of the catacomb. He takes on weight from knowing someday he will have us all. Good night, Filomena. No, not even that. For the night is bad."

He went away down the street.