Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 1

Uncle Einar

‘It will take only a minute,’ said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife.

‘I refuse,’ he said. ‘And that takes but a second.’

‘I’ve worked all morning,’ she said, holding to her slender back, ‘and you won’t help? It’s drumming for a rain.’

‘Let it rain,’ he cried, morosely. ‘I’ll not be pierced by lightning just to air your clothes.’

‘But you’re so quick at it.’

‘Again, I refuse.’ His vast tarpaulin wings hummed nervously behind his indignant back.

She gave him a slender rope on which were tied four dozen fresh-washed clothes. He turned it in his fingers with distaste. ‘So it’s come to this,’ he muttered, bitterly. ‘To this, to this, to this.’ He almost wept angry and acid tears.

‘Don’t cry; you’ll wet them down again,’ she said. ‘Jump up, now, run them about.’

‘Run them about.’ His voice was hollow, deep, and terribly wounded. ‘I say: let it thunder, let it pour!’

‘If it was a nice, sunny day I wouldn’t ask,’ she said, reasonably. ‘All my washing gone for nothing if you don’t. They’ll hang about the house—’

That did it. Above all, he hated clothes flagged and festooned so a man had to creep under on the way across a room. He jumped up. His vast green wings boomed. ‘Only so far as the pasture fence!’

Whirl: up he jumped, his wings chewed and loved the cool air. Before you’d say Uncle Einar Has Green Wings he sailed low across his farmland, trailing the clothes in a vast fluttering loop through the pounding concussion and backwash of his wings!

‘Catch!’

Back from the trip, he sailed the clothes, dry as popcorn, down on a series of clean blankets she’d spread for their landing.

‘Thank you!’ she cried.

‘Gahh!’ he shouted, and flew off under the apple tree to brood.

Uncle Einar’s beautiful silklike wings hung like sea-green sails behind him, and whirred and whispered from his shoulders when he sneezed or turned swiftly. He was one of the few in the Family whose talent was visible. All his dark cousins and nephews and brothers hid in small towns across the world, did unseen mental things or things with witch-fingers and white teeth, or blew down the sky like fire-leaves, or loped in forests like moon-silvered wolves. They lived comparatively safe from normal humans. Not so a man with great green wings.

Not that he hated his wings. Far from it! In his youth he’d always flown nights, because nights were rare times for winged men! Daylight held dangers, always had, always would; but nights, ah, nights, he had sailed over islands of cloud and seas of summer sky. With no danger to himself. It had been a rich, full soaring, an exhilaration.

But now he could not fly at night.

On his way home to some high mountain pass in Europe after a Homecoming among Family members in Mellin Town, Illinois (some years ago) he had drunk too much rich crimson wine. ‘I’ll be all right,’ he had told himself, vaguely, as he beat his long way under the morning stars, over the moon-dreaming country hills beyond Mellin Town. And then – crack out of the sky—

A high-tension tower.

Like a netted duck! A great sizzle! His face blown black by a blue sparkler of wire, he fended off the electricity with a terrific back-jumping percussion of his wings, and fell.

His hitting the moonlit meadow under the tower made a noise like a large telephone book dropped from the sky.

Early the next morning, his dew-sodden wings shaking violently, he stood up. It was still dark. There was a faint bandage of dawn stretched across the east. Soon the bandage would stain and all flight would be restricted. There was nothing to do but take refuge in the forest and wait out the day in the deepest thicket until another night gave his wings a hidden motion in the sky.

In this fashion he met his wife.

During the day, which was warm for November first in Illinois country, pretty young Brunilla Wexley was out to udder a lost cow, for she carried a silver pail in one hand as she sidled through thickets and pleaded cleverly to the unseen cow to please return home or burst her gut with unplucked milk. The fact that the cow would have most certainly come home when her teats needed pulling did not concern Brunilla Wexley. It was a sweet excuse for forest-journeying, thistle-blowing, and flower-chewing; all of which Brunilla was doing as she stumbled upon

Asleep near a bush, he seemed a man under a green shelter.

‘Oh,’ said Brunilla, with a fever. ‘A man. In a camp-tent.’

Uncle Einar awoke. The camp-tent spread like a large green fan behind him.

‘Oh,’ said Brunilla, the cow-searcher. ‘A man with wings.’

That was how she took it. She was startled, yes, but she had never been hurt in her life, so she wasn’t afraid of anyone, and it was a fancy thing to see a winged man and she was proud to meet him. She began to talk. In an hour they were old friends, and in two hours she’d quite forgotten his wings were there. And he somehow confessed how he happened to be in this wood.

‘Yes, I noticed you looked banged around,’ she said. ‘That right wing looks very bad. You’d best let me take you home and fix it. You won’t be able to fly all the way to Europe on it, anyway. And who wants to live in Europe these days?’

He thanked her, but he didn’t quite see how he could accept.

‘But I live alone,’ she said. ‘For, as you see, I’m quite ugly.’

He insisted she was not.

‘How kind of you,’ she said. ‘But I am, there’s no fooling myself. My folks are dead, I’ve a farm, a big one, all to myself, quite far from Mellin Town, and I’m in need of talking company.’

But wasn’t she afraid of him? he asked.

‘Proud and jealous would be more near it,’ she said. ‘May I?’ And she stroked his large green membraned veils with careful envy. He shuddered at the touch and put his tongue between his teeth.

So there was nothing for it but that he come to her house for medicaments and ointments, and my! what a burn across his face, beneath his eyes! ‘Lucky you weren’t blinded,’ she said. ‘How’d it happen?’

‘Well …’ he said, and they were at her farm, hardly noticing they’d walked a mile, looking at each other.

A day passed, and another, and he thanked her at her door and said he must be going, he much appreciated the ointment, the care, the lodging. It was twilight and between now, six o’clock, and five the next morning, he must cross an ocean and a continent. ‘Thank you; good-by,’ he said, and started to fly off in the dusk and crashed right into a maple tree.

‘Oh!’ she screamed, and ran to his unconscious body.

When he waked the next hour he knew he’d fly no more in the dark again ever; his delicate night-perception was gone. The winged telepathy that had warned him where towers, trees, houses and hills stood across his path, the fine clear vision and sensibility that had guided him through mazes of forest, cliff, and cloud, all were burnt forever by that strike across his face, that blue electric fry and sizzle.

‘How?’ he moaned softly. ‘How can I go to Europe? If I flew by day, I’d be seen and – miserable joke – maybe shot down! Or kept for a zoo perhaps, what a life that’d be! Brunilla, tell me, what shall I do?’

‘Oh,’ she whispered, looking at her hands. ‘We’ll think of something …’

They were married.

The Family came for the wedding. In a great autumnal avalanche of maple, sycamore, oak, elm leaf, they hissed and rustled, fell in a shower of horse-chestnut, thumped like winter apples on the earth, with an overall scent of farewell-summer on the wind they made in their rushing. The ceremony? The ceremony was brief as a black candle lit, blown out, and smoke left still on the air. Its briefness, darkness, upside-down and backward quality escaped Brunilla, who only listened to the great tide of Uncle Einar’s wings faintly murmuring above them as they finished out the rite. And as for Uncle Einar, the wound across his nose was almost healed and, holding Brunilla’s arm, he felt Europe grow faint and melt away in the distance.

He didn’t have to see very well to fly straight up, or come straight down. It was only natural that on this night of their wedding he take Brunilla in his arms and fly right up into the sky.

A farmer, five miles over, glanced at a low cloud at midnight, saw faint glows and crackles.

‘Heat lightning,’ he observed, and went to bed.

They didn’t come down till morning, with the dew.

The marriage took. She had only to look at him, and it lifted her to think she was the only woman in the world married to a winged man. ‘Who else could say it?’ she asked her mirror. And the answer was: ‘No one!’

He, on the other hand, found great beauty behind her face, great kindness and understanding. He made some changes in his diet to fit her thinking, and was careful with his wings about the house; knocked porcelains and broken lamps were nerve-scrapers, he stayed away from them. He changed his sleeping habits, since he couldn’t fly nights now anyhow. And she in turn fixed chairs so they were comfortable for his wings, put extra padding here or took it out there, and the things she said were the things he loved her for. ‘We’re in our cocoons, all of us. See how ugly I am?’ she said. ‘But one day I’ll break out, spread wings as fine and handsome as you.’

‘You broke out long ago,’ he said.

She thought it over. ‘Yes,’ she had to admit. ‘I know just which day it was, too. In the woods when I looked for a cow and found a tent!’ They laughed, and with him holding her she felt so beautiful she knew their marriage had slipped her from her ugliness, like a bright sword from its case.

They had children. At first there was fear, all on his part, that they’d be winged.

‘Nonsense, I’d love it!’ she said. ‘Keep them out from under foot.’

‘Then,’ he exclaimed, ‘they’d be in your hair!’

‘Ow!’ she cried.

Four children were born, three boys and a girl, who, for their energy, seemed to have wings. They popped up like toadstools in a few years, and on hot summer days asked their father to sit under the apple tree and fan them with his cooling wings and tell them wild starlit tales of island clouds and ocean skies and textures of mist and wind and how a star tastes melting in your mouth, and how to drink cold mountain air, and how it feels to be a pebble dropped from Mt. Everest, turning to a green bloom, flowering your wings just before you strike bottom!

This was his marriage.

And today, six years later, here sat Uncle Einar, here he was, festering under the apple tree, grown impatient and unkind; not because this was his desire, but because after the long wait, he was still unable to fly the wild night sky: his extra sense had never returned. Here he sat despondently, nothing more than a summer sun-parasol, green and discarded, abandoned for the season by the reckless vacationers who once sought the refuge of its translucent shadow. Was he to sit here forever, afraid to fly by day because someone might see him? Was his only flight to be as a drier of clothes for his wife, or a fanner of children on hot August noons? His one occupation had always been flying Family errands, quicker than storms. A boomerang, he’d whickled over hills and valleys and like a thistle, landed. He had always had money; the Family had good use for their winged man! But now? Bitterness! His wings jittered and whisked the air and made a captive thunder.

‘Papa,’ said little Meg.

The children stood looking at his thought-dark face.

‘Papa,’ said Ronald. ‘Make more thunder!’

‘It’s a cold March day, there’ll soon be rain and plenty of thunder,’ said Uncle Einar.

‘Will you come watch us?’ asked Michael.

‘Run on, run on! Let Papa brood!’

He was shut of love, the children of love, and the love of children. He thought only of heavens, skies, horizons, infinities, by night or day, lit by star, moon, or sun, cloudy or clear, but always it was skies and heavens and horizons that ran ahead of you forever when you soared. Yet here he was, sculling the pasture, kept low for fear of being seen.

Misery in a deep well!

‘Papa, come watch us; it’s March!’ cried Meg. ‘And we’re going to the Hill with all the kids from town!’

Uncle Einar grunted. ‘What hill is that?’

‘The Kite Hill, of course!’ they all sang together.

Now he looked at them.

Each held a large paper kite, their faces sweating with anticipation and an animal glowing. In their small fingers were balls of white twine. From the kites, colored red and blue and yellow and green, hung caudal appendages of cotton and silk strips.

‘We’ll fly our kites!’ said Ronald. ‘Won’t you come?’

‘No,’ he said, sadly. ‘I mustn’t be seen by anyone or there’d be trouble.’

‘You could hide and watch from the woods,’ said Meg. ‘We made the kites ourselves. Just because we know how.’

‘How do you know?’

‘You’re our father!’ was the instant cry. ‘That’s why!’

He looked at his children for a long while. He sighed. ‘A kite festival, is it?’

‘Yes, sir!’

‘I’m going to win,’ said Meg.

‘No, I’m!’ Michael contradicted.

‘Me, me!’ piped Stephen.

‘God up the chimney!’ roared Uncle Einar, leaping high with a deafening kettledrum of wings. ‘Children! Children. I love you dearly!’

‘Father, what’s wrong?’ said Michael, backing off.

‘Nothing, nothing, nothing!’ chanted Einar. He flexed his wings to their greatest propulsion and plundering. Whoom! they slammed like cymbals. The children fell flat in the backwash! ‘I have it, I have it! I’m free again! Fire in the flue! Feather on the wind! Brunilla!’ Einar called to the house. His wife appeared. ‘I’m free!’ he called, flushed and tall, on his toes. ‘Listen, Brunilla, I don’t need the night any more! I can fly by day! I don’t need the night! I’ll fly every day and any day of the year from now on! – but, God, I waste time, talking. Look!’

And as the worried members of his family watched, he seized the cotton tail from one of the little kites, tied it to his belt behind, grabbed the twine ball, held one end in his teeth, gave the other end to his children, and up, up into the air he flew, away into the Match wind!

And across the meadows and over the farms his children ran, letting out string to the daylit sky, bubbling and stumbling, and Brunilla stood back in the farmyard and waved and laughed to see what was happening; and her children marched to the far Kite Hill and stood, the four of them, holding the twine in their eager, proud fingers, each tugging and directing and pulling. And the children from Mellin Town came running with their small kites to let up on the wind, and they saw the great green kite leap and hover in the sky and exclaimed:

‘Oh, oh, what a kite! What a kite! Oh, I wish I’d a kite like that! Where, where did you get it!’

‘Our father made it!’ cried Meg and Michael and Stephen and Ronald, and gave an exultant pull on the twine and the humming, thundering kite in the sky dipped and soared and made a great and magical exclamation mark across a cloud!

The Traveler

Father looked into Cecy’s room just before dawn. She lay upon her bed. He shook his head uncomprehendingly and waved at her.

‘Now, if you can tell me what good she does, lying there,’ he said. ‘I’ll eat the crape on my mahogany box. Sleeping all night, eating breakfast, and then lying on top her bed all day.’

‘Oh, but she’s so helpful,’ explained Mother, leading him down the hall away from Cecy’s slumbering pale figure. ‘Why, she’s one of the most adjustable members of the Family. What good are your brothers? Most of them sleep all day and do nothing. At least Cecy is active.’

They went downstairs through the scent of black candles; the black crape on the banister, left over from the Homecoming some months ago and untouched, whispering as they passed. Father unloosened his tie, exhaustedly. ‘Well, we work nights,’ he said. ‘Can we help it if we’re – as you put it – old-fashioned?’

‘Of course not. Everyone in the Family can’t be modern.’ She opened the cellar door; they moved down into darkness arm in arm. She looked over at his round white face, smiling. ‘It’s really very lucky I don’t have to sleep at all. If you were married to a night-sleeper, think what a marriage it would be! Each of us to our own. None of us the same. All wild. That’s how the Family goes. Sometimes we get one like Cecy, all mind: and then there are those like Uncle Einar, all wing; and then again we have one like Timothy, all even and calm and normal. Then there’s you, sleeping days. And me, awake all and all of my life. So Cecy shouldn’t be too much for you to understand. She helps me a million ways each day. She sends her mind down to the green-grocer’s for me, to see what he sells. She puts her mind inside the butcher. That saves me a long trip if he’s fresh out of good cuts. She warns me when gossips are coming to visit and talk away the afternoon. And, well, there are six hundred other things—!’

They paused in the cellar near a large empty mahogany box. He settled himself into it, still not convinced. ‘But if she’d only contribute more,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask her to find some sort of work.’

‘Sleep on it,’ she said to him. ‘Think it over. You may change your mind by sunset.’

She was closing the lid down on him. ‘Well,’ he said, thoughtfully. The lid closed.

‘Good morning, dear,’ she said.

‘Good morning,’ he said, muffled, enclosed, within the box.

The sun rose. She hurried upstairs to make breakfast.

Cecy Elliott was the one who Traveled. She seemed an ordinary eighteen-year-old. But then none of the Family looked like what they were. There was naught of the fang, the foul, the worm or wind-witch to them. They lived in small towns and on farms across the world, simply, closely re-aligning and adapting their talents to the demands and laws of a changing world.

Cecy Elliott awoke. She glided down through the house, humming. ‘Good morning, Mother!’ She walked down to the cellar to recheck each of the large mahogany boxes, to dust them, to be certain each was tightly sealed. ‘Father,’ she said, polishing one box. ‘Cousin Esther,’ she said, examining another, ‘here on a visit. And—’ she rapped at a third, ‘Grandfather Elliott.’ There was a rustle inside like a piece of papyrus. ‘It’s a strange, cross-bred family,’ she mused, climbing to the kitchen again. ‘Night-siphoners and flume-fearers, some awake, like Mother, twenty-five hours out of twenty-four; some asleep, like me, fifty-nine minutes out of sixty. Different species of sleep.’

She ate breakfast. In the middle of her apricot dish she saw her mother’s stare. She laid the spoon down. Cecy said, ‘Father’ll change his mind. I’ll show him how fine I can be to have around. I’m family insurance; he doesn’t understand. You wait.’

Mother said, ‘You were inside me a while ago when I argued with Father?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought I felt you looking out my eyes,’ the mother nodded.

Cecy finished and went up to bed. She folded down the blankets and clean cool sheets, then laid herself out atop the covers, shut her eyes, rested her thin white fingers on her small bosom, nodded her slight, exquisitely sculptured head back against her thick gathering of chestnut hair.

She started to Travel.

Her mind slipped from the room, over the flowered yard, the fields, the green hills, over the ancient drowsy streets of Mellin Town, into the wind and past the moist depression of the ravine. All day she would fly and meander. Her mind would pop into dogs, sit there, and she would feel the bristly feels of dogs, taste ripe bones, sniff tangy-urined trees. She’d hear as a dog heard. She forgot human construction completely. She’d have a dog frame. It was more than telepathy, up one flue and down another. This was complete separation from one body environment into another. It was entrance into tree-nozzling dogs, men, old maids, birds, children at hopscotch, lovers on their morning beds, into workers asweat with shoveling, into unborn babies’ pink, dream-small brains.

Where would she go today? She made her decision, and went!

When her mother tiptoed a moment later to peek into the room, she saw Cecy’s body on the bed, the chest not moving, the face quiet. Cecy was gone already. Mother nodded and smiled.

The morning passed. Leonard, Bion and Sam went off to their work, as did Laura and the manicuring sister: and Timothy was dispatched to school. The house quieted. At noontime the only sound was made by Cecy Elliott’s three young girl-cousins playing Tisket Tasket Coffin Casket in the back yard. There were always extra cousins or uncles or grand-nephews and night-nieces about the place; they came and went; water out a faucet, down a drain.

The cousins stopped their play when the tall loud man banged on the front door and marched straight in when Mother answered.

‘That was Uncle Jonn!’ said the littlest girl, breathless.

‘The one we hate?’ asked the second.

‘What’s he want?’ cried the third. ‘He looked mad!’

‘We’re mad at him, that’s what,’ explained the second, proudly. ‘For what he did to the Family sixty years ago, and seventy years ago and twenty years ago.’

‘Listen!’ They listened. ‘He’s run upstairs!’

‘Sounds like he’s cryin’.’

‘Do grown-ups cry?’

‘Sure, silly!’

‘He’s in Cecy’s room! Shoutin’. Laughin’. Prayin’. Gryin’. He sounds mad, and sad, and fraidy-cat, all together!’

The littlest one made tears, herself. She ran to the cellar door. ‘Wake up! Oh, down there, wake up! You in the boxes! Uncle Jonn’s here and he might have a cedar stake with him! I don’t want a cedar stake in my chest! Wake up!’

‘Shh,’ hissed the biggest girl. ‘He hasn’t a stake! You can’t wake the Boxed People, anyhow, Listen!’

Their heads tilted, their eyes glistened upward, waiting.

‘Get off the bed!’ commanded Mother, in the doorway.

Uncle Jonn bent over Cecy’s slumbering body. His lips were misshaped. There was a wild, fey and maddened focus to his green eyes.

‘Am I too late?’ he demanded, hoarsely, sobbing. ‘Is she gone?’

‘Hours ago!’ snapped Mother. ‘Are you blind? She might not be back for days. Sometimes she lies there a week. I don’t have to feed the body, she finds sustenance from whatever or whoever she’s in. Get away from her!’

Uncle Jonn stiffened, one knee pressed on the springs.

‘Why couldn’t she wait?’ he wanted to know, frantically, looking at her, his hands feeling her silent pulse again and again.

‘You heard me!’ Mother moved forward curtly. ‘She’s not to be touched. She’s got to be left as she is. So if she comes home she can get back in her body exactly right.’

Uncle Jonn turned his head. His long hard red face was pocked and senseless, deep black grooves crowded the tired eyes.

‘Where’d she go? I’ve got to find her.’

Mother talked like a slap in the face. ‘I don’t know. She has favorite places. You might find her in a child running along a trail in the ravine. Or swinging on a grape vine. Or you might find her in a crayfish under a rock in the creek, looking up at you. Or she might be playing chess inside an old man in the court-house square. You know as well as I she can be anywhere.’ A wry look came to Mother’s mouth. ‘She might be vertical inside me now, looking out at you, laughing, and not telling you. This might be her talking and having fun. And you wouldn’t know it.’

‘Why—’ He swung heavily around, like a huge pivoted boulder. His big hands came up, wanting to grab something. ‘If I thought—’

Mother talked on, casual quiet. ‘Of course she’s not in me, here. And if she was there’d be no way to tell.’ Her eyes gleamed with a delicate malice. She stood tall and graceful, looking upon him with no fear. ‘Now, suppose you explain what you want with her?’

He seemed to be listening to a distant bell, tolling. He shook his head, angrily, to clear it. Then he growled. ‘Something … inside me …’ He broke off. He leaned over the cold, sleeping body. ‘Cecy! Come back, you hear! You can come back if you want!’

The wind blew softly through the high willows outside the sundrifted windows. The bed creaked under his shifted weight. The distant bell tolled again and he was listening to it, but Mother could not hear it. Only he heard the drowsy summer-day sounds of it, far far away. His mouth opened obscurely:

‘I’ve a thing for her to do to me. For the past month I’ve been kind of going – insane. I get funny thoughts. I was going to take a train to the big city and talk to a psychiatrist but he wouldn’t help. I know that Cecy can enter my head and exorcise those fears I have. She can suck them out like a vacuum cleaner, if she wants to help me. She’s the only one can scrape away the filth and cobwebs and make me new again. That’s why I need her, you understand?’ he said, in a tight, expectant voice. He licked his lips. ‘She’s got to help me!’

‘After all you’ve done to the Family?’ said Mother.

‘I did nothing to the Family!’

‘The story goes,’ said Mother, ‘that in bad times, when you needed money, you were paid a hundred dollars for each of the Family you pointed out to the law to be staked through the heart.’

‘That’s unfair!’ he said, wavering like a man hit in the stomach. ‘You can’t prove that. You lie!’

‘Nevertheless, I don’t think Cecy’d want to help you. The Family wouldn’t want it.’

‘Family, Family!’ He stomped the floor like a huge, brutal child. ‘Damn the Family! I won’t go insane on their account! I need help. God damn it, and I’ll get it!’

Mother faced him, her face reserved, her hands crossed over her bosom.

He lowered his voice, looking at her with a kind of evil shyness, not meeting her eyes. ‘Listen to me, Mrs Elliott,’ he said. ‘And you, too, Cecy,’ he said to the sleeper. ‘If you’re there,’ he added. ‘Listen to this.’ He looked at the wall clock ticking on the far, sun-drenched wall. ‘If Cecy isn’t back here by six o’clock tonight, ready to help clean out my mind and make me sane, I’ll – I’ll go to the police.’ He drew himself up. ‘I’ve got a list of Elliotts who live on farms all around and inside Mellin Town. The police can cut enough new cedar stakes in an hour to drive through a dozen Elliott hearts.’ He stopped, wiped the sweat off his face. He stood, listening.

The distant bell began to toll again.

He had heard it for weeks. There was no bell, but he could hear it ringing. It rang now, near, far, close, away. Nobody else could hear it save himself.

He shook his head. He shouted to cover the sound of those bells, shouted at Mrs Elliott. ‘You heard me?’

He hitched up his trousers, tightened the buckle clasp with a jerk, walked past Mother to the door.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I heard. But even I can’t call Cecy back if she doesn’t want to come. She’ll arrive eventually. Be patient. Don’t go running off to the police—’

He cut her. ‘I can’t wait. This thing of mine, this noise in my head’s gone on eight weeks now! I can’t stand it much longer!’ He scowled at the clock. ‘I’m going. I’ll try to find Cecy in town. If I don’t get her by six – well, you know what a cedar stake’s like …’

His heavy shoes pounded away down the hall, fading down the stairs, out of the house. When the noises were all gone, the mother turned and looked, earnestly, painfully, down upon the sleeper.

‘Cecy,’ she called, softly, insistently. ‘Cecy, come home!’

There was no word from the body. Cecy lay there, not moving, for as long as her mother waited.

Uncle Jonn walked through the fresh open country and into the streets of Mellin Town, looking for Cecy in every child that licked an ice-pop and in every little white dog that padded by on its way to some eagerly anticipated nowhere.

The town spread out like a fancy graveyard. Nothing more than a few monuments, really – edifices to lost arts and pastimes. It was a great meadow of elms and deodars and hackmatack trees, laid out with wooden walks you could haul into your barn at night if the hollow sound of walking people irked you. There were tall old maiden houses, lean and narrow and wisely wan, in which were spectacles of colored glass, upon which the thinned golden hair of age-old bird nests sprouted. There was a drug shop full of quaint wire-rung soda-fountain stools with plywood bottoms, and the memorious clear sharp odor that used to be in drug stores but never is any more. And there was a barber emporium with a red-ribboned pillar twisting around inside a chrysalis of glass in front of it. And there was a grocery that was all fruity shadow and dusty boxes and the smell of an old Armenian woman, which was like the odor of a rusty penny. The town lay under the deodar and mellow-leaf trees, in no hurry, and somewhere in the town was Cecy, the one who Traveled.

Uncle John stopped, bought himself a bottle of Orange Crush, drank it, wiped his face with his handkerchief, his eyes jumping up and down, like little kids skipping rope. I’m afraid, he thought. I’m afraid.

He saw a code of birds strung dot-dash on the high telephone wires. Was Cecy up there laughing at him out of sharp bird eyes, shuffling her feathers, singing at him? He suspicioned the cigar-store Indian. But there was no animation in that cold, carved, tobacco-brown image.

Distantly, like on a sleepy Sunday morning, he heard the bells ringing in a valley of his head. He was stone blind. He stood in blackness. White, tortured faces drifted through his inturned vision.

‘Cecy!’ he cried, to everything, everywhere. ‘I know you can help me! Shake me like a tree! Cecy!’

The blindness passed. He was bathed in a cold sweating that didn’t stop, but ran like a syrup.

‘I know you can help,’ he said. ‘I saw you help Cousin Marianne years ago. Ten years ago, wasn’t it?’ He stood, concentrating.