by Ray Bradbury
‘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 T
ravel.
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 awa
y 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.
