by Ray Bradbury
Grandma stood tightening her eyes, her hands up to catch the breath that moved from her mouth. She couldn’t see. ‘Where’s my specs?’ she cried. People searched. ‘Can’t you find ’em?’ she shouted. She squinted at the body. ‘Never mind,’ she said, getting close. The room settled. She sighed and quavered and cooed over the open box.
‘He’s kept,’ said one of the women. ‘He ain’t crumbled.’
‘Things like that,’ said Joseph Pikes, ‘don’t happen.’
‘It happened,’ said the woman.
‘Sixty years underground. Stands to reason no man lasts that long.’
The sunlight was late by each window, the last butterflies were settling among flowers to look like nothing more than other flowers.
Grandma Loblilly put out her wrinkly hand, trembling. ‘The earth kept him. The way the air is. That was good dry soil for keeping.’
‘He’s young,’ wailed one of the women, quietly. ‘So young.’
‘Yes,’ said Grandma Loblilly, looking at him. ‘Him, lying there, twenty-three years old. And me, standing here, pushing eighty!’ She shut her eyes.
‘Now, Grandma.’ Joseph Pikes touched her shoulder.
‘Yes, him lyin’ there, all twenty-three and fine and purty, and me—’ She squeezed her eyes tight. ‘Me bending over him, never young agin, myself, only old and spindly, never to have a chance at being young agin. Oh, Lord! Death keeps people young. Look how kind death’s been to him.’ She ran her hands over her body and face slowly, turning to the others. ‘Death’s nicer than life. Why didn’t I die then too? Then we’d both be young now, together. Me in my box, in my white wedding gown all lace, and my eyes closed down, all shy with death. And my hands making a prayer on my bosom.’
‘Grandma, don’t carry on.’
‘I got a right to carry on! Why didn’t I die, too? Then, when he came back, like he came today, to see me, I wouldn’t be like this!’
Her hands went wildly to feel her lined face, to twist the loose skin, to fumble the empty mouth, to yank the gray hair and look at it with appalled eyes.
‘What a fine coming-back he’s had!’ She showed her skinny arms. ‘Think that a man of twenty-three years will want the likes of a seventy-nineyear-old woman with sump-rot in her veins? I been cheated! Death kept him young forever. Look at me; did Life do so much?’
‘They’re compensations,’ said Joseph Pikes. ‘He ain’t young, Grandma. He’s long over eighty years.’
‘You’re a fool, Joseph Pikes. He’s fine as a stone, not touched by a thousand rains. And he’s come back to see me and he’ll be picking one of the younger girls now. What would he want with an old woman?’
‘He’s in no way to fetch nuthin’ offa nobody,’ said Joseph Pikes.
Grandma pushed him back. ‘Get out now, all of you! Ain’t your box, ain’t your lid, and it ain’t your almost-husband! You leave the box here, leastwise tonight, and tomorrow you dig a new burying place.’
‘Awright, Grandma; he was your beau. I’ll come early tomorra. Don’t you cry, now.’
‘I’ll do what my eyes most need to do.’
She stood stiff in the middle of the room until the last of them were out the door. After a while she got a candle and lit it and she noticed someone standing on the hill outside. It was Joseph Pikes. He’d be there the rest of the night, she reckoned, and she did not shout for him to go away. She did not look out the window again, but she knew he was there, and so was much better rested in the following hours.
She went to the coffin and looked down at William Simmons.
She gazed fully upon him. Seeing his hands was like seeing actions. She saw how they had been with reins of a horse in them, moving up and down. She remembered how the lips of him had clucked as the carriage had glided along with an even pacing of the horse through the meadowlands, the moonlight shadows all around. She knew how it was when those hands held to you.
She touched his suit. ‘That’s not the same suit he was buried in!’ she cried suddenly. And yet she knew it was the same. Sixty years had changed not the suit but the linings of her mind.
Seized with a quick fear, she hunted a long time until she found her spectacles and put them on.
‘Why, that’s not William Simmons!’ she shouted.
But she knew this also was untrue. It was William Simmons. ‘His chin didn’t go back that far!’ she cried softly, logically. ‘Or did it?’ And his hair. ‘It was a wonderful sorrel color, I remember! This hair here’s just plain brown. And his nose, I don’t recall it being that tippy!’
She stood over this strange man and, gradually, as she watched, she knew that this indeed was William Simmons. She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory—you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculpt and finish a man-memory until he’s all out of kilter.
There was a certain sense of loss and bewilderment in her. She wished she had never opened the box. Or, leastwise, had the sense to leave her glasses off. She had not seen him clearly at first; just enough so she filled in the rough spots with her mind. Now, with her glasses on…
She glanced again and again at his face. It became slowly familiar. That memory of him that she had torn apart and put together for sixty years faded to be replaced by the man she had really known. And he was fine to look upon. The sense of having lost something vanished. He was the same man, no more, no less. This was always the way when you didn’t see people for years and they came back to say howdy-do. For a spell you felt so very uneasy with them. But then, at last you relaxed.
‘Yes, that’s you,’ she laughed. ‘I see you peeking out from behind all the strangeness. I see you all glinty and sly here and there and about.’
She began to cry again. If only she could lie to herself, if only she could say, ‘Look at him, he don’t look the same, he’s not the same man I took a fetching on!’ then she could feel better. But all the little inside-people sitting around in her head would rock back in their tiny rockers and cackle and say, ‘You ain’t foolin’ us none, Grandma.’
Yes, how easy to deny it was him. And feel better. But she didn’t deny it. She felt the great depressing sadness because here he was, young as creek water, and here she was, old as the sea.
‘William Simmons!’ she cried. ‘Don’t look at me! I know you still love me, so I’ll primp myself up!’
She stirred the stove-fire, quickly put irons on to heat, used irons on her hair till it was all gray curls. Baking powder whitened her cheeks! She bit a cherry to color her lips, pinched her cheeks to bring a flush. From a trunk she yanked old materials until she found a faded blue velvet dress which she put on.
She stared wildly in the mirror at herself.
‘No, no.’ She groaned and shut her eyes. ‘There’s nothing I can do to make me younger’n you, William Simmons! Even if I died now it wouldn’t cure me of this old thing come on me, this disease—’
She had a violent wish to run forever in the woods, fall in a leaf pile and moulder down into smoking ruin with them. She ran across the room, intending never to come back. But as she yanked the door wide a cold wind exploded over her from outside and she heard a sound that made her hesitate.
The wind rushed about the room, yanked at the coffin and pushed inside it.
William Simmons seemed to stir in his box.
Grandma slammed the door.
She moved slowly back to squint at him.
He was ten years older.
There were wrinkles and lines on his hands and face.
‘William Simmons!’
During the next hour, William Simmons’s face tolled away the years. His cheeks went in on themselves, like clenching a fist, like withering an apple in a bin. His flesh was made of carved pure white snow, and the cabin heat melted it. It got a charred look. The air made the eyes and mouth pucker. Then, as if struck a hammer blow, the face shattered into a mi
llion wrinkles. The body squirmed in an agony of time. It was forty, then fifty, then sixty years old! It was seventy, eighty, one hundred years! Burning, burning away! There were small whispers and leaf-crackles from its face and its age-burning hands, one hundred ten, one hundred twenty years, lined upon etched, graved, line!
Grandma Loblilly stood there all the cold night, aching her bird bones, watching, cold, over the changing man. She was a witness to all improbabilities. She felt something finally let loose of her heart. She did not feel sad any more. The weight lifted away from her.
She went peacefully to sleep, standing against a chair.
Sunlight came yellow through the woodland, birds and ants and creek waters were moving, each as quiet as the other, going somewhere.
It was morning.
Grandma woke and looked down upon William Simmons.
‘Ah,’ said Grandma, looking and seeing.
Her very breath stirred and stirred his bones until they flaked, like a chrysalis, like a kind of candy all whittling away, burning with an invisible fire. The bones flaked and flew, light as pieces of dust on the sunlight. Each time she shouted the bones split asunder, there was a dry flaking rustle from the box.
If there was a wind and she opened the door, he’d be blown away on it like so many crackly leaves!
She bent for a long time, looking at the box. Then she gave a knowing cry, a sound of discovery, and moved back, putting her hands first to her face and then to her spindly breasts and then traveling all up and down her arms and legs and fumbling at her empty mouth.
Her shout brought Joseph Pikes running.
He pulled up at the door only in time to see Grandma Loblilly dancing and jumping around on her yellow, high-peg shoes in a wild gyration.
She clapped her hands, laughed, flung her skirts, ran in a circle, and did a little waltz with herself, tears on her face. And to the sunlight and the flashing image of herself in the wall mirror she cried:
‘I’m young! I’m eighty, but I’m younger’n him!’
She skipped, she hopped, and she curtsied.
‘There are compensations, Joseph Pikes; you was right!’ she chortled. ‘I’m younger’n all the dead ones in the whole world!’
And she waltzed so violently the whirl of her dress pulled at the box and whispers of chrysalis leapt on the air to hang golden and powdery amid her shouts.
‘Whee-deee!’ she cried. ‘Whee-heee!’
The Haunting of the New
I hadn’t been in Dublin for years. I’d been round the world—everywhere but Ireland—but now within the hour of my arrival the Royal Hibernian Hotel phone rang and on the phone: Nora herself, God Bless!
‘Charles? Charlie? Chuck? Are you rich at last? And do rich writers buy fabulous estates?’
‘Nora!’ I laughed. ‘Don’t you ever say hello?’
‘Life’s too short for hellos, and now there’s no time for decent goodbys. Could you buy Grynwood?’
‘Nora, Nora, your family house, two hundred rich years old? What would happen to wild Irish social life, the parties, drinks, gossip? You can’t throw it all away!’
‘Can and shall. Oh, I’ve trunks of money waiting out in the rain this moment. But, Charlie, Charles, I’m alone in the house. The servants have fled to help the Aga. Now on this final night, Chuck, I need a writer-man to see the Ghost. Does your skin prickle? Come. I’ve mysteries and a home to give away. Charlie, oh, Chuck, oh, Charles.’
Click. Silence.
Ten minutes later I roared round the snake-road through the green hills toward the blue lake and the lush grass meadows of the hidden and fabulous house called Grynwood.
I laughed again. Dear Nora! For all her gab, a party was probably on the tracks this moment, lurched toward wondrous destruction. Bertie might fly from London, Nick from Paris, Alicia would surely motor up from Galway. Some film director, cabled within the hour, would parachute or helicopter down, a rather seedy manna in dark glasses. Marion would show with his Pekingese dog troupe, which always got drunker, and sicker, than he.
I gunned my hilarity as I gunned the motor.
You’ll be beautifully mellow by eight o’clock. I thought, stunned to sleep by concussions of bodies before midnight, drowse till noon, then even more nicely potted by Sunday high tea. And somewhere in between, the rare game of musical beds with Irish and French countesses, ladies, and plain field-beast art majors crated in from the Sorbonne, some with chewable mustaches, some not, and Monday ten million years off. Tuesday, I would motor oh so carefully back to Dublin, nursing my body like a great impacted wisdom tooth, gone much too wise with women, pain-flashing with memory.
Trembling, I remembered the first time I had drummed out to Nora’s, when I was twenty-one.
A mad old Duchess with flour-talcumed cheeks, and the teeth of a barracuda had wrestled me and a sports car down this road fifteen years ago, braying into the fast weather:
‘You shall love Nora’s menagerie zoo and horticultural garden! Her friends are beasts and keepers, tigers and pussies, rhododendrons and flytraps. Her streams run cold fish, hot trout. Hers is a great greenhouse where brutes grow outsize, force-fed by unnatural airs: enter Nora’s on Friday with clean linen, sog out with the wet-wash-soiled bedclothes Monday, feeling as if you had meantime inspired, painted, and lived through all Bosch’s Temptations, Hells, Judgments, and Dooms! Live at Nora’s and you reside in a great warm giant’s cheek, deliciously gummed and morseled hourly. You will pass, like victuals, through her mansion. When it has crushed forth your last sweet-sour sauce and dismarrowed your youth-candied bones, you will be discarded in a cold iron-country train station lonely with rain.’
‘I’m coated with enzymes?’ I cried above the engine roar. ‘No house can break down my elements, or take nourishment from my Original Sin.’
‘Fool!’ laughed the Duchess. ‘We shall see most of your skeleton by sunrise Sunday!’
I came out of memory as I came out of the woods at a fine popping glide and slowed because the very friction of beauty stayed the heart, the mind, the blood, and therefore the foot upon the throttle.
There under a blue-lake sky by a blue-sky lake lay Nora’s own dear place, the grand house called Grynwood. It nestled in the roundest hills by the tallest trees in the deepest forest in all Eire. It had towers built a thousand years ago by unremembered peoples and unsung architects for reasons never to be guessed. Its gardens had first flowered five hundred years back and there were outbuildings scattered from a creative explosion two hundred years gone amongst old tomb yards and crypts. Here was a convent hall become a horse barn of the landed gentry, there were new wings built on ninety years ago. Out around the lake was a huntinglodge ruin where wild horses might plunge through minted shadow to sink away in greenwater grasses by yet further cold ponds and single graves of daughters whose sins were so rank they were driven forth even in death to the wilderness, sunk traceless in the gloom.
As if in bright welcome, the sun flashed vast tintinnabulations from scores of house windows. Blinded, I clenched the car to a halt. Eyes shut, I licked my lips.
I remembered my first night at Grynwood.
Nora herself opening the front door. Standing stark naked, she announced:
‘You’re too late. It’s all over!’
‘Nonsense. Hold this, boy, and this.’
Whereupon the Duchess, in three nimble moves, peeled herself raw as a blanched oyster in the wintry doorway.
I stood aghast, gripping her clothes.
‘Come in, boy, you’ll catch your death.’ And the bare Duchess walked serenely away among the well-dressed people.
‘Beaten at my own game,’ cried Nora. ‘Now, to compete, I must put my clothes back on. And I was so hoping to shock you.’
‘Never fear,’ I said. ‘You have.’
‘Come help me dress.’
In the alcove, we waded among her clothes, which lay in misshapen pools of musky scent upon a parqueted floor.
‘Hold the panties while
I slip into them. You’re Charles, aren’t you?’
‘How do you do.’ I flushed, then burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. ‘Forgive me,’ I said at last, snapping her bra in back, ‘it’s just here it is early evening, and I’m putting you into your clothes. I—’
A door slammed somewhere. I glanced around for the Duchess.
‘Gone,’ I murmured. ‘The house has devoured her, already.’
True. I didn’t see the Duchess again until the rainy Monday morn she had predicted. By then she had forgotten my name, my face, and the soul behind my face.
‘My God,’ I said. ‘What’s that, and that?’
Still dressing Nora, we had arrived at the library door. Inside, like a bright mirror-maze, the weekend guests turned.
‘That,’ Nora pointed, ‘is the Manhattan Civic Ballet flown over on ice by jet stream. To the left, the Hamburg Dancers, flown the opposite way. Divine casting. Enemy ballet mobs unable, because of language, to express their scorn and vitriol. They must pantomime their cat-fight. Stand aside, Charlie. What was Valkyrie must become Rhine Maiden. And those boys are Rhine Maidens. Guard your flank!’
Nora was right.
The battle was joined.
The tiger lilies leapt at each other, jabbering in tongues. Then, frustrated, they fell away, flushed. With a bombardment of slammed doors, the enemies plunged off to scores of rooms. What was horror became horrible friendship and what was friendship became steamroom ovenbastings of unabashed and, thank God, hidden affection.
After that it was one grand crystal-chandelier avalanche of writer-artist-choreographer-poets down the swift-sloped weekend.
Somewhere I was caught and swept in the heaped pummel of flesh headed straight for a collision with the maiden-aunt reality of Monday noon.
Now, many lost parties, many lost years later, here I stood.
And there stood Grynwood manse, very still.