‘Why, we’ll be on some world with a number maybe; planet 6 of star system 97, planet 2 of system 99! So damn far off from here you need a nightmare to take it in! We’ll be gone, do you see, gone off away and safe! And I thought to myself, ah, ah. So that’s the reason we came to Mars, so that’s the reason men shoot off their rockets.’
‘Bob—’
‘Let me finish; not to make money, no. Not to see the sights, no. Those are the lies men tell, the fancy reasons they give themselves. Get rich, get famous, they say. Have fun, jump around, they say. But all the while, inside, something else is ticking along the way it ticks in salmon or whales, the way it ticks, by God, in the smallest microbe you want to name. And that little clock that ticks in everything living, you know what it says? It says get away, spread out, move along, keep swimming. Run to so many worlds and build so many towns that nothing can ever kill man. You see, Carrie? It’s not just us come to Mars, it’s the race, the whole darn human race, depending on how we make out in our lifetime. This thing is so big I want to laugh. I’m so scared stiff of it.’
He felt the boys walking steadily behind him and he felt Carrie beside him and he wanted to see her face and how she was taking all this, but he didn’t look there, either.
‘All this is no different than me and Dad walking the fields when I was a boy, casting seed by hand when our seeder broke down and we’d no money to fix it. It had to be done, somehow, for the later crops. My God, Carrie, my God, you remember those Sunday-supplement articles, ‘The Earth Will Freeze in a Million Years?’ I bawled once, as a boy, reading articles like that. My mother asked why. I’m bawling for all those poor people up ahead. I said. Don’t worry about them, Mother said. But, Carrie, that’s my whole point; we are worrying about them. Or we wouldn’t be here. It matters if Man with a capital M keeps going. There’s nothing better than Man with a capital M in my books. I’m prejudiced, of course, because I’m one of the breed. But if there’s any way to get hold of that immortality men are always talking about, this is the way—spread out—seed the universe. Then you got a harvest against crop failures anywhere down the line. No matter if Earth has famines or the rust comes in. You got the new wheat lifting on Venus or where-in-hell-ever man gets to in the next thousand years. I’m crazy with the idea, Carrie, crazy. When I finally hit on it I got so excited I wanted to grab people, you, the boys, and tell them. But hell, I knew that wasn’t necessary. I knew a day or night would come when you’d hear that ticking in yourselves too, and then you’d see, and no one’d have to say anything again about all this. It’s big talk, Carrie, I know, and big thoughts for a man just short of five feet five, but by all that’s holy, it’s true.’
They moved through the deserted streets of the town and listened to the echoes of their walking feet.
‘And this morning?’ said Carrie.
‘I’m coming to this morning,’ he said. ‘Part of me wants to go home too. But the other part says if we go, everything’s lost. So I thought, what bothers us most? Some of the things we once had. Some of the boys’ things, your things, mine. And I thought, if it takes an old thing to get a new thing started, by God, I’ll use the old thing. I remember from history books that a thousand years ago they put charcoals in a hollowed-out cow horn, blew on them during the day, so they carried their fire on marches from place to place, to start a fire every night with the sparks left over from morning. Always a new fire, but always something of the old in it. So I weighed and balanced it off. Is the Old worth all our money? I asked. No! It’s only the things we did with the Old that have any worth. Well, then, is the New worth all our money? I asked. Do you feel like investing in the day after the middle of next week? Yes! I said. If I can fight this thing that makes us want to go back to Earth, I’d dip my money in kerosene and strike a match!’
Carrie and the two boys did not move. They stood on the street, looking at him as if he were a storm that had passed over and around, almost blowing them from the ground, a storm that was now dying away.
‘The freight rocket came in this morning,’ he said, quietly. ‘Our delivery’s on it. Let’s go and pick it up.’
They walked slowly up the three steps into the rocket depot and across the echoing floor toward the freight room that was just sliding back its doors, opening for the day.
‘Tell us again about the salmon,’ said one of the boys.
In the middle of the warm morning they drove out of town in a rented truck filled with great crates and boxes and parcels and packages, long ones, tall ones, short ones, flat ones, all numbered and neatly addressed to one Robert Prentiss, New Toledo, Mars.
They stopped the truck by the quonset hut and the boys jumped down and helped their mother out. For a moment Bob sat behind the wheel, and then slowly got out himself to walk around and look into the back of the truck at the crates.
And by noon all but one of the boxes were opened and their contents placed on the sea-bottom where the family stood among them.
‘Carrie…’
And he led her up the old porch steps that now stood uncrated on the edge of town.
‘Listen to ’em, Carrie.’
The steps squeaked and whispered underfoot.
‘What do they say, tell me what they say?’
She stood on the ancient wooden steps, holding to herself, and could not tell him.
He waved his hand. ‘Front porch here, living room there, dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms. Part we’ll build new, part we’ll bring. Of course all we got here now is the front porch, some parlor furniture, and the old bed.’
‘All that money, Bob!’
He turned, smiling. ‘You’re not mad, now, look at me! You’re not mad. We’ll bring it all up, next year, five years! The cut-glass vases, that Armenian carpet your mother gave us in 1961! Just let the sun explode!’
They looked at the other crates, numbered and lettered: Front-porch swing, front-porch wicker rocker, hanging Chinese crystals…
‘I’ll blow them myself to make them ring.’
They set the front door, with its little panes of colored glass, on the top of the stairs, and Carrie looked through the strawberry window.
‘What do you see?’
But he knew what she saw, for he gazed through the colored glass, too. And there was Mars, with its cold sky warmed and its dead seas fired with color, with its hills like mounds of strawberry ice, and its sand like burning charcoals sifted by wind. The strawberry window, the strawberry window, breathed soft rose colors on the land and filled the mind and the eye with the light of a never-ending dawn. Bent there, looking through, he heard himself say:
‘The town’ll be out this way in a year. This’ll be a shady street, you’ll have your porch, and you’ll have friends. You won’t need all this so much, then. But starting right here, with this little bit that’s familiar, watch it spread, watch Mars change so you’ll know it as if you’ve known it all your life.’
He ran down the steps to the last and as yet unopened canvas-covered crate. With his pocket knife he cut a hole in the canvas. ‘Guess!’ he said.
‘My kitchen stove? My furnace?’
‘Not in a million years.’ He smiled very gently. ‘Sing me a song,’ he said.
‘Bob, you’re clean off your head.’
‘Sing me a song worth all the money we had in the bank and now don’t have, but who gives a blast in hell,’ he said.
‘I don’t know anything but “Genevieve, Sweet Genevieve”!’
‘Sing that,’ he said.
But she could not open her mouth and start the song. He saw her lips move and try, but there was no sound.
He ripped the canvas wider and shoved his hand into the crate and touched around for a quiet moment, and started to sing the words himself until he moved his hand a last time and then a single clear piano chord sprang out on the morning air.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Let’s take it right on to the end. Everyone! Here’s the harmony.’
A Scent of Sarsaparilla
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Mr William Finch stood quietly in the dark and blowing attic all morning and afternoon for three days. For three days in late November, he stood alone, feeling the soft, white flakes of Time falling out of the infinite cold steel sky, silently, softly, feathering the roof and powdering the eaves. He stood, eyes shut. The attic, wallowed in seas of wind in the long sunless days, creaked every bone and shook down ancient dusts from its beams and warped timbers and lathings. It was a mass of sighs and torments that ached all about him where he stood sniffing its elegant dry perfumes and feeling of its ancient heritages. Ah. Ah.
Listening, downstairs, his wife Cora could not hear him walk or shift or twitch. She imagined she could only hear him breathe, slowly out and in, like a dusty bellows, alone up there in the attic, high in the windy house.
‘Ridiculous,’ she muttered.
When he hurried down for lunch the third afternoon, he smiled at the bleak walls, the chipped plates, the scratched silverware, and even at his wife!
‘What’s all the excitement?’ she demanded.
‘Good spirits is all. Wonderful spirits!’ he laughed. He seemed almost hysterical with joy. He was seething in a great warm ferment which, obviously, he had trouble concealing. His wife frowned.
‘What’s that smell?’
‘Smell, smell, smell?’
‘Sarsaparilla.’ She sniffed suspiciously. ‘That’s what it is!’
‘Oh, it couldn’t be!’ His hysterical happiness stopped as quickly as if she’d switched him off. He seemed stunned, ill at ease, and suddenly very careful.
‘Where did you go this morning?’ she asked.
‘You know I was cleaning the attic.’
‘Mooning over a lot of trash. I didn’t hear a sound. Thought maybe you weren’t in the attic at all. What’s that?’ She pointed.
‘Well, now how did those get there?’ he asked the world.
He peered down at the pair of black spring-metal bicycle clips that bound his thin pants cuffs to his bony ankles.
‘Found them in the attic,’ he answered himself. ‘Remember when we got out on the gravel road in the early morning on our tandem bike, Cora, forty years ago, everything fresh and new?’
‘If you don’t finish that attic today, I’ll come up and toss everything out myself.’
‘Oh, no,’ he cried, ‘I have everything the way I want it!’
She looked at him coldly.
‘Cora,’ he said, eating his lunch, relaxing, beginning to enthuse again, ‘you know what attics are? They’re Time Machines, in which old, dimwitted men like me can travel back forty years to a time when it was summer all year round and children raided ice wagons. Remember how it tasted? You held the ice in your handkerchief. It was like sucking the flavor of linen and snow at the same time.’
Cora fidgeted.
It’s not impossible, he thought, half closing his eyes, trying to see it and build it. Consider an attic. Its very atmosphere is Time. It deals in other years, the cocoons and chrysalises of another age. All the bureau drawers are little coffins where a thousand yesterdays lie in state. Oh, the attic’s a dark, friendly place, full of Time, and if you stand in the very center of it, straight and tall, squinting your eyes, and thinking and thinking, and smelling the Past, and putting out your hands to feel of Long Ago, why, it…
He stopped, realizing he had spoken some of this aloud. Cora was eating rapidly.
‘Well, wouldn’t it be interesting,’ he asked the part in her hair, ‘if Time Travel could occur? And what more logical, proper place for it to happen than in an attic like ours, eh?’
‘It’s not always summer back in the old days,’ she said. ‘It’s just your crazy memory. You remember all the good things and forget the bad. It wasn’t always summer.’
‘Figuratively speaking, Cora, it was.’
‘Wasn’t.’
‘What I mean is this,’ he said, whispering excitedly, bending forward to see the image he was tracing on the blank dining-room wall. ‘If you rode your unicycle carefully between the years, balancing, hands out, careful, careful, if you rode from year to year, spent a week in 1909, a day in 1900, a month or a fortnight somewhere else, 1905, 1898, you could stay with summer the rest of your life.’
‘Unicycle?’
‘You know, one of those tall chromium one-wheeled bikes, single-seater, the performers ride in vaudeville shows, juggling. Balance, true balance, it takes, not to fall off, to keep the bright objects flying in the air, beautiful, up and up, a light, a flash, a sparkle, a bomb of brilliant colors, red, yellow, blue, green, white, gold; all the Junes and Julys and Augusts that ever were, in the air, about you, at once, hardly touching your hands, flying, suspended, and you, smiling, among them. Balance, Cora, balance.’
‘Blah,’ she said, ‘blah, blah.’ And added, ‘Blah!’
He climbed the long cold stairs to the attic, shivering.
There were nights in winter when he woke with porcelain in his bones, with cool chimes blowing in his ears, with frost piercing his nerves in a raw illumination like white-cold fireworks exploding and showering down in flaming snows upon a silent land deep in his subconscious. He was cold, cold, cold, and it would take a score of endless summers, with their green torches and bronze suns, to thaw him free of his wintry sheath. He was a great tasteless chunk of brittle ice, a snowman put to bed each night, full of confetti dreams, tumbles of crystal and flurry. And there lay winter outside forever, a great leaden wine press smashing down its colorless lid of sky, squashing them all like so many grapes, mashing color and sense and being from everyone, save the children who fled on skis and toboggans down mirrored hills which reflected the crushing iron shield that hung lower above town each day and every eternal night.
Mr Finch lifted the attic trap door. But here, here. A dust of summer sprang up about him. The attic dust simmered with heat left over from other seasons. Quietly, he shut the trap door down.
He began to smile.
The attic was quiet as a thundercloud before a storm. On occasion, Cora Finch heard her husband murmuring, murmuring, high up there.
At five in the afternoon, singing ‘My Isle of Golden Dreams,’ Mr Finch flipped a crisp new straw hat in the kitchen door. ‘Boo!’
‘Did you sleep all afternoon?’ snapped his wife. ‘I called up at you four times and no answer.’
‘Sleep?’ He considered this and laughed, then put his hand quickly over his mouth. ‘Well, I guess I did.’
Suddenly she saw him. ‘My God!’ she cried, ‘where’d you get that coat?’
He wore a red candy-striped coat, a high white, choking collar and ice cream pants. You could smell the straw hat like a handful of fresh hay fanned in the air.
‘Found ’em in an old trunk.’
She sniffed. ‘Don’t smell of moth balls. Looks brand-new.’
‘Oh, no!’ he said hastily. He looked stiff and uncomfortable as she eyed his costume.
‘This isn’t a summer-stock company,’ she said.
‘Can’t a fellow have a little fun?’
‘That’s all you’ve ever had.’ She slammed the oven door. ‘While I’ve stayed home and knitted, Lord knows, you’ve been down at the store helping ladies’ elbows in and out doors.’
He refused to be bothered. ‘Cora.’ He looked deep into the crackling straw hat. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to take a Sunday walk the way we used to do, with your silk parasol and your long dress whishing along, and sit on those wire-legged chairs at the soda parlor and smell the drugstore the way they used to smell? Why don’t drugstores smell that way any more? And order two sarsaparillas for us, Cora, and then ride out in our 1910 Ford to Hannahan’s Pier for a box supper and listen to the brass band. How about it?’
‘Supper’s ready. Take that dreadful uniform off.’
‘If you could make a wish and take a ride on those oak-lined country roads like they had before cars started rushing, would you do it?’ he insisted, watching her.
‘Those old roads were dirty.
We came home looking like Africans. Anyway’—she picked up a sugar jar and shook it—‘this morning I had forty dollars here. Now it’s gone! Don’t tell me you ordered those clothes from a costume house. They’re brand-new; they didn’t come from any trunk!’
‘I’m—’ he said.
She raved for half an hour, but he could not bring himself to say anything. The November wind shook the house and as she talked, the snows of winter began to fall again in the cold steel sky.
‘Answer me!’ she cried. ‘Are you crazy, spending our money that way, on clothes you can’t wear?’
‘The attic,’ he started to say.
She walked off and sat in the living room.
The snow was falling fast now and it was a cold dark November evening. She heard him climb up the stepladder, slowly, into the attic, into that dusty place of other years, into that black place of costumes and props and Time, into a world separate from this world below.
He closed the trap door down. The flashlight, snapped on, was company enough. Yes, here was all of Time compressed in a Japanese paper flower. At the touch of memory, everything would unfold into the clear water of the mind, in beautiful blooms, in spring breezes, larger than life. Each of the bureau drawers slid forth, might contain aunts and cousins and grandmamas, ermined in dust. Yes, Time was here. You could feel it breathing, an atmospheric instead of a mechanical clock.
Now the house below was as remote as another day in the Past. He half shut his eyes and looked and looked on every side of the waiting attic.
Here, in prismed chandelier, were rainbows and mornings and noons as bright as new rivers flowing endlessly back through Time. His flashlight caught and flickered them alive, the rainbows leapt up to curve the shadows back with colors, with colors like plums and strawberries and Concord grapes, with colors like cut lemons and the sky where the clouds drew off after storming and the blue was there. And the dust of the attic was incense burning and all of Time burning, and all you need do was peer into the flames. It was indeed a great machine of Time, this attic, he knew, he felt, he was sure, and if you touched prisms here, doorknobs there, plucked tassels, chimed crystals, swirled dust, punched trunk hasps and gusted the vox humana of the old hearth bellows until it puffed the soot of a thousand ancient fires into your eyes, if, indeed, you played this instrument, this warm machine of parts, if you fondled all of its bits and pieces, its levers and changers and movers, then, then, then!