The Stories of Ray Bradbury Read Online Free PDF Page B

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, andflower-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; goodby,’ 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 throughmazes 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