Ray Bradbury. A Scent of Sarsaparilla

                Ray Bradbury
                http://blogs.myspace.com/mysteryal

                A Scent of Sarsaparilla
                1958

     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 pr
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?" He jerked his greying head back and forth.
     "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 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, dim-witted 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 flavour 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 centre 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 parting 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 colours, 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 for ever, a great leaden
winepress  smashing  down  its colourless lid of sky, squashing them all like so
many grapes, mashing colour 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  trapdoor.  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 trapdoor 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 mothballs. Look 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 parlour and smell the drug store the way they used to smell?
Why  don't  drug stores 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 oaklaned 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  step ladder, 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 momings 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
colours,  with  colours  like  plums  and  raspberries  and Concord grapes, with
colours 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!
     He  thrust  out his hands to orchestrate, to conduct, to Hourish. There was
music in his head, in his mouth shut tight, and he played the great machine, the
thunderously  silent  organ,  bass,  tenor,  soprano, low, high, and at last, at
last, a chord that shuddered him so that he had to shut his eyes.

    
     About  nine  o'clock  that  night  she  heard him calling, "Cora!" She went
upstairs.  His  head peered down at her from above, smiling at her. He waved his
hat. "Good-bye, Cora."
     "What do you mean?" she cried.
     "I've thought it over for three days and I'm saying good-bye."
     "Come down out of there, you fool!"
     "I  drew  five  hundred dollars from the bank yesterday. I've been thinking
about this. And then when it happened, well... Cora..." He shoved his eager hand
down. "For the last time, will you come along with me?"
     "In  the  attic?  Hand  down that step-ladder, William Finch. I'll climb up
there and run you out of that filthy place!"
     "I'm  going  to  Hannahan's Pier for a bowl of Clam Chowder," he said. "And
I'm  requesting  the brass band to play Moonlight Bay. Oh, come on, Cora...." He
motioned his extended hand.
     She simply stared at his gentle, questioning face.
     "Good-bye," he said.
     He waved gently, gently. Then his face was gone, the straw hat was gone.
     "William!" she screamed.
     The attic was dark and silent.
     Shrieking, she ran and got a chair and used it to groan her way up into the
musty darkness. She flourished a flashlight. "William! William!"
     The dark spaces were empty. A winter wind shook the house.
     Then she saw the far west attic window, ajar.
     She  fumbled  over to it. She hesitated, held her breath. Then, slowly, she
opened  it. The ladder was placed outside the window, leading down on to a porch
roof.
     She pulled back from the window.
     Outside  the  opened frame the apple trees were lush green, it was twilight
of  a summer day in July. Faintly, she heard explosions, firecrackers going off.
She  heard  laughter  and distant voices. Rockets burst in the warm air, softly,
red, white, and blue, fading.
     She slammed the window and stood reeling. "William!"
     Wintry  November light glowed up through the trap in the attic floor behind
her.  Bent  to it, she saw the snow whispering against the cold clear panes down
in that November world where she would spend the next thirty years.
     She  did  not  go  near the window again. She sat alone in the black attic,
smelling the one smell that did not seem to fade. It lingered like a gentle sigh
of satisfaction, on the air. She took a deep, long breath.
     The old, the familiar, the unforgettable scent of drugstore sarsaparilla.