From the Dust Returned by Ray Bradbury Read Free Book Online Page B

piano teeth. Before he could protest, at four different gaits and speeds, he was shambled from the house, across the lawn, and down the lost railroad tracks toward town, a mob of laughter in his cereal throat.
    The Family leaned from the porch, staring after the rushing parade of one.
    Cecy, deep asleep again, gaped her mouth to free the echoes of the mob.
     
    At noon the next day the big, dull-blue iron engine panted into the railroad station to find the Family restless on the platform, the old harvest pharaoh supported in their midst. They not so much walked but carried him to the day coach, which smelled of fresh varnish and hot plush. Along the way, the Nile traveler, eyes shut, uttered curses in many voices that everyone ignored.
    They propped him like an ancient corn-shock in his seat, fastened a hat on his head like putting a new roof on an old building, and addressed his wrinkled face.
    "Grandpere, sit up. Grandpere, are you in there? Get out of the way, cousins, let the old one speak."
    "Here." His dry mouth twitched and whistled. "And suffering their sins and misery! Oh, damn, damn!"
    "No!"
    "Lies!"
    "We did nothing!" cried the voices from one side, then the other, of his mouth. "Cease!"
    "Silence!" Father seized the ancient chin and focused the inner bones with a shake. "West of October is Sojourn, Missouri, not a long trip. We have kin there. Uncles, aunts, some with, some without children. Since Cecy's mind can only travel a few miles, you must cargo-transit these obstreperous cousins yet farther and stash them with Family flesh and minds."
    "But if you can't distribute the fools," he added, "bring them back alive."
    "Goodbye!" said four voices from the ancient harvest bundle.
    "Goodbye Grandpere, Peter, William, Philip, Jack!"
    "Forget me not!" a young woman's voice cried.
    "Cecy!" all shouted. "Farewell!"
    The train chanted away, west of October.
    The train rounded a long curve. The Nile ancestor leaned and creaked.
    "Well," whispered Peter, "here we are."
    "Yes." William went on: "Here we are."
    The train whistled.
    "Tired," said Jack.
    " You're tired!" the ancient one rasped.
    "Stuffy in here," said Philip.
    "Expect that! The ancient one is four thousand years old, right, old one? Your skull is a tomb."
    "Cease!" The old one gave his own brow a thump. A panic of birds knocked in his head. "Cease!"
    "There," whispered Cecy, quieting the panic. "I've slept well and I'll come for part of the trip, Grandpere, to teach you how to hold, stay, and keep the resident crows and vultures in your cage."
    "Crows! Vultures!" the cousins protested.
    "Silence," said Cecy, tamping the cousins like tobacco in an ancient uncleaned pipe. Far away, her body lay on her Egyptian sands, but her mind circled, touched, pushed, enchanted, kept. "Enjoy. Look!"
    The cousins looked.
    And indeed, wandering in the upper keeps of the ancient tomb was like surviving in a dim sarcophagus in which memories, transparent wings folded, lay piled in ribboned bundles, in files, packets, shrouded figures, strewn shadows. Here and there, a special bright memory, like a single ray of amber light, struck in upon and shaped a golden hour, a summer day. There was a smell of worn leather and burnt horsehair and the faintest scent of uric acid from the jaundiced stones that ached about them as they jostled half-seen elbows.
    "Look," murmured the cousins. "Oh, yes! Yes!"
    For now, quietly indeed, they were peering through the dusty panes of the ancient's eyes, viewing the great hellfire train that bore them and the green-turning-to-brown autumn world streaming, passing as before a house with cobwebbed windows. When they worked the old one's mouth it was like ringing a lead clapper in a rusted bell. The sounds of the world wandered in through his hollow ears, static on a badly tuned radio.
    "Still," Peter said, "it's better than having no body at all."
    The train banged across a bridge in thunders.
    "Think I'll look around," said Peter.
    The ancient felt his