Dandelion Wine (Green Town, #1)

by Ray Bradbury

Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.

“Sandwich outdoors isn’t a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite.” Douglas’s tongue hesitated on the texture of bread and deviled ham. No … no … it was just a sandwich. Tom chewed and nodded. “Know just what you mean, Dad!”

Douglas opened one eye. And everything, absolutely everything, was there. The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him. And he knew what it was that had leaped upon him to stay and would not run away now. I’m alive, he thought.

The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were sun and fiery spots of sky strewn through the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing his wrists, the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened. I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!

I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn’t forget, I’m alive, I know I’m alive, I mustn’t forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.

“Every year,” said Grandfather. “They run amuck; I let them. Pride of lions in the yard. Stare, and they burn a hole in your retina. A common flower, a weed that no one sees, yes. But for us, a noble thing, the dandelion.”

Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.

“I got a statistic for you right now. Grab your pencil, Doug. There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I’ll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! Think of it! Shadows running around in the air, muddying the waters you might say. If only we could figure a way to keep those darn five billion shadows under those trees, we could stay up half the night, Doug, because there’d be no night! There you are; something old, something new.” “That’s old and new, all right.” Douglas licked the yellow Ticonderoga pencil, whose name he dearly loved. “Say it again.” “Shadows are under five billion trees

Five minutes passed in comfortable eating silence, then, holding a spoonful of moon-colored ice cream up as if it were the whole secret of the universe to be tasted carefully he said, “Lena? What would you think if I tried to invent a Happiness Machine?” “Something’s wrong?” she asked quickly.

And Death was the Lonely One, unseen, walking and standing behind trees, waiting in the country to come in, once or twice a year, to this town, to these streets, to these many places where there was little light, to kill one, two, three women in the past three years. That was Death.... But this was more than Death. This summer night deep down under the stars was all things you would ever feel or see or hear in your life, drowning you all at once.

He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid. Like here, standing. If he should scream, if he should holler for help, would it matter?

Doug,” he whispered. “What?” “Nighttime’s awful dark—is one.” “What’s the other?” “The ravine at night don’t belong in Mr. Auffmann’s Happiness Machine, if he ever builds it.”

Grandfather smiled in his sleep. Feeling the smile and wondering why it was there, he awoke. He lay quietly listening, and the smile was explained. For he heard a sound which was far more important than birds or the rustle of new leaves. Once each year he woke this way and lay waiting for the sound which meant that summer had officially begun. And it began on a morning such as this when a boarder, a nephew, a cousin, a son or a grandson came out on the lawn below and moved in consecutively smaller quadrangles north and east and south and west with a clatter of rotating metal through the sweet summer grass. Clover blossoms, the few unharvested dandelion fires, ants, sticks, pebbles, remnants of last year’s July Fourth squibs and punks, but predominantly clear green, a fount leaped up from the chattering mower. A cool soft fount; Grandfather imagined it tickling his legs, spraying his warm face, filling his nostrils with the timeless scent of a new season begun, with the promise that, yes, we’ll all live another twelve months.

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hem-lock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.

On Sunday morning Leo Auffmann moved slowly through his garage, expecting some wood, a curl of wire, a hammer or wrench to leap up crying, “Start here!” But nothing leaped, nothing cried for a beginning. Should a Happiness Machine, he wondered, be something you can carry in your pocket? Or, he went on, should it be something that carries you in its pocket? “One thing I absolutely know,” he said aloud. “It should be bright!” He set a can of orange paint in the center of the work-bench, picked up a dictionary, and wandered into the house.

“Lena?” He glanced at the dictionary. “Are you ‘pleased, contented, joyful, delighted’? Do you feel ‘Lucky, fortunate’? Are things ‘clever and fitting,’ ‘successful and suitable’ for you?” Lena stopped slicing vegetables and closed her eyes. “Read me the list again, please,” she said. He shut the book. “What have I done, you got to stop and think an hour before you can tell me. All I ask is a simple yes or no! You’re not contented, delighted, joyful?” “Cows are contented, babies and old people in second childhood are delighted, God help them,” she said. “As for ‘joyful,’ Leo? Look how I laugh scrubbing out the sink....”

“A Tale of Two Cities? Mine. The Old Curiosity Shop? Ha, that’s Leo Auffmann’s all right! Great Expectations? That used to be mine. But let Great Expectations be his, now!” “What’s this?” asked Leo Auffmann, entering. “This,” said his wife, “is sorting out the community property! When a father scares his son at night it’s time to chop everything in half! Out of the way, Mr. Bleak House, Old Curiosity Shop. In all these books, no mad scientist lives like Leo Auffmann, none!” “You’re leaving, and you haven’t even tried the machine!” he protested. “Try it once, you’ll unpack, you’ll stay!” “Tom Swift and His Electric Annihilator—whose is that?” she asked. “Must I guess?” Snorting, she gave Tom Swift to Leo Auffmann.

All the things you want to last, last. But outside, the children wait on lunch, the clothes need buttons. And then let’s be frank, Leo, how long can you look at a sunset? Who wants a sunset to last? Who wants perfect temperature? Who wants air smelling good always? So after awhile, who would notice? Better, for a minute or two, a sunset. After that, let’s have something else. People are like that, Leo. How could you forget?” “Did I?” “Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away.” “But Lena, that’s sad.” “No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness. So two things you did you should never have. You made quick things go slow and stay around. You brought things faraway to our backyard where they don’t belong, where they just tell you, ‘No, you’ll never travel, Lena Auffmann, Paris you’ll never see! Rome you’ll never visit.’ But I always knew that, so why tell me? Better to forget and make do, Leo, make do, eh?”

“The first thing you learn in life is you’re a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you’re the same fool. In one hour, I’ve done a lot of thinking. I thought, Leo Auffmann is blind! … You want to see the real Happiness Machine? The one they patented a couple thousand years ago, it still runs, not good all the time, no! but it runs. It’s been here all along.”

“It won’t work,” Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. “No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you’re nine, you think you’ve always been nine years old and will always be. When you’re thirty, it seems you’ve always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You’re in the present, you’re trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.”

“Be what you are, bury what you are not,” he had said. “Ticket stubs are trickery. Saving things is a magic trick, with mirrors.”

“Nobody ever grabbed a water-strider-spider in his life. You ever know anybody grabbed a water-strider-spider? Go ahead, think!” “I’m thinking.” “Well?” “You’re right. Nobody ever did. Nobody ever will, I guess. They’re just too fast.” “It’s not that they’re fast. They just don’t exist,” said Tom. He thought about it and nodded. “That’s right, they just never did exist at all. Well, what I got to report is this.” He leaned over and whispered in his brother’s ear. Douglas wrote it. They both looked at it. “I’ll be darned!” said Douglas. “I never thought of that. That’s brilliant! It’s true. Old people never were children!” “And it’s kind of sad,” said Tom, sitting still. “There’s nothing we can do to help them.”

The grand army of the ancient prairie: the bison, the buffalo!” The colonel let the silence build, then broke it again. “Heads like giant Negroes’ fists, bodies like locomotives! Twenty, fifty, two hundred thousand iron missiles shot out of the west, gone off the track and flailing cinders, their eyes like blazing coals, rumbling toward oblivion!

War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns. But I don’t suppose that’s the kind of victory you boys mean for me to talk on.”

“Hey!” They looked up. “Yes, sir, Colonel?” The colonel leaned out, waving one arm. “I thought about what you said, boys!” “Yes, sir?” “And—you’re right! Why didn’t I think of it before! A Time Machine, by God, a Time Machine!” “Yes, sir.”

The facts about John Huff, aged twelve, are simple and soon stated. He could pathfind more trails than any Choctaw or Cherokee since time began, could leap from the sky like a chimpanzee from a vine, could live underwater two minutes and slide fifty yards downstream from where you last saw him. The baseballs you pitched him he hit in the apple trees, knocking down harvests. He could jump six-foot orchard walls, swing up branches faster and come down, fat with peaches, quicker than anyone else in the gang. He ran laughing. He sat easy. He was not a bully. He was kind. His hair was dark and curly and his teeth were white as cream. He remembered the words to all the cowboy songs and would teach you if you asked. He knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise and set and when the tides came in or out. He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of.

It was a day as perfect as the flame of a candle.

“My gosh, if you’re going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we would’ve talked about next month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers! Go on like you was back there, grasshoppers spitting tobacco!” “Funny thing is I don’t feel like talking about grasshoppers.” “You always did!” “Sure.” John looked steadily at the town. “But I guess this just ain’t the time.”

For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you weren’t looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching! “John!”

There was a small sound like an insect in the hay. They both heard it, but they didn’t look at the sound. When Douglas moved his wrist the sound ticked in another part of the haystack. When he brought his arm around on his lap the sound ticked in his lap. He let his eyes fall in a brief flicker. The watch said three o’clock. Douglas moved his right hand stealthily to the ticking, pulled out the watch stem. He set the hands back. Now they had all the time they would ever need to look long and close at the world, feel the sun move like a fiery wind over the sky. But at last John must have felt the bodiless weight of their shadows shift and lean, and he spoke. “Doug, what time is it?” “Two-thirty.” John looked at the sky. Don’t! thought Douglas. “Looks more like three-thirty, four,” said John. “Boy Scout. You learn them things.” Douglas sighed and slowly turned the watch ahead. John watched him do this, silently. Douglas looked up. John punched him, not hard at all, in the arm.

Elmira, go to your dentist and see what he can do about that serpent’s tongue in there.”

“I wouldn’t count on me being innocent, Mrs. Brown,” said the boy. “My mother says—” “Shut up, Tom, good’s good! You’ll be there on my right hand, boy.” “Yes’m,” said Tom. “If, that is,” said Elmira, “I can live through the night with this lady making wax dummies of me—shoving rusty needles through the very heart and soul of them. If you find a great big fig in my bed all shriveled up come sunrise, Tom, you’ll know who picked the fruit in the vineyard. And look to see Mrs. Goodwater president till she’s a hundred and ninety-five years old.”

Mrs. Elmira Brown’s foot hurt her in the middle of the night, so she got up and went down to the kitchen and ate some cold chicken and made a neat, painfully accurate list of things. First, illnesses in the past year. Three colds, four mild attacks of indigestion, one seizure of bloat, arthritis, lumbago, what she imagined to be gout, a severe bronchial cough, incipient asthma, and spots on her arms, plus an abscessed semicircular canal which made her reel like a drunken moth some days, backache, head pains, and nausea. Cost of medicine: ninety-eight dollars and seventy-eight cents. Secondly, things broken in the house during the twelve months just past; two lamps, six vases, ten dishes, one soup tureen, two windows, one chair, one sofa cushion, six glasses, and one crystal chandelier prism. Total cost: twelve dollars and ten cents. Thirdly, her pains this very night. Her toe hurt from being run over. Her stomach was upset. Her back was stiff, her legs were pulsing with agony. Her eyeballs felt like wads of blazing cotton. Her tongue tasted like a dust mop. Her ears were belling and ringing away. Cost? She debated, going back to bed. Ten thousand dollars in personal suffering. “Try to settle this out of court!” she said half aloud. “Eh?” said her husband, awake. She lay down in bed. “I simply refuse to die.” “Beg pardon?” he said. “I won’t die!” she said, staring at the ceiling. “That’s what I always claimed,” said her husband, and turned over to snore.

stirred a green-looking porridge in a large glass. “Good Lord, what’s that?” asked her husband. “Looks like a milk shake been left out in the sun for forty years. Got kind of a fungus on it.” “Fight magic with magic.” “You going to drink that?” “Just before I go up into the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge for the big doings.” Samuel Brown sniffed the concoction. “Take my advice. Get up those steps first, then drink it. What’s in it?” “Snow from angels’ wings, well, really menthol, to cool hell’s fires that burn you, it says in this book I got at the library. The juice of a fresh grape off the vine, for thinking clear sweet thoughts in the face of dark visions, it says. Also red rhubarb, cream of tartar, white sugar, white of eggs, spring water and clover buds with the strength of the good earth in them. Oh, I could go on all day. It’s here in the list, good against bad, white against black. I can’t lose!” “Oh, you’ll win, all right,” said her husband. “But will you know it?”

At one-thirty, the president, Mrs. Goodwater, banged the gavel and all but two dozen of the ladies quit talking.

It doesn’t matter if being so alive kills a man; it’s better to have the quick fever every time. Now give me that phone.

Somewhere, a book said once, all the talk ever talked, all the songs ever sung, still lived, had vibrated way out in space and if you could travel to Far Centauri you could hear George Washington talking in his sleep or Caesar surprised at the knife in his back.

“The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you’re seventeen you know everything. When you’re twenty-seven if you still know everything you’re still seventeen.”

“So you think I was pretty?” He nodded good-humoredly. “But how can you tell?” she asked. “When you meet a dragon that has eaten a swan, do you guess by the few feathers left around the mouth? That’s what it is—a body like this is a dragon, all scales and folds. So the dragon ate the white swan. I haven’t seen her for years. I can’t even remember what she looks like. I feel her, though. She’s safe inside, still alive; the essential swan hasn’t changed a feather. Do you know, there are some mornings in spring or fall, when I wake and think, I’ll run across the fields into the woods and pick wild strawberries! Or I’ll swim in the lake, or I’ll dance all night tonight until dawn! And then, in a rage, discover I’m in this old and ruined dragon. I’m the princess in the crumbled tower, no way out, waiting for her Prince Charming.”

“About yourself, now. You’re thirty-one and still not married?” “Let me put it this way,” he said. “Women who act and think and talk like you are rare.” “My,” she said seriously, “you mustn’t expect young women to talk like me. That comes later. They’re much too young, first of all. And secondly, the average man runs helter-skelter the moment he finds anything like a brain in a lady. You’ve probably met quite a few brainy ones who hid it most successfully from you. You’ll have to pry around a bit to find the odd beetle. Lift a few boards.”

Pyramids are all very nice, but mummies are hardly fit companions. Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life?”

“In a few days I will be dead. No.” She put up her hand. “I don’t want you to say a thing. I’m not afraid. When you live as long as I’ve lived you lose that, too. I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I’d never tried it. On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I can’t say I’m greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don’t fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it.”

“No,” said Charlie. “You know who lives here? Only one guy. A guy who gives you goose-pimples just to think of him.” Charlie dropped his voice very low. “The Lonely One.” “The Lonely One?” “Born, raised and lives here! All that winter, Tom, all that cold, Doug! Where else would he come from to make us shiver the hottest nights of the year? Don’t it smell like him? You know darn well it does. The Lonely One … the Lonely One …” The mists and vapors curled in darkness. Tom screamed. “It’s okay, Doug.” Charlie grinned. “I just dropped a little bitty hunk of ice down Tom’s back, is all.”

Now, chalk in hand, she stood back from life a silent hour before reaching for the eraser. “Let me see now,” said Great-grandma. “Let me see …” With no fuss or further ado, she traveled the house in an ever-circling inventory, reached the stairs at last, and, making no special announcement, she took herself up three flights to her room where, silently, she laid herself out like a fossil imprint under the snowing cool sheets of her bed and began to die.

“Well, consider then, boy. Any man saves fingernail clippings is a fool. You ever see a snake bother to keep his peeled skin? That’s about all you got here today in this bed is fingernails and snake skin. One good breath would send me up in flakes. Important thing is not the me that’s lying here, but the me that’s sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that’s downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I’m not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I’ll be around a long time. A thousand years from now a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade. That’s my answer to anyone asks big questions! Quick now, send in the rest!”

“My gosh!” hissed Tom. “Two dozen, three dozen fireflies!” “Shh, for cry-yi!” “What you got ’em for?” “We got caught reading nights with flashlights under our sheets, right? So, nobody’ll suspect an old jar of fireflies; folks’ll think it’s just a night museum.” “Doug, you’re a genius!”

All the people I know who died this summer! Colonel Freeleigh, dead! I didn’t know it before; why? Great-grandma, dead, too. Really-truly. Not only that but … He paused. Me! No, they can’t kill me! Yes, said a voice, yes, any time they want to they can, no matter how you kick or scream, they just put a big hand over you and you’re still.... I don’t want to die! Douglas screamed, without a sound. You’ll have to anyway, said the voice, you’ll have to anyway....

Some night you’ll hear that a strange, beautiful Italian girl was seen downtown in a summer dress, buying a ticket for the East and everyone saw her at the station and saw her on the train as it pulled out and everyone said she was the prettiest girl they ever saw, and when you hear that, Tom—and believe me, the news will get around fast! nobody knowing where she came from or where she went—then you’ll know I worked the spell and set her free. And then, as I said, a year, two years from now, on that night when that train pulls out, it’ll be the time when we can cut through the wax. With her gone, you’re liable to find nothing but little cogs and wheels and stuff inside her. That’s how it is.”

Somewhere in the burning bone-colored sky a great copper wire was strummed and shaken. Again and again the piercing metallic vibrations, like charges of raw electricity, fell in paralyzing shocks from the stunned trees.

The sidewalks were haunted by dust ghosts all night as the furnace wind summoned them up, swung them about, and gentled them down in a warm spice on the lawns. Trees, shaken by the footsteps of late-night strollers, sifted avalanches of dust. From midnight on, it seemed a volcano beyond the town was showering red-hot ashes everywhere, crusting slumberless night watchmen and irritable dogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spontaneous combustion at three in the morning.