From the Dust Returned by Ray Bradbury

Author:Ray Bradbury
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER 15

Uncle Einar

“It will take only a minute,” said Uncle Einar’s good wife.

“I refuse,” he said. “And that takes me one second.”

“I’ve worked all morning,” she said. “And you refuse to help? It’s about to rain.”

“Let it rain,” he cried. “I’ll not be struck by lightning just to air your clothes.”

“But you’re so quick at it,” she said.

“Again, I refuse.” His vast tarpaulin wings hummed nervously behind his back.

She gave him a slender rope on which were tied two dozen fresh-washed clothes. He turned it in his fingers with distaste in his eyes. “So it’s come to this,” he muttered, bitterly. “To this, to this, to this.”

After all the days and weeks of Cecy searching the winds and seeing the land and finding the farms that were not quite right, she at last had found an empty farm, with the people gone and the house deserted. Cecy sent him here on a long transit to search for a possible wife and refuge from a disbelieving world, and here he was, stranded.

“Don’t cry; you’ll wet the clothes down again,” she said. “Jump now, run them up and it’ll be finished in a jiffy.”

“Run them up,” he said in mockery, both hollow and terribly wounded. “Let it thunder, let it pour!”

“If it was a nice sunny day I wouldn’t ask,” she said. “All my washing gone for nothing. They’ll hang about the house—”

That did it. If it was anything he hated it was clothes flagged and festooned so a man had to creep under them on the way across a room. He boomed his vast wings.

“But only as far as the pasture fence,” he said.

“Only!” she cried.

Whirl … and up he jumped, his wings cleaving and loving the cool air, to roar low across the farmland, trailing the line of clothes in a vast fluttering loop, drying them in the pounding concussion and backwash from his wings.

“Catch!”

A minute later, returned, he sailed the clothes, dry as fresh wheat, down on a series of clean blankets she’d laid out.

“Much thanks!” she cried.

“Gahh!” he shouted, and flew off to brood under the sour-apple tree.

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