The Stories of Ray Bradbury (91 page)

‘I do not see,’ said Blinky Watts, ‘the Church or any of her girly priests up in them clouds.’

‘It was a different kind of Doom in them days,’ said Nolan. ‘Everyone knows
that
.’

‘Me and Tuohy,’ said Flannery, ‘will carry the demon gods to my place. Right, Tuohy?’

‘Right!’

And so it went now, along the hall, the squad pausing here or there as on a grand tour of a museum, and each in turn volunteering to scurry home through the snowfall night with a Degas or a Rembrandt sketch or a large oil by one of the Dutch masters, until they came to a rather grisly oil of a man, hung in a dim alcove.

‘Portrait of myself,’ muttered the old man, ‘done by her Ladyship. Leave it there, please.’

‘You mean,’ gasped Nolan, ‘you want it to go up in the Conflagration?’

‘Now, this next picture—’ said the old man, moving on.

And finally the tour was at an end.

‘Of course,’ said his Lordship, ‘if you really want to be saving, there are a dozen exquisite Ming vases in the house—’

‘As good as collected,’ said Nolan.

‘A Persian carpet on the landing—’

‘We will roll it and deliver it to the Dublin Museum.’

‘And that exquisite chandelier in the main dining room.’

‘It shall be hidden away until the Troubles are over,’ sighed Casey, tired already.

‘Well, then,’ said the old man, shaking each hand as he passed. ‘Perhaps you might start now, don’t you imagine? I mean, you do indeed have a largish job preserving the National Treasures. Think I shall nap five minutes now before dressing.’

And the old man wandered off upstairs.

Leaving the men stunned and isolated in a mob in the hall below, watching him go away out of sight.

‘Casey,’ said Blinky Watts, ‘has it crossed your small mind, if you’d remembered to bring the matches there would be no such long night of work as this ahead?’

‘Jesus, where’s your taste for the ass-thetics?’ cried Riordan.

‘Shut up!’ said Casey. ‘Okay, Flannery, you on one end of the
Twilight of the Gods
, you, Tuohy, on the far end where the maid is being given what’s good for her. Ha!
Lift!
’

And the gods, soaring crazily, took to the air.

By seven o’clock most of the paintings were out of the house and racked against each other in the snow, waiting to be taken off in various directions toward various huts. At seven-fifteen, Lord and Lady Kilgotten came out and drove away, and Casey quickly formed the mob in front of the stacked paintings so the nice old lady wouldn’t see what they were up to. The boys cheered as the car went down the drive. Lady Kilgotten waved frailly back.

From seven-thirty until ten the rest of the paintings walked out in ones and twos.

When all the pictures were gone save one, Kelly stood in the dim alcove worrying over Lady Kilgotten’s Sunday painting of the old Lord. He shuddered, decided on a supreme humanitarianism, and carried the portrait safely out into the night.

At midnight, Lord and Lady Kilgotten, returning with guests, found only great shuffling tracks in the snow where Flannery and Tuohy had set off one way with the dear bacchanal; where Casey, grumbling, had led a parade of Van Dycks, Rembrandts, Bouchers, and Piranesis another; and, where last of all, Blinky Watts, kicking his heels, had trotted happily into the woods with his nude Renoirs.

The dinner party was over by two. Lady Kilgotten went to bed satisfied that all the paintings had been sent out, en masse, to be cleaned.

At three in the morning, Lord Kilgotten still sat sleepless in his library, alone among empty walls, before a fireless hearth, a muffler about his thin neck, a glass of brandy in his faintly trembling hand.

About three-fifteen there was a stealthy creaking of parquetry, a shift of shadows, and, after a time, cap in hand, there stood Casey at the library door.

‘Hist!’ he called softly.

The Lord, who had dozed somewhat, blinked his eyes wide. ‘Oh dear me,’ he said, ‘is it time for us to go?’

‘That’s tomorrow night,’ said Casey. ‘And anyways, it’s not you that’s going, it’s Them is coming back.’

‘Them? Your friends?’

‘No,
yours
.’ And Casey beckoned.

The old man let himself be led through the hall to look out the front door into a deep well of night.

There, like Napoleon’s numbed dog-army of foot-weary, undecided, and demoralized men, stood the shadowy but familiar mob, their hands full of pictures—pictures leaned against their legs, pictures on their backs, pictures stood upright and held by trembling, panic-whitened hands in the drifted snow. A terrible silence lay over and among the men. They seemed stranded, as if one enemy had gone off to fight far better wars while yet another enemy, as yet unnamed, nipped silent and trackless at their behinds. They kept glancing over their shoulders at the hills and the town as if at any moment Chaos herself might unleash her dogs from there. They alone, in the infiltering night, heard the far-off baying of dismays and despairs that cast a spell.

‘Is that
you
, Riordan?’ called Casey, nervously.

‘Ah, who the hell
would
it be!’ cried a voice out beyond.

‘What do they
want
?’ asked the old party.

‘It’s not so much what
we
want as what
you
might now want from
us
,’ called a voice.

‘You see,’ said another, advancing until all could see it was Hannahan in the light, ‘considered in all its aspects, your Honor, we’ve decided, you’re such a fine gent, we—’

‘We will
not
burn your house!’ cried Blinky Watts.

‘Shut up and let the man talk!’ said several voices.

Hannahan nodded. ‘That’s it. We will
not
burn your house.’

‘But see here,’ said the Lord. ‘I’m quite prepared. Everything can easily be moved out.’

‘You’re taking the whole thing too lightly, begging your pardon, your Honor,’ said Kelly. ‘Easy for you is not easy for us.’

‘I see,’ said the old man, not seeing at all.

‘It seems,’ said Tuohy, ‘we have all of us, in just the last few hours, developed problems. Some to do with the home and some to do with transport and cartage, if you get my drift. Who’ll explain first? Kelly? No? Casey? Riordan?’

Nobody spoke.

At last, with a sigh, Flannery edged forward. ‘It’s this way—’ he said.

‘Yes?’ said the old man, gently.

‘Well,’ said Flannery, ‘me and Tuohy here got half through the woods, like damn fools, and was across two thirds of the bog with the large picture of the
Twilight of the Gods
when we began to sink.’

‘Your strength failed?’ inquired the Lord kindly.

‘Sink, your Honor, just plain sink, into the
ground
,’ Tuohy put in.

‘Dear me,’ said the Lord.

‘You can say that again, your Lordship,’ said Tuohy. ‘Why together, me and Flannery and the demon gods must have weighed close on to six hundred pounds, and that bog out there is infirm if it’s anything, and the more we walk the deeper we sink, and a cry strangled in me throat, for I’m thinking of those scenes in the old story where the Hound of the Baskervilles or some such fiend chases the heroine out in the moor and down she goes, in a watery pit, wishing she had kept at that diet, but it’s too late, and bubbles rise to pop on the surface. All of this a-throttling in me mind, your Honor.’

‘And so?’ the Lord put in, seeing he was expected to ask.

‘And so,’ said Flannery, ‘we just walked off and left the damn gods there in their twilight.’

‘In the middle of the
bog
?’ asked the elderly man, just a trifle upset.

‘Ah, we covered them up, I mean we put our mufflers over the scene. The gods will not die twice, your Honor. Say, did you hear
that
, boys? The gods—’

‘Ah, shut up,’ cried Kelly. ‘Ya dimwits. Why didn’t you bring the damn portrait in off the bog?’

‘We thought we would come get two more boys to help—’

‘Two more!’ cried Nolan. ‘That’s four men, plus a parcel of gods, you’d all sink
twice
as fast, and the bubbles rising, ya nitwit!’

‘Ah!’ said Tuohy. ‘I never thought of that.’

‘It has been thought of now,’ said the old man. ‘And perhaps several of you will form a rescue team—’

‘It’s done, your Honor,’ said Casey. ‘Bob, you and Tim dash off and save the pagan deities.’

‘You won’t tell Father Leary?’

‘Father Leary my behind. Get!’ And Tim and Bob panted off.

His Lordship turned now to Nolan and Kelly.

‘I see that you, too, have brought your rather large picture back.’

‘At least we made it within a hundred yards of the door, sir,’ said Kelly. ‘I suppose you’re wondering
why
we have returned it, your Honor?’

‘With the gathering in of coincidence upon coincidence,’ said the old man, going back in to get his overcoat and putting on his tweed cap so he could stand out in the cold and finish what looked to be a long converse, ‘yes, I was given to speculate.’

‘It’s me back,’ said Kelly. ‘It gave out not five hundred yards down the main road. The back has been springing out and in for five years now, and me suffering the agonies of Christ. I sneeze and fall to my knees, your Honor.’

‘I have suffered the selfsame delinquency,’ said the old man. ‘It is as if someone had driven a spike into one’s spine.’ The old man touched his back, carefully, remembering, which brought a gasp from all, nodding.

‘The agonies of Christ, as I said,’ said Kelly.

‘Most understandable then that you could not finish your journey with that heavy frame,’ said the old man, ‘and most commendable that you were able to struggle back this far with the dreadful weight.’

Kelly stood taller immediately, as he heard his plight described. He beamed. ‘It was nothing. And I’d do it again, save for the string of bones above me ass. Begging pardon, your Honor.’

But already his Lordship had passed his kind if tremulous gray-blue, unfocused gaze toward Blinky Watts who had, under either arm, like a dartful prancer, the two Renoir peach ladies.

‘Ah, God, there was no trouble with sinking into bogs or knocking my spine out of shape,’ said Watts, treading the earth to demonstrate his passage home. ‘I made it back to the house in ten minutes flat, dashed into the wee cot, and began hanging the pictures on the wall, when my wife came up behind me. Have ya ever had your wife come up behind ya, your Honor, and just stand there mum’s the word?’

‘I seem to recall a similar circumstance,’ said the old man, trying to remember if he did, then nodding as indeed several memories flashed over his fitful baby mind.

‘Well, your Lordship, there is no silence like a woman’s silence, do you agree? And no standing there like a woman’s standing there like a monument out of Stonehenge. The mean temperature dropped in the room so quick I suffered from the polar concussions, as we call it in our house. I did not dare turn to confront the Beast, or the daughter of the Beast, as I call her in deference to her mom. But finally I heard her suck in a great breath and let it out very cool and calm like a Prussian general. “That woman is naked as a jay bird,” and “That other woman is raw as the inside of a clam at low tide.”

‘“But,” said I, “these are studies of natural physique by a famous French artist.”

‘“Jesus-come-after-me-French,” she cried: “the-skirts-half-up-to-your-bum-French. The-dress-half-down-to-your-navel-French. And the-gulping-and-smothering-they-do-with-their-mouths-in-their-dirty-novels-French, and now you come home and nail ‘French’ on the walls, why don’t you while you’re at it, pull the crucifix down and nail one fat naked lady
there
?’

‘Well, your Honor, I just shut up my eyes and wished my ears would fall off. “Is
this
what you want our boys to look at last thing at night as they go to sleep?” she says. Next thing I know, I’m on the path and here I am and here’s the raw-oyster nudes, your Honor, beg your pardon, thanks, and much obliged.’

‘They
do
seem to be unclothed,’ said the old man, looking at the two pictures, one in either hand, as if he wished to find all that this man’s wife said was in them. ‘I had always thought of summer, looking at them.’

‘From your seventieth birthday on, your Lordship, perhaps. But
before
that?’

‘Uh, yes, yes,’ said the old man, watching a speck of half-remembered lechery drift across one eye.

When his eye stopped drifting it found Bannock and Toolery on the edge of the far rim of the uneasy sheepfold crowd. Behind each, dwarfing them, stood a giant painting.

Bannock had got his picture home only to find he could not get the damn thing through the door, nor any window.

Toolery had actually got his picture
in
the door when his wife said what a laughingstock they’d be, the only family in the village with a Rubens worth half a million pounds and not even a cow to milk!

So that was the sum, total, and substance of this long night. Each man had a similar chill, dread, and awful tale to tell, and all were told at last, and as they finished a cold snow began to fall among these brave members of the local, hard-fighting IRA.

The old man said nothing, for there was nothing really to say that wouldn’t be obvious as their pale breaths ghosting the wind. Then, very
quietly, the old man opened wide the front door and had the decency not even to nod or point.

Slowly and silently they began to file by, as past a familiar teacher in an old school, and then faster they moved. So in flowed the river returned, the Ark emptied out before, not after, the Flood, and the tide of animals and angels, nudes that flamed and smoked in the hands, and noble gods that pranced on wings and hoofs, went by, and the old man’s eyes shifted gently, and his mouth silently named each, the Renoirs, the Van Dycks, the Lautrec, and so on until Kelly, in passing, felt a touch at his arm.

Surprised, Kelly looked over.

And saw the old man was staring at the small painting beneath his arm.

‘My wife’s portrait of me?’

‘None other,’ said Kelly.

The old man stared at Kelly and at the painting beneath his arm and then out toward the snowing night.