The Stories of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury Page B

in the house that wasn’t anything like death silence, but a silence of things living well and happily.
    He got up, dressed, and ate his breakfast slowly. He wasn’t going to work. He went out to milk the cows, stood on the porch smoking a cigarette, walked about the back yard a little and then came back in and asked Molly what he had gone out to do.
    ‘Milk the cows,’ she said.
    ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, and went out again. He found the cows waiting and full, and milked them and put the milk cans in the spring-house, but thought of other things. The wheat. The scythe.
    All through the morning he sat on the back porch rolling cigarettes. He made a toy boat for little Drew and one for Susie, and then he churned some of the milk into butter and drew off the buttermilk, but the sun was in his head, aching. It burned there. He wasn’t hungry for lunch. He kept looking at the wheat and the wind bending and tipping and ruffling it. His arms flexed, his fingers, resting on his knee as he sat again on the porch, made a kind of grip in the empty air, itching. The pads of his palms itched and burned. He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants and sat down and tried to roll another cigarette and got mad at the mixings and threw it all away with a muttering. He had a feeling as if a third arm had been cut off of him, or he had lost something of himself. It had to do with his hands and his arms.
    He heard the wind whisper in the field.
    By one o’clock he was going in and out of the house, getting underfoot, thinking about digging an irrigation ditch, but all the time really thinking about the wheat and how ripe and beautiful it was, aching to be cut.
    ‘Damn it to hell!’
    He strode into the bedroom, took the scythe down off its wall-pegs. He stood holding it. He felt cool. His hands stopped itching. His head didn’t ache. The third arm was returned to him. He was intact again.
    It was instinct. Illogical as lightning striking and not hurting. Each day the grain must be cut. It had to be cut. Why? Well, it just did, that was all. He laughed at the scythe in his big hands. Then, whistling, he took it out to the ripe and waiting field and did the work. He thought himself a little mad. Hell, it was an ordinary-enough wheat field, really, wasn’t it? Almost.
    The days loped away like gentle horses.
    Drew Erickson began to understand his work as a sort of dry ache and hunger and need. Things built in his head.
    One noon. Susie and little Drew giggled and played with the scythe while their father lunched in the kitchen. He heard them. He came out and took it away from them. He didn’t yell at them. He just looked very concerned and locked the scythe up after that, when it wasn’t being used.
    He never missed a day, scything.
    Up. Down. Up, down, and across. Back and up and down and across. Cutting. Up. Down.
    Up.
    Think about the old man and the wheat in his hands when he died.
    Down.
    Think about this dead land, with wheat living on it.
    Up.
    Think about the crazy patterns of ripe and green wheat, the way it grows!
    Down.
    Think about…
    The wheat whirled in a full yellow tide at his ankles. The sky blackened. Drew Erickson dropped the scythe and bent over to hold his stomach, his eyes running blindly. The world reeled.
    ‘I’ve killed somebody!’ he gasped, choking, holding to his chest, falling to his knees beside the blade. ‘I’ve killed a lot—’
    The sky revolved like a blue merry-go-round at the county fair in Kansas. But no music. Only a ringing in his ears.
    Molly was sitting at the blue kitchen table peeling potatoes when he blundered into the kitchen, dragging the scythe behind him.
    ‘Molly!’
    She swam around in the wet of his eyes.
    She sat there, her hands fallen open, waiting for him to finally get it out.
    ‘Get the things packed!’ he said, looking at the floor.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘We’re leavin’,’ he said, dully.
    ‘We’re leavin’?’ she said.
    ‘That old man. You know what he did here? It’s