Ray Bradbury - When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

Ray Bradbury

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Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1954, 1957, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973

Cover design by Mike Topping.

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers 2014 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Ebook Edition © JULY 2013 ISBN: 9780007539932

Version: 2014–07–18

THIS ONE TO THE MEMORY OF

my grandmother Minnie Davis Bradbury and my grandfather Samuel Hinkston Bradbury, and my brother Samuel and my sister Elizabeth Jane, long lost in the years but now remembered.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Remembrance

Pretend at Being Blind, Which Calls Truth Near

The Boys Across the Street Are Driving My Young Daughter Mad

Old Ahab’s Friend, and Friend to Noah, Speaks His Piece

When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

Darwin, the Curious

Darwin, in the Fields

Darwin, Wandering Home at Dawn

Evidence

Telling Where the Sweet Gums Are

Emily Dickinson, Where Are You? Herman Melville Called Your Name Last Night in His Sleep!

O Give a Fig for Newton, Praise for Him!

I Was the Last, the Very Last

Man Is the Animal That Cries

N

Air to Lavoisier

Women Know Themselves; All Men Wonder

Death in Mexico

All Flesh Is One; What Matter Scores?

The Machines, Beyond Shylock

That Beast upon the Wire

Christ, Old Student in a New School

This Time of Kites

If You Will Wait Just Long Enough, All Goes

For a Daughter, Traveling

Old Mars, Then Be a Hearth to Us

The Thing That Goes By Night: The Self That Lazes Sun

Groon

That Woman on the Lawn

A Train Station Sign Viewed from an Ancient Locomotive Passing Through Long after Midnight

Please to Remember the Fifth of November: A Birthday Poem for Susan Marguerite

That Is Our Eden’s Spring, Once Promised

The Fathers and Sons Banquet

Touch Your Solitude to Mine

God Is a Child; Put Toys in the Tomb

Ode to Electric Ben

Some Live like Lazarus

These Unsparked Flints, These Uncut Gravestone Brides

And This Did Dante Do

You Can Go Home Again

And Dark Our Celebration Was

Mrs. Harriet Hadden Atwood, Who Played the Piano for Thomas A. Edison for the World’s First Phonograph Record, Is Dead at 105

What Seems a Balm Is Salt to Ancient Wounds

Here All Beautifully Collides

God for a Chimney Sweep

To Prove That Cowards Do Speak Best and True and Well

I, Tom, and My Electric Gran

Boys Are Always Running Somewhere

O to Be a Boy in a Belfry

If I Were Epitaph

If Only We Had Taller Been

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

And this is where we went, I thought,

Now here, now there, upon the grass

Some forty years ago.

I had returned and walked along the streets

And saw the house where I was born

And grown and had my endless days.

The days being short now, simply I had come

To gaze and look and stare upon

The thought of that once endless maze of afternoons.

But most of all I wished to find the places where I ran

As dogs do run before or after boys,

The paths put down by Indians or brothers wise and swift

Pretending at a tribe.

I came to the ravine.

I half slid down the path

A man with graying hair but seeming supple thoughts

And saw the place was empty.

Fools! I thought. O, boys of this new year,

Why don’t you know the Abyss waits you here?

Ravines are special fine and lovely green

And secretive and wandering with apes and thugs

And bandit bees that steal from flowers to give to trees.

Caves echo here and creeks for wading after loot:

A water-strider, crayfish, precious stone

Or long-lost rubber boot—

It is a natural treasure-house, so why the silent place?

What’s happened to our boys they now no longer race

And stand them still to contemplate Christ’s handiwork:

His clear blood bled in syrups from the lovely wounded trees?

Why only bees and blackbird winds and bending grass?

No matter. Walk. Walk, look, and sweet recall.

I came upon an oak where once when I was twelve

I had climbed up and screamed for Skip to get me down.

It was a thousand miles to earth. I shut my eyes and yelled.

My brother, richly compelled to mirth, gave shouts of laughter

And scaled up to rescue me.

“What were you doing there?” he said.

I did not tell. Rather drop me dead.

But I was there to place a note within a squirrel nest

On which I’d written some old secret thing now long forgot.

Now in the green ravine of middle years I stood

Beneath that tree. Why, why, I thought, my God,

It’s not so high. Why did I shriek?

It can’t be more than fifteen feet above. I’ll climb it handily.

And did.

And squatted like an aging ape alone and thanking God

That no one saw this ancient man at antics

Clutched grotesquely to the bole.

But then, ah God, what awe.

The squirrel’s hole and long-lost nest were there.

I lay upon the limb a long while, thinking.

I drank in all the leaves and clouds and weathers

Going by as mindless

As the days.

What, what, what if? I thought. But no. Some forty years beyond!

The note I’d put? It’s surely stolen off by now.

A boy or screech-owl’s pilfered, read, and tattered it.

It’s scattered to the lake like pollen, chestnut leaf

Or smoke of dandelion that breaks along the wind of time …

No. No.

I put my hand into the nest. I dug my fingers deep.

Nothing. And still more nothing. Yet digging further

I brought forth:

The note.

Like mothwings neatly powdered on themselves, and folded close

It had survived. No rains had touched, no sunlight bleached

Its stuff. It lay upon my palm. I knew its look:

Ruled paper from an old Sioux Indian Head scribble writing book.

What, what, oh, what had I put there in words

So many years ago?