Dad took his arm, walked him over and sat him down on the porch
steps, relit his pipe. Puffing, he said, 'All right. Your mother's
asleep. She doesn't know we're out here with our tomcat talk. We can go on. Now, look, since when did you think being good meant being happy?'
'Since always.'
'Since now learn otherwise. Sometimes the man who looks happiest in
town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of
sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from
the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter half the time he's
covering up. He's had his fun and he's guilty. And men do love sin.
Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colours,
and smells. Times come when troughs, not tables, suit our appetites.
Hear a man too loudly praising others, and look to wonder if he didn't
just get up from the sty. On the other hand, that unhappy, pale,
put-upon man walking by, who looks all guilt and sin, why, often that's
your good man with a capital G, Will. For being good is a fearful
occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two. I suppose it's
thinking about trying to be good makes the crack run up the wall one
night. A man with high standards, too, the least hair falls on him
sometimes wilts his spine. He can't let himself alone, won't lift
himself off the hook if he falls just a breath from grace.
'Oh, it
would be lovely if you could just be fine, act fine, not think of it all
the time. But it's hard, right? With the last piece of lemon cake
waiting in the icebox, middle of the night, not yours, but you be awake
in a hot sweat for it, eh? Do I need tell you? Or, a hot spring day,
noon, and there you are chained to your school desk and away off there
goes the river, cool and fresh over the rock-fall. Boys can hear clear
water like that miles away. So, minute by minute, hour by hour, a
lifetime, it never ends, never stops, you got the choice this second,
now this next, and the next after that, be good, be bad, that's what the
clock ticks, that's what it says in the ticks. Run swim, or stay hot,
run eat or lie hungry. So you stay but once stayed, Will, you know the
secret, don't you? Don't think of the river again. Or the cake. Because
if you do, you'll go crazy. Add up all the rivers never swum in, cakes
never eaten, and by the time you get my age, Will, it's a lot missed out
on. But then you console yourself, thinking, the more times in, the
more times possibly drowned, or choke on lemon frosting. But then,
through plain dumb cowardice, I guess, maybe you hold off from too much,
wait, play it safe.
'Look at me: married at thirty-nine, Will
thirty-nine! But I was so busy wrestling myself two falls out of three, I
figured I couldn't marry until I had licked myself good and forever.
Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out
and fall down and get up with everybody else. So at last I looked up
from my great self-wrestling match one night when your mother came to
the library for a book, and got me, instead. And I saw then and there
you take a man half-bad and a woman half-bad and put their two good
halves together and you get one human all good to share between. That's
you, Will, for my money. And the strange thing is, son, and sad, too,
though you're always racing out there on the rim of the lawn, and me on
the roof using books for shingles, comparing life to libraries, I soon
saw you were wiser, sooner and better, than I will ever be..'
Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes.
