From the Dust Returned

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.

Uncle Einar’s beautiful silklike wings hung like sea-green sails behind him and whirred and whispered from his shoulders when he sneezed or turned around swiftly.

Did he hate his wings? Far from it. In his youth he’d always flown nights. Nights were the times for winged men. Daylight held dangers, always had, always would, but night, ah, night, he had sailed over far lands and farther seas. With no danger to himself. It had been a rich, full flying and an exhilaration.

But now he could not fly at night.

On his way here to this damnable, luckless farm he had drunk too much rich crimson wine. “I’ll be all right,” he had told himself, blearily, as he beat his long way under the morning stars, over the moon-dreaming country hills. And then—crack out of the sky—

God’s or the Universe’s bolt of blue lightning! A high tension tower, invisible till the last second against the dark bowl of night.

Like a netted duck! A great sizzling! His face was blown black by blazed St. Elmo’s fires. He fended off the fire with a terrific back-jumping percussion of his wings, and fell.

His hitting the moonlit meadow made a noise like a huge

telephone book dropped from the sky.

Early the next morning, his dew-sodden wings shaking violently, he arose. It was still dark. There was a faint bandage of dawn stretched across the east. Soon the bandage would stain and all flight would be restricted. There was nothing to do but take refuge in the forest and wait out the day in the deepest thicket until another night gave his wings a hidden movement in the sky.

In this fashion his future wife found him.