Free Dark Carnival by Ray Bradbury Page B

embraced my chest, then my knees, up and down, one way and another, sucking under my heels.
        'Tally! Come back, Tally!'
        I was only twelve. But I know how much I loved her. It was that love that comes before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that is no more bad than wind and sea and sand lying side by side forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the humming quiet days of droning education at the school. All the long autumn days of the years past when I had carried her books home from school.
        Tally!
        I called her name for the last time. I shivered. I felt water on my face and did not know how it got there. The waves had not splashed that high.
        Turning, I retreated to the sand and stood there for half an hour, hoping for one glimpse, one sign, one little bit of Tally to remember. Then, I knelt and built a sandcastle, shaping it fine, building it as Tally and I had often built so many of them. But this time, I only built half of it. Then I got up.
        'Tally, if you hear me, come in and build the rest.'
        I walked off towards that far away speck that was Mamma. The water came in, blended the sandcastle circle by circle, mashing it down little by little into the original smoothness.
        Silently, I walked along the shore.
        Far away, a merry-go-round jangled faintly, but it was only the wind.
       
        The next day, I went away on the train.
        A train has a poor memory; it soon puts all behind it. It forgets the cornlands of Illinois, the rivers of childhood, the bridges, the lakes, the valleys, the cottages, the hurts and the joys. It spreads them out behind and they drop behind a horizon.
        I lengthened my bones, put flesh on them, changed my young mind for an older one, threw away clothes as they no longer fitted, shifted from grammar to high-school, to college books, to law books. And then there was a young woman in Sacramento. I knew her for a time, and we were married.
        I continued my law study. By the time I was twenty-two, I had almost forgotten what the East was like.
        Margaret suggested that our delayed honeymoon be taken back in that direction.
        Like a memory, a train works both ways. A train can bring rushing back all those things you left behind so many years before.
        Lake Bluff, population 10,000, came up over the sky. Margaret looked so handsome in her fine new clothes. She watched me as I felt my old world gather me back into its living. She held my arm as the train slid into Bluff Station and our baggage was escorted out.
        So many years, and the things they do to people's faces and bodies. When we walked through the town together I saw no one I recognized. There were faces with echoes in them. Echoes of hikes on ravine trails. Faces with small laughter in them from closed grammar schools and swinging on metal-linked swings and going up and down on teeter-totters. But I didn't speak. I walked and looked and filled up inside with all those memories, like leaves stacked for autumn burning.
        We stayed on two weeks in all, revisiting all the places together. The days were happy. I thought I loved Margaret well. At least I thought I did.
        It was on one of the last days that we walked down by the shore. It was not quite as late in the year as that day so many years before, but the first evidences of desertion were coming upon the beach. People were thinning out, several of the hot-dog stands had been shuttered and nailed, and the wind, as always, waited there to sing for us.
        I almost saw Mamma sitting on the sand as she used to sit. I had that feeling again of wanting to be alone. But I could not force myself to speak of this to Margaret. I only held on to her and waited.
        It got late in the day. Most of the children had gone home and only a few men and women remained basking in the windy sun.
        The life-guard boat pulled up on the shore. The