Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You! Ray Bradbury

Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You!

It all began with the smell of chocolate.

On a steaming late afternoon of June rain, Father Malley drowsed in his confessional, waiting for penitents.

Where in all the world were they? he wondered. Immense traffics of sin lurked beyond in the warm rains. Then why not immense traffics of confession here?

Father Malley stirred and blinked.

Today’s sinners moved so fast in their cars that this old church was an ecclesiastical blur. And himself? And ancient watercolor priest, tints fading fast, trapped inside.

Let’s give it another five minutes and stop, he thought, not in panic but in the kind of quiet shame and desperation that neglect shoulders on a man.

There was a rustle from beyond the confessional grate next door.
Father Malley sat up, quickly.

A smell of chocolate sifted through the grille.
Ah, God, thought the priest, it’s a lad with his small basket of sins soon laid to rest and him gone. Well…

The old priest leaned to the grate where the candy essence lingered and where the words must come.
But, no words. No ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…’
Only strange small mouse-sounds of…chewing!

The sinner in the next booth, God sew up his mouth, was actually sitting in there devouring a candy bar!
‘No!’ whispered the priest, to himself.

His stomach, gathering data, rumbled, reminding him that he had not eaten since breakfast. For some sin of pride which he could not now recall, he had nailed himself to a saint’s diet all day, and now—this!

Next door, the chewing continued.
Father Malley’s stomach growled. He leaned hard against the grille, shut his eyes, and cried:
‘Stop that!’

The mouse-nibbling stopped.
The smell of chocolate faded.
A young man’s voice said, ‘That’s exactly why I’ve come, Father.’
The priest opened one eye to examine the shadow behind the screen.

‘What’s exactly why you’ve come?’
‘The chocolate, Father.’
‘The what?’
‘Don’t be angry, Father.’
‘Angry, hell, who’s angry?’

‘You are, Father. I’m damned and burnt before I start, by the sound of your voice.’
The priest sank back in the creaking leather and mopped his face and shook his senses.
‘Yes, yes. The day’s hot. I’m out of temper. But then, I never had much.’
‘It will cool off later in the day, Father. You’ll be fine.’

The old priest eyed the screen. ‘Who’s taking and who’s giving confession here?’
‘Why, you are, Father.’
‘Then, get on with it!’
The voice hastened forth the facts:
‘You have smelled the chocolate, Father?’
The priest’s stomach answered for him, faintly.

Both listened to the sad sound. Then:
‘Well, Father, to hit it on the head, I was and still am a…chocolate junkie.’
Old fires stirred in the priest’s eyes. Curiosity became humor, then laughed itself back to curiosity again.
‘And that’s why you’ve come to confession this day?’

‘That’s it, sir, or, Father.’
‘You haven’t come about sweating over your sister or blueprints for fornication or self-battles with the grand war of masturbation?’
‘I have not, Father,’ said the voice in remorse.

The priest caught the tone and said, ‘Tut, tut, it’s all right. You’ll get around to it. For now, you’re a grand relief. I’m full-up with wandering males and lonely females and all the junk they read in books and try in waterbeds and sink from sight with suffocating cries as the damn things spring leaks and all is lost. Get on. You have bruised my antennae alert. Say more.’

‘Well, Father, I have eaten, every day of my life now for ten or twelve years, one or two pounds of chocolate. I cannot leave it alone, Father. It is the end-all and be-all of my life.’
‘Sounds like a fearful affliction of lumps, acne, carbuncles, and pimples.’

‘It was. It is.’
‘And not exactly contributing to a lean figure.’
‘If I leaned, Father, the confessional would fall over.’

The cabinet around them creaked and groaned as the hidden figure beyond demonstrated.
‘Sit still!’ cried the priest.
The groaning stopped.

The priest was wide awake now and feeling splendid. Not in years had he felt so alive and aware of his happily curious and beating heart and fine blood that sought and found, sought and found the far corners of his cloth and body.

The heat of the day was gone.
He felt immensely cool. A kind of excitement pulsed his wrists and lingered in his throat. He leaned almost like a lover to the grille and prompted more spillage.
‘Oh, lad, you’re rare.’

‘And sad, Father, and twenty-two years old and put upon, and hate myself for eating, and need to do something about it.’
‘Have you tried chewing more and swallowing less?’

‘Oh, each night I go to bed saying: Lord, put off the crunchbars and the milk-chocolate kisses and the Hersheys. Each morning I rave out of bed and run to the liquor store not for liquor but for eight Nestlés in a row! I’m in sugar-shock by noon.’

‘That’s not so much confession as medical fact, I can see.’
‘My doctor yells at me, Father.’
‘He should.’
‘I don’t listen, Father.’

‘You should.’
‘My mother’s no help, she’s hog-fat and candy-wild.’
‘I hope you’re not one of those who live at home still?’
‘I loiter about, Father.’

‘God, there should be laws against boys loitering in the round shade of their mas. Is your father surviving the two of you?’
‘Somehow.’
‘And his weight?’
‘Irving Gross, he calls himself. Which is a joke about size and weight and not his name.’

‘With the three of you, the sidewalk’s full?’
‘No bike can pass, Father.’
‘Christ in the wilderness,’ murmured the priest, ‘starving for forty days.’

‘Sounds like a terrible diet, Father.’
‘If I knew the proper wilderness, I’d boot you there.’

‘Boot away, Father. With no help from my mom and dad, a doctor and skinny friends who snort at me. I’m out of pocket from eating and out of mind from the same. I never dreamed I’d wind up with you. Beg pardon, Father, but it took a lot to drive me here. If my friends knew, if my mom, my dad, my crazy doctor knew I was here with you at this minute, oh what the hell!’

There was a fearful stampede of feet, a careening of flesh.
‘Wait!’
But the weight blundered out of the next-door cubby.
With an elephant trample, the young man was gone.

The smell of chocolate alone stayed behind and told all by saying nought.
The heat of the day swarmed in to stifle and depress the old priest.

He had to climb out of the confessional because he knew if he stayed he would begin to curse under his breath and have to run off to have his sins forgiven at some other parish.
I suffer from Peevish, O Lord, he thought. How many Hail Marys for that?

Come to think of it, how many for a thousand tons, give or take a ton, of chocolate?
Come back! he cried silently at the empty church aisle.
No, he won’t, not ever now, he thought, I pressed too hard.

And with that as supreme depression, he went to the parish house to tub himself cool and towel himself to distemper.
A day, two days, a week passed.

The sweltering noons dissolved the old priest back into a stupor of sweat and vinegar-gnat mean. He snoozed in his cubby or shuffled papers in the unlined library, looked out at the untended lawn and reminded himself to caper with the mower one day soon.

But most of all he found himself brambling with irritability. Fornication was the minted coin of the land, and masturbation its handmaiden. Or so it seemed from the few whispers that slid through the confessional grille during the long afternoons.

On the fifteenth day of July, he found himself staring at some boys idling by on their bicycles, mouths full of Hershey bars that they were gulping and chewing.
That night he awoke thinking Power House and Baby Ruth and Love Nest and Crunch.

He stood it as long as he could and then got up, tried to read, tossed the book down, paced the dark night church, and at last, spluttering mildly, went up to the altar and asked one of his rare favors of God.

The next afternoon, the young man who loved chocolate at last came back.

‘Thank you, Lord,’ murmured the priest, as he felt the vast weight creak the other half of the confessional like a ship foundered with wild freight.

‘What?’ whispered the young voice from the far side.
‘Sorry. I wasn’t addressing you,’ said the priest.
He shut his eyes and inhaled.

The gates of the chocolate factory stood wide somewhere and its mild spice moved forth to change the land.

Then, an incredible thing happened.
Sharp words burst from Father Malley’s mouth.

‘You shouldn’t be coming here!’
‘What, what, Father?’

‘Go somewhere else! I can’t help. You need special work. No, no.’

The old priest was stunned to feel his own mind jump out his tongue this way. Was it the heat, the long days and weeks kept waiting by this fiend, what, what? But still his mouth leaped on:
‘No help here! No, no. Go for help—’

‘To the shrinks, you mean?’ the voice cut in, amazingly calm, considering the explosion.
‘Yes, yes, Lord save us, to those people. The—the psychiatrists.’

This last word was even more incredible. He had rarely heard himself say it.
‘Oh, God. Father, what do they know?’ said the young man.

What indeed, thought Father Malley, for he had long been put off by their carnival talk and to-the-rear-march chat and clamor. Good grief, why don’t I turn in my collar and buy me a beard! he thought, but went on more calmly.
‘What do they know, my son? Why, they claim to know everything.’

‘Just like the Church used to claim, Father?’
Silence. Then:
‘There’s a difference between claiming and knowing,’ the old priest replied, as calmly as his beating heart would allow.

‘And the Church knows, is that it, Father?’
‘And if it doesn’t, I do!’

‘Don’t get mad again,