The Handler, Ray Bradbury

The Handler

MR. Benedict Came Out Of His Little House. He stood on the porch, painfully shy of the sun and inferior to people.

A little dog trotted by with clever eyes; so clever that Mr. Benedict could not meet its gaze. A small child peered through the wrought-iron gate around the graveyard, near the church, and Mr. Benedict winced at the pale, penetrant curiosity of the child.

“You’re the funeral man,” said the child.

Cringing within himself, Mr. Benedict did not speak.
“You own the church?” asked the child, finally.
“Yes,” said Mr. Benedict.
“And the funeral place?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Benedict bewilderedly.
“And the yards and the stones and the graves?” wondered the child.

“Yes,” said Benedict, with some show of pride. And it was true. An amazing thing it was. A stroke of business luck really, that had kept him busy and humming nights over long years. First he had landed the church and the churchyard, with a few green-mossed tombs, when the Baptist people moved uptown.

Then he had built himself a fine little mortuary, in Gothic style, of course, and covered it with ivy, and then added a small house for himself, way in back. It was very convenient to die for Mr. Benedict.

He handled you in and out of buildings with a minimum of confusion and a maximum of synthetic benediction. No need of a funeral procession! declared his large ads in the morning paper. Out of the church and into the earth, slick as a whistle. Nothing but the finest preservatives used!

The child continued to stare at him and he felt like a candle blown out in the wind. He was so inferior. Anything that lived or moved made him feel apologetic and melancholy.

He was continually agreeing with people, never daring to argue or shout or say no. Whoever you might be, if Mr. Benedict met you on the street he would look up your nostrils or perceive your ears or examine your hairline with his little shy, wild eyes and never look you straight in your eye, and he would hold your hand between his cold ones as if your hand was a precious gift, as he said to you:
“You are definitely, irrevocably, believably correct.”

But, always, when you talked to him, you felt he never heard a word you said.

Now, he stood on his porch and said, “You are a sweet little child,” to the little staring child, in fear that the child might not like him.

Mr. Benedict walked down the steps and out the gate, without once looking at his little mortuary building. He saved that pleasure for later. It was very important that things took the right precedence. It wouldn’t pay to think with joy of the bodies awaiting his talents in the mortuary building. No, it was better to follow his usual day-after-day routine. He would let the conflict began.

He knew just where to go to get himself enraged. Half of the day he spent traveling from place to place in the little town, letting the superiority of the living neighbors overwhelm him, letting his own inferiority dissolve him, bathe him in perspiration, tie his heart and brain into trembling knots.

He spoke with Mr. Rodgers, the druggist, idle, senseless morning talk. And he saved and put away all the little slurs and intonations and insults that Mr. Rodgers sent his way. Mr. Rodgers always had some terrible thing to say about a man in the funeral profession.

“Ha, ha,” laughed Mr. Benedict at the latest joke upon himself, and he wanted to cry with miserable violence. “There you are, you cold one,” said Mr. Rodgers on this particular morning. “Cold one,” said Mr. Benedict, “ha, ha!”

Outside the drugstore, Mr. Benedict met up with Mr. Stuyvesant, the contractor. Mr. Stuyvesant looked at his watch to estimate just how much time he dared waste on Benedict before trumping up some appointment. “Oh, hello, Benedict,” shouted Stuyvesant. “How’s business? I bet you’re going at it tooth and nail. Did you get it? I said, I bet you’re going at it tooth and—”

“Yes, yes,” chuckled Mr. Benedict vaguely. “And how is your business, Mr. Stuyvesant?” “Say, how do your hands get so cold, Benny, old man? That’s a cold shake you got there. You just get done embalming a frigid woman! Hey, that’s not bad. You heard what I said?” roared Mr. Stuyvesant, pounding him on the back. “Good, good!” cried Mr. Benedict, with a fleshless smile. “Good day.”

On it went, person after person. Mr. Benedict, pummeled on from one to the next, was the lake into which all refuse was thrown. People began with little pebbles and then when Mr. Benedict did not ripple or protest, they heaved a stone, a brick, a boulder. There was no bottom to Mr. Benedict, no splash and no settling. The lake did not answer.

As the day passed he became more helpless and enraged with them, and he walked from building to building and had more little meetings and conversations and hated himself with a very real, masochistic pleasure.

But the thing that kept him going most of all was the thought of the night pleasures to come. So he inflicted himself again and again with these stupid, pompous bullies and bowed to them and held his hands like little biscuits before his stomach, and asked no more than to be sneered at.

“There you are, meat-chopper,” said Mr. Flinger, the delicatessen man. “How are all your corned beeves and pickled brains?”

Things worked to a crescendo of inferiority. With a final kettle-drumming of insult and terrible self-effacement, Mr. Benedict, seeking wildly the correct time from his wrist-watch, turned and ran back through the town. He was at his peak, he was all ready now, ready to work, ready to do what must be done, and enjoy himself. The awful part of the day was over, the good part was now to begin!

He ran eagerly up the steps to his mortuary.
The room waited like a fall of snow. There were white hummocks and pale delineations of things recumbent under sheets in the dimness.
The door burst open.

Mr. Benedict, framed in a flow of light stood in the door, head back, one hand upraised in dramatic salute, the other hand upon the door-knob in unnatural rigidity.
He was the puppet-master come home.

He stood a long minute in the very center of his theater. In his head applause, perhaps, thundered. He did not move, but lowered his head in abject appreciation of this kind, applauding audience.

He carefully removed his coat, hung it up, got himself into a fresh white smock, buttoned the cuffs with professional crispness, then washed his hands together as he looked around at his very good friends.

It had been a fine week; there were any number of family relics lying under the sheets, and as Mr. Benedict stood before them he felt himself grow and grow and tower and stretch over them.
“Like Alice!” he cried to himself in surprise. “Taller, taller. Curiouser and curiouser!” He flexed his hands straight out and up.

He had never gotten over his initial incredulity when in the room with the dead. He was both delighted and bewildered to discover that here he was master of peoples, here he might do what he wished with men, and they must, by necessity, be polite and cooperative with him.

They could not run away. And now, as on other days, he felt himself released and resilient, growing, growing like Alice. “Oh, so tall, oh, so tall, so very tall . . . until my head . . . bumps . . . the ceiling.”

He walked about among the sheeted people. He felt the same way he did when coming from a picture show late at night, very strong, very alert, very certain of himself. He felt that everyone was watching him as he left a picture show, and that he was very handsome and very correct and brave and all the things that the picture hero was, his voice oh, so resonant, persuasive and he had the right lilt to his left eyebrow and the right tap with his cane.

And sometimes this movie-induced hypnosis lasted all the way home and persisted into sleep. Those were the only two times in his living he felt miraculous and fine, at the picture show, or here—in his own little theater of the cold.

He walked along the sleeping rows, noting each name on its white card.
“Mrs. Walters, Mr. Smith. Miss Brown. Mr. Andrews. Ah, good afternoon, one and all!”

“How are you today, Mrs. Shellmund?” he wanted to know, lifting a sheet as if looking for a child under a bed. “You’re looking splendid, dear lady.”
Mrs. Shellmund had never spoken to him in her life, she’d always gone by like a large, white statue with roller skates hidden under her skirts, which gave her an elegant, gliding, imperturbable rush.

“My dear Mrs. Shellmund,” he said, pulling up a chair and regarding her through a magnifying glass. “Do you realize, my lady, that you have a sebaceous condition of the pores? You were quite waxen in life. Pore trouble. Oil and grease and pimples.

A rich, rich diet, Mrs. Shellmund, there was your trouble. Too many frosties and spongie cakes and cream candies. You always prided yourself on your brain, Mrs. Shellmund, and thought I was like a dime under your toe, or a penny, really. But you kept that wonderful, priceless brain of yours afloat in parfaits and fizzes and limeades and sodas and were so very superior to me that now, Mrs. Shellmund, here is what shall happen. . . .”

He did a neat operation on her.