Today, January 2, is the birthday of Charles Beaumont (1929-1967). Beaumont was one of the writers of the original Twilight Zone. The reason Rod Serling asked Beaumont to write for him can be easily seen in Beaumont’s work.
One of Beaumont’s mentors was Ray Bradbury. Bradbury wrote in the introduction to Best of Beaumont (1982) that he and Beaumont lived in the same part of Los Angeles and used to pass a cemetery that had a sign advertising FREE DIRT.
Bradbury was working on a story by that title when Beaumont showed up at his house with his own story of “Free Dirt”. Bradbury loved it and shelved his version for a few decades. Beaumont’s story was originally published in the May 1955 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It has been reprinted a number of times and is currently available in Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories.
In this story, a Mr. Aorta lives to get things free. He’s basically a grifter and a common thief. When he sees a sign outside a cemetery offering free dirt, he intimidates his next door neighbor to let him borrow the neighbor’s truck. Aorta uses the truck to fill his back yard with dirt from the cemetery. He plants a garden using seeds he’d ordered through the mail. Free samples, naturally.
The garden grows a rich yield, which Aorta harvests and then consumes in a single meal. Then he spots something through the window…
Beaumont’s story has a clear and distinct ending with little left to the imagination. Aorta is not a likeable protagonist. His comeuppance is entirely satisfying and well deserved.
Ray Bradbury did eventually publish his version of “Free Dirt”. It appeared in the October 15, 1996 issue of The American Way. I believe that’s American Airlines inflight magazine. It was then reprinted in the collection Quicker Than the Eye.
There are a lot of similarities between the two stories. In Bradbury’s tale a young man stops by a cemetery on a late afternoon and has a long conversation with the cemetery keeper, an old man, in which the cemetery keeper tells a story of something harrowing that had happened in his youth. Then the young loads his truck with the dirt and heads home.
A storm is coming, so he unloads the dirt in his garden. The rain waters the garden and something begins to grow.
The difference between the stories is that Beaumont’s version has an unambiguous endings. Bradbury’s is wide open and leaves what happens entirely to the reader’s imagination. I like both stories. The central idea is the same in each one, but the executions are different enough that they aren’t the same tale. Overall, I think I prefer Beaumont’s version better. YMMV.