Dandelion Wine

  Everybody looked around but didn't see any witch.

  "I mean your president!" cried Elmira.

  "Me!" Mrs. Goodwater waved at everyone.

  "Today," breathed Elmira, holding onto the desk for support, "I went to the library. I looked up counteractions. How to get rid of people who take advantage of others, how to make witches leave off and go. And I found a way to fight for all our rights. I can feel the power growing. I got the magic of all kinds of good roots and chemicals in me. I got ..." She paused and swayed. She blinked once. "I got cream of tartar and ... I got ... white hawkweed and milk soured in the light of the moon and ..." She stopped and thought for a moment. She shut her mouth and a tiny sound came from deep inside her and worked up through to come out the corners of her lips. She closed her eyes for a moment to see where the strength was.

  "Mrs. Brown, you feelin' all right?" asked Mrs. Goodwater.

  "Feelin' fine!" said Mrs. Brown slowly. "I put in some pulverized carrots and parsley root, cut fine; juniper berry ..."

  Again she paused as if a voice had said STOP to her and she looked out across all those faces.

  The room, she noticed, was beginning to turn slowly, first from left to right, then right to left.

  "Rosemary roots and crowfoot flower ..." she said rather dimly. She let go of Tom's hand. Tom opened one eye and looked at her.

  "Bay leaves, nasturtium petals ..." she said.

  "Maybe you better sit down," said Mrs. Goodwater.

  One lady at the side went and opened a window.

  "Dry betel nuts, lavender and crab-apple seed," said Mrs. Brown and stopped. "Quick now, let's have the election. Got to have the votes. I'll tabulate."

  "No hurry, Elmira," said Mrs. Goodwater.

  "Yes, there is." Elmira took a deep trembling breath. "Remember, ladies, no more fear. Do like you always wanted to do. Vote for me, and ..." The room was moving again, up and down. "Honesty in government. All those in favor of Mrs. Goodwater for president say 'Aye.'"

  "Aye," said the whole room.

  "All those in favor of Mrs. Elmira Brown?" said Elmira in a faint voice.

  She swallowed.

  After a moment she spoke, alone.

  "Aye," she said.

  She stood stunned on the rostrum.

  A silence filled the room from wall to wall. In that silence Mrs. Elmira Brown made a croaking sound. She put her hand on her throat. She turned and looked dimly at Mrs. Goodwater, who now very casually drew forth from her purse a small wax doll in which were a number of rusted thumbtacks.

  "Tom," said Elmira, "show me the way to the ladies' room."

  "Yes'm."

  They began to walk and then hurry and then run. Elmira ran on ahead, through the crowd, down the aisle.... She reached the door and started left.

  "No, Elmira, right, right!" cried Mrs. Goodwater.

  Elmira turned left and vanished.

  There was a noise like coal down a chute.

  "Elmira!"

  The ladies ran around like a girl's basketball team, colliding with each other.

  Only Mrs. Goodwater made a straight line.

  She found Tom looking down the stairwell, his hands clenched to the banister.

  "Forty steps!" he moaned. "Forty steps to the ground!"

  Later on and for months and years after it was told how like an inebriate Elmira Brown negotiated those steps touching every one on her long way down. It was claimed that when she began the fall she was sick to unconsciousness and that this made her skeleton rubber, so she kind of rolled rather than ricocheted. She landed at the bottom, blinking and feeling better, having left whatever it was that had made her uneasy all along the way. True, she was so badly bruised she looked like a tattooed lady. But, no, not a wrist was sprained or an ankle twisted. She held her head funny for three days, kind of peering out of the sides of her eyeballs instead of turning to look. But the important thing was Mrs. Goodwater at the bottom of the steps, pillowing Elmira's head on her lap and dropping tears on her as the ladies gathered hysterically.

  "Elmira, I promise, Elmira, I swear, if you just live, if you don't die, you hear me, Elmira, listen! I'll use my magic for nothing but good from now on. No more black, nothing but white magic. The rest of your life, if I have my way, no more falling over iron dogs, tripping on sills, cutting fingers, or dropping downstairs for you! Elysium, Elmira, Elysium, I promise! If you just live! Look, I'm pulling the tacks out of the doll! Elmira, speak to me! Speak now and sit up! And come upstairs for another vote. President, I promise, president of the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge, by acclamation, won't we, ladies?"

  At this all the ladies cried so hard they had to lean on each other.

  Tom, upstairs, thought this meant death down there.

  He was halfway down when he met the ladies coming back up, looking like they had just wandered out of a dynamite explosion.

  "Get out of the way, boy!"

  First came Mrs. Goodwater, laughing and crying.

  Next came Mrs. Elmira Brown, doing the same.

  And after the two of them came all the one hundred twenty-three members of the lodge, not knowing if they'd just returned from a funeral or were on their way to a ball.

  He watched them pass and shook his head.

  "Don't need me no more," he said. "No more at all."

  So he tiptoed down the stairs before they missed him, holding tight to the rail all the way.

  "For what it's worth," said Tom, "there's the whole thing in a nutshell. The ladies carrying on like crazy. Everybody standing around blowing their noses. Elmira Brown sitting there at the bottom of the steps, nothing broke, her bones made out of Jell-O, I suspect, and the witch sobbin' on her shoulder, and then all of them goin' upstairs suddenly laughing. Cry-yi, you figure it out. I got out of there fast!"

  Tom loosened his shirt and took off his tie.

  "Magic, you say?" asked Douglas.

  "Magic six ways from Sunday."

  "You believe it?"

  "Yes I do and no I don't."

  "Boy, this town is full of stuff!" Douglas peered off at the horizon where clouds filled the sky with immense shapes of old gods and warriors. "Spells and wax dolls and needles and elixirs, you said?"

  "Wasn't much as an elixir, but awful fine as an upchuck. Blap! Wowie!" Tom clutched his stomach and stuck out his tongue.

  "Witches ..." said Douglas. He squinted his eyes mysteriously.

  And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one, from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on the tree; and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky, and drop you down and down. Long before you hit the grass you will have forgotten there ever was a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below. You will fall in darkness....

  "No!"

  Colonel Freeleigh opened his eyes quickly, sat erect in his wheel chair. He jerked his cold hand out to find the telephone. It was still there! He crushed it against his chest for a moment, blinking.

  "I don't like that dream," he said to his empty room.

  At last, his fingers trembling, he lifted the receiver and called the long-distance operator and gave her a number and waited, watching the bedroom door as if at any moment a plague of sons, daughters, grandsons, nurses, doctors, might swarm in to seize away this last vital luxury he permitted his failing senses. Many days, or was it years, ago, when his heart had thrust like a dagger through his ribs and flesh, he had heard the boys below ... their names what were they? Charles, Charlie, Chuck, yes! And Douglas! And Tom! He remembered! Calling his name far down the hall, but the door being locked in their faces, the boys turned away. You can't be excited, the doctor said. No visitors, no visitors, no visitors. And he heard the boys moving across the street, he saw them, he waved. And they waved
back. "Colonel ... Colonel ..." And now he sat alone with the little gray toad of a heart flopping weakly here or there in his chest from time to time.

  "Colonel Freeleigh," said the operator. "Here's your call. Mexico City. Erickson 3899."

  And now the far away but infinitely clear voice:

  "Bueno."

  "Jorge!" cried the old man

  "Senor Freeleigh! Again? This costs money."

  "Let it cost! You know what to do."

  "Si. The window?"

  "The window, Jorge, if you please."

  "A moment," said the voice.

  And, thousands of miles away, in a southern land, in an office in a building in that land, there was the sound of footsteps retreating from the phone. The old man leaned forward, gripping the receiver tight to his wrinkled ear that ached with waiting for the next sound.

  The raising of a window.

  Ah, sighed the old man.

  The sounds of Mexico City on a hot yellow noon rose through the open window into the waiting phone. He could see Jorge standing there holding the mouthpiece out, out into the bright day.

  "Senor ..."

  "No, no, please. Let me listen."

  He listened to the hooting of many metal horns, the squealing of brakes, the calls of vendors selling red-purple bananas and jungle oranges in their stalls. Colonel Freeleigh's feet began to move, hanging from the edge of his wheel chair, making the motions of a man walking. His eyes squeezed tight. He gave a series of immense sniffs, as if to gain the odors of meats hung on iron hooks in sunshine, cloaked with flies like a mantle of raisins; the smell of stone alleys wet with morning rain. He could feel the sun burn his spiny-bearded cheek, and he was twenty-five years old again, walking, walking, looking, smiling, happy to be alive, very much alert, drinking in colors and smells.

  A rap on the door. Quickly he hid the phone under his lap robe.

  The nurse entered. "Hello," she said. "Have you been good?"

  "Yes." The old man's voice was mechanical. He could hardly see. The shock of a simple rap on the door was such that part of him was still in another city, far removed. He waited for his mind to rush home--it must be here to answer questions, act sane, be polite.

  "I've come to check your pulse."

  "Not now!" said the old man.

  "You're not going anywhere, are you?" She Smiled.

  He looked at the nurse steadily. He hadn't been anywhere in ten years.

  "Give me your wrist."

  Her fingers, hard and precise, searched for the sickness in his pulse like a pair of calipers.

  "What've you been doing to excite yourself?" she demanded.

  "Nothing."

  Her gaze shifted and stopped on the empty phone table. At that instant a horn sounded faintly, two thousand miles away.

  She took the receiver from under the lap robe and held it before his face. "Why do you do this to yourself? You promised you wouldn't. That's how you hurt yourself in the first place, isn't it? Getting excited, talking too much. Those boys up here jumping around--"

  "They sat quietly and listened," said the colonel. "And I told them things they'd never heard. The buffalo, I told them, the bison. It was worth it. I don't care. I was in a pure fever and I was alive. It doesn't matter if being so alive kills a man; it's better to have the quick fever every time. Now give me that phone. If you won't let the boys come up and sit politely I can at least talk to someone outside the room."

  "I'm sorry, Colonel. Your grandson will have to know about this. I prevented his having the phone taken out last week. Now it looks like I'll let him go ahead.

  "This is my house, my phone. I pay your salary!" he said.

  "To make you well, not get you excited." She wheeled his chair across the room. "To bed with you now, young man!"

  From bed he looked back at the phone and kept looking at it.

  "I'm going to the store for a few minutes," the nurse said. "Just to be sure you don't use the phone again, I'm hiding your wheel chair in the hall."

  She wheeled the empty chair out the door. In the downstairs entry, he heard her pause and dial the extension phone.

  Was she phoning Mexico City? he wondered. She wouldn't dare!

  The front door shut.

  He thought of the last week here, alone, in his room, and the secret, narcotic calls across continents, an isthmus, whole jungle countries of rain forest, blue-orchid plateaus, lakes and hills ... talking ... talking ...to Buenos Aires ... and ... Lima ... Rio de Janeiro ...

  He lifted himself in the cool bed. Tomorrow the telephone gone! What a greedy fool he had been! He slipped his brittle ivory legs down from the bed, marveling at their desiccation. They seemed to be things which had been fastened to his body while he slept one night, while his younger legs were taken off and burned in the cellar furnace. Over the years, they had destroyed all of him, removing hands, arms, and legs and leaving him with substitutes as delicate and useless as chess pieces. And now they were tampering with something more intangible--the memory; they were trying to cut the wires which led back into another year.

  He was across the room in a stumbling run. Grasping the phone, he took it with him as he slid down the wall to sit upon the floor. He got the long-distance operator, his heart exploding within him, faster and faster, a blackness in his eyes. "Hurry, hurry!"

  He waited.

  "Bueno?"

  "Jorge, we were cut off."

  "You must not phone again, Senor," said the faraway voice. "Your nurse called me. She says you are very ill. I must hang up."

  "No, Jorge! Please!" the old man pleaded. "One last time, listen to me. They're taking the phone out tomorrow. I can never call you again."

  Jorge said nothing.

  The old man went on. "For the love of God, Jorge! For friendship, then, for the old days! You don't know what it means. You're my age, but you can move! I haven't moved anywhere in ten years."

  He dropped the phone and had trouble picking it up, his chest was so thick with pain. "Jorge! You are still there, aren't you?"

  "This will be the last time?" said Jorge.

  "I promise!"

  The phone was laid on a desk thousands of miles away. Once more, with that clear familiarity, the footsteps, the pause, and, at last, the raising of the window.

  "Listen," whispered the old man to himself.

  And he heard a thousand people in another sunlight, and the faint, tinkling music of an organ grinder playing "La Marimba"--oh, a lovely, dancing tune.

  With eyes tight, the old man put up his hand as if to click pictures of an old cathedral, and his body was heavier with flesh, younger, and he felt the hot pavement underfoot.

  He wanted to say, "You're still there, aren't you? All of you people in that city in the time of the early siesta, the shops closing, the little boys crying loteria nacional para hoy! to sell lottery tickets. You are all there, the people in the city. I can't believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living.... "

  He sat with the receiver tightly pressed to his ear.

  And at last, the clearest, most improbable sound of all--the sound of a green trolley car going around a corner--a trolley burdened with brown and alien and beautiful people, and the sound of other people running and calling out with triumph as they leaped up and swung aboard and vanished around a corner on the shrieking rails and were borne away in the sun-blazed distance to leave only the sound of tortillas frying on the market stoves, or was it merely the ever rising and falling hum and burn of static quivering along two thousand miles of copper wire....

  The old man sat on the floor.

  Time passed.

  A downstairs door opened slowly. Light fo
otsteps came in, hesitated, then ventured up the stairs. Voices murmured.

  "We shouldn't be here!"

  "He phoned me, I tell you. He needs visitors bad. We can't let him down."

  "He's sick!"

  "Sure! But he said to come when the nurse's out. We'll only stay a second, say hello, and ..."

  The door to the bedroom moved wide. The three boys stood looking in at the old man seated there on the floor.

  "Colonel Freeleigh?" said Douglas softly.

  There was something in his silence that made them all shut up their mouths.

  They approached, almost on tiptoe.

  Douglas, bent down, disengaged the phone from the old man's now quite cold fingers. Douglas lifted the receiver to his own ear, listened. Above the static he heard a strange, a far, a final sound.

  Two thousand miles away, the closing of a window.

  "Boom!" said Tom. "Boom. Boom. Boom."

  He sat on the Civil War cannon in the courthouse square. Douglas, in front of the cannon, clutched his heart and fell down on the grass. But he did not get up; he just lay there, his face thoughtful.

  "You look like you're going to get out the old pencil any second now," said Tom.

  "Let me think!" said Douglas, looking at the cannon. He rolled over and gazed at the sky and the trees above him. "Tom, it just hit me."

  "What?"

  "Yesterday Ching Ling Soo died. Yesterday the Civil War ended right here in this town forever. Yesterday Mr. Lincoln died right here and so did General Lee and General Grant and a hundred thousand others facing north and south. And yesterday afternoon, at Colonel Freeleigh's house, a herd of buffalo-bison as big as all Green Town, Illinois, went off the cliff into nothing at all. Yesterday a whole lot of dust settled for good. And I didn't even appreciate it at the time. It's awful, Tom, it's awful! What we going to do without all those soldiers and Generals Lee and Grant and Honest Abe; what we going to do without Ching Ling Soo? I never dreamed so many people could die so fast, Tom. But they did. They sure did!"

  Tom sat astride the cannon, looking down at his brother as his voice trailed away.