IN THE next few days from her window Aggie Lou saw Clarisse all dressed up and going down the street and when she called to ask over the distance where Clarisse was going, Clarisse pivoted and with a shining white look, which was alien to her face, replied that she was going to church to pray for Aggie Lou to get well.
“Clarisse, you come back here, come back!” shouted Aggie Lou.
“Why, Aggie Lou,” said her parents to her, “how can you be so cross towards Clarisse, she’s so considerate, bothering to go all the way to church that way.”
Aggie Lou thumped over in bed, muttering into the pillow.
And when the new doctor appeared, Aggie Lou stared at him and his silver hypodermic and said, “Where’d he come from?”
The doctor, it turned out, was a cousin of Mr. Partridge’s who had experimented with some new injections which he promptly gave to Aggie Lou with a smile and only a little prickling pain to her arm.
“I suppose Clarisse had something to do with this?” asked Aggie Lou.
“Yes, she kept talking to her father and her father finally telegraphed the doctor.”
Aggie Lou rubbed her injection mark fiercely and said, “I knew it, I knew it!”
At night, in the cool darkness, Aggie kneeled upon her bed and looked at the ceiling. “God, if you’re listening to Clarisse, don’t any more. She spoils everything. After all, it’s up to me, isn’t it, to ask for what happens to me? Yes. Then, don’t pay no attention to Clarisse, she’s mean. Thank you, God.”
Late that night she tried her very hardest to die. She gritted her teeth and sweat rolled down and tasted of salt in her mouth. She clenched her fists and held them taut at her sides and stretched her body like a steel spring. Inside, she tried to catch the beat of her heart, using her ribs and lungs as hands to clutch it with and stop it, as you stop a clock in the night when its ticking keeps you awake.
Finally, too warm, she threw back the covers and lay moist and panting. Much later she went and stood by the window and looked over at the other house where the lights burned until dawn. She practiced lying on the floor and dying. And she practiced sitting in a chair and dying. She tried it in many postures, but nothing happened, her heart ticked merrily on.
At other times Clarisse would come stand under her window. “I’m going to jump in the river,” she said, tauntingly. Or, “I’m going to eat until I bust.”
“Shut up!” Aggie Lou would reply.
Clarisse would bounce her red ball and pass her little curve of leg over over over it, one two three four, over over. And while doing it she would sing, “Gonna jump in the river, gonna leap off a hotel, gonna eat till I bah-ust, gonna jump in the rih-ver.” Bounce, bounce, bounce rubber.
Slam, would go Aggie Lou’s windows!
Aggie Lou scowled in bed. Supposing Clarisse did what she said? It would be spoiled. There would be no use dying then. Aggie Lou hated to be second comer for anything. She always wanted something her very own. Clarisse had just better not try anything!
Then, the insidious thing began to take place. Aggie Lou started feeling better. The yellow sun looked bright, hot. The birds sang sweetly. She smelled the air like spring wine. But she was afraid to tell mother because mother would tell Clarisse and Clarisse would go ha ha oh ha ha, haha oh haha and yahhh for you! Aggie Lou realized, like a flash bulb going off, that she was getting well! Did the doctor know? Did mother guess? They mustn’t. Not yet. No, not yet.
And she began to feel like running in the sun, over the lawns, she felt like hop scotching and climbing leafy trees, and lots of things. But she didn’t dare say this. No, she pretended she was still sick and going to die. A weird thought came to her suddenly that she didn’t really care about that silver house on the hill, or the dolls, or the dress, it was just so good not to feel tired.
But there was Clarisse to be faced, and what if she got well now and Clarisse teased her? My, she couldn’t bear to think of it!
So next time Clarisse ran by like a pink robot on the grass, Aggie Lou yoohooed. “I’m going to die Thursday at three-fifteen. The doctor said so. He showed me a picture of my nice casket!”
And a few minutes later Clarisse rushed out of her house, her coat and bonnet on, heading down toward church to see what she could do to circumvent this!
And as she returned at twilight, Aggie Lou leaned out and said in a faint and poignant whisper: “I’m feeling worse!”
Clarisse stamped her foot.
THE NEXT morning a fly landed on the quilt. The fly walked around until Aggie Lou hit it. Then it lay quivering and then was silent. It didn’t make a noise. It didn’t buzz or twitch.
When father came up bearing breakfast on a tray she pointed at the fly and asked a question.
Her father nodded. “Yes, it’s dead.” He gave it no importance, he seemed preoccupied with something else. It was, after all, just a fly.
After breakfast, alone, she touched the fly and it did not protest.
“You’re dead,” she said. “You’re dead.”
An hour of watching and waiting revealed something to her. “Why, he doesn’t do anything. Just sits there.”
“How silly,” she said, forty minutes later. “That’s no fun.”
And she looked over at Clarisse’s house and then lay back, closing her eyes, and, presently, she began to smile, contentedly.
HOW IT came about three days later that Clarisse had her accident, no one knew. It happened for sure. After three days of Aggie Lou poking out the window, advising Clarisse as to her coming death, Clarisse ran to play softball in the street Wednesday afternoon with some other girls who played way out in the distances behind the boy fielders.
They were chasing long flies when the accident happened.
Homer Philipps smacked out a walloping three bagger and Clarisse ran to catch it and a car turned a sharp corner, and Clarisse was running along silently, when the car made her stop by hitting her.
Now, whether the car or Clarisse was to blame is one of those things you can talk about forever but never settle. Some say Clarisse didn’t look around—others say she did, but something compelled her to keep running.
The car lifted her like a leaf and tossed her. She tumbled and broke.
AGGIE LOU’S mother came into her room that night.
“Aggie Lou, I want to talk to you about Clarisse.”
“What about Clarisse?” asked Aggie Lou, breathlessly.
Two months later, Aggie Lou walked up to the cemetery hill and listened to Clarisse’s silence and not moving, and dropped some worms on the grave to help things along.
THE WADERS
THE FEET WAITED inside the door, burning in their leather boxes. The feet waited inside a thousand doors and the day burned green and yellow and blue, the day was a great circus banner. The trees stamped their images fiercely upon clouds like summer snow. The sidewalks fried the ants and the grass quivered like a green ocean. And the feet waited, white with a winter of waiting, large and small feet, tender with six months of imprisonment, delicate and blunt feet, apprehensive and wiggling in warm darkness. And far and away and above came the muted and then the whining arguments about the season of the year, the temperature, colds, winter hardly over, or spring hardly over, rather. But this, said the whining voices, the insistent voices, was green summer, this was the day of the sun. And the feet worked their toes together and clenched the material of the socks in darkness, waiting.
There, just beyond the squeaking porch, the ferns were a green water sprinkled softly on the air. There waited the great pool of grass with its tender heads of clover and its devil weed, with its old acorns hidden, with its ant civilizations. It was toward this grass country that the feet were slowly inching. As the body of a boy on a sweltering July day yearns toward swimming holes, so the feet are drawn to oceans of oak-cooled grass and seas of minted clover and dew.
As the naked bodies of boys plunge like white stones and bobble like brown corks in the far country rivers, so the feet wish to plu
nge and swim in the summer lawns, refreshed.
Well, said a woman’s voice, well. A screen door opened. All right, said the voice, all right, but if you catch your death of cold, don’t come to me, sniffling.
Bang! Out the door! Over the rail! Watch the ferns! And into the lake of grass! Under the shady oaks! Off with the shoes, and now, running wet in the dew, running dry and cool under apple shade and oak shade and elm shade, a hot race over desert sidewalks, and the coolness of limes again on the far side, the touch of green ice and menthol, the feet burrowing like animals, feeling for old autumn’s leaves buried deep, feeling for a year ago’s burnt rose-petals, for anthills. The pompous, nuzzling big white toe, jamming into cool dark earth, the little toes picking at milky-purple clover buds, and now, just standing, the hot feet drowning in cool tides of grass. Time enough later, to venture tenderly out on cinder drives and rocky paths where the enemy, the shattered bottles, brown and glittering white, lie waiting to test one’s softened calluses. Time enough later for these marshmallow, winter-soft feet to slim themselves like Indian braves, paint themselves with colored dirts, bruise themselves with rocks and thorns.
Now, now, just the cool grass. The cool grass and a thousand other bare feet, running and running there.
THE DOG
HE WAS THE town. He was the town compounded and reduced, refined to its essences, its odors and its strewing.
He walked through the town or ran through the town any hour of the day or night, whenever the whim took him, when the moon drew him with its nocturnal tides or the sun brought him like a carved animal from a Swiss clock. He was small; with a handle you could have carried him like a black valise. And he was hairy as copper-wool, steel-wool, shavings and brushes. And he was never silent when he could be loud.
He came home from the cold night lake with a smell of water in his pelt. He came from the sands and shook a fine dust of it under the bed. He smelled of June rain and October maple leaves and Christmas snows and April rains. He was the weather, hot or cold. He fetched it back from wherever he was, wherever he had been. The smell of brass; he had lounged against fire station poles amid intervals of tobacco spitting and come home feverish from political conversation. The smell of marble; he had trotted through the cool tombs of the court house. The smell of oil; he had lain in the cool lubrication pit at the gas station, away from summer. Frosted like a birthday cake he entered from January. Baked like a rabbit he came in from July with world-shaking messages buried in his clock-spring hair.
But mostly he followed the Revolution; he moved in the sounds and shadowing of boys, and more often than not, his tongue slickly protruding in a smile, he wore a hand, like a white hat, moving, on his head....
THE RIVER THAT WENT TO THE SEA
EVERY NIGHT AFTER kissing mother, mashing her warm sweet hugeness into his small arms, and rubbing the abrasive cheek of father, so full of the odor of tobacco and machinery, he would run to the bathroom and stand enchanted with the secret note in his hand, poised, ready to send it on its way. And the note would read, “Dear Mermaid, I am Tom Spaulding and I live at 11 South Saint James in Green Town, Illinois and—”
Then he would press the toilet handle. The clear cool waters would gush with a throttling roar down the tile throat. At the very last moment, he would drop his secret note into the vanishing river. The waters would cease flowing. All would be quiet. The note was gone. He would stand for a moment thinking, It’s going on down to the sea, now, way on down to the sea. And then he would go to bed. I wonder if she’s reading it now, he thought, lying there. I wonder if she is.
OVER, OVER, OVER, OVER, OVER, OVER, OVER, OVER!
IN CHILDHOOD HE saw the yellow rubber ball flung over the topmost slats of the house, pause against the Illinois summer sky and come dribbling down the opposite side, while the children sang.
“Over, over, over! Over, Annie, over!”
Sometimes it sounded like a person calling a dog.
“Rover, rover, rover!” they cried. “Rover, any Rover?”
On the moist green lawn at seven in the evening when the distant clatter of dishes told of mother cleansing them in the house, as shadows were spread like carpets for them to sit on, they began to play the game.
“Pick a word?” asked Hilda, flopping her buttery coils of hair. “Umm.” She squinched her nose until the freckles were lost. “How about ‘storm’?”
The seven other children digested the word. They looked at each other with questions in their shadowsy eyes. “Yes,” someone said. “Yes,” everyone agreed. “Let’s try storm.”
“Storm, storm, storm, storm, storm, storm!” they cried. “Storm, storm, storm, storm, storm, storm, storm, storm, storm!”
Then they stopped abruptly, withheld their mirth a moment and one of them said, “What does that mean? Storm? Is it a word? It sounds so queer. That isn’t a word at all!”
THE RPOJECTOR
HE HAD THIS small motion picture projector hidden in his head and when he went to bed at night he ran films from the time the lights went out until his eyes closed and he could no longer see the oblong on the wall full of witches and castles and monsters and misty seas. He ran the films every night for years and nobody knew how talented he was. He never told a soul about his magnificent ability. It was better that way.
THE PEOPLE WITH SEVEN ARMS
“IT CAME LATE,” said Grandfather. “For Tom. It started early for you and it’s still going on. Discovering things, looking at things, smelling, sniffing, tasting things. Hearing things. It should never stop. It stops for most people, but they shouldn’t let it. Don’t let it. Keep it up all your life. I do. I do keep it up every day. Like with the lawn, and the dandelion wine. See, hear, feel, touch, smell, know, and you love. Put out your hands. God gave you seven. Your two regular ones, plus nose, mouth, eyes, ears, skin.
“When you stop knowing you stop loving and when you stop loving you’re not living, and when you’re not living, Douglas boy, you might as well be dead.”
A SERIOUS DISCUSSION (or EVIL IN THE WORLD)
“DOUGLAS,” SAID GRANDFATHER, “You must Iearn as soon as possible the difference between the real world and the world the way you would like it. The difference between the way some people teach us the world is, and the way it happens to be. For only then will you know what to expect, boy. You will see the world clear. And you won’t be a cynic, a man with a bunch of dreams still lying around in the back of the mind, that turns him sour on everything. And you won’t be a skeptic, either, really. I don’t even know if there’s a name for it, boy. You’ll just be someone that looks at the world straight off and sees it. You can even enjoy the duplicity of man, somehow. By recognizing that evil is natural to man, you should be able to cope with it better.”
THE FIREFLIES
“FIREFLIES NEVER QUITE make it back,” said Grandfather, on the bottom front porch stair.
“Make it back where?”
“My father used to say they were stars got shaken loose. On summer nights, he said, God cleaned his furnace, shook it down. Coals dropping everywhere. Run out and pick up a few, he’d say. I’d run. Come back, a light in each hand.”
“I’ll catch some,” said Douglas.
“Thanks.”
Douglas moved like a breath. There was darkness and stars in the heavens and stars on the lawn.
“They don’t even burn!”
“No. Gentle now.”
“They’ve gone out!”
“Startled.”
The fireflies were transferred to Grandfather’s cupped hands. Later, they lit up again.
“I wish I could glow like that.”
“Why, boy, you do. We all do, at times. Poets say love burns with a pure light. Here’s proof. Anything as beautiful as this must be important.”
“I don’t light up like that.”
“Saw you looking at your mother yesterday. In a dark room, bet I could read a book by your face.”
“Aw.”
“Yes, sir!”
Grandfather held up the fireflies. “Better let them get back to brightening the corner where they are.” He opened his hand. They lit the air softly, flying away. “Yes, sir, love is a wonderful thing.”
“We go out in the lobby and eat popcorn or go to the toilet until it’s over, matinees.”
“You’ve got yourself an argument.”
“It’s pretty silly, some Saturdays.”
“You ever see Grandma and me on the movie screen down there?”
“Heck, no.”
“Ever seen your mother, father, yourself, your brother on that screen?”
“Not yet.”
“I’m afraid you never will. Or any of your friends or aunts or uncles, or the boarders here. On the day when the Elite theatre starts showing Grandma and me and your mother and father and all the other relatives and boarders, tell me, I’ll come down with you. We’ll stay until midnight and they sweep us out with the popcorn. In the meantime, Douglas, you keep right on marching to the restroom when things get silly on the screen. You’ve got good common sense in that head. Everybody knows love isn’t like that.”
“Charlie Henwood says he sure hopes not.”
“Maybe you’re wondering what it is, then? It’s what I said; it’s you and me and Grandma and all our children and the children of uncles and cousins, and all the boarders here. It’s how we all feel about each other most of the time, subtract the fights and meanness. Simple as that. It’s trying to live peaceably in an un-peaceable world. It’s Grandma baking a pumpkin pie and me whittling you a hickory whistle. It’s you sitting here right now listening very politely. And you and your brother going to sleep winter nights and warming your feet, one on the other. It’s your mother worrying when your father works late, and there may have been an accident. It’s all of us laughing at the dinner table. It’s Neva playing for us to sing in the parlor. It’s sitting here on the porch nights, or a game of checkers in the fall, inside. It’s so darned many things I can’t tell them all. But it’s a miracle if you find them on that silver screen downtown Saturday matinees. Almost as hard to find in the evening shows. Once a year maybe I see Grandma on the screen, or myself, or someone I know. The rest of the time it might as well be a bunch of rabbits hitting each other on the head with clubs, for all I understand the shows. Do you know why they put those kissing scenes in films? They can’t think of anything to say that means anything. It’s the trademark of an empty man. When they show you that sort of thing, Douglas, you just stroll right out of the theatre and stand on the nearest street-corner. You’ll see more real love in the popcorn man’s cat and her kittens than you’ll ever buy for a dime at the show. Don’t let it fool you. The kiss is just the first note of the first bar, played by a piccolo. What follows is either a symphony or a riot, everyone trying to get out the door.”