But you waited until all the children were gone. Then, very carefully unfolding yourself and your warmth and secretness, and keeping out of the lantern light at corners, you ran home alone, alone in the darkness and shadow, hardly breathing, keeping the sound of your heart quiet and in yourself, so if people heard anything at all they might think it was only the wind blowing a dry leaf by in the night. And your mother standing there, with the screen door wide...
He finished wiping his hands on the towel.
He stood a moment thinking of how it had been the last two years here in town. The old game going on, by himself, playing it alone, the children gone, grown into settled middle-age, but now, as before, himself the final and last and only Hider, and the whole town seeking and seeing nothing and going on home to lock their doors.
But tonight, out of a time long past, and on many nights now, he had heard that old sound, the sound of the silver whistle, blowing and blowing. It was certainly not a night bird singing, for he knew each sound so well. But the whistle kept calling and calling and a voice said, Home and Nine o’clock, even though it was now long after midnight. He listened. There was the silver whistle. Even though his mother had died many years ago, after having put his father in an early grave with her temper and her tongue. “Do this, do that, do this, do that, do this, do that, do this, do that...” A phonograph record, broken, playing the same cracked tune again, again, again, her voice, her cadence, around, around, around, around, repeat, repeat, repeat.
And the clear silver whistle blowing and the game of hide-and-seek over. No more of walking in the town and standing behind trees and bushes and smiling a smile that burned through the thickest foliage. An automatic thing was happening. His feet were walking and his hands were doing and he knew everything that must be done now.
His hands did not belong to him.
He tore a button off his coat and let it drop into the deep dark well of the room. It never seemed to hit bottom. It floated down. He waited.
It seemed never to stop rolling. Finally, it stopped.
His hands did not belong to him.
He took his pipe and flung that into the depths of the room. Without waiting for it to strike emptiness, he walked quietly back through the kitchen and peered outside the open, blowing, white-curtained window at the footprints he had made there. He was the Seeker, seeking now, instead of the Hider hiding. He was the quiet searcher finding and sifting and putting away clues, and those footprints were now as alien to him as something from a prehistoric age. They had been made a million years ago by some other man on some other business; they were no part of him at all. He marvelled at their precision and deepness and form in the moonlight. He put his hand down almost to touch them, like a great and beautiful archeological discovery! Then he was gone, back through the rooms, ripping a piece of material from his pants-cuff and blowing it off his open palm like a moth.
His hands were not his hands any more, or his body his body.
He opened the front door and went out and sat for a moment on the porch rail. He picked up the lemonade glass and drank what was left, made warm by an evening’s waiting, and pressed his fingers tight to the glass, tight, tight, very tight. Then he put the glass down on the railing.
The silver whistle!
Yes, he thought. Coming, coming.
The silver whistle!
Yes, he thought. Nine o’clock. Home, home. Nine o’clock. Studies and milk and graham crackers and white cool bed, home, home; nine o’clock and the silver whistle.
He was off the porch in an instant, running softly, lightly, with hardly a breath or a heartbeat, as one barefooted runs, as one all leaf and green June grass and night can run, all shadow, forever running, away from the silent house and across the street, and down into the ravine...
HE PUSHED the door wide and stepped into the owl diner, this long railroad car that, removed from its track, had been put to a solitary and unmoving destiny in the center of town. The place was empty. At the far end of the counter, the counterman glanced up as the door shut and the customer walked along the line of empty swivel seats. The counterman took the toothpick from his mouth.
“Tom Dillon, you old so-and-so! What you doing up this time of night, Tom?”
Tom Dillon ordered without the menu. While the food was being prepared, he dropped a nickel in the wall-phone, got his number, and spoke quietly for a time. He hung up, came back, and sat, listening. Sixty seconds later, both he and counterman heard the police siren wail by at 50 miles an hour. “Well—hell!” said the counterman. “Go get ’em, boys!”
He set out a tall glass of milk and a plate of six fresh graham crackers.
Tom Dillon sat there for a long while, looking secretly down at his ripped pants-cuff and muddied shoes. The light in the diner was raw and bright, and he felt like he was on a stage. He held the tall cool glass of milk in his hand, sipping it, eyes shut, chewing the good texture of the graham crackers, feeling it all through his mouth, coating his tongue.
“Would or would you not.” he asked, quietly, “call this a hearty meal?”
“I’d call that very hearty indeed,” said the counterman, smiling.
Tom Dillon chewed another graham cracker with great concentration, feeling all of it in his mouth. It’s just a matter of time, he thought, waiting.
“More milk?”
“Yes,” said Tom.
And he watched with steady interest, with the purest and most alert concentration in all of his life, as the white carton tilted and gleamed, and the snowy milk poured out, cool and quiet, like the sound of a running spring at night, and filled the glass up all the way, to the very brim, to the very brim, and over...
A WALK IN SUMMER
THE ROOM WAS like the bottom of a cool well all night and she lay in it like a white stone in a well, enjoying it, floating in the dark yet clear element of half-dreams and half-wakening. She felt the breath move in small jets from her nostrils and she felt the immense sweep of her eyelids shutting and opening again and again. And at last she felt the fever brought into her room by the presence of the sun beyond the hills.
“Morning,” she thought. “It might be a special day. Anything might happen. And I hope it does.”
The air moved the white curtains like a summer breath.
“Vinia...?”
A voice was calling. But it couldn’t be a voice. Yet—Vinia raised herself—there it was again.
“Vinia...?”
She slipped from bed and ran to the window of her high second story bedroom.
There on the fresh lawn below, calling up to her in the early hour, stood James Conway, no older than herself, sixteen, very seriously smiling, waving his hand now as her head appeared.
“Jim, what’re you doing here?” she said.
“I’ve been up an hour already,” he replied. “I’m going for a walk, starting early, all day. Want to come along?”
“Oh, but I couldn’t...My folks won’t be back ’till late tonight, I’m alone, I’m supposed to stay...”
She saw the green hills beyond the town and the roads leading out into summer, leading out into August and rivers and places beyond this town and this house and this room and this particular moment.
“I can’t go...” she said, faintly.
“I can’t hear you!” he protested, mildly, smiling up at her under a shielding hand.
“Why did you ask me to walk with you and not someone else?”
He considered this a moment. “I don’t know,” he admitted. He thought it over again, and gave her his most pleasant and agreeable look. “Because, that’s all, just because.”
“I’ll be down,” she said.
“Hey!” he said.
But the window was empty.
THEY STOOD in the center of the perfect, jewelled lawn, over which one set of prints, hers, had run leaving marks, and another, his, had walked in great slow strides, to meet them. The town was silent as a stopped clock. All the shades were still down.
&n
bsp; “My gosh,” said Vinia, “it’s early. It’s crazy-early. I’ve never been up this early and out this early in years. Listen to everyone sleeping.”
They listened to the trees and the whiteness of the house in this early whispering hour, the hour when mice went back to sleep and flowers began untightening their bright fists.
“Which way do we go?”
“Pick a direction.”
Vinia closed her eyes, whirled, and pointed blindly. “Which way am I pointing?”
“North.”
She opened her eyes. “Let’s go north out of town then. I don’t suppose we should.”
“Why?”
And they walked out of town as the sun rose above the hills and the grass burned greener on the lawns.
THERE WAS a smell of hot chalk highway, of dust and sky and waters flowing in a creek the color of grapes. The sun was a new lemon. The forest lay ahead with shadows stirring like a million birds under each tree, each bird a leaf-darkness trembling. At noon, Vinia and James Conway had crossed vast meadows that sounded brisk and starched underfoot. The day had grown warm, as an iced glass of tea grows warm, the frost burning off, left in the sun.
They picked a handful of grapes from a wild barbed-wire vine. Holding them up to the sun you could see the clear grape thoughts suspended in the dark amber fluid, the little hot seeds of contemplation stored from many afternoons of solitude and plant philosophy. The grapes tasted of fresh clear water and something that they had saved from the morning dews and the evening rains. They were the warmed over flesh of April ready now, in August, to pass on their simple gain to any passing stranger. And the lesson was this: sit in the sun, head down, within a prickly vine, in flickery light or open light, and the world will come to you. The sky will come in its time, bringing rain, and the earth will rise through you, from beneath, and make you rich and make you full.
“Have a grape,” said James Conway. “Have two.”
They munched their wet, full mouths.
They sat on the edge of a brook and took off their shoes and let the water cut their feet off to the ankles with an exquisite cold razor.
“My feet are gone!” thought Vinia. But when she looked, there they were, underwater, living comfortably apart from her, completely acclimated to an amphibious existence.
They ate egg sandwiches Jim had brought with him in a paper sack.
“Vinia,” said Jim, looking at his sandwich before he bit it. “Would you mind if I kissed you?”
“I don’t know,” she said, after a moment. “I hadn’t thought.”
“Will you think it over?” he asked.
“Did we come on this picnic just so you could kiss me?” she asked, suddenly.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong! It’s been a swell day! I don’t want to spoil it. But if you should decide later, that it’s all right for me to kiss you, would you tell me?”
“I’ll tell you,” she said, starting on her second sandwich, “if I ever decide.”
THE RAIN came as a cool surprise.
It smelled of soda water and limes and oranges and the cleanest freshest river in the world, made of snow-water, falling from the high, parched sky.
First there had been a motion, as of veils, in the sky. The clouds had enveloped each other softly. A faint breeze had lifted Vinia’s hair, sighing and evaporating the moisture from her upper lip, and then, as she and Jim began to run, the raindrops fell down all about without touching them and then at last began to touch them, coolly, as they leaped green-moss logs and darted among vast trees into the deepest, muskiest cavern of the forest. The forest sprang up in wet murmurs overhead, every leaf ringing and painted fresh with water.
“This way!” cried Jim.
And they reached a hollow tree so vast that they could squeeze in and be warmly cozy from the rain. They stood together, arms about each other, the first coldness from the rain making them shiver, raindrops on their noses and cheeks, laughing.
“Hey!” He gave her brow a lick. “Drinking water!”
“Jim!”
They listened to the rain, the soft envelopment of the world in the velvet clearness of falling water, the whispers in deep grass, evoking odors of old wet wood and leaves that had lain a hundred years, mouldering and sweet.
Then they heard another sound. Above and inside the hollow warm darkness of the tree was a constant humming, like someone in a kitchen, far away, baking and crusting pies, contentedly, dipping in sweet sugars and snowing in baking powders, someone in a warm dim summer-rainy kitchen making a vast supply of food, happy at it, humming between lips over it.
“Bees, Jim, up there! Bees!”
“Sh!”
Up the channel of moist warm hollow they saw little yellow flickers. Now the last bees, wettened, were hurrying home from whatever pasture or meadow or field they had covered, dipping by Vinia and Jim, vanishing up the warm flue of summer into hollow dark.
“They won’t bother us. Just stand still.”
Jim tightened his arms, Vinia tightened hers. She could smell his breath with the wild tart grapes still on it. And the harder the rain drummed on the tree, the tighter they held, laughing, at last quietly letting their laughter drain away into the sound of the bees home from the far fields. And for a moment, Vinia thought that she and Jim might be caught by a sudden drop of great masses of honey from above, sealing them into this tree forever, enchanted, in amber, to be seen by anyone in the next thousand years who strolled by, while the weather of all ages rained and thundered and turned green outside the tree.
It was so warm, so safe, so protected here, the world did not exist, there was raining silence, in the sunless, forested day.
“Vinia,” whispered Jim, after awhile. “May I now?”
His face was very large, near her, larger than any face she had ever seen.
“Yes,” she said.
He kissed her.
The rain poured hard on the tree for a full minute while everything was cold outside and everything was tree-warmth and hidden away inside.
It was a very sweet kiss. It was very friendly and comfortably warm and it tasted like apricots and fresh apples and as water tastes when you rise at night and walk into a dark warm summer kitchen and drink from a cool tin cup. She had never imagined that a kiss could be so sweet and immensely tender and careful of her. He held her not as he had held her a moment before, hard, to protect her from the green rain weather, but he held her now as if she were a porcelain clock, very carefully and with consideration. His eyes were closed and the lashes were glistening dark; she saw this in the instant she opened her eyes and closed them again.
The rain stopped.
It was a moment before the new silence shocked them into an awareness of the climate beyond their world. Now there was nothing but the suspension of water in all the intricate branches of the forest. Clouds moved away to show the blue sky in great quilted patches.
They looked out at the change with some dismay. They waited for the rain to come back, to keep them, by necessity, in this hollow tree for another minute or an hour. But the sun appeared, shining through upon everything, making the scene quite commonplace again.
They stepped from the hollow tree slowly and stood, with their hands out, balancing, finding their way, it seemed, in these woods where the water was drying fast on every limb and leaf.
“I think we’d better start walking,” said Vinia. “That way.”
They walked off into the summer afternoon.
THEY CROSSED the town-limits at sunset and walked, hand in hand in the last glowing of the summer day. They had talked very little the rest of the afternoon, and now as they turned down one street after another, they looked at the passing sidewalk under their feet.
“Vinia,” he said at last. “Do you think this is the beginning of something?”
“Oh, gosh, Jim, I don’t know.”
“Do you think maybe we’re in love?”
“Oh, I don’t know that either!”
They passed
down the ravine and over the bridge and up the other side to her street.
“Do you think we’ll ever be married?”
“It’s too early to tell, isn’t it?” she said.
“I guess you’re right.” He bit his lip. “Will we go walking again soon?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Let’s wait and see, Jim.”
The house was dark, her parents not home yet. They stood on her porch and she shook his hand gravely.
“Thanks, Jim, for a really fine day,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
They stood there.
Then he turned and walked down the steps and across the dark lawn. At the far edge of lawn he stopped in the shadows and said, “Good night.”
He was almost out of sight, running, when she, in turn, said good night.
IN THE middle of the night, a sound wakened her.
She half sat up in bed, trying to hear it again. The folks were home, everything was locked and secure, but it hadn’t been them. No, this was a special sound. And, lying there, looking out at the summer night that had, not long ago, been a summer day, she heard the sound again, and it was a sound of hollowing warmth and moist bark and empty, tunnelled tree, and rain outside but comfortable dryness and secretness inside, and it was the sound of bees come home from distant fields, moving upward in the flue of summer into wonderful darkness.
And this sound, she realized, putting her hand up in the summer night room to touch it, was coming from her sleepy, half-smiling mouth.
And it was this sound, eventually, which sang her to sleep.
AUTUMN AFTERNOON
“IT’S A VERY sad time of year to be cleaning out the attic,” said Grandma. “I don’t like autumn, sometimes. Don’t like the way the trees get empty. And the sky always looks like the sun had bleached it out.” She stood hesitantly at the bottom of the attic stairs, her gray head moving from side to side, her pale gray eyes uncertain. “But no matter what you do, here comes September,” she said. “So tear August off the calendar!”