Summer Morning, Summer Night

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 plunge 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!”