The October Country

like toadstools in a few years, and on hot summer days asked their father to sit under the apple tree and fan them with his cooling wings and tell them wild starlit tales of island clouds and ocean skies and textures of mist and wind and how a star tastes melting in your mouth, and how to drink cold mountain air, and how it feels to be a pebble dropped from Mt. Everest, turning to a green bloom, flowering your wings just before you strike bottom!

This was his marriage.

And today, six years later, here sat Uncle Einar, here he was, festering under the apple tree, grown impatient and unkind; not because this was his desire, but because after the long wait, he was still unable to fly the wild night sky; his extra sense had never returned. Here he sat despondently, nothing more than a summer sun-parasol, green and discarded, abandoned for the season by the reckless vacationers who once sought the refuge of its translucent shadow. Was he to sit here forever, afraid to fly by day because someone might see him? Was his only flight to be as a drier of clothes for his wife, or a fanner of children on hot August noons? His one occupation had always been flying Family errands, quicker than storms. A boomerang, he'd whickled over hills and valleys and like a thistle, landed. He had always had money; the Family had good use for their winged man! But now? Bitterness! His wings jittered and whisked the air and made a captive thunder.

'Papa,' said little Meg.

The children stood looking at his thought-dark face.

'Papa,' said Ronald. 'Make more thunder!'

'It's a cold March day, there'll soon be rain and plenty of thunder,' said Uncle Einar.

'Will you come watch us?' asked Michael.

'Run on, run on! Let papa brood!'

He was shut of love, the children of love, and the love of children. He thought only of heavens, skies, horizons, infinities, by night or day, lit by star, moon, or sun, cloudy or clear, but always it was skies and heavens and horizons that ran ahead of you forever when you soared. Yet here he was, sculling the pasture, kept low for fear of being seen.

Misery in a deep well!

'Papa, come watch us; it's March!' cried Meg. 'And we're going to the Hill with all the kids from town!'

Uncle Einar grunted. 'What hill is that?'

'The Kite Hill, of course!' they all sang together.

Now he looked at them.

Each held a large paper kite, their faces sweating with anticipation and an animal glowing. In their small fingers were balls of white twine. From the kites, colored red and blue and yellow and green, hung caudal appendages of cotton and silk strips.

'We'll fly our kites!' said Ronald. 'Won't you come?'

'No,' he said, sadly. 'I mustn't be seen by anyone or there'd be trouble.'

'You could hide and watch from the woods.' said Meg. 'We made the kites ourselves. Just because we know how.'

'How do you know?'

'You're our father!' was the instant cry. 'That's why!'

He looked at his children for a long while. He sighed. 'A kite festival, is it?'

'Yes, sir!'

'I'm going to win,' said Meg.

'No, I'm!' Michael contradicted.

'Me, me!' piped Stephen.

'God up the chimney!' roared Uncle Einar, leaping high with a deafening kettledrum of wings. 'Children! Children, I love you dearly!'

'Father, what's wrong?' said Michael, backing off.

'Nothing, nothing, nothing!' chanted Einar. He flexed his wings to their greatest propulsion and plundering. Whoom! they slammed like cymbals. The children fell flat in the backwash! 'I have it, I have it! I'm free again! Fire in the flue! Feather on the wind! Brunilla!' Einar called to the house. His wife appeared. 'I'm free!' he called, flushed and tall, on his toes. 'Listen, Brunilla, I don't need the night any more! I can fly by day! I don't need the night! I'll fly every day and any day of the year from now on!-but, God, I waste time, talking. Look!'

And as the worried members of his family watched, he seized the cotton tail from one of the little kites, tied it to his belt behind, grabbed the twine ball, held one end in his teeth, gave the other end to his children, and up, up into the air he flew, away into the March wind!

And across the meadows and over the farms his children ran, letting out string to the daylit sky, bubbling and stumbling, and Brunilla stood back in the farmyard and waved and laughed to see what was happening; and her children marched to the far Kite Hill and stood, the four of them, holding the twine in their eager, proud fingers, each tugging and directing and pulling. And the children from Mellin Town came running with their small kites to let up on the wind, and they saw the great green kite leap and hover in the sky and exclaimed: 'Oh, oh, what a kite! What a kite! Oh, I wish I'd a kite like that! Where, where did you get it!'

'Our father made it!' cried Meg and Michael and Stephen and Ronald, and gave an exultant pull on the twine and the humming, thundering kite in the sky dipped and soared and made a great and magical exclamation mark across a cloud!

The Wind

The phone rang at five-thirty that evening. It was December, and long since dark as Thompson picked up the phone.

'Hello.'

'Hello, Herb?'

'Oh, it's you, Allin.'

'Is your wife home, Herb?'

'Sure. Why?'

'Damn it.'

Herb Thompson held the receiver quietly. 'What's up? You sound funny.'

'I wanted you to come over tonight.'

'We're having company.'

'I wanted you to spend the night. When's your wife going away?'

'That's next week,' said Thompson. 'She'll be in Ohio for about nine days. Her mother's sick. I'll come over then.'

'I wish you could come over tonight.'

'Wish I could. Company and all, my wife'd kill me.'

'I wish you could come over.'

'What's it? the wind again?'

'Oh, no. No.'

'Is it the wind?' asked Thompson.

The voice on the phone hesitated. 'Yeah. Yeah, it's the wind.'

'It's a clear night, there's not much wind.'

'There's enough. It comes in the window and blows the curtains a little bit. Just enough to tell me.'

'Look, why don't you come and spend the night here?' said Herb Thompson looking around the lighted halt.

'Oh, no. It's too late for that. It might catch me on the way over. It's a damned long distance. I wouldn't dare, but thanks, anyway. It's thirty miles, but thanks.'

'Take a sleeping-tablet.'

'I've been standing in the door for the past hour, Herb. I can see it building up in the west. There are some clouds there and I saw one of them kind of rip apart. There's a wind coming, all right.'