Dandelion Wine (6 page)

“Something's wrong?” she asked quickly.

G
randfather walked Douglas and Tom home. Halfway there, Charlie Woodman and John Huff and some other boys rushed by like a swarm of meteors, their gravity so huge they pulled Douglas away from Grandfather and Tom and swept him off toward the ravine.

“Don't get lost, son!”

“I won't … I won't …”

The boys plunged into darkness.

Tom and Grandfather walked the rest of the way in silence, except when they turned in at home and Tom said, “Boy, a Happiness Machine—hot diggety!”

“Don't hold your breath,” said Grandpa.

The courthouse clock struck eight.

 

T
he courthouse clock struck nine and it was getting late and it was really night on this small street in a small town in a big state on a large continent on a planet earth hurtling down the pit of space toward nowhere or somewhere and Tom feeling every mile of the long drop. He sat by the front-door screen looking out at that rushing blackness that looked very innocent, as if it was holding still. Only when you closed your eyes and lay down could you feel the world spinning under your bed and hollowing your ears with a black sea that came in and broke on cliffs that weren't there.

There was a smell of rain. Mother was ironing and sprinkling water from a corked ketchup bottle over the crackling dry clothes behind Tom.

One store was still open about a block away—Mrs. Singer's.

Finally, just before it was time for Mrs. Singer to close her store, Mother relented and told Tom, “Run get a pint of ice cream and be sure she packs it tight.”

He asked if he could get a scoop of chocolate on top, because he didn't like vanilla, and Mother agreed. He clutched the money and ran barefooted over the warm evening cement sidewalk, under the apple and oak trees, toward the store. The town was so quiet and far off you could hear only the crickets sounding in the spaces beyond the hot indigo trees that hold back the stars.

His bare feet slapped the pavement. He crossed the street and found Mrs. Singer moving ponderously about her store, singing Yiddish melodies.

“Pint ice cream?” she said. “Chocolate on top? Yes!”

He watched her fumble the metal top off the ice-cream freezer and manipulate the scoop, packing the cardboard pint chock-f with “chocolate on top, yes!” He gave the money, received the chill, icy pack, and rubbing it across his brow and cheek, laughing, thumped barefootedly homeward. Behind him the lights of the lonely little store blinked out and there was only a street light shimmering on the corner, and the whole city seemed to be going to sleep.

Opening the screen door, he found Mom still ironing. She looked hot and irritated but she smiled just the same.

“When will Dad be home from lodge meeting?” he asked.

“About eleven or eleven-thirty,” Mother replied. She took the ice cream to the kitchen, divided it. Giving him his special portion of chocolate, she dished out some for herself and the rest was put away, “for Douglas and your father when they come.”

They sat enjoying the ice cream, wrapped at the core of the deep quiet summer night. His mother and himself and the night all around their small house on the small street. He licked each spoonful of ice cream thoroughly before digging for another, and Mom put her ironing board away and the hot iron in its open case cooling, and she sat in the armchair by the phonograph, eating her dessert and saying, “My land, it was a hot day today. Earth soaks up all the heat and lets it out at night. It'll be soggy sleeping.”

They both sat listening to the night, pressed down by every window and door and complete silence because the radio needed a new battery, and they had played all the Knickerbocker Quartet records and Al Jolson and Two Black Crows records to exhaustion; so Tom just sat on the hardwood floor and looked out into the dark dark dark, pressing his nose against the screen until the flesh of its tip was molded into small dark squares.

“I wonder where Doug is? It's almost nine-thirty.”

“He'll be here,” Tom said, knowing very well that Douglas would be.

He followed Mom out to wash the dishes. Each sound, each rattle of spoon or dish was amplified in the baked evening. Silently they went to the living room, removed the couch cushions and, together, yanked it open and extended it down into the double bed it secretly was. Mother made the bed, punching pillows neatly to flump them up for their heads. Then, as he was unbuttoning his shirt, she said, “Wait awhile, Tom.”

“Why?”

“Because I say so.”

“You look funny, Mom.”

Mom sat down a moment, then stood up, went to the door and called. He listened to her calling and calling, “Douglas, Douglas, oh Doug! Douglasssssss!” over and over. Her calling floated out into the summer warm dark and never came back. The echoes paid no attention.

Douglas. Douglas. Douglas.

Douglas!

And as he sat on the floor, a coldness that was not ice cream and not winter, and not part of summer's heat, went through Tom. He noticed Mom's eyes sliding, blinking; the way she stood undecided and was nervous. All of these things.

She opened the screen door. Stepping out into the night, she walked down the steps and down the front sidewalk under the lilac bush. He listened to her moving feet.

She called again.

Silence.

She called twice more. Tom sat in the room. Any moment now, Douglas would answer from down the long long narrow street, “All right, Mom! All right, Mother! Hey!”

But he didn't answer. And for two minutes Tom sat looking at the made-up bed, the silent radio, the silent phonograph, at the chandelier with the crystal bobbins gleaming quietly, at the rug with the scarlet and purple curlicues on it. He stubbed his toe on the bed purposely to see if it hurt. It did.

Whining, the screen door opened and Mother said, “Come on, Tom. We'll take a walk.”

“Where to?”

“Just down the block. Come on.”

He took her hand. Together they walked down St. James Street. Underfoot the concrete was still warm, and the crickets were sounding louder against the darkening dark. They reached a corner, turned, and walked toward the West Ravine.

Off somewhere a car floated by, flashing its lights in the distance. There was such a complete lack of life, light, and activity. Here and there, back off from where they were walking, faint squares of light glowed where people were still up. But most of the houses, darkened, were sleeping already, and there were a few lightless places where the occupants of a dwelling sat talking low night talk on their front porches. You heard a porch swing squeaking as you walked by.

“I wish your father was home,” said Mother. Her large hand squeezed around his small one. “Just wait'll I get that boy. The Lonely One's around again. Killing people. No one's safe anymore. You never know when the Lonely One'll turn up or where. So help me, when Doug gets home I'll spank him within an inch of his life.”

Now they had walked another block and were standing by the holy black silhouette of the German Baptist Church at the corner of Chapel Street and Glen Rock. In back of the church, a hundred yards away, the ravine began. He could smell it. It had a dark-sewer, rotten-foliage, thick-green odor. It was a wide ravine that cut and twisted across town—a jungle by day, a place to let alone at night, Mother often declared.

He should have felt encouraged by the nearness of the German Baptist Church but he was not, because the building was not illumined, was cold and useless as a pile of ruins on the ravine edge.

He was only ten years old. He knew little of death, fear, or dread. Death was the waxen effigy in the coffin when he was six and Great-grandfather passed away, looking like a great fallen vulture in his casket, silent, withdrawn, no more to tell him how to be a good boy, no more to comment succinctly on politics. Death was his little sister one morning when he awoke at the age of seven, looked into her crib, and saw her staring up at him with a blind, blue, fixed and frozen stare until the men came with a small wicker basket to take her away. Death was when he stood by her high chair four weeks later and suddenly realized she'd never be in it again, laughing and crying and making him jealous of her because she was born. That was death. And Death was the Lonely One, unseen, walking and standing behind trees, waiting in the country to come in, once or twice a year, to this town, to these streets, to these many places where there was little light, to kill one, two, three women in the past three years. That was Death....

But this was more than Death. This summer night deep down under the stars was all things you would ever feel or see or hear in your life, drowning you all at once.

Leaving the sidewalk, they walked along a trodden, pebbled, weed-fringed path while the crickets rose in a loud full drumming chorus. He followed obediently behind brave, fine, tall Mother—defender of the universe. Together, then, they approached, reached, and paused at the very end of civilization.

The Ravine.

Here and now, down in that pit of jungled blackness were suddenly all the things he would never know or understand; all the things without names lived in the huddled tree shadow, in the odor of decay.

He realized he and his mother were alone.

Her hand
trembled.

He felt the tremble.... Why? But she was bigger, stronger, more intelligent than himself, wasn't she? Did she, too, feel that intangible menace, that groping out of darkness, that crouching malignancy down below? Was there, then, no strength in growing up? No solace in being an adult? No sanctuary in life? No fleshly citadel strong enough to with-stand the scrabbling assault of midnights? Doubts flushed him. Ice cream lived again in his throat, stomach, spine and limbs; he was instantly cold as a wind out of December gone.

He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid. Like here, standing. If he should scream, if he should holler for help, would it matter?

Blackness could come swiftly, swallowing; in one titanically freezing moment all would be concluded. Long before dawn, long before police with flashlights might probe the dark, disturbed pathway, long before men with trembling brains could rustle down the pebbles to his help. Even if they were within five hundred yards of him now, and help
certainly
was, in three seconds a dark tide could rise to take all ten years from him and—

The essential impact of life's loneliness crushed his begining-to-tremble body. Mother was alone, too. She could not look to the sanctity of marriage, the protection of her family's love, she could not look to the United States Constitution or the City Police, she could not look anywhere, in this very instant, save into her heart, and there she would find nothing but uncontrollable repugnance and a will to fear. In this instant it was an individual problem seeking an individual solution. He must accept being alone and work on from there.

He swallowed hard, clung to her.
Oh, Lord, don't let her die, please,
he thought.
Don't do anything to us. Father will be coming home from lodge meeting in an hour and if the house is empty—

Mother advanced down the path into the primeval jungle. His voice trembled. “Mom, Doug's all right. Doug's all right. He's all right. Doug's all right!”

Mother's voice was strained, high. “He always comes through here. I tell him not to, but those darned kids, they come through here anyway. Some night he'll come through and never come out again—”

Never come out again.
That could mean anything. Tramps. Criminals. Darkness. Accident. Most of all—death!

Alone in the universe.

There were a million small towns like this all over the world. Each as dark, as lonely, each as removed, as full of shuddering and wonder. The reedy playing of minor-key violins was the small towns' music, with no lights, but many shadows. Oh, the vast swelling loneliness of them. The secret damp ravines of them. Life was a horror lived in them at night, when at all sides sanity, marriage, children, happiness, were threatened by an ogre called Death.

Mother raised her voice into the dark. “Doug! Douglas!”

Suddenly both of them realized something was wrong.

The crickets had stopped chirping.

Silence was complete.

Never in his life a silence like this one. One so utterly complete. Why should the crickets cease? Why? What reason? They'd never stopped ever before. Not ever.

Unless. Unless—

Something was going to happen.

It was as if the whole ravine was tensing, bunching together its black fibers, drawing in power from sleeping countrysides all about, for miles and miles. From dew-sodden forest and dells and rolling hills where dogs tilted heads to moons, from all around the great silence was sucked into one center, and they were the core of it. In ten seconds now, something would happen, something would happen. The crickets kept their truce, the stars were so low he could almost brush the tinsel. There were swarms of them, hot and sharp.