Summer Morning, Summer Night (Green Town 4)

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!”

“Can I have August?” Tom stood holding the torn month in his hands.

“I don’t know what you’ll do with it,” said Grandma.

“It isn’t really over, it’ll never be.” Tom held the paper up. “I know what happened on every day of it.”

“It was over before it began.” Grandma’s eyes grew remote. “I don’t remember a thing that happened.”

“On Monday I roller-skated at Chessman Park; on Tuesday I had chocolate cake at home; on Wednesday I fell in the crick.” Tom put the calendar in his blouse. “That was this week. Last week I caught crayfish, swung on a vine, hurt my hand on a nail, and fell off a fence. That takes me up until last Friday.”

“Well, it’s good somebody’s doing some thing,” said Grandma.

“And, I’ll remember today,” said Tom, “because the oak leaves turned all red and yellow and fell down and I made a big fire out of them. And this afternoon I’m going to Colonel Quartermain’s for a big birthday party.”

“You just run and play,” said Grandma. “I’ve got this job in the attic.”

She was breathing hard when she climbed into the musty garret. “Meant to do this last spring,” she murmured. “Here it is coming on winter and I don’t want to go all through the snow, thinking about this stuff up here.” She peered about in the attic gloom, saw the huge trunks, the spider webs, the stacked newspapers. There was a smell of ancient wooden beams.

She opened a dirty window that looked out on the apple trees far below. The smell of autumn came in, cool and sharp.

“Look out below!” cried Grandma, and began heaving old magazines and yellow trash down into the yard. “Better than carrying it downstairs.”

Old wire frame dressmaker’s dummies went careening down, followed by silent parrot cages and riffling encyclopaedias. A faint dust rose in the air and her heart was giddy in a few minutes. She had to pick her way over to sit down on a trunk, laughing breathlessly at her own inadequacy.