Summer Morning, Summer Night (Green Town 4)

“Ever seen your mother, father, yourself, your brother on that screen?”

“Not yet.”

“I’m afraid you never will. Or any of your friends or aunts or uncles, or the boarders here. On the day when the Elite theatre starts showing Grandma and me and your mother and father and all the other relatives and boarders, tell me, I’ll come down with you. We’ll stay until midnight and they sweep us out with the popcorn. In the meantime, Douglas, you keep right on marching to the restroom when things get silly on the screen. You’ve got good common sense in that head. Everybody knows love isn’t like that.”

“Charlie Henwood says he sure hopes not.”

“Maybe you’re wondering what it is, then? It’s what I said; it’s you and me and Grandma and all our children and the children of uncles and cousins, and all the boarders here. It’s how we all feel about each other most of the time, subtract the fights and meanness. Simple as that. It’s trying to live peaceably in an un-peaceable world. It’s Grandma baking a pumpkin pie and me whittling you a hickory whistle. It’s you sitting here right now listening very politely. And you and your brother going to sleep winter nights and warming your feet, one on the other. It’s your mother worrying when your father works late, and there may have been an accident. It’s all of us laughing at the dinner table. It’s Neva playing for us to sing in the parlor. It’s sitting here on the porch nights, or a game of checkers in the fall, inside. It’s so darned many things I can’t tell them all. But it’s a miracle if you find them on that silver screen downtown Saturday matinees. Almost as hard to find in the evening shows. Once a year maybe I see Grandma on the screen, or myself, or someone I know. The rest of the time it might as well be a bunch of rabbits hitting each other on the head with clubs, for all I understand the shows. Do you know why they put those kissing scenes in films? They can’t think of anything to say that means anything. It’s the trademark of an empty man. When they show you that sort of thing, Douglas, you just stroll right out of the theatre and stand on the nearest street-corner. You’ll see more real love in the popcorn man’s cat and her kittens than you’ll ever buy for a dime at the show. Don’t let it fool you. The kiss is just the first note of the first bar, played by a piccolo. What follows is either a symphony or a riot, everyone trying to get out the door.”

“What good is love?”

“Good. Well, I guess you’d call it a kind of lubricant. It stops friction. There are so many elbows to knock and feet to step on in this world. And so many people swatting each other in the face with pan-cake flippers, accidentally, of course, you need to be baptized in this first-grade oil, love, or you wouldn’t get anywhere. Your brakes would burn out on the first mile.”

THE CIRCUS

THE EMPTY MEADOW lay beyond the town.

At eight o’clock, Tom Spaulding came walking through the dusk to the edge of the meadow and stood breathing in the scents that blew from the summer grass in whispers.

“This is where it was,” he thought. “If only I could have come. If only I hadn’t had a cold and stayed in bed.”

He walked slowly to the center of the meadow. He stood sniffing, under the great chandelier of stars as all the blazing constellations caught fire and burned above him.

“Here’s where the lions were...”

The yellow smell, the smell of carpeting in sunlight, the smell of African dust, the smell of violent acid. A few quartz pebbles glittered in the dry grass like yellow animal eyes, and turned to stone once more as he bent down.

“Here’s where the elephants stood.”

The wind was large, towering above him, touching him with a cold, wrapping-around touch. The wind swayed back and forth, invisible. And the smell of the elephant was like a huge barn.

“Here’s where I’d have fed them.”

He picked up a few scattered peanut-shells, shoved them in his pocket after looking them over and over.

“And here’s where the monkeys were and the zebras and camels.” The dry bushes chattered in the wind. Summer lightning painted great luminous stripes upon the hills, soft, pale, and gone.

There hadn’t even been a circus parade. The lions had been silenced outside of town by the Lions inside of town. The elephants had been vanquished by the Elks. The calliope had been throttled and choked with red-tape and the entire circus assemblage, band, wagons, and clowns had fled before an Ark of Moose, Eagles and Oddfellows. The Kiwanis, reaching out its arm for its proverbial handshake, had had its knuckles slapped by Colonel Quartermain. Quartermain, Quartermain, the name was an unending repetition in the crowd of days, his face appeared in every window, on every street, he spoke from every monument on Memorial morning, he stood silent on Armistice Day facing East, he cried out from between the tar-black Civil War cannons on the Fourth of July. His eye was glittered at you from the clawing eagle’s head on the back of every dollar bill. His teeth smiled at you evilly in the store front cases of town dentists. His domed head glinted suggestively each time you opened the ice box and reached in for a fresh farm egg. He had fired off his mouth and sent the circus in panic to a forest beyond town. And passed a law preventing the employment of children therein when the poles were going up in the cold dawn light. Quartermain, Quartermain. Tom thought of him and knew the hatred that Douglas must know for the buzzard and the vulture and the snake.

“And here’s where the ring was and the man in the black silk hat saying, ‘Ladies ’n Gentlemen!’”

He stood at the exact center of the quiet meadow.

“And up there was where the men and ladies in pink cotton candy clothes swung on trapezes.”

Now the night wind whirled in a great merry-go-round about, stirring the odors, colors, sounds, tossing tin-cans fitfully in gusts through the grasses that swished like lions walking, and Tom staring at the sky through which papers flew and soared, dipping, to fly again. The whole meadow shook and quivered with the calliope wind and leaves spun in circles, the boy turning his hand out to them with an invisible whip. His eyes fixed the sky. Birds, crying, flew away.

The wind died.

Tom stood for only a minute longer, then his gaze dropped, his hands dropped. He walked across the meadow. He stood at its rim, and the numerous odors were richly ripened and might last, if savored carefully, if he didn’t come too often, until next year, until another late spring and summer. Even on winter nights, if you came here, if the wind was right, and the night not too full of moon, anything might happen.

“This is where it was, all right,” he said to himself.

And he walked away from the rich meadow, back into the summer night town.

THE CEMETERY (or THE TOMBYARD)

IT HAD BECOME a familiar pattern by now. Every summer, on a certain July Sunday, they packed themselves into the open air Kissel and thundered out on quiet highways, down dirt roads and through woods to Green Ravine Rest, and here on every hand, as numerous as tenpins, lay relatives, aunts and cousins who had died at night, uncles who had died at high noon, fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers who had wanted to grow up to be firemen and nurses and now were nailed into packets and crossed with stones. And always, starting four years back, Charles had run off, alone, among the horrified stones, frozen at what they represented, and he would fumble his fingers over the chiselled names, reading, with eyes shut, in silent Braille, whispering the name he touched: “B, A, N, G, L, Le, y. Bangley! Died 1924.” And on and on, more names, more wanderings. And four years ago he had happened on this one stone building in the ravine, tried the door, found it open, and entered into silence. Oh, how frightened had the aunts been, and the cousins scurrying to find him. But he had waited until he felt like it and come out, not telling where he’d hid. Saying he had simply run off. It meant a licking, but it was worth it.