"Okay, Mom! Coming, Mother!"
And again: "Hi, Mom! Coming, Mom!"
And then the quick scuttering of tennis shoes padding down through the pit of the ravine as three kids came dashing, giggling. His brother Douglas, Chuck Woodman, and John Huff. Running, giggling ...
The stars sucked up like the stung antennae of ten million snails.
The crickets sang!
The darkness pulled back, startled, shocked, angry. Pulled back, losing its appetite at being so rudely interrupted as it prepared to feed. As the dark retreated like a wave on the shore, three children piled out of it, laughing.
"Hi, Mom! Hi, Tom! Hey!"
It smelled like Douglas, all right. Sweat and grass and the odor of trees and branches and the creek about him.
"Young man, you're going to get a licking," declared Mother. She put away her fear instantly. Tom knew she would never tell anyone of it, ever. It would be in her heart, though, for all time, as it was in his heart for all time.
They walked home to bed in the late summer night. He was glad Douglas was alive. Very glad. For a moment there he had thought--
Far off in the dim moonlit country, over a viaduct and down a valley, a train rushed along whistling like a lost metal thing, nameless and running. Tom went to bed shivering, beside his brother, listening to that train whistle, and thinking of a cousin who lived way out in the country where that train ran now; a cousin who died of pneumonia late at night years and years ago--
He smelled the sweat of Doug beside him. It was magic. Tom stopped trembling.
"Only two things I know for sure, Doug," he whispered.
"What?"
"Nighttime's awful dark--is one."
"What's the other?"
"The ravine at night don't belong in Mr. Auffmann's Happiness Machine, if he ever builds it."
Douglas considered this awhile. "You can say that again."
They stopped talking. Listening, suddenly they heard footsteps coming down the street, under the trees, outside the house now, on the sidewalk. From her bed Mother called quietly,
"That's your father."
It was.
Late at night, on the front porch, Leo Auffmann wrote a list he could not see in the dark, exclaiming, "Ah!" or, "That's another!" when he hit upon a fine component. Then the front-door screen made a moth sound, tapping.
"Lena?" he whispered.
She sat down next to him on the swing, in her nightgown, not slim the way girls get when they are not loved at seventeen, not fat the way women get when they are not loved at fifty, but absolutely right, a roundness, a firmness, the way women are at any age, he thought, when there is no question.
She was miraculous. Her body, like his, was always thinking for her, but in a different way, shaping the children, or moving ahead of him into any room to change the atmosphere there to fit any particular mood he was in. There seemed no long periods of thought for her; thinking and doing moved from her head to her hand and back in a natural and gentle circuiting he could not and cared not to blueprint.
"That machine," she said at last, "... we don't need it."
"No," he said, "but sometimes you got to build for others. I been figuring, what to put in. Motion pictures? Radios? Stereoscopic viewers? All those in one place so any man can run his hand over it and smile and say, 'Yes, sir, that's happiness.'"
Yes, he thought, to make a contraption that in spite of wet feet, sinus trouble, rumpled beds, and those three-in-the-morning hours when monsters ate your soul, would manufacture happiness, like that magic salt mill that, thrown in the ocean, made salt forever and turned the sea to brine. Who wouldn't sweat his soul out through his pores to invent a machine like that? he asked the world, he asked the town, he asked his wife!
In the porch swing beside him, Lena's uneasy silence was an opinion.
Silent now, too, head back, he listened to the elm leaves above hissing in the wind.