Dandelion Wine (Green Town 1)

"A ten-year-old brother'll be eleven next summer. I'll unwind the world like the rubber band on a golf ball's insides every morning, put it back together every night. Show you how, if you ask."

"Crazy."

"Always was." Tom crossed his eyes, stuck out his tongue. "Always will be."

Douglas laughed. They went down in the cellar with Grandpa and while he decapitated the flowers they looked at all the summer shelves and glimmering there in the motionless streams, the bottles of dandelion wine. Numbered from one to ninety-odd, there the ketchup bottles, most of them full now, stood burning in the cellar twilight, one for every living summer day.

"Boy," said Tom, "what a swell way to save June, July, and August. Real practical."

Grandfather looked up, considered this, and smiled.

"Better than putting things in the attic you never use again. This way, you get to live the summer over for a minute or two here or there along the way through the winter, and when the bottles are empty the summer's gone for good and no regrets and no sentimental trash lying about for you to stumble over forty years from now. Clean, smokeless, efficient, that's dandelion wine."

The two boys pointed along the rows of bottles.

"There's the first day of summer."

"There's the new tennis shoes day."

"Sure! And there's the Green Machine!"

"Buffalo dust and Ching Ling Soo!"

"The Tarot Witch! The Lonely One!"

"It's not really over," said Tom. "It'll never be over. I'll remember what happened on every day of this year, forever."

"It was over before it began," said Grandpa, unwinding the wine press. "I don't remember a thing that happened except some new type of grass that wouldn't need cutting."

"You're joking!"

"No, sir, Doug, Tom, you'll find as you get older the days kind of blur ... can't tell one from the other...."

"But, heck," said Tom. "On Monday this week I roller-skated at Electric Park, Tuesday I ate chocolate cake, Wednesday I fell in the crick, Thursday fell off a swinging vine, the week's been full of things! And today, I'll remember today because the leaves outside are beginning to get all red and yellow. Won't be long they'll be all over the lawn and we'll jump in piles of them and burn them. I'll never forget today! I'll always remember, I know!"

Grandfather looked up through the cellar window at the late-summer trees stirring in a colder wind. "Of course you will, Tom," he said. "Of course you will."

And they left the mellow light of the dandelion wine and went upstairs to carry out the last few rituals of summer, for they felt that now the final day, the final night had come. As the day grew late they realized that for two or three nights now, porches had emptied early of their inhabitants. The air had a different, drier smell and Grandma was talking of hot coffee instead of iced tea; the open, white-flutter-curtained windows were closing in the great bays; cold cuts were giving way to steamed beef. The mosquitoes were gone from the porch, and surely when they abandoned the conflict the war with Time was really done, there was nothing for it but that humans also forsake the battleground.

Now Tom and Douglas and Grandfather stood, as they had stood three months, or was it three long centuries ago, on this front porch which creaked like a ship slumbering at night in growing swells, and they sniffed the air. In

side, the boys' bones felt like chalk and ivory instead of green mint sticks and licorice whips as earlier in the year. But the new cold touched Grandfather's skeleton first, like a raw hand chording the yellow bass piano keys in the dining room.

As the compass turns, so turned Grandfather, north.

"I guess," he said, deliberating, "we won't be coming out here anymore."

And the three of them clanked the chains shaken down from the porch-ceiling eyelets and carried the swing like a weathered bier around to the garage, followed by a blowing of the first dried leaves. Inside, they heard Grandma poking up a fire in the library. The windows shook with a sudden gust of wind.

Douglas, spending a last night in the cupola tower above Grandma and Grandpa, wrote in his tablet:

"Everything runs backward now. Like matinee films sometimes, where people jump out of water onto diving boards. Come September you push down the windows you pushed up, take off the sneakers you put on, pull on the hard shoes you threw away last June. People run in the house now like birds jumping back inside clocks. One minute, porches loaded, everyone gabbing thirty to a dozen. Next minute, doors slam, talk stops, and leaves fall off trees like crazy."

He looked from the high window at the land where the crickets were strewn like dried figs in the creek beds, at a sky where birds would wheel south now through the cry of autumn loons and where trees would go up in a great fine burning of color on the steely clouds. Way out in the country tonight he could smell the pumpkins ripening toward the knife and the triangle eye and the singeing candle. Here in town the first few scarves of smoke unwound from chimneys and the faint faraway quaking of iron was the rush of black hard rivers of coal down chutes, building high dark mounds in cellar bins.

But it was late and getting later.

Douglas in the high cupola above the town, moved his hand.