Farewell Summer (Green Town 3)

The sound of a far boat wailed up from the lake shore.

‘March!’

Grandma shook her tambourine, Tom thrummed his kazoo, and the bright mob drew Doug off along the street with a dog pack yipping at their heels. Downtown, someone threw a torn telephone book off the Green Town Hotel roof. When the confetti hit the bricks the parade was gone.

At the lake shore fog moved on the water.

Far out, he could hear a foghorn’s mournful wail.

And a pure white boat loomed out of the fog and nudged the pier.

Doug stared. ‘How come that boat’s got no name?’

The ship’s whistle shrieked. The crowd swarmed, shoving Douglas to the gangplank.

‘You first, Doug!’

The band dropped a ton of brass and ten pounds of chimes with ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,’ as they thrust him on the deck, then leapt back on the dock.

Wham!

The gangplank fell.

The people weren’t trapped on land, no.

He was trapped on water.

The steamboat shrieked away from the dock. The band played ‘Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.’

‘Goodbye, Douglas,’ cried the town librarians.

‘So long,’ whispered everyone.

Douglas stared around at the picnic put by in wicker hampers on the deck and remembered a museum where he had once seen an Egyptian tomb with toys and clumps of withered fruit placed around a small carved boat. It flared like a gunpowder flash.

‘So long, Doug, so long …’ Ladies lifted their handkerchiefs, men waved straw hats.

And soon the ship was way out in the cold water with the fog wrapping it up so the band faded.

‘Brave journey, boy.’

And now he knew that if he searched he would find no captain, no crew as the ship’s engines pumped belowdecks.

Numbly, he

sensed that if he reached down to touch the prow he would find the ship’s name, freshly painted:

FAREWELL SUMMER.

‘Doug …’ the voices called. ‘Oh, goodbye … oh, so long …’

And then the dock was empty, the parade gone as the ship blew its horn a last time and broke his heart so it fell from his eyes in tears as he cried all the names of his loves on shore.

‘Grandma, Grandpa, Tom, help!’

Doug fell from bed, hot, cold, and weeping.

CHAPTER THREE