Dandelion Wine (25 page)

"Doug," he said, "you just lie quiet. You don't have to say anything or open your eyes. You don't even have to pretend to listen. But inside there, I know you hear me, and it's old Jonas, your friend. Your friend," he repeated and nodded.

He reached up and picked an apple off the tree, turned it round, took a bite, chewed, and continued.

"Some people turn sad awfully young," he said. "No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them."

He took another bite of the apple and chewed it.

"Well, now, where are we?" he asked.

"A hot night, not a breath stirring, in August," he answered himself. "Killing hot. And a long summer it's been and too much happening, eh? Too much. And it's getting on toward one o'clock and no sign of a wind or rain. And in a moment now I'm going to get up and go. But when I go, and remember this clearly, I will leave these two bottles here upon your bed. And when I've gone I want you to wait a little while and then slowly open your eyes and sit up and reach over and drink the contents of these bottles. Not with your mouth, no. Drink with your nose. Tilt the bottles, uncork them, and let what is in them go right down into your head. Read the labels first, of course. But here, let me read them for you."

He lifted one bottle into the light.

"GREEN DUSK FOR DREAMING BRAND PURE NORTHERN AIR,' " he read. "'Derived from the atmosphere of the white Arctic in the spring of 1900, and mixed with the wind from the upper Hudson Valley in the month of April, 1910, and containing particles of dust seen shining in the sunset of one day in the meadows around Grinnell, Iowa, when a cool air rose to be captured from a lake and a little creek and a natural spring.'

"Now the small print," he said. He squinted. "'Also containing molecules of vapor from menthol, lime, papaya, and watermelon and all other water-smelling, cool-savored fruits and trees like camphor and herbs like wintergreen and the breath of a rising wind from the Des Plaines River itself. Guaranteed most refreshing and cool. To be taken on summer nights when the heat passes ninety.' "

He picked up the other bottle.

"This one the same, save I've collected a wind from the Aran Isles and one from off Dublin Bay with salt on it and a strip of flannel fog from the coast of Iceland."

He put the two bottles on the bed.

"One last direction." He stood by the cot and leaned over and spoke quietly. "When you're drinking these, remember: It was bottled by a friend. The S. J. Jonas Bottling Company, Green Town, Illinois--August, 1928. A vintage year, boy ... a vintage year."

A moment later there was the sound of reins slapping the back of the horse in the moonlight, and the rumble of the wagon down the street and away.

After a moment Douglas's eyes twitched and, very slowly, opened.

"Mother!.' whispered Tom. "Dad! Doug, it's Doug! He's going to be well. I just went down to check and come on!"

Tom ran out of the house. His parents followed.

Douglas was asleep as they approached. Tom motioned to his parents, smiling wildly. They bent over the cot.

A single exhalation, a pause, a single exhalation, a pause, as the three bent there.

Douglas's mouth was slightly open and from his lips and from the thin vents of his nostrils, gently there rose a scent of cool night and cool water and cool white snow and cool green moss, and cool moonlight on silver pebbles lying at the bottom of a quiet river and cool clear water at the bottom of a small white stone well.

It was like holding their heads down for a brief moment to the pulse of an apple-scented fountain flowing cool up into the air and washing their faces.

They could not move for a long time.

The next morning was a morning of no caterpillars. The world that had been full to bursting with tiny bundles of black and brown fur trundling on their way to green leaf and tremulous grass blade, was suddenly empty. The sound that was no sound, the billion footfalls of the caterpillars stomping through their own universe, died. Tom, who said he could hear that sound, precious as it was, looked with wonder at a town where not a single bird's mouthful stirred. Too, the cicadas had ceased.

Then, in the silence, a great sighing rustle began and they knew then why the absence of caterpillar and abrupt silence of cicada.

Summer rain.

The rain began light, a touch. The rain increased and fell heavily. It played the sidewalks and roofs like great pianos.

And upstairs, Douglas, inside again, like a fall of snow in his bed, turned his head and opened his eyes to see the freshly falling sky and slowly slowly twitch his fingers toward his yellow nickel pad and yellow Ticonderoga pencil. ...

There was a great flurry of arrival. Somewhere trumpets were shouting. Somewhere rooms were teeming with boarders and neighbors having afternoon tea. An aunt had arrived and her name was Rose and you could hear her voice clarion clear above the others, and you could imagine her warm and huge as a hothouse rose, exactly like her name, filling any room she sat in. But right now, to Douglas, the voice, the commotion, were nothing at all. He had come from his own house, and now stood outside Grandma's kitchen door just as Grandma, having excused herself from the chicken squabble in the parlor, whisked into her own domain and set about making supper. She saw him standing there, opened the screen door for him, kissed his brow, brushed his pale hair back from his eyes, looked him straight on in the face to see if the fever had fallen to ashes and, seeing that it had, went on, singing, to her work.

Grandma, he had often wanted to say, Is this where the world began? For surely it had begun in no other than a place like this. The kitchen, without doubt, was the center of creation, all things revolved about it; it was the pediment that sustained the temple.

Eyes shut to let his nose wander, he snuffed deeply. He moved in the hell-fire steams and sudden baking-powder flurries of snow in this miraculous climate where Grandma, with the look of the Indies in her eyes and the flesh of two firm warm hens in her bodice, Grandma of the thousand arms, shook, basted, whipped, beat, minced, diced, peeled, wrapped, salted, stirred.

Blind, he touched his way to the pantry door. A squeal of laughter rang from the parlor, teacups tinkled. But he moved on into the cool underwater green and wild-persimmon country where the slung and hanging odor of creamy bananas ripened silently and bumped his head. Gnats fitted angrily about vinegar cruets and his ears.

He opened his eyes. He saw bread waiting to be cut into slices of warm summer cloud, doughnuts strewn like clown hoops from some edible game. The faucets turned on and off in his cheeks. Here on the plum-shadowed side of the house with maple leaves making a creek-water running in the hot wind at the window he read spice-cabinet names.

How do I thank Mr. Jonas, he wondered, for what he's done? How do I thank him, how pay him back? No way, no way at all. You just can't pay What then? What? Pass it on somehow, he thought, pass it on to someone else. Keep the chain moving. Look around, find someone, and pass it on. That was the only way....

"Cayenne, marjoram, cinnamon."

The names of lost and fabulous cities through which storms of spice bloomed up and dusted away.

He tossed the cloves that had traveled from some dark continent where once they had spilled on milk marble, jackstones for children with licorice hands.

And looking at one single label on a jar, he felt himself gone round the calendar to that private day this summer when he had looked at the circling world and found himself at its center.

The word on the jar was RELISH.

And he was glad he had decided to live.

RELISH! What a special name for the minced pickle sweetly crushed in its white-capped jar. The man who had named it, what a man he must have been. Roaring, stamping around, he must have tromped the joys of the world and jammed them in this jar and writ in a big hand, shouting, RELISH! For its very sound meant rolling in sweet fields with roistering chestnut mares, mouths bearded with grass, plunging your head fathoms deep in trough water so the sea poured cavernously through your head. RELISH!

He put out his hand. And here was--SAVORY.

"What's Grandma cooking for dinner tonight?" said Aunt Rose's voice from the real world of afternoon in the parlor.

"No one knows what Grandma cooks," said Grandfather, home from the office early to tend this immense flower, "until we sit at table. There's always mystery, always suspense."

"Well, I always like to know what I'm going to eat," cried Aunt Rose, and laughed. The chandelier prisms in the dining room rang with pain.

Douglas moved deeper into pantry darkness.

"Savory ... that's a swell word. And Basil and Betel. Capsicum. Curry. All great. But Relish, now, Relish with a capital R. No argument, that's the best."

Trailing veils of steam, Grandma came and went and came again with covered dishes from kitchen to table while the assembled company waited in silence. No one lifted lids to peer in at the hidden victuals. At last Grandma sat down, Grandpa said grace, and immediately thereafter the silverware flew up like a plague of locusts on the air.

When everyone's mouths were absolutely crammed full of miracles, Grandmother sat back and said, "Well, how do you like it?"

And the relatives, including Aunt Rose, and the boarders, their teeth deliciously mortared together at this moment, faced a terrible dilemma. Speak and break the spell, or continue allowing this honey-syrup food of the gods to dissolve and melt away to glory in their mouths? They looked as if they might laugh or cry at the cruel dilemma. They looked as if they might sit there forever, untouched by fire or earthquake, or shooting in the street, a massacre of innocents in the yard, overwhelmed with effluviums and promises of immortality. All villains were innocent in this moment of tender herbs, sweet celeries, luscious roots. The eye sped over a snow field where lay fricassees, salmagundis, gumbos, freshly invented succotashes, chowders, ragouts. The only sound was a primeval bubbling from the kitchen and the clocklike chiming of fork-on-plate announcing the seconds instead of the hours.

And then Aunt Rose gathered her indomitable pinkness and health and strength into herself with one deep breath and, fork poised on air, looking at the mystery there impaled, spoke in much too loud a voice.

"Oh, it's beautiful food all right. But what is this thing we're eating?"

The lemonade stopped tinkling in the frosty glasses, the forks ceased flashing on the air and came to rest on the table.

Douglas gave Aunt Rose that look which a shot deer gives the hunter before it falls dead. Wounded surprise appeared in each face down the line. The food was self-explanatory, wasn't it? It was its own philosophy, it asked and answered its own questions. Wasn't it enough that your blood and your body asked no more than this moment of ritual and rare incense?

"I really don't believe," said Aunt Rose, "that anyone heard my question."

At last Grandma let her lips open a trifle to allow the answer out.

"I call this our Thursday Special. We have it regularly."

This was a lie.

In all the years not one single dish resembled another. Was this one from the deep green sea? Had that one been shot from blue summer air? Was it a swimming food or a flying food, had it pumped blood or chlorophyll, had it walked or leaned after the sun? No one knew. No one asked. No one cared.

The most people did was stand in the kitchen door and peer at the baking-powder explosions, enjoy the clangs and rattles and bangs like a factory gone wild where Grandma stared half blindly about, letting her fingers find their way among canisters and bowls.

Was she conscious of her talent? Hardly. If asked about her cooking, Grandma would look down at her hands which some glorious instinct sent on journeys to be gloved in flour, ,r to plumb disencumbered turkeys, wrist-deep in search of their animal souls. Her gray eyes blinked from spectacles warped by forty years of oven blasts and blinded with strewings of pepper and sage, so she sometimes flung cornstarch ,ver steaks, amazingly tender, succulent steaks! And sometimes dropped apricots into meat leaves, cross-pollinated meats, herbs, fruits, vegetables with no prejudice, no tolerance for recipe or formula, save that at the final moment of delivery, mouths watered, blood thundered in response. Her lands then, like the hands of Great-grandma before her, were Grandma's mystery, delight, and life. She looked at them in astonishment, but let them live their life the way they must absolutely lead it.

But now for the first time in endless years, here was an upstart, a questioner, a laboratory scientist almost, speaking out where silence could have been a virtue.

"Yes, yes, but what did you put in this Thursday Special?"

"Why," said Grandma evasively, "what does it taste like to you?"

Aunt Rose sniffed the morsel on the fork.

"Beef, or is it lamb? Ginger, or is it cinnamon? Ham sauce? Bilberries? Some biscuit thrown in? Chives? Almonds?"

"That's it exactly," said Grandma. "Second helpings, everyone?"

A great uproar ensued, a clashing of plates, a swarming of arms, a rush of voices which hoped to drown blasphemous inquiry forever, Douglas talking louder and making more motions than the rest. But in their faces you could see their world tottering, their happiness in danger. For they were the privileged members of a household which rushed from work or play when the first dinner bell was so much as clapped once in the hall. Their arrival in the dining room had been for countless years a sort of frantic musical chairs, as they shook out napkins in a white fluttering and seized up utensils as if recently starved in solitary confinement, waiting for the summons to fall downstairs in a mass of twitching elbows and overflow themselves at table. Now they clamored nervously, making obvious jokes, darting glances at Aunt Rose as if she concealed a bomb in that ample bosom that was ticking steadily on toward their doom.