Seventeenth Summer (32 page)

And I was crying with my face tight against his shoulder,
standing in the tall weeds that were cool and damp against my bare legs.

Back in the firelight the others had already gathered up their things and were ready to leave. Swede kicked at the heap of glowing embers till they were scattered in the grass in a shower of sparks like fireflies; and when Jack leaned over to gather up his car robe Swede patted him on the shoulder saying quietly, “That’s okay, fellow.”

The cars were still parked at the roadside and we put the picnic basket in the back seat again and Fitz got in first so Margie could sit on his knee and Swede and Dollie got in next. Jack opened the door for me and I stepped in carefully, trying not to look at him. He swung round to his own side of the car and slammed his door shut. My breath was still short in my throat and my hands were trembling, so I had to fold them together to keep them still.

Jack waited a moment before starting the motor. Just sitting beside him made my heart pound again. He took a cigarette from his pocket and bent over to light it, striking a match. I noticed his hands were trembling, He held the match with both hands to steady it. In the small glow of light his face was very young and very sad and I saw that his lips were still stained purple from the wild grapes.

And the next morning the swallows were there. I came
downstairs early with my eyes small and tired and my heart aching with a weariness that went through me right down to my hands, leaving them limp and heavy on my wrists. I wondered what Jack was thinking then. His thoughts must have dragged as slowly and listlessly as mine with the same painful dullness. The whole night through, lying in bed, memories had corkscrewed through my mind till my head throbbed with thinking and now, in the morning light, everything was still as drab and dismally hopeless as I had dreamed.

The kitchen was filled with the usual fresh smell of morning coffee and my mother was sitting by the window, looking over the garden. “It’s the first day of real fall we’ve had,” she said. “We could almost stand a bit of fire.” I poured a cup of coffee for myself, hoping the warmth of it would really get inside of me. It was such a dull morning that the grayness of it spread over my thoughts like mold. For the first time I could see brown sticks bare in the hedges and there were a few stiff-petaled zinnias, dull, heavy red, standing alone in the corner of the flower bed, the leaves curling. I tried not to look at the swallows but they were there.

Year after year and every year, we had watched the first flowers drop their petals, the squash turn orange between the corn rows, and leaves thin in the trees but no one would admit the summer was over until one morning we would wake and the swallows would be there. It never failed. The swallows would come, lining the telephone wires, and from that day on it was
fall. The wind would have frost on its breath and the grape leaves would curl and fall from the vines and the dew would be white patches frosted on the grass in early morning. Soon, lonely killdeers would be winging across the sky, their wistful cries hanging in the cool, misty air.

And that morning, sitting by the kitchen window with my cup of coffee, I saw the telephone wires across the foot of the garden dotted with swallows, perched on the black lines like long-tailed notes—a bar of music, stark and sad against the gray fall sky.

It seemed so incredible I couldn’t keep the surprise of it out of my voice, “How could it happen, Mom?” I asked. “How could it
end
overnight?”

She looked at me oddly and said, “It’s always been like that, Angie. You just haven’t been old enough to notice before.”

We spent a long time over our breakfast, talking about school, planning; just loitering because there were only two days left and we wouldn’t have breakfast together again for a long time.

And then suddenly my mother brightened. “Run up and wake that lazy little sister of yours while I straighten the kitchen. She and I have to go downtown this morning. I keep forgetting that you aren’t the only one who is going to school. Kitty needs new shoes!”

I was just waving good-bye to them from the front window when the phone rang. I let it ring twice and then again before I
answered it, because I knew it was Jack and it takes a moment or two to get your thoughts in order and to make sure your voice is calm. His voice on the other end of the wire sounded as tired as I felt, as if he had just got out of bed and wished he hadn’t risen at all.

“Hi there, Angie,” he said glumly. “Just called up to see how things were going with you this morning.”

“Fine, Jack. How about you?”

“Pretty good, I guess. But we’re packing some stuff—that’s why I called you. I’m home here with my mother wrapping gunny sacks around some of the upstairs furniture and tying it with rope to ship down to Oklahoma. She wants to get as much of it out of the way as she can.”

“Lot of work?” I asked lamely. There was a scratching on his end of the line as if he were scribbling with a pencil on a piece of paper—an aimless, annoying sound and I could tell he was thinking of something else as he talked.

“It’s not so much work but I don’t think I’ll be able to get over to see you today.”

“Why not, Jack?”

“’Cause my mother wants me round to help her. She’s got her hair tied up in a dust cap and is really going at it. I can tell by the way she’s working herself that she wouldn’t like it if I took time off….”

“Does she know I’m going away the day after tomorrow, Jack?”

“Yeah, I told her about it, Angie. And she said to say good-bye
to you for her—even if she has never met you.”

The conversation was empty, meaningless—there are times when two people can’t really talk together without seeing each other. I could just imagine Jack at the other end of the wire, tapping his pencil on the table, his eyes thoughtful, not wanting to hang up and still not knowing what to say next. “I’d better get back to my packing too,” I suggested. “There are still little things that have to be sorted out. I want to bring so much but it won’t all fit in the bags.”

“Okay, Angie,” he answered. “But I’ll see you tonight, won’t I? I may even get a chance to drop round this afternoon but I really don’t think so. But we’ll have a good time tonight. We’ll make it fun, Angie.” His voice was warm and almost happy again and after he had hung up I sat holding the phone, as if by doing so I could still hold onto the sound. In two days, I thought, I won’t be able to hear his voice anymore.

Margaret didn’t come home for supper that night so my mother and Kitty and I were alone. The gray sky of the day was melted into the darkness of a night sky and outside there was a wind that rustled in the bushes.

“I heard downtown that they expect to have a frost tonight,” my mother told me. “It’s unusual to have it come so early but they say this is going to be a very cold winter for us. The man in the shoestore said that already there have been hunters out after the ducks over the lake.”

Kitty was quiet and contented after the day of shopping and she was eating placidly, her eyes already soft with sleep. “This year when it snows I’m going to make Daddy help me with a snow hill in the garden for my sled,” she remarked, half to herself. “We’ll build it with boards and put snow over it.”

My drawers had all been emptied and my trunks packed and now we were all just marking off minutes till it was time to go down to the train. Now that the day was almost here there was nothing left to say; almost nothing left to think. But we sat and sat at our supper until it was dark outside and the tea kettle had steamed the windows opaque and inside the house seemed very warm and bright. Outside, the wind blew high in the trees, swaying just topmost branches and sending a few leaves floating down to the gutter.

“Not even two days left,” kept running through my mind, keeping pace with the other more commonplace thoughts, trying to crowd them out. I was still sitting comfortably in my own kitchen and already my throat ached with lonesomeness and there was a queer, soundless crying inside of me. My mother was just finishing her supper tea and her face was very calm and happy, with her hair brushed up high, just showing white at the temples. I felt there was something that I wanted very much to say; some little words that would come out warm and shaky because they had been shut up inside of me for so long. But they must have been shut up inside too long, for when I tried then to say that I was sorry that summer was over and that I was going
away; when I tried to say that I would miss them—no words came out at all!

And then for the last time Jack came. He came in the front door rubbing his hands together and his cheeks were red with cold. “Did you ever see such a change in the weather, Mrs. Morrow? This is regular football weather.” He clapped his hands together and his voice was loud, having come in out of the wind. He had his basketball sweater on, buttoned up tightly, and everything about him had a crisp, fresh-air look.

My mother laughed, just looking at him. You couldn’t help laughing at someone so brown-skinned and healthy who brought fresh air in with him when he came. He seemed taller to me that night.

“You wouldn’t believe that just this time last week Kitty was running around in play suits. We’ll probably have weeks of Indian summer yet but it feels like real fall tonight,” she said. “I was telling Angie that I heard downtown that we may have a touch of frost.”

“I heard that too,” Jack told her. “My dad told me he heard a warning on the radio to farmers and there was a notice in the weather report in the paper tonight. From the feel of that wind there could be!” and he laid the palms of his hands against his tingling cheeks.

“You’re red, Jack!” Kitty laughed up at him and he pulled one of her braids.

“You’re a little red yourself,” he said.

My mother was worrying away under her breath. “I certainly do hate to have them go to waste when I could can them just as easily as not. A good frost will spoil them for sure.”

“You’re worrying about the tomatoes, aren’t you, Mom?” I asked. Having to gather in the tomatoes before a frost was a yearly occurrence with us. It was all part of having winter come. We were never prepared for that first frost, for we could never quite believe that summer was really over.

“Let Jack and me take them in—will you, Jack? It will take only about an hour …” I knew he would do anything I asked that night.

“Really, Angie,” my mother protested, “if Jack has something else he’d rather do we can just let them go….”

“No, let’s get them picked,” he said quickly. “I like to do things like that. There’s something about tonight that makes you feel good to be outside even if … well, even if it’s the end of summer.”

Kitty brought my old heavy sweater from an upstairs closet and I carried up three clean bushel baskets from the basement. “Just pick the riper ones and don’t bother with those that are too small,” my mother said as we went out the back door.

The garden lay very square in the moonlight edged with sharp sticks of hedge. I took one basket and Jack the other two, one in each hand—that would be enough for the scattered few tomatoes that were left. Most of the green leaves were dead and the knobby vines were already wet with night dew. We worked side by side,
not talking at first, feeling about in the half-darkness for the tomatoes, and soon our hands were wet to the wrists and the rough wool of my sweater chafed. Even my fingers felt stiff. But somehow it was so natural to be working beside Jack that I didn’t want to stop, even for a moment.

Little patches of spider web shone white and filmy in the moonlight, stretched from one sprawling vine to another. Once our hands touched among the cold leaves and my breath came short for a moment. Jack looked at me and laughed. “Funny girl, Angie,” he whispered. The tomatoes were cold to touch and the ripe, red ones looked black in the darkness and their skins were smooth and moist. There were green ones with tough stems that broke with a snap and sometimes a whole vine would pull out of the earth, trailing from my hands and sending a shower of cold drops onto the hard ground. Our ankles were wet with dew but my cheeks were tingling warm and Jack was humming a happy, jerky tune under his breath as he moved along the plants. Small, hard, green tomatoes with dried blossoms still stuck to them fell on the mud with soft little thuds. We didn’t speak at all but just tossed the tomatoes into the baskets, our arms moving in an unconscious rhythm, stopping now and then to blow on our fingers and to wipe the dew off our hands.

I could feel it getting colder by minutes and the wind blew harder till the dew on the bare vines and little clods of earth began to turn white. There were storm circles round the moon and wisps of dark cloud brushed across it. Jack picked an over-ripe
tomato and its tight skin burst between his fingers. He threw it over his shoulder into the darkness and a moment later it fell softly in the hedge. Above us the wind was wailing quietly and high up in the night the moon was racing with a cloud. The bare vines stretched like sinews in the pale light and Jack struck a match to see if we had missed any tomatoes, but the wind snuffed it out. He laughed to himself.

One by one we carried the full, heavy baskets into the garage, the cold wire handles cutting into our hands. The soft blackness of the garage seemed very still after the sharp chill gusts outside—as if the wind were holding its breath. We set them side by side on the cement floor and when the third basket was in place—we covered the tomatoes carefully with newspaper to keep out the cold. Jack found some funnies in a corner and, striking a match, he began to read a sheet of Dick Tracy funnies, yellowed at the edges. The match sputtered and went out. In the darkness we tucked the newspapers in tightly and shoved the baskets into one corner.

“Jack,” I said, “I won’t be able to see you tomorrow night at all. That last night will be sort of family night….”

“That’s all right, Angie. I sort of figured that. I guess tonight’s the last then.” I nodded my head but somehow I didn’t feel sad anymore.

Outside the wind was nosing around the garage windows and slipping in under the door. Jack kissed me and his hands were cold on my cheeks. This is how it should be, I thought. This is
Jack. This is how it should be and his lips were warm on mine; soft and warm, and his cheek was cool and firm. It was only moments. A whole summer summed up in a few moments and then we went into the house by the back door.