The Summer of the Swans (8 page)

“So then she said, ‘I want the truth now. Do you know who did take the watch?’ and he said that nobody had stolen the watch.”

“So where did it disappear to for a week, I’d like to know.”

“I’m coming to that. He said some of the fellows were out in front of the drugstore and Charlie was standing there waiting for the school bus—you were in the drug store. Remember it was the day we were getting the stamps for letters to those pen pals who never answered? Remember the stamps wouldn’t come out of the machine? Well, anyway, these boys outside the store started teasing Charlie with some candy, and while Charlie was trying to get the candy, one of the boys took off Charlie’s watch without Charlie noticing it. Then they were going to ask Charlie what time it was and when he looked down at his watch, he would get upset because the watch would be gone. They were just going to tease him.”

“Finks!
Finks!”

“Only you came out of the drugstore right then and saw what they were doing with the candy and told them off and the bus came and you hustled Charlie on the bus before anybody had a chance to give back the watch. Then they got scared to give it back and that’s the whole story. Joe didn’t steal the watch at all. He wasn’t even in on it. He came up right when you did and didn’t even know what had happened. Later, when he found out, he got the watch back and gave it to Charlie, that’s all.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before this?”

“Because I just found out about it at lunch. For four months my mother has known all about this thing and never mentioned it because she said it was one of those things best forgotten.”

“Why did she tell you now?”

“That’s the way my mom is. We were talking about Charlie at the dinner table, and suddenly she comes up with this. Like one time she casually mentioned that she had had a long talk with Mr. Homer about me. Mr. Homer, the principal! She went over there and they had a long discussion and she never mentioned it for a year.”

“That is the worst thing Aunt Willie has ever done.”

“Well, don’t let on that you know or I’ll be in real trouble.”

“I won’t, but honestly, I could just—”

“You promised.”

“I know. You don’t have to keep reminding me. It makes me feel terrible though, I can tell you that.” She walked with her head bent forward. “Terrible ! You know what I just did when I saw him?”

“What?”

“Accused him of stealing the watch.”

“Sara, you didn’t.”

“I did too. I can’t help myself. When I think somebody has done something mean to Charlie I can’t forgive them. I want to keep after them and keep after them just like Aunt Willie said. I even sort of suspected Joe Melby hadn’t really taken that watch and I still kept on—”

“Shh! Be quiet a minute.” Mary was carrying her transistor radio and she held it up between them. “Listen.”

The announcer was saying: “We have a report of a missing child in the Cass section-ten-year-old Charlie Godfrey, who has been missing from his home since sometime last night. He is wearing blue pajamas and brown felt slippers, has a watch on one wrist and an identification bracelet with his name and address on the other. He is a mentally handicapped child who cannot speak and may become alarmed when approached by a stranger. Please notify the police immediately if you have seen this youngster.”

The two girls looked at each other, then continued walking across the field in silence.

M
ary and Sara were up in the field by the woods. They had been searching for Charlie for an hour without finding a trace of him.

Mary said, “I don’t care how I look. I am taking off this scarf. It must be a hundred degrees out here.”

“Charlie!” Sara called as she had been doing from time to time. Her voice had begun to sound strained, she had called so often. “Charlie!”

“Sara, do you know where we are?” Mary asked after a moment.

“Of course. The lake’s down there and the old shack’s over there and you can see them as soon as we get up a little higher.”

“If
we get up a little higher,” Mary said in a tired voice.

“You didn’t have to come, you know.”

“I wanted to come, only I just want to make sure we don’t get lost. I have to go to Bennie Hoffman’s party tonight.”

“I know. You told me ten times.”

“So I don’t want to get lost.” Mary walked a few steps without speaking. “I still can’t figure out why I was invited, because Bennie Hoffman hardly knows me. I’ve just seen him two times this whole summer at the pool. Why do you think he—”

“Come on, will you?”

“It seems useless, if you ask me, to just keep walking when we don’t really know which way he went. Aunt Willie thinks he went in the old coal mine.”

“I know, but she only thinks that because she associates the mine with tragedy because her uncle and brother were killed in that coal mine. But Charlie wouldn’t go in there. Remember that time we went into the Bryants’ cellar after they moved out, and he wouldn’t even come in there because it was cold and dark and sort of scary.”

“Yes, I do remember because I sprained my ankle jumping down from the window and had to wait two hours while you looked through old
Life
magazines.”

“I was not looking through old magazines.”

“I could hear you. I was down there in that dark cellar with the rats and you were upstairs and I was yelling for help and you kept saying, ‘I’m going for help right now,’ and I could hear the pages turning and turning and turning.”

“Well, I got you out, didn’t I?”

“Finally.”

Sara paused again. “Charlie! Charlie!” The girls waited in the high grass for an answer, then began to walk again. Mary said, “Maybe we should have waited for the others before we started looking. They’re going to have a regular organized posse with everybody walking along together. There may be a helicopter.”

“The longer we wait, the harder it will be to find him.”

“Well, I’ve got to get home in time to bathe and take my hair down.”

“I know. I
know
You’re going to Bennie Hoffman’s party.”

“You don’t have to sound so mad about it. I didn’t
ask
to be invited.”

“I am not mad because you were invited to Bennie Hoffman’s party. I couldn’t care less about Bennie Hoffman’s party. I’m just mad because you’re slowing me up on this search.”

“Well, if I’m slowing you up so much, then maybe I’ll just go on home.”

“That suits me fine.”

They looked at each other without speaking. Between them the radio began announcing: “Volunteers are needed in the Cass area in the search for young Charlie Godfrey, who disappeared from his home sometime during the night. A search of the Cheat woods will begin at three o’clock this afternoon.”

Mary said, “Oh, I’ll keep looking. I’ll try to walk faster.”

Sara shrugged, turned, and started walking up the hill, followed by Mary. They came to the old fence that once separated the pasture from the woods. Sara walked slowly beside the fence. “Charlie!” she called.

“Would he come if he heard you, do you think?”

Sara nodded. “But if they get a hundred people out here clomping through the woods and hollering, he’s not going to come. He’ll be too scared. I know him.”

“I don’t see how you can be so sure he came up this way.”

“I just know. There’s something about me that makes me understand Charlie. It’s like I know how he feels about things. Like sometimes I’ll be walking down the street and I’ll pass the jeweler’s and I’ll think that if Charlie were here he would want to stand right there and look at those watches all afternoon and I know right where he’d stand and how he’d put his hands up on the glass and how his face would look. And yesterday I knew he was going to love the swans so much that he wasn’t ever going to want to leave. I know how he feels.”

“You just think you do.”

“No, I
know.
I was thinking about the sky one night and I was looking up at the stars and I was thinking about how the sky goes on and on forever, and I couldn’t understand it no matter how long I thought, and finally I got kind of nauseated and right then I started thinking, Well, this is how Charlie feels about some things. You know how it makes him sick sometimes to try to print letters for a long time and—”

“Look who’s coming,” Mary interrupted.

“Where?”

“In the trees, walking toward us. Joe Melby.”

“You’re lying. You’re just trying to make me—”

“It is him. Look.” She quickly began to tie her scarf over her rollers again. “And you talk about
me
needing eyeglasses.”

“Cut across the field, quick!” Sara said. “No, wait, go under the fence. Move, will you, Mary, and leave that scarf alone. Get under the fence. I am not going to face him. I mean it.”

“I am not going under any fence. Anyway, it would look worse for us to run away than to just walk by casually.”

“I cannot walk by casually after what I said.”

“Well, you’re going to have to face him sometime, and it might as well be now when everyone feels sorry for you about your brother.” She called out, “Hi, Joe, having any luck?”

He came up to them and held out a brown felt slipper and looked at Sara. “Is this Charlie’s?”

Sara looked at the familiar object and forgot the incident of the watch for a moment. “Where did you find it?”

“Right up there by the fence. I had just picked it up when I saw you.”

She took the slipper and, holding it against her, said, “Oh, I
knew
he came up this way, but it’s a relief to have some proof of it.”

“I was just talking to Mr. Aker,” Joe continued, “and he said he heard his dogs barking up here last night. He had them tied out by the shack and he thought maybe someone was prowling around.”

“Probably Charlie,” Mary said.

“That’s what I figured. Somebody ought to go down to the gas station and tell the people. They’re organizing a big search now and half of the men are planning to go up to the mine.”

There was a pause and Mary said, “Well, I guess I could go, only I don’t know whether I’ll have time to get back up here.” She looked at Joe. “I promised Bennie Hoffman I’d come to his party tonight. That’s why my hair’s in rollers.”

“Tell them I found the slipper about a half mile up behind the Akers’ at the old fence,” Joe said.

“Sure. Are you coming to Bennie’s tonight?”

“Maybe.”

“Come. It’s going to be fun.”

Sara cleared her throat and said, “Well, I think I’ll get on with my search if you two will excuse me.” She turned and started walking up the hill again. There seemed to be a long silence in which even the sound of the cicadas in the grass was absent. She thrashed at the high weeds with her tennis shoes and hugged Charlie’s slipper to her.

“Wait a minute, Sara, I’ll come with you,” Joe Melby said.

He joined her and she nodded, still looking down at the slipper. There was a picture of an Indian chief stamped on the top of the shoe and there was a loneliness to the Indian’s profile, even stamped crudely on the felt, that she had never noticed before.

She cleared her throat again. “There is just one thing I want to say.” Her voice did not even sound familiar, a tape-recorded voice.

He waited, then said, “Go ahead.”

She did not speak for a moment but continued walking noisily through the weeds.

“Go ahead.”

“If you’ll just wait a minute, I’m trying to think how to say this.” The words she wanted to say—I’m sorry—would not come out at all.

They continued walking in silence and then Joe said, “You know, I was just reading an article about a guru over in India and he hasn’t spoken a word in twenty-eight years.
Twenty-eight years
and he hasn’t said one word in all that time. And everyone has been waiting all those years to hear what he’s going to say when he finally does speak because it’s supposed to be some great wise word, and I thought about this poor guy sitting there and for twenty-eight years he’s been trying to think of something to say that would be the least bit great and he can’t think of anything and he must be getting really desperate now. And every day it gets worse and worse.”

“Is there supposed to be some sort of message in that story?”

“Maybe.”

She smiled. “Well, I just wanted to say that I’m sorry.” She thought again that she was going to start crying and she said to herself, You are nothing but a big soft snail. Snail!

“That’s all right.”

“I just found out about Aunt Willie going to see your mother.”

He shrugged. “She didn’t mean anything by it.”

“But it was a terrible thing.”

“It wasn’t all that bad. At least it was different to be accused of something I
didn’t
do for a change.”

“But to be called in like that in front of Aunt Willie and Mary’s mother. No, it was terrible.” She turned and walked into the woods.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m tough. I’m indestructible. I’m like that coyote in ‘Road Runner’ who is always getting flattened and dynamited and crushed and in the next scene is strolling along, completely normal again.”

“I just acted too hastily. That’s one of my main faults.”

“I do that too.”

“Not like me.”

“Worse probably. Do you remember when we used to get grammar-school report cards, and the grades would be on one part of the card, and on the other side would be personality things the teacher would check, like ‘Does not accept criticism constructively’?”

Sara smiled. “I always used to get a check on that one,” she said.

“Who didn’t? And then they had one, ‘Acts impetuously and without consideration for others,’ or something like that, and one year I got a double check on that one.”

“You didn’t.”

“Yes, I did. Second grade. Miss McLeod. I remember she told the whole class that this was the first year she had ever had to give double checks to any student, and everyone in the room was scared to open his report card to see if he had got the double checks. And when I opened mine, there they were, two sets of double checks, on acting impetuously and on not accepting criticism, and single checks on everything else.”