“Listen,” whispered the old man to himself.
And he heard a thousand people in another sunlight, and the faint, tinkling music of an organ grinder playing “La Marimba”—oh, a lovely, dancing tune.
With eyes tight, the old man put up his hand as if to click pictures of an old cathedral, and his body was heavier with flesh, younger, and he felt the hot pavement underfoot.
He wanted to say, “You’re still there, aren’t you? All of: you people in that city in the time of the early siesta, the shops closing, the little boys crying loteria nacional para hoy! to sell lottery tickets. You are all there, the people in the city. I can’t believe I was ever among you. When you are away I: from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a ’ quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living . . .”
He sat with the receiver tightly pressed to his ear.
And at last, the dearest, most improbable sound of all—the sound of a green trolley car going around a comer—a trolley burdened with brown and alien and beautiful people, and the sound of other people running and calling out with triumph as they leaped up and swung aboard and vanished around a corner on the shrieking rails and were borne away in the sun-blazed distance to leave only the sound of tortillas frying on the market stoves, or was it merely the ever rising and falling hum and burn of static quivering along two thousand miles of copper wire . . .
The old man sat on the floor.
Time passed.
A downstairs door opened slowly. Light footsteps came in, hesitated, then ventured up the stairs. Voices murmured.
“We shouldn’t be here!”
“He phoned me, I tell you. He needs visitors bad. We can’t let him down.”
“He’s sick!”
“Sure! But he said to come when the nurse’s out. We’ll only stay a second, say hello, and . . .”
The door to the bedroom moved wide. The three boys stood looking in at the old man seated there on the floor.
“Colonel Freeleigh?” said Douglas softly.
There was something in his silence that made them all shut up their mouths.
They approached, almost on tiptoe.
Douglas, bent down, disengaged the phone from the old man’s now quite cold fingers. Douglas lifted the receiver to his own ear, listened. Above the static he heard a strange, a far, a final sound.
Two thousand miles away, the closing of a window.
“Boom!!” said Tom. “Boom. Boom. Boom.”
He sat on the Civil War cannon in the courthouse square. Douglas, in front of the cannon, clutched his heart and fell down on the grass. But he did not get up; he just lay there, his face thoughtful.
“You look like you’re going to get out the old pencil any second now,” said Tom.
“Let me think!” said Douglas, looking at the cannon. He rolled over and gazed at the sky and the trees above him. “Tom, it just hit me.”
“What?”
“Yesterday Ching Ling Soo died. Yesterday the Civil War ended right here in this town forever. Yesterday Mr. Lincoln died right here and so did General Lee and General Grantl and a hundred thousand others facing north and south. And yesterday afternoon, at Colonel Freeleigh’s house, a herd of buffalo-bison as big as all Green Town, Illinois, went off the cliff into nothing at all. Yesterday a whole lot of dust settled for good. And I didn’t even appreciate it at the time. It’s awful, Tom, it’s awful! What we going to do without all those soldiers and Generals Lee and Grant and Honest Abe; what we going to do without Ching Ling Soo? It never dreamed so many people could die so fast, Tom. But they did. They sure did!”
Tom sat astride the cannon, looking down at his brother as his voice trailed away.
“You got your tablet with you?”
Douglas shook his head.
“Better get home and put all that down before you forget it. It ain’t every day you got half the population of the world keeling over on you.”
Douglas sat up and then stood up. He walked across the courthouse lawn slowly, chewing his lower lip.
“Boom,” said Tom quietly. “Boom. Boom!”
Then he raised his voice:
“Doug! I killed you three times, crossing the grass! Doug, you hear me? Hey, Doug! Okay. All right for you.” He lay down on the cannon and sighted along the crusted barrel. He squinted one eye. “Boom!” he whispered at that dwindling figure. “Boom!”
“There!”
“Twenty-nine!”
“There!”
“Thirty!”
“There!”
“Thirty-one!”
The lever plunged. The tin caps, crushed atop the filled bottles, flickered bright yellow. Grandfather handed the last bottle to Douglas.
“Second harvest of the summer. June’s on the shelf. Here’s July. Now, just-August up ahead.”
Douglas raised the bottle of warm dandelion wine but did not set it on the shelf. He saw the other numbered bottles waiting there, one like another, in no way different, all bright, all regular, all self-contained.
There’s the day I found I was alive, he thought, and why isn’t it brighter than the others?
There’s the day John Huff fell off the edge of the world, gone; why isn’t it darker than the others?
Where, where all the summer dogs leaping like dolphins in the wind-braided and unbraided tides of what? Where lightning smell of Green Machine or trolley? Did the wine remember? It did not! Or seemed not, anyway.
Somewhere, a book said once, all the talk ever talked, all the songs ever sung, still lived, had vibrated way out in space and if you could travel to Far Centauri you could hear George Washington talking in his sleep or Caesar surprised at the knife in his back. So much for sounds. What about light then? All things, once seen, they didn’t just die, that couldn’t be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly’s gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers. This he would have to believe.
And yet . . .looking here at this bottle which by its number signalized the day when Colonel Freeleigh had stumbled and fallen six feet into the earth, Douglas could not find so much as a gram of dark sediment, not a speck of the great flouring buffalo dust, not a flake of sulphur from the guns at Shiloh . . .
“August up ahead,” said Douglas. “Sure. But the way things are going, there’ll be no machines, no friends, and dam few dandelions for the last harvest.”
“Doom. Doom. You sound like a funeral bell tolling,” said Grandfather. “Talk like that is worse than swearing. I won’t wash out your mouth with soap, however. A thimbleful of dandelion wine is indicated. Here, now, swig it down. What’s it taste like?”
“I’m a fire-eater! Whoosh!”
“Now upstairs, run three times around the block, do five somersets, six pushups, climb two trees, and you’ll be concertmaster instead of chief mourner. Get!”
On his way, running, Douglas thought, Four pushups, one tree, and two somersets will do it!
And out there in the middle of the first day of August just getting into his car, was Bill Forrester, who shouted he Ir was going downtown for some extraordinary ice cream or other and would anyone join him? So, not five minutes later, jiggled and steamed into a better mood, Douglas found himself stepping in off the fiery pavements and moving through the grotto of soda-scented air, of vanilla freshness at the drugstore, to sit at the snow-marble fountain with Bill Forrester. They then asked for a recital of the most unusual ices and when the fountain man said, “Old fashioned lime-vanilla ice . . .”
“That’s it!” said Bill Forrester.
“Yes, sir!” said Douglas.
And, while waiting, they turned slowly on their rotating stools. The silver spigots, the gleaming mirrors, the hushed whirl-around ceiling fans, the green shades over the small windows, the harp-wire chairs, passed under their moving gaze. They stopped turning. Their eyes had touched upon the face and form of Miss Helen Loomis, ninety-five years old, ice-cream spoon in hand, ice cream in mouth.
“Young man,” she said to Bill Forrester, “you are a person of taste and imagination. Also, you have the will power of ten men; otherwise you would not dare veer away from the common flavors listed on the menu and order, straight out, without quibble or reservation, such an unheard-of thing as lime-vanilla ice.”
He bowed his head solemnly to her.
“Come sit with me, both of you,” she said. “We’ll talk of strange ice creams and such things as we seem to have a bent for. Don’t be afraid; J’11 foot the bill.”
Smiling, they carried their dishes to her table and sat.
“You look like a Spaulding,” she said to the boy. “You’ve got your grandfather’s head. And you, you’re William Forrester. You write for the Chronicle, a good enough column. I’ve heard more about you than I’d care to tell.”
“I know you,” said Bill Forrester. “You’re Helen Loomis.” He hesitated, then continued. “T was in love with you once,” he said.
“Now that’s the way I like a conversation to open.” She dug quietly at her ice cream. “That’s grounds for another meeting. No-don’t tell me where or when or
