There, in a small meadow at the center of the ravine, were nine summer boys, playing.
Circling, they knocked the echoes with their voices, plunged, rolled over, spun, jigged, shook themselves, raced off, hurtled back, leapt high, mad with summer light and heat, unable to stop just being alive.
They did not see William, so he had time to recall where he had seen each before. This one he remembered from a house on Elm, that one from a shoe shop on Maple, a third had last been seen leaning against a mailbox near the Elite Theater. Nameless, all nine of them, gloriously frisky, nutty with their games.
And, miracle of miracles, they were all his age!
“Hey!” cried Will.
The frolic ceased. The boys unscrambled. All gazed, some blinked at him. Some looked to set the panic off. Panting, they waited for Will to speak.
“May—” he asked quietly, “—may I play?”
They peered at him with their shining honey-warm molasses-brown eyes. Their smiles, the white smiles pinned to their faces, were wide as all of summer.
Will threw a stick far over the ravine.
“There!”
The boys, answering with their own sound, bolted off. Their furious romp kicked up vast sunlit clouds of dust.
One trotted back. The stick was in his smiling mouth. He laid it at Will’s feet with a bow.
“Thank you,” said Will.
The other boys ran, danced, waiting for a throw. Looking, Will thought, cats are girls, I always knew that. But dogs, just look! All summer ahead, us here together, and dogs are nothing but—boys!
The boys barked. The boys smiled.
“You’re my friends, right? We’ll meet every day, right?”
They wagged their tails. They whined.
“Do like I say, and—bones and biscuits!”
The boys shivered.
“Biscuits and bones!”
He hurled the stick ten million miles out. The summer boys ran and he thought, No matter if they have pups, dogs are boys, no other animal in the whole world so much like me, Dad, Gramps. And suddenly he ran yipping, barking, fell on their dance-ground, pummeled their dusty earth, leapt their wet tree stumps. Then in a great yelling swoop they rocked off, all ten, toward wilderness country.
Under a wooden rail trestle, they froze.
A train like steel God in his wrath flashed over, along, above, away, unraveling, swift-shimmering, gone. His voice knocked forth a sweet dust in their bones.
They stood up on the empty tracks where a thousand tarbabies had melted to pools at noon. Their eyes cried with light. His summer friends showed their pink, loosely tied cravat tongues to each other.
Over them, a vast power-line tower hurled its flaming blue wires north and south in dazzles of solid electric insect-hum.
Climbing half up the tower, Will gasped.
The boys were gone!
Will shouted Hey! Boys retorted Bark!
They had trotted over to lave themselves in vast pools of butterfly shadow beneath a tree that had summoned them with the sound of the wind in its drowsy leaves. Legs out in all directions, stomachs pressed to earth, awash in green shade, they fired another cap-pistol roll of barks from their automatic throats.
“Charge!” Will slid down and off.
The boys unbathed themselves from shadow, tossed amber water-beads to telegraph pole with crisp salute of leg, then in a running march, saluting all along the way, they headed for the real lake.
There the boys dog-paddled out, the boys dog-paddled in through the great silence. A mystery lay on the shore in foam whispers and sky color which they waded through to lie on the fried sand, baking.
And lying there, Will guessed this was the best summer of his life. One like this might never happen again. For these summer-happy friends, yes, next summer and the one after that they would lie like this in water as cool or sun as hot.
But next year Will, being older, might have new real friends to keep him home, fence him, draw him away from this fine sprawling, aimless time of no clocks, no beginning, no end, on these lonely sands with his unschooled and silently accepting friends.
These boys, eternal children, would run forever on the rim of the world, as long as the world turned round. He did not see himself running with them anywhere beyond tomorrow.
But then at last, while his friends saluted trees, William rose and imitated his team with style and flourish. His name was writ in amber water on the sand.
“I feel sorry for girls.” He looped the two l’s, made low hills of the m, and dotted the two i’s in his name.
The summer boys barked and scratched idle scatters of sand over the wet signature. Then proud as a gang of calligraphers, all ran into town, and with the sun tilted over his house, at long last he went up the porch steps and looked back at his independent volunteers, these tramp bum excursionists, who stood in a rough cluster on the lawn.
“This is my place, see? Tomorrow, more of the same!”
Will, in the door, felt the easy weight of the tennis shoes in one hand, warm-relaxed, and life slung in his other hand, no weight at all to palm, to bone, to whorl of thumb and fingers. He knew he smelled of dog. But then, they smelled of boy.
“Go on! S’long!”
An imaginary rabbit pelted by. In wild pretense, the team, a riot, a tumult, scurried off.
“Tomorrow!” cried Will.
And the day after and the day after that.
He watched their smiles, as wide as summer, shadow away under the trees.
Then, bearing his own smile as easily as the shoes in one hand, and life in the other, he took his happiness back through and into the cool dark pantry, where, picking and choosing, he gave it gifts.
Time Intervening
Very late on this night, the old man came from his house with a flashlight in his hand and asked of the little boys the object of their frolic. The little boys gave no answer, but tumbled on in the leaves.
The old man went into his house and sat down and worried. It was three in the morning. He saw his own pale, small hands trembling on his knees. He was all joints and angles, and his face, reflected above the mantel, was no more than a pale cloud of breath exhaled upon the mirror.
The children laughed softly outside, in the leaf piles.
He switched out his flashlight quietly and sat in the dark. Why he should be bothered in any way by playing children he could not know. But it was late for them to be out, at three in the morning, playing. He was very cold.
There was a sound of a key in the door and the old man arose to go see who could possibly be coming into his house. The front door opened and a young man entered with a young woman. They were looking at each other softly and tenderly, holding hands, and the old man stared at them and cried, “What are you doing in my house?”
The young man and the young woman replied, “What are you doing in our house? Here now, old man, get on out!” And the young man took the old man by the elbow, searched him to see if he had stolen anything, and shoved him out the door and closed and locked it.
“This is my house. You can’t lock me out!” The old man beat at the door, then stood back in the dark morning air and looked up at the lights shining in the warm windows and rooms upstairs and then, with a motion of shadows, going out. The old man walked down the street and came back and still the small boys rolled in the icy morning leaves, not seeing him.
He stood before the house as he watched the lights turned on and turned off more than a few thousand times as he counted softly under his breath.
A boy of about fourteen ran up to the house, a football in his hand, and opened the door without unlocking it and went in. The door closed.
Half an hour later, with the morning wind rising, the old man saw a car pull up and a plump woman get out with a little boy three years old. As they walked across the wet lawn the woman looked at the old man and said, “Is that you, Mr. Terle?”
“Yes,” said the old man automatically, for somehow he didn’t wish to frighten her. But it was a lie. He knew he was not Mr. Terle at all. Mr. Terle lived down the street.
The lights glowed on and off a thousand more times.
The children rustled softly in the leaves.
A seventeen-year-old boy bounded across the street, smelling faintly of the smudged lipstick on his cheek, almost knocked the old man down, cried, “Sorry!” and leaped up the porch steps and went in.
The old man stood there with the town lying asleep on all sides of him; the unlit windows, the breathing rooms, the stars all through the trees, liberally caught and held on winter branches, like so much snow suspended glittering on the cold air.
“That’s my house; who are all those people going in and out?” the old man cried to the wrestling children.
The wind blew, shaking the empty trees.
In the year which was 1923 the house was dark. A car drove up before it; the mother stepped from the car with her son William, who was three. William looked at the dusky morning world and saw his house and as he felt his mother lead him toward the house he heard her say, “Is that you, Mr. Terle?” and in the shadows by the great wind-filled oak tree an old man stood and
