In the year which was 1934 William came running in the summer night, feeling the football cradled in his hands, feeling the murky night street pass under his running feet, along the sidewalk. He smelled, rather than saw, an old man as he ran past. Neither of them spoke. And so, on into the house.
In the year 1937 William ran with antelope boundings across the street, a smell of lipstick on his face, a smell of someone young and fresh upon his cheeks; all thoughts of love and deep night. He almost knocked the stranger down, cried, “Sorry!” and ran to open the front door.
In the year 1947 a car stopped before the house, William relaxed, his wife beside him. He wore a fine tweed suit, it was late, he was tired, they both smelled faintly of too many drinks offered and accepted. For a moment they both heard the wind in the trees. They got out of the car and let themselves into the house with a key. An old man came from the living room and cried, “What are you doing in my house?”
“What are you doing in our house?” said William. “Here now, old man, get on out.” And William, feeling faintly sick in his stomach, for there was something about the old man that made him feel cold, searched the old man and pushed him out the door and closed and locked it. From outside the old man cried, “This is my house. You can’t lock me out!”
They went up to bed and turned out the lights.
In the year 1928 William and the other small boys wrestled on the lawn, waiting for the time when they would leave to watch the circus come chuffing into the pale-dawn railroad station on the blue metal tracks. In the leaves they lay and laughed and kicked and fought. An old man with a flashlight came across the lawn. “Why are you playing here on my lawn at this time of morning?” asked the old man.
“Who are you?” replied William, looking up a moment from the tangle.
The old man stood over the tumbling children a long moment. Then he dropped his flash. “Oh, my dear boy, I know now, now I know!” He bent to touch the boy. “I am you and you are me. I love you, my dear boy, with all of my heart! Let me tell you what will happen to you in the years to come!
If you knew! My name is William—so is yours! And all these people going into the house, they are William, they are you, they are me!” The old man shivered. “Oh, all the long years and time passing!”
“Go away,” said the boy. “You’re crazy.”
“But—” said the old man.
“You’re nuts! I’ll call my dad!”
The old man backed off and walked away.
There was a flickering of the house lights, on and off. The boys wrestled quietly and secretly in the rustling leaves. The old man stood in shadow on the dark lawn.
Upstairs, in his bed, in the year 1947, William Latting did not sleep. He sat up, lit a cigarette, and looked out the window. His wife was awake. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“That old man,” said William Latting. “I think he’s still down there, under the oak tree.”
“Oh, he couldn’t be,” she said.
William drew quietly on his cigarette and nodded. “Who are those kids?”
“What kids?”
“On the lawn there. What a helluva time of night to be messing around in the leaves!”
“Probably the Moran boys.”
“Hell! At this hour? No, no.”
He stood by the window, eyes shut. “You hear something?”
“What?”
“A baby crying. Somewhere …?
“I don’t hear anything,” she said.
She lay listening. They both thought they heard running footsteps on the street, the front doorknob turn. William Latting went to the hall and looked down the stairs but saw nothing.
In the year 1937, coming in the door, William saw a man in a dressing gown at the top of the stairs, looking down, with a cigarette in his hand.
“That you, Dad?” No answer. The man upstairs sighed and stepped back in darkness. William walked to the kitchen to raid the icebox.
The children wrestled in the soft, dark leaves of morning.
William Latting said, “Listen.”
He and his wife listened.
“It’s that old man,” said William, “crying.”
“Why?”
“Why does anyone cry? Maybe he’s unhappy.”
“If he’s still there in the morning,” said his wife in the dark, “call the police.”
William Latting turned away from the window, put out his cigarette, and lay in bed, staring at the shadows on the ceiling that flicked off and on a thousand times, silently. “No,” he said at last. “I won’t call the police. Not for him.”
“Why not?”
His voice almost whispered. “I wouldn’t want to do that. I just couldn’t.”
They both lay there and faintly there was a sound of crying and the wind blew and William Latting knew that all he had to do if he wanted to watch the boys wrestling in the icy leaves of morning would be to reach out with his hand and lift the shade and look, and there they would be, far below, wrestling and wrestling, as the dawn came pale in the eastern sky.
With all his heart, soul, and blood he wanted to go out and lie in the leaves with them, and let the leaves bury him deep as he snuffed them in, eyes wet. He could go out there now …
Instead, he turned on his side and could not close his eyes, and could not sleep.
The Enemy in the Wheat
The family was deep in bed the night the enemy came to live in their wheat field.
It was midnight. The war had burned the land only forty miles away. Two small countries had been fighting each other for years, but now the war was almost finished, both sides saying, “Ah, let us quit this foolishness and go back to being human.”
And then, in the dark midnight sky, the family heard a single missile cry out, the air around it whistling, so they sat up to clutch each other in their beds. The bomb struck with a loud whump! in their field of autumn wheat.
Silence.
The father sat higher and gasped to the quiet rooms, “Dear God, why didn’t it explode? Listen! Tick, tick! Better it blew us all to a million pieces, but no! Tick, tick, tick!”
“I hear nothing. Lie down,” said his wife. “You can search for the bomb tomorrow. It’s away from the house. If it explodes it will knock a few pictures down.”
“No, no, for God’s sake, it’ll flatten us all!” The father threw on a robe and hurried down and out into the wheat field.
He sniffed. “They say you can smell hot metal. We must find it before it cools. Oh, God, this misery!”
“A bomb, Father?” Tony, his smallest son, arrived behind him with a flashlight.
The father glared. “Why the flashlight?”
“I didn’t want you to trip over the bomb.”
“I can find more with my nose than with ten thousand flashlights.” Before the son could back off, his flashlight was seized. “Did you hear? Bam! It must’ve knocked down a thousand trees.”
“There’s a tree standing over there, Father,” said Tony.
The father rolled his eyeballs. “Go inside, you’ll catch your death.”
“It’s a warm night.”
“It’s still summer,” called his other children, swarming into the field.
“Stand back! If anyone gets blown to hell it’ll be me!” cried the father.
The children went back in but left the kitchen door ajar.
“Shut that door!” The father orchestrated the flashlight beam wildly, as he stamped through the wheat field, sniffing.
When he strode into the house, his nightshirt was stitched with burrs and tassels. “Are you still up?” he yelled at his family.
“Must you jump around like a mad bull, crushing the wheat?” asked his wife.
“Mad bull? Crushing?”
“Look.” Tony pointed out of the door. “There are paths in the wheat where Papa ran up and down, east and west, back and forth.”
“How soon will you grow up?” said the father. “And become a writer?”
In the gray dawn he was out in the wheat field plunging recklessly about, and then, tiptoeing, eyes afire, mouth open, probing with trembling hands. The wheat rustled in the soft wind as he stood in the center of this great mystery. Where? Where!
Only hunger brought him in at noon, but then, sandwich in hand, he was back searching, his face both fearful and pleased, excited and depressed, a furious charge and countercharge evaporating his sweat, stopping to address the sky, the wheat field, or his own two hands. “Did you hear? Bang! Never in any war has a shell come near our farms! Woman! Bring me soup.”
“Come in and get it,” she replied.
“God, this waiting,” he whispered. “Where’s the crater? The shell must have buried itself. Dear God, the least breath … the tiniest touch of an ant or fly, thirty years from now. What a legacy for my sons. This enemy here, waiting to slaughter them in the next century! Think! The war ends. The heroes return. The years fly. And, one day, the hero aims his plow, cries ‘Hup’ to his horse, and. … Wham! Blown to bits!”
“Maybe it didn’t land in our wheat field.” Tony, his fingers laced atop his head, smiled a delicate smile.
“My God! Didn’t you see the flash? It bleached the hills yellow!”
“The hills were yellow yesterday—”
“Like a great flying stove in the sky, it fell. I saw—”
“Our bedroom window’s on the other side of the house,” said Mother, arriving with a bowl of soup.
“So?” Father said. “Bam! Dead center in my field. God save us.”
“We’ll help you search,” cried the children.
He stared at his wife. “Your offspring are
