Dandelion Wine (21 page)

 

T
wo days later William Forrester was at his desk in his room when the letter came. Douglas brought it upstairs and handed it to Bill and looked as if he knew what was in it.

William Forrester recognized the blue envelope, but did not open it. He simply put it in his shirt pocket, looked at the boy for a moment, and said, “Come on, Doug; my treat.”

They walked downtown, saying very little, Douglas preserving the silence he sensed was necessary. Autumn, which had threatened for a time, was gone. Summer was back full, boiling the clouds and scouring the metal sky. They turned in at the drugstore and sat at the marble fountain. William Forrester took the letter out and laid it before him and still did not open it.

He looked out at the yellow sunlight on the concrete and on the green awnings and shining on the gold letters of the window signs across the street, and he looked at the calendar on the wall. August 27, 1928. He looked at his wrist watch and felt his heart beat slowly, saw the second hand of the watch moving moving with no speed at all, saw the calendar frozen there with its one day seeming forever, the sun nailed to the sky with no motion toward sunset whatever. The warm air spread under the sighing fans over his head. A number of women laughed by the open door and were gone through his vision, which was focused beyond them at the town itself and the high courthouse clock. He opened the letter and began to read.

He turned slowly on the revolving chair. He tried the words again and again, silently, on his tongue, and at last spoke them aloud and repeated them.

“A dish of lime-vanilla ice,” he said. “A dish of lime-vanilla ice.”

D
ouglas and Tom and Charlie came panting along the unshaded street.

“Tom, answer me true, now.”

“Answer what true?”

“What ever happened to happy endings?”

“They got them on shows at Saturday matinees.”

“Sure, but what about life?”

“All I know is I feel good going to bed nights, Doug. That's a happy ending once a day. Next morning I'm up and maybe things go bad. But all I got to do is remember that I'm going to bed that night and just lying there a while makes everything okay.”

“I'm talking about Mr. Forrester and old Miss Loomis.”

“Nothing we can do; she's dead.”

“I know! But don't you figure someone slipped up there?”

“You mean about him thinking she was the same age as her picture and her a trillion years old all the time? No, sir, I think it's swell!”

“Swell, for gosh sakes?”

“The last few days when Mr. Forrester told me a little here or a little there and I finally put it all together—boy, did I bawl my head off. I don't even know why. I wouldn't change one bit of it. If you changed it, what would we have to talk about? Nothing! And besides, I like to cry. After I cry hard it's like it's morning again and I'm starting the day over.”

“I heard everything now.”

“You just won't admit you like crying, too. You cry just so long and everything's fine. And there's your happy ending. And you're ready to go back out and walk around with folks again. And it's the
start
of gosh-knows-what-all! Any time now, Mr. Forrester will think it over and see it's just the only way and have a good cry and then look around and see it's morning again, even though it's five in the afternoon.”

“That don't sound like no happy ending to me.”

“A good night's sleep, or a ten-minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine, Doug. You listen to Tom Spaulding, M.D.”

“Shut up, you guys,” said Charlie. “We're almost there!”

They turned a corner.

Deep in winter they had looked for bits and pieces of summer and found it in furnace cellars or in bonfires on the edge of frozen skating ponds at night. Now, in summer, they went searching for some little bit, some piece of the forgotten winter.

Rounding the corner, they felt a continual light rain spray down from a vast brick building to refresh them as they read the sign they knew by heart, the sign which showed them what they'd come searching for:

S
UMMER
'
S
I
CE
H
OUSE
.

Summer's Ice House on a summer day! They said the words, laughing, and moved to peer into that tremendous cavern where in fifty, one-hundred, and two-hundred-pound chunks, the glaciers, the icebergs, the fallen but not forgotten snows of January slept in ammoniac steams and crystal drippings.

“Feel that,” sighed Charlie Woodman. “What more could you ask?”

For the winter breath was exhaled again and again about them as they stood in the glary day, smelling the wet wood platform with the perpetual mist shimmering in rainbows down from the ice machinery above.

They chewed icicles that froze their fingers so they had to grip the ice in handkerchiefs and suck the linen.

“All that steam, all that fog,” whispered Tom. “The Snow Queen. Remember that story? Nobody believes in that stuff, Snow Queens, now. So don't be surprised if this is where she came to hide out because nobody believes in her anymore.”

They looked and saw the vapors rise and drift in long swathes of cool smoke.

“No,” said Charlie. “You know who lives here? Only one guy. A guy who gives you goose-pimples just to think of him.” Charlie dropped his voice very low. “The Lonely One.”

“The Lonely One?”

“Born, raised and
lives
here! All that winter, Tom, all that cold, Doug! Where else would he come from to make us shiver the hottest nights of the year? Don't it
smell
like him? You know darn well it does. The Lonely One … the Lonely One …”

The mists and vapors curled in darkness.

Tom screamed.

“It's okay, Doug.” Charlie grinned. “I just dropped a little bitty hunk of ice down Tom's back, is all.”

T
he courthouse clock chimed seven times. The echoes of the chimes faded.

Warm summer twilight here in upper Illinois country in this little town deep far away from everything, kept to itself by a river and a forest and a meadow and a lake. The sidewalks still scorched. The stores closing and the streets shadowed. And there were two moons; the clock moon with four faces in four night directions above the solemn black courthouse, and the real moon rising in vanilla whiteness from the dark east.

In the drugstore fans whispered in the high ceiling. In the rococo shade of porches, a few invisible people sat. Cigars glowed pink, on occasion. Screen doors whined their springs and slammed. On the purple bricks of the summer-night streets, Douglas Spaulding ran; dogs and boys followed after.

“Hi, Miss Lavinia!”

The boys loped away. Waving after them quietly, Lavinia Nebbs sat all alone with a tall cool lemonade in her white fingers, tapping it to her lips, sipping, waiting.

“Here I am, Lavinia.”

She turned and there was Francine, all in snow white, at the bottom steps of the porch, in the smell of zinnias and hibiscus.

Lavinia Nebbs locked her front door and, leaving her lemonade glass half empty on the porch, said, “It's a fine night for the movie.”

They walked down the street.

“Where you going, girls?” cried Miss Fern and Miss Roberta from their porch over the way.

Lavinia called back through the soft ocean of darkness: “To the Elite Theater to see CHARLIE CHAPLIN!”

“Won't catch us out on no night like this,” wailed Miss Fern. “Not with the Lonely One strangling women. Lock ourselves up in our closet with a gun.”

“Oh, bosh!” Lavinia heard the old women's door bang and lock, and she drifted on, feeling the warm breath of summer night shimmering off the oven-baked sidewalks. It was like walking on a hard crust of freshly warmed bread. The heat pulsed under your dress, along your legs, with a stealthy and not unpleasant sense of invasion.

“Lavinia, you don't believe all that about the Lonely One, do you?”

“Those women like to see their tongues dance.”

“Just the same, Hattie McDollis was killed two months ago, Roberta Ferry the month before, and now Elizabeth Ramsell's disappeared....”

“Hattie McDollis was a silly girl, walked off with a traveling man, I bet.”

“But the others, all of them, strangled, their tongues sticking out their mouths, they say.”

They stood upon the edge of the ravine that cut the town half in two. Behind them were the lit houses and music, ahead was deepness, moistness, fireflies and dark.

“Maybe we shouldn't go to the show tonight,” said Francine. “The Lonely One might follow and kill us. I don't like that ravine. Look at it, will you!”

Lavinia looked and the ravine was a dynamo that never stopped running, night or day; there was a great moving hum, a bumbling and murmuring of creature, insect, or plant life. It smelled like a greenhouse, of secret vapors and ancient, washed shales and quicksands. And always the black dynamo humming, with sparkles like great electricity where fireflies moved on the air.

“It won't be
me
coming back through this old ravine tonight late, so darned late; it'll be you, Lavinia, you down the steps and over the bridge and maybe the Lonely One there.”

“Bosh!” said Lavinia Nebbs.

“It'll be you alone on the path, listening to your shoes, not me. You all alone on the way back to your house. Lavinia, don't you get lonely living in that house?”

“Old maids love to live alone.” Lavinia pointed at the hot shadowy path leading down into the dark. “Let's take the short cut.”

“I'm afraid!”

“It's early. Lonely One won't be out till late.” Lavinia took the other's arm and led her down and down the crooked path into the cricket warmth and frog sound and mosquito-delicate silence. They brushed through summer-scorched grass, burs prickling at their bare ankles.

“Let's run!” gasped Francine.

“No!”

They turned a curve in the path—and there it was.

In the singing deep night, in the shade of warm trees, as if she had laid herself out to enjoy the soft stars and the easy wind, her hands at either side of her like the oars of a delicate craft, lay Elizabeth Ramsell!

Francine screamed.

“Don't scream!” Lavinia put out her hands to hold onto Francine, who was whimpering and choking. “Don't! Don't!”

The woman lay as if she had floated there, her face moonlit, her eyes wide and like flint, her tongue sticking from her mouth.

“She's dead!” said Francine. “Oh, she's dead, dead! She's dead!”

Lavinia stood in the middle of a thousand warm shadows with the crickets screaming and the frogs loud.

“We'd better get the police,” she said at last.

 

“H
old me, Lavinia, hold me, I'm cold, oh, I've never been so cold in all my life!”

Lavinia held Francine and the policemen were brushing through the crackling grass, flashlights ducked about, voices mingled, and the night grew toward eight-thirty.

“It's like December. I need a sweater,” said Francine, eyes shut, against Lavinia.

The policeman said, “I guess you can go now, ladies. You might drop by the station tomorrow for a little more questioning.”

Lavinia and Francine walked away from the police and the sheet over the delicate thing upon the ravine grass.

Lavinia felt her heart going loudly in her and she was cold, too, with a February cold; there were bits of sudden snow all over her flesh, and the moon washed her brittle fingers whiter, and she remembered doing all the talking while Francine just sobbed against her.

A voice called from far off, “You want an escort, ladies?”

“No, we'll make it,” said Lavinia to nobody, and they walked on. They walked through the nuzzling, whispering ravine, the ravine of whispers and clicks, the little world of investigation growing small behind them with its lights and voices.

“I've never seen a dead person before,” said Francine.

Lavinia examined her watch as if it was a thousand miles away on an arm and wrist grown impossibly distant. “It's only eight-thirty. We'll pick up Helen and get on to the show.”

“The show!” Francine jerked.

“It's what we need. We've got to forget this. It's not good to remember. If we went home now we'd remember. We'll go to the show as if nothing happened.”

“Lavinia, you don't
mean
it!”

“I never meant anything more in my life. We need to laugh now and forget.”

“But Elizabeth's back there—your friend, my friend—”

“We can't help her; we can only help ourselves. Come on.”

They started up the ravine side, on the stony path, in the dark. And suddenly there, barring their way, standing very still in one spot, not seeing them, but looking on down at the moving lights and the body and listening to the official voices, was Douglas Spaulding.