Dandelion Wine Page 16

  "Maybe part of you doesn't want to live anymore."

  "You and Francine. Honestly!"

  "I feel so guilty. I'll be drinking some hot cocoa just as you reach the ravine bottom and walk on the bridge."

  "Drink a cup for me. Good night."

  Lavinia Nebbs walked alone down the midnight street, down the late summer-night silence. She saw houses with the dark windows and far away she heard a dog barking. In five minutes, she thought, I'll be safe at home. In five minutes I'll be phoning silly little Francine. I'll--"

  She heard the man's voice.

  A man's voice singing far away among the trees.

  "Oh, give me a June night, the moonlight and you ..."

  She walked a little faster.

  The voice sang, "In my arms ... with all your charms ..."

  Down the street in the dim moonlight a man walked slowly and casually along.

  I can run knock on one of these doors, thought Lavinia, if I must.

  "Oh, give me a June night," sang the man, and he carried a long club in his hand. "The moonlight and you. Well, look who's here! What a time of night for you to be out, Miss Nebbs!"

  "Officer Kennedy!"

  And that's who it was, of course.

  "I'd better see you home!"

  "Thanks, I'll make it."

  "But you live across the ravine...."

  Yes, she thought, but I won't walk through the ravine with any man, not even an officer. How do I know who the Lonely One is? "No," she said, "I'll hurry."

  "I'll wait right here," he said. "If you need any help, give a yell. Voices carry good here. I'll come running."

  "Thank you."

  She went on, leaving him under a light, humming to himself, alone.

  Here I am, she thought.

  The ravine.

  She stood on the edge of the one hundred and thirteen steps that went down the steep hill and then across the bridge seventy yards and up the hills leading to Park Street. And only one lantern to see by. Three minutes from now, she thought, I'll be putting my key in my house door. Nothing can happen in just one hundred eighty seconds.

  She started down the long dark-green steps into the deep ravine.

  "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten steps," she counted in a whisper.

  She felt she was running, but she was not running.

  "Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty steps," she breathed.

  "One fifth of the way!" she announced to herself.

  The ravine was deep, black and black, black! And the world was gone behind, the world of safe people in bed, the locked doors, the town, the drugstore, the theater, the lights, everything was gone. Only the ravine existed and lived, black and huge, about her.

  "Nothing's happened, has it? No one around, is there? Twenty-four, twenty-five steps. Remember that old ghost story you told each other when you were children?"

  She listened to her shoes on the steps.

  "The story about the dark man coming in your house and you upstairs in bed. And now he's at the first step coming up to your room. And now he's at the second step. And now he's at the third step and the fourth step and the fifth! Oh, how you used to laugh and scream at that story! And now the horrid dark man's at the twelfth step and now he's opening the door of your room and now he's standing by your bed. 'I GOT YOU!'"

  She screamed. It was like nothing she'd ever heard, that scream. She had never screamed that loud in her life. She stopped, she froze, she clung to the wooden banister. Her heart exploded in her. The sound of the terrified beating filled the universe.

  "There, there!" she screamed to herself. "At the bottom of the steps. A man, under the light! No, now he's gone! He was waiting there!"

  She listened.

  Silence.

  The bridge was empty.

  Nothing, she thought, holding her heart. Nothing. Fool! That story I told myself. How silly. What shall I do?

  Her heartbeats faded.

  Shall I call the officer--did he hear me scream?

  She listened. Nothing. Nothing.

  I'll go the rest of the way. That silly story.

  She began again, counting the steps.

  "Thirty-five, thirty-six, careful, don't fall. Oh, I am a fool. Thirty-seven steps, thirty-eight, nine and forty, and two makes forty-two--almost halfway."

  She froze again.

  Wait, she told herself.

  She took a step. There was an echo.

  She took another step.

  Another echo. Another step, just a fraction of a moment later.

  "Someone's following me," she whispered to the ravine, to the black crickets and dark-green hidden frogs and the black stream. "Someone's on the steps behind me. I don't dare turn around."

  Another step, another echo.

  "Every time I take a step, they take one."

  A step and an echo.

  Weakly she asked of the ravine, "Officer Kennedy, is that you?"

  The crickets were still.

  The crickets were listening. The night was listening to her. For a change, all of the far summer-night meadows and close summer-night trees were suspending motion; leaf, shrub, star, and meadow grass ceased their particular tremors and were listening to Lavinia Nebbs's heart. And perhaps a thousand miles away, across locomotive-lonely country, in an empty way station, a single traveler reading a dim newspaper under a solitary naked bulb, might raise up his head, listen, and think, What's that? and decide, Only a wood-chuck, surely, beating on a hollow log. But it was Lavinia Nebbs, it was most surely the heart of Lavinia Nebbs.

  Silence. A summer-night silence which lay for a thousand miles, which covered the earth like a white and shadowy sea.

  Faster, faster! She went down the steps.

  Run!

  She heard music. In a mad way, in a silly way, she heard the great surge of music that pounded at her, and she realized as she ran, as she ran in panic and terror, that some part of her mind was dramatizing, borrowing from the turbulent musical score of some private drama, and the music was rushing and pushing her now, higher and higher, faster, faster, plummeting and scurrying, down, and down into the pit of the ravine.

  Only a little way, she prayed. One hundred eight, nine, one hundred ten steps! The bottom! Now, run! Across the bridge!

  She told her legs what to do, her arms, her body, her terror; she advised all parts of herself in this white and terrible moment, over the roaring creek waters, on the hollow, thudding, swaying, almost alive, resilient bridge planks she ran, followed by the wild footsteps behind, behind, with the music following, too, the music shrieking and babbling.

  He's following, don't turn, don't look, if you see him, you'll not be able to move, you'll be so frightened. Just run, run!

  She ran across the bridge.

  Oh, God, God, please, please let me get up the hill! Now up the path, now between the hills, oh God, it's dark, and everything so far away. If I screamed now it wouldn't help; I can't scream anyway. Here's the top of the path, here's the street, oh, God, please let me be safe, if I get home safe I'll never go out alone; I was a fool, let me admit it, I was a fool, I didn't know what terror was, but if you let me get home from this I'll never go without Helen or Francine again! Here's the street. Across the street!

  She crossed the street and rushed up the sidewalk.

  Oh God, the porch! My house! Oh God, please give me time to get inside and lock the door and I'll be safe!

  And there--silly thing to notice--why did she notice, instantly, no time, no time--but there it was anyway, flashing by--there on the porch rail, the half-filled glass of lemonade she had abandoned a long time, a year, half an evening ago! The lemonade glass sitting calmly, imperturbably there on the rail ... and ...

  She heard her clumsy feet on the porch and listened and felt her hands scrabbling and ripping at the lock with the key. She heard her heart. She heard her inner voice screaming.

  The key fit.

  Unlock the door, quick,
quick!

  The door opened.

  Now, inside. Slam it!

  She slammed the door.

  "Now lock it, bar it, lock it!" she gasped wretchedly.

  "Lock it, tight, tight!"

  The door was locked and bolted tight.

  The music stopped. She listened to her heart again and the sound of it diminishing into silence.

  Home! Oh God, safe at home! Safe, safe and safe at home! She slumped against the door. Safe, safe. Listen. Not a sound. Safe, safe, oh thank God, safe at home. I'll never go out at night again. I'll stay home. I won't go over that ravine again ever. Safe, oh safe, safe home, so good, so good, safe! Safe inside, the door locked. Wait.

  Look out the window.

  She looked.

  Why, there's no one there at all! Nobody. There was nobody following me at all. Nobody running after me. She got her breath and almost laughed at herself. It stands to reason. If a man had been following me, he'd have caught me! I'm not a fast runner.... There's no one on the porch or in the yard. How silly of me. I wasn't running from anything. That ravine's as safe as anyplace. Just the same, it's nice to be home. Home's the really good warm place, the only place to be.

  She put her hand out to the light switch and stopped.

  "What?" she asked. "What, What?"

  Behind her in the living room, someone cleared his throat.

  "Good grief, they ruin everything!"

  "Don't take it so hard, Charlie."

  "Well, what're we going to talk about now? It's no use talking the Lonely One if he ain't even alive! It's not scary anymore!"

  "Don't know about you, Charlie," said Tom. "I'm going back to Summer's Ice House and sit in the door and pretend he's alive and get cold all up and down my spine."

  "That's cheating."

  "You got to take your chills where you can find them, Charlie."

  Douglas did not listen to Tom and Charlie. He looked at Lavinia Nebbs's house and spoke, almost to himself.

  "I was there last night in the ravine. I saw it. I saw everything. On my way home I cut across here. I saw that lemonade glass right on the porch rail, half empty. Thought I'd like to drink it. Like to drink it, I thought. I was in the ravine and I was here, right in the middle of it all."

  Tom and Charlie, in turn, ignored Douglas.

  "For that matter," said Tom. "I don't really think the Lonely One is dead."

  "You were here this morning when the ambulance came to bring that man out on the stretcher, weren't you?"

  "Sure," said Tom.

  "Well, that was the Lonely One, dumb! Read the papers! After ten long years escaping, old Lavinia Nebbs up and stabbed him with a handy pair of sewing scissors. I wish she'd minded her own business."

  "You want she'd laid down and let him squeeze her windpipe?"

  "No, but the least she could've done is gallop out of the house and down the street screaming 'Lonely One! Lonely One!' long enough to give him a chance to beat it. This town used to have some good stuff in it up until about twelve o'clock last night. From here on, we're vanilla junket."

  "Let me say it for the last time, Charlie; I figure the Lonely One ain't dead. I saw his face, you saw his face, Doug saw his face, didn't you, Doug?"

  "What? Yes. I think so. Yes."

  "Everybody saw his face. Answer me this, then: Did it look like the Lonely One to you?"

  "I ..." said Douglas, and stopped.

  The sun buzzed in the sky for about five seconds.

  "My gosh ..." whispered Charlie at last.

  Tom waited, smiling.

  "It didn't look like the Lonely One at all," gasped Charlie. "It looked like a man."

  "Right, yes, sir, a plain everyday man, who wouldn't pull the wings off even so much as a fly, Charlie, a fly! The least the Lonely One would do if he was the Lonely One is look like the Lonely One, right? Well, he looked like the candy butcher down front the Elite Theater nights."

  "What you think he was, a tramp coming through town, got in what he thought was an empty house, and got killed by Miss Nebbs?"

  "Sure!"

  "Hold on, though. None of us know what the Lonely One should look like. There's no pictures. Only people ever saw him wound up dead."

  "You know and Doug knows and I know what he looks like. He's got to be tall, don't he?"

  "Sure ..."

  "And he's got to be pale, don't he?"

  "Pale, that's right."

  "And skinny like a skeleton and have long dark hair, don't he?"

  "That's what I always said."

  "And big eyes bulging out, green eyes like a cat?"

  "That's him to the t."

  "Well, then." Tom snorted. "You saw that poor guy they lugged out of the Nebbs's place a couple hours ago. What was he?"

  "Little and red-faced and kind of fat and not much hair and what there was was sandy. Tom, you hit on it! Come on! Call the guys! You go tell them like you told me! The Lonely One ain't dead. He'll still be out lurkin' around tonight."

  "Yeah," said Tom, and stopped, suddenly thoughtful.

  "Tom, you're a pal, you got a real brain. None of us would've saved the day this way. The summer was sure going bad up to this very minute. You got your thumb in the dike just in time. August won't be a total loss. Hey, kids!"

  And Charlie was off, waving his arms, yelling.

  Tom stood on the sidewalk in front of Lavinia Nebbs's house, his face pale.

  "My gosh!" he whispered. "What've I gone and done now!"

  He turned to Douglas.

  "I say, Doug, what've I gone and done now?"

  Douglas was staring at the house. His lips moved.

  "I was there, last night, in the ravine. I saw Elizabeth Ramsell. I came by here last night on the way home. I saw the lemonade glass there on the rail. Just last night it was. I could drink that, I thought ... I could drink that.... "

  She was a woman with a broom or a dustpan or a washrag or a mixing spoon in her hand. You saw her cutting piecrust in the morning, humming to it, or you saw her setting out the baked pies at noon or taking them in, cool, at dusk. She rang porcelain cups like a Swiss bell ringer, to their place. She glided through the halls as steadily as a vacuum machine, seeking, finding, and setting to rights. She made mirrors of every window, to catch the sun. She strolled but twice through any garden, trowel in hand, and the flowers raised their quivering fires upon the warm air in her wake. She slept quietly and turned no more than three times in a night, as relaxed as a white glove to which, at dawn, a brisk hand will return. Waking, she touched people like pictures, to set their frames straight.

  But, now ...?

  "Grandma," said everyone. "Great-grandma."

  Now it was as if a huge sum in arithmetic were finally drawing to an end. She had stuffed turkeys, chickens, squabs, gentlemen, and boys. She had washed ceilings, walls, invalids, and children. She had laid linoleum, repaired bicycles, wound clocks, stoked furnaces, swabbed iodine on ten thousand grievous wounds. Her hands had flown all around about and down, gentling this, holding that, throwing baseballs, swinging bright croquet mallets, seeding black earth, or fixing covers over dumplings, ragouts, and children wildly strewn by slumber. She had pulled down shades, pinched out candles, turned switches, and--grown old. Looking back on thirty billions of things started, carried, finished and done, it all summed up, totaled out; the last decimal was placed, the final zero swung slowly into line. Now, chalk in hand, she stood back from life a silent hour before reaching for the eraser.

  "Let me see now," said Great-grandma. "Let me see ..."

  With no fuss or further ado, she traveled the house in an ever-circling inventory, reached the stairs at last, and, making no special announcement, she took herself up three flights to her room where, silently, she laid herself out like a fossil imprint under the snowing cool sheets of her bed and began to die.

  Again the voices:

  "Grandma! Great-grandma!"

  The rumor of what she was doing dropped down the stairwell, hit, and s
pread ripples through the rooms, out doors and windows and along the street of elms to the edge of the green ravine.

  "Here now, here!"

  The family surrounded her bed.

  "Just let me lie," she whispered.

  Her ailment could not be seen in any microscope; it was a mild but ever-deepening tiredness, a dim weighing of her sparrow body; sleepy, sleepier, sleepiest.

  As for her children and her children's children--it seemed impossible that with such a simple act, the most leisurely act in the world, she could cause such apprehension.

  "Great-grandma, now listen--what you're doing is no better than breaking a lease. This house will fall down without you. You must give us at least a year's notice!"

  Great-grandma opened one eye. Ninety years gazed calmly out at her physicians like a dust-ghost from a high cupola window in a fast-emptying house. "Tom ...? "

  The boy was sent, alone, to her whispering bed.

  "Tom," she said, faintly, far away, "in the Southern Seas there's a day in each man's life when he knows it's time to shake hands with all his friends and say good-bye and sail away, and he does, and it's natural--it's just his time. That's how it is today. I'm so like you sometimes, sitting through Saturday matinees until nine at night when we send your dad to bring you home. Tom, when the time comes that the same cowboys are shooting the same Indians on the same mountaintop, then it's best to fold back the seat and head for the door, with no regrets and no walking backward up the aisle. So, I'm leaving while I'm still happy and still entertained."

  Douglas was summoned next to her side.

  "Grandma, who'll shingle the roof next spring?"

  Every April for as far back as there were calendars, you thought you heard woodpeckers tapping the housetop. But no, it was Great-grandma somehow transported, singing, pounding nails, replacing shingles, high in the sky!

  "Douglas," she whispered, "don't ever let anyone do the shingles unless it's fun for them."

  "Yes'm."

  "Look around come April, and say, 'Who'd like to fix the roof?' And whichever face lights up is the face you want, Douglas. Because up there on that roof you can see the whole town going toward the country and the country going toward the edge of the earth and the river shining, and the morning lake, and birds on the trees down under you, and the best of the wind all around above. Any one of those should be enough to make a person climb a weather vane some spring sunrise. It's a powerful hour, if you give it half a chance...."