Dandelion Wine (27 page)

“She was real young when Napoleon …” Douglas stopped. “Old people are heavy. That's how you tell.”

“But why? Tell me why all this running around for her, Doug. Why?”

Why? Douglas blinked and stopped. Things had gone so fast, he had run so far and his blood was so high, he had long since forgotten why. Only now, as they moved again along the sidewalk, shadows like black butterflies on their eyelids, the thick smell of dusty wax on their hands, did he have time to reason why, and, slowly, speak of it, his voice as strange as moonlight.

“Tom, a couple weeks ago, I found out I was alive. Boy, did I hop around. And then, just last week in the movies, I found out I'd have to die someday. I never thought of that, really. And all of a sudden it was like knowing the Y.M.C.A. was going to be shut up forever—or school, which isn't so bad as we like to think, being over for good, and all the peach trees outside town shriveling up and the ravine being filled in and no place to play ever again and me sick in bed for as long as I could think and everything dark, and I got scared. So, I don't know; what I want to do is this: help Mme. Tarot. I'll hide her a few weeks or months while I look up in the black-magic books at the library how to undo spells and get her out of the wax to run around in the world again after all this time. And she'll be so grateful, she'll lay out the cards with all those devils and cups and swords and bones on them and tell me what sump holes to walk around and when to stay in bed on certain Thursday afternoons. I'll live forever, or next thing to it.”

“You don't believe that.”

“Yes, I do, or most of it. Watch it now, here's the ravine. We'll cut down through by the dump heap, and …”

Tom stopped. Douglas had stopped him. The boys did not turn, but they heard the heavy clubbing blows of feet behind them, each one like a shotgun set off in the bed of a dry lake not far away. Someone was shouting and cursing.

“Tom, you let him follow you!”

As they ran a giant hand lifted and tossed them aside, and Mr. Black was there laying to left and right and the boys, crying out, on the grass, saw the raving man, spittle showering the air from his biting teeth and widened lips. He held the witch by her neck and one arm and glared with fiery eyes down on the boys.

“This is mine! To do with like I want. What you mean, taking her? Caused all my trouble—money, business, everything. Here's what I think of her!”

“No!” shouted Douglas.

But like a great iron catapult, the huge arms hoisted the figure up against the moon and flourished and wheeled the fragile body upon the stars and let it fly out with a curse and a rustling wind down the air into the ravine to tumble and take avalanches of junk with her into white dust and cinders.

“No!” said Douglas, sitting there, looking down. “NO!”

The big man toppled on the rim of the hill, gasping. “You just thank God it wasn't you I did that to!” He moved unsteadily away, falling once, getting up, talking to himself, laughing, swearing, then gone.

Douglas sat on the edge of the ravine and wept. After a long while he blew his nose. He looked at Tom.

“Tom, it's late. Dad'll be out walking, looking for us. We should've been home an hour ago. Run back along Washington Street, get Dad and bring him here.”

“You're not going down in that ravine?”

“She's city property now, on the trash dump, and nobody cares what happens, not even Mr. Black. Tell Dad what he's coming here for and he don't have to be seen coming home with me and her. I'll take her the back way around and nobody'll ever know.”

“She won't be no good to you now, her machinery all busted.”

“We can't leave her out in the rain, don't you see, Tom?”

“Sure.”

Tom moved slowly off.

Douglas let himself down the hill, walking in piles of cinder and old paper and tin cans. Halfway down he stopped and listened. He peered at the multicolored dimness, the great landslide below. “Mme. Tarot?” he almost whispered. “Mme. Tarot?”

At the bottom of the hill in the moonlight he thought he saw her white wax hand move. It was a piece of white paper blowing. But he went toward it anyway....

 

T
he town clock struck midnight. The house lights around were mostly turned out. In the workshop garage the two boys and the man stood back from the witch, who now sat, rearranged and at peace, in an old wicker chair before an oilcloth-covered card table, upon which were spread, in fantastic fans of popes and clowns and cardinals and deaths and suns and comets, the tarot cards upon which one wax hand touched.

Father was speaking.

“… know how it is. When I was a boy, when the circus left town I ran around collecting a million posters. Later it was breeding rabbits, and magic. I built illusions in the attic and couldn't get them out.” He nodded to the witch. “Oh, I remember she told my fortune once, thirty years ago. Well, clean her up good, then come in to bed. We'll build her a special case Saturday.” He moved out the garage door but stopped when Douglas spoke softly.

“Dad. Thanks. Thanks for the walk home. Thanks.”

“Heck,” said Father, and was gone.

The two boys left alone with the witch looked at each other. “Gosh, right down the main street we go, all four of us, you, me, Dad, the witch! Dad's one in a million!”

“Tomorrow,” said Douglas, “I go down and buy the rest of the machine from Mr. Black, for ten bucks, or he'll throw it out.”

“Sure.” Tom looked at the old woman there in the wicker chair. “Boy she sure looks alive. I wonder what's inside.”

“Little tiny bird bones. All that's left of Mme. Tarot after Napoleon—”

“No machinery at all? Why don't we just cut her open and see?”

“Plenty of time for that, Tom.”

“When?”

“Well, in a year, two years, when I'm fourteen or fifteen, then's the time to do it. Right now I don't want to know nothing except she's here. And tomorrow I get to work on the spells to let her escape forever. Some night you'll hear that a strange, beautiful Italian girl was seen downtown in a summer dress, buying a ticket for the East and everyone saw her at the station and saw her on the train as it pulled out and everyone said she was the prettiest girl they ever saw, and when you hear that, Tom—and believe me, the news will get around fast! nobody knowing
where
she came from or
where
she went—then you'll know I worked the spell and set her free. And then, as I said, a year, two years from now, on that night when that train pulls out, it'll be the time when we can cut through the wax. With her gone, you're liable to find nothing but little cogs and wheels and stuff inside her. That's how it is.”

Douglas picked up the witch's hand and moved it over the dance of life, the frolic of bone-white death, the dates and dooms, the fates and follies, tapping, touching, whispering her worn-down fingernails. Her face tilted with some secret equilibrium and looked at the boys and the eyes flashed bright in the raw bulb light, unblinking.

“Tell your fortune, Tom?” asked Douglas quietly.

“Sure.”

A card fell from the witch's voluminous sleeve.

“Tom, you see that? A card, hidden away, and now she throws it out at us!” Douglas held the card to the light. “It's blank. I'll put it in a matchbox full of chemicals during the night. Tomorrow we'll open the box and there the message'll be!”

“What'll it say?”

Douglas closed his eyes the better to see the words.

“It'll say, ‘Thanks from your humble servant and grateful friend, Mme. Floristan Mariani Tarot, the Chiromancer, Soul Healer, and Deep-Down Diviner of Fates and Furies.'”

Tom laughed and shook his brother's arm.

“Go on, Doug, what else, what else?”

“Let me see … And it'll say, ‘Hey nonny no! … is't not fine to dance and sing? … when the bells of death do ring … and turn upon the toe … and sing Hey nonny no!' And it'll say, ‘Tom and Douglas Spaulding, everything you wish for, all your life through, you'll get …' And it'll say that we'll live forever, you and me, Tom, we'll live forever....”

“All that on just this one card?”

“All that, every single bit of it, Tom.”

In the light of the electric bulb they bent, the two boys' heads down, the witch's head down, staring and staring at the beautiful blank but promising white card, their bright eyes sensing each and every incredibly hidden word that would soon rise up from pale oblivion.

“Hey,” said Tom in the softest of voices.

And Douglas repeated in a glorious whisper, “Hey …”

F
aintly, the voice chanted under the fiery green trees at noon.

“… nine, ten, eleven, twelve …”

Douglas moved slowly across the lawn. “Tom, what you counting?”

“… thirteen, fourteen, shut up, sixteen, seventeen, cicadas, eighteen, nineteen … !”

“Cicadas?”

“Oh hell!” Tom unsqueezed his eyes. “Hell, hell, hell!”

“Better not let people hear you swearing.”

“Hell, hell, hell is a place!” Tom cried. “Now I got to start all over. I was counting the times the cicadas buzz every fifteen seconds.” He held up his two dollar watch. “You time it, then add thirty-nine and you get the temperature at that very moment.” He looked at the watch, one eye shut, tilted his head and whispered again, “One, two, three … !”

Douglas turned his head slowly, listening. Somewhere in the burning bone-colored sky a great copper wire was strummed and shaken. Again and again the piercing metallic vibrations, like charges of raw electricity, fell in paralyzing shocks from the stunned trees.

“Seven!” counted Tom. “Eight.”

Douglas walked slowly up the porch steps. Painfully he peered into the hall. He stayed there a moment, then slowly he stepped back out on the porch and called weakly to Tom. “It's exactly eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit.”

“—twenty-seven, twenty-eight—”

“Hey, Tom you hear me?”

“I hear you—thirty, thirty-one! Get away! Two, three, thirty-four!”

“You can stop counting now, right inside on that old thermometer it's eighty-seven and going up, without the help of no katydids.”

“Cicadas! Thirty-nine, forty! Not katydids! Forty-two!”

“Eighty-seven degrees, I thought you'd like to know.

“Forty-five, that's inside, not outside! Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one! Fifty-two, fifty-three! Fifty-three plus thirty-nine is—ninety-two degrees!”

“Who says?”

“I say! Not eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit! But ninety two degrees Spaulding!”

“You and who else?”

Tom jumped up and stood red-faced, staring at the sun. “Me and the cicadas, that's who! Me and the cicadas! You're out-numbered! Ninety-two, ninety-two, ninety-two degrees Spaulding, by gosh!”

They both stood looking at the merciless unclouded sky like a camera that has broken and stares, shutter wide, at a motionless and stricken town dying in a fiery sweat.

Douglas shut his eyes and saw two idiot suns dancing on the reverse side of the pinkly translucent lids.

“One … two … three …”

Douglas felt his lips move.

“… four … five … six …”

This time the cicadas sang even faster.

F
rom noontime to sundown, from midnight to sunrise, one man, one horse, and one wagon were known to all twenty-six thousand three hundred forty-nine inhabitants of Green Town, Illinois.

In the middle of the day, for no reason quickly apparent, children would stop still and say:

“Here comes Mr. Jonas!”

“Here comes Ned!”

“Here comes the wagon!”

Older folks might peer north or south, east or west and see no sign of the man named Jonas, the horse named Ned, or the wagon which was a Conestoga of the kind that bucked the prairie tides to beach on the wilderness.

But then if you borrowed the ear of a dog and tuned it high and stretched it taut you could hear, miles and miles across the town a singing like a rabbi in the lost lands, a Moslem in a tower. Always, Mr. Jonas's voice went clear before him so people had a half an hour, an hour, to prepare for his arrival. And by the time his wagon appeared, the curbs were lined by children, as for a parade.

So here came the wagon and on its high board seat under a persimmon-colored umbrella, the reins like a stream of water in his gentle hands, was Mr. Jonas, singing.

 

“Junk! Junk!

No, sir, not Junk!

Junk! Junk!

No, ma'am, not Junk!

Bricabracs, brickbats!

Knitting needles, knick-knacks!