Dandelion Wine

But this was more than Death. This summer night deep down under the stars was all things you would ever feel or see or hear in your life, drowning you all at once.

Leaving the sidewalk, they walked along a trodden, pebbled, weed-fringed path while the crickets rose in a loud full drumming chorus. He followed obediently behind brave, fine, tall Mother—defender of the universe. Together, then, they approached, reached, and paused at the very end of civilization.

The Ravine.

Here and now, down in that pit of jungled blackness were suddenly all the things he would never know or understand; all the things without names lived in the huddled tree shadow, in the odor of decay.

He realized he and his mother were alone.

Her hand trembled.

He felt the tremble . . . Why? But she was bigger, stronger, more intelligent than himself, wasn’t she? Did she, too, feel that intangible menace, that groping out of darkness, that crouching malignancy down below? Was there, then, no strength in growing up? No solace in being an adult? No sanctuary in life? No fleshly citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of midnights? Doubts flushed him. Ice cream lived again in his throat, stomach, spine and limbs; he was instantly cold as a wind out of December gone.

He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid. Like here, standing. If he should scream, if he should holler for help, would it matter?

Blackness could come swiftly, swallowing; in one titanically freezing moment all would be concluded. Long before dawn, long before police with flashlights might probe the dark, disturbed pathway, long before men with trembling brains could rustle down the pebbles to his help. Even if they were within five hundred yards of him now, and help certainly was, in three seconds a dark tide could rise to take all ten years from him and—

The essential impact of life’s loneliness crushed his begi

He swallowed hard, clung to her. Oh, Lord, don’t let her die, please, he thought. Don’t do anything to us. Father will be coming home from lodge meeting in an hour and if the house is empty—

Mother advanced down the path into the primeval jungle. His voice trembled. “Mom, Doug’s all right. Doug’s all right. He’s all right. Doug’s all right!”

Mother’s voice was strained, high. “He always comes through here. I tell him not to, but those darned kids, they come through here anyway. Some night he’ll come through and never come out again—”

Never come out again. That could mean anything. Tramps. Criminals. Darkness. Accident. Most of all death!

Alone in the universe.

There were a million small towns like this all over the world. Each as dark, as lonely, each as removed, as full of shuddering and wonder. The reedy playing of minor-key violins was the small towns’ music, with no lights, but many shadows. Oh, the vast swelling loneliness of them. The secret damp ravines of them. Life was a horror lived in them at night, when at all sides sanity, marriage, children, happiness, were threatened by an ogre called Death.

Mother raised her voice into the dark. “Doug! Douglas!”

Suddenly both of them realized something was wrong.

The crickets had stopped chirping. Silence was complete.

Never in his life a silence like this one. One so utterly complete. Why should the crickets cease? Why? What reason? They’d never stopped ever before. Not ever.

Unless. Unless—

Something was going to happen.

It was as if the whole ravine was tensing, bunching together its black fibers, drawing in power from sleeping countrysides all about, for miles and miles. From dew-sodden forest and dells and rolling hills where dogs tilted heads to moons, from all around the great silence was sucked into one center, and they were the core of it. In ten seconds now, something would happen, something would happen. The crickets kept their truce, the stars were so low he could almost brush the tinsel. There were swarms of them, hot and sharp.

Growing, growing, the silence. Growing, growing, the tenseness. Oh, it was so dark, so far away from everything. Oh, God!

And then, way way off across the ravine:

“Okay, Mom! Coming, Mother!”

And again: “Hi, Mom! Coming, Mom!”

And then the quick scuttering of te

The stars sucked up like the stung ante

The crickets sang!

The darkness pulled back, startled, shocked, angry. Pulled back, losing its appetite at being so rudely interrupted as it prepared to feed. As the dark retreated like a wave on the shore, three children piled out of it, laughing.

“Hi, Mom! Hi, Tom! Hey!”

It smelled like Douglas, all right. Sweat and grass and the odor of trees and branches and the creek about him.

“Young man, you’re going to get a licking,” declared Mother. She put away her fear instantly. Tom knew she would never tell anyone of it, ever. It would be in her heart, though, for all time, as it was in his heart for all time.

They walked home to bed in the late summer night. He was glad Douglas was alive. Very glad. For a moment there he had thought—

Far off in the dim moonlit country, over a viaduct and down a valley, a train rushed along whistling like a lost metal thing, nameless and ru

He smelled the sweat of Doug beside him. It was magic. Tom stopped trembling.

“Only two things I know for sure, Doug,” he whispered.

“What?”

“Nighttime’s awful dark—is one.”

“What’s the other?”

“The ravine at night don’t belong in Mr. Auffma

Douglas considered this awhile. “You can say that again.”

They stopped talking. Listening, suddenly they heard footsteps coming down the street, under the trees, outside the house now, on the sidewalk. From her bed Mother called quietly, “That’s your father.” It was.

Late at night on the bent parch Leo Auffma

“Lena?” he whispered.

She sat down next to him on the swing, in her nightgown, not slim the way girls get when they are not loved at seventeen, not fat the way women get when they are not loved at fifty, but absolutely right, a roundness, a firmness, the way women are at any age, he thought, when there is no question.

She was miraculous. Her body, like his, was always thinking for her, but in a different way, shaping the children, or moving ahead of him into any room to change the atmosphere there to fit any particular mood he was in. There seemed no long periods of thought for her; thinking and doing moved from her head to her hand and back in a natural and gentle circuiting he could not and cared not to blueprint.

“That machine,” she said at last, “…we don’t need it.”

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