Dandelion Wine

“Don’t hold your breath,” said Grandpa.

The courthouse clock struck eight.

The courthouse clock struck nine and it was getting late and it was really night on this small street in a small town in a big state on a large continent on a planet earth hurtling down the pit of space toward nowhere or somewhere and Tom feeling every mile of the long drop. He sat by the front-door screen looking out at that rushing blackness that looked very i

There was a smell of rain. Mother was ironing and sprinkling water from a corked ketchup bottle over the crackling dry clothes behind Tom.

One store was still open about a block away—Mrs. Singer’s.

Finally, just before it was time for Mrs. Singer to close her store, Mother relented and told Tom, “Run get a pint of ice cream and be sure she packs it tight.”

He asked if he could get a scoop of chocolate on top, because he didn’t like vanilla, and Mother agreed. He clutched the money and ran barefooted over the warm evening cement sidewalk, under the apple and oak trees, toward the store. The town was so quiet and far off you could hear only the crickets sounding in the spaces beyond the hot indigo trees that hold back the stars.

His bare feet slapped the pavement. He crossed the street and found Mrs. Singer moving ponderously about her store, singing Yiddish melodies.

“Pint ice cream?” she said. “Chocolate on top? Yes!”

He watched her fumble the metal top off the ice-cream freezer and manipulate the scoop, packing the cardboard pint chock-full with “chocolate on top, yes!” He gave the money, received the chill, icy pack, and rubbing it across his brow and cheek, laughing, thumped barefootedly homeward. Behind him the lights of the lonely little store blinked out and there was only a street light shimmering on the corner, and the whole city seemed to be going to sleep.

Opening the screen door, he found Mom still ironing. She looked hot and irritated but she smiled just the same.

“When will Dad be home from lodge meeting?” he asked.

“About eleven or eleven-thirty,” Mother replied. She took the ice cream to the kitchen, divided it. Giving him his special portion of chocolate, she dished out some for herself and the rest was put away, “for Douglas and your father when they come.”

They sat enjoying the ice cream, wrapped at the core of the deep quiet summer night. His mother and himself and the night all around their small house on the small street. He licked each spoonful of ice cream thoroughly before digging for another, and Mom put her ironing board away and the hot iron in its open case cooling, and she sat in the armchair by the phonograph, eating her dessert and saying, “My land, it was a hot day today. Earth soaks up all the heat and lets it out at night. It’ll be soggy sleeping.

They both sat listening to the night, pressed down by every window and door and complete silence because the radio needed a new battery, and they had played all the Knickerbocker Quartet records and Al Jolson and Two Black Crows records to exhaustion; so Tom just sat on the hardwood floor and looked out into the dark dark dark, pressing his nose against the screen until the flesh of its tip was molded into small dark squares.

“I wonder where Doug is? It’s almost nine-thirty.”

“He’ll be here,” Tom said, knowing very well that Douglas would be.

He followed Mom out to wash the dishes. Each sound, each rattle of spoon or dish was amplified in the baked evening. Silently they went to the living room, removed the couch cushions and, together, yanked it open and extended it down into the double bed it secretly was. Mother made the bed, punching pillows neatly to flump them up for their heads. Then, as he was unbuttoning his shirt, she said, “Wait awhile, Tom.”

“Why?”

“Because I say so.”

“You look fu

Mom sat down a moment, then stood up, went to the door and called. He listened to her calling and calling, “Douglas, Douglas, oh Doug! Douglasssssss!” over and over. Her calling floated out into the summer warm dark and never came back. The echoes paid no attention.

Douglas. Douglas. Douglas.

Douglas!

And as he sat on the floor, a coldness that was not ice cream and not winter, and not part of summer’s heat, went through Tom. He noticed Mom’s eyes sliding, blinking; the way she stood undecided and was nervous. All of these things.

She opened the screen door. Stepping out into the night, she walked down the steps and down the front sidewalk under the lilac bush. He listened to her moving feet.

She called again.

Silence.

She called twice more. Tom sat in the room. Any moment now, Douglas would answer from down the long long narrow street, “All right, Mom! All right, Mother! Hey!”

But he didn’t answer. And for two minutes Tom sat looking at the made-up bed, the silent radio, the silent phonograph, at the chandelier with the crystal bobbins gleaming quietly, at the rug with the scarlet and purple curlicues on it. He stubbed his toe on the bed purposely to see if it hurt. It did.

Whining, the screen door opened and Mother said, “Come on, Tom. We’ll take a walk.” “Where to?”

“Just down the block. Come on.”

He took her hand. Together they walked down St. James Street. Underfoot the concrete was still warm, and the crickets were sounding louder against the darkening dark. They reached a corner, turned, and walked toward the West Ravine.

Off somewhere a car floated by, flashing its lights in the distance. There was such a complete lack of life, light, and activity. Here and there, back off from where they were walking, faint squares of light glowed where people were still up. But most of the houses, darkened, were sleeping already, and there were a few lightless places where the occupants of a dwelling sat talking low night talk on their front porches. You heard a porch swing squeaking as you walked by.

“I wish your father was home,” said Mother. Her large hand squeezed around his small one. “Just wait’ll I get that boy. The Lonely One’s around again. Killing people. No one’s safe anymore. You never know when the Lonely One’ll turn up or where. So help me, when Doug gets home I’ll spank him within an inch of his life.”

Now they had walked another block and were standing by the holy black silhouette of the German Baptist Church at the corner of Chapel Street and Glen Rock. In back of the church, a hundred yards away, the ravine began. He could smell it. It had a dark-sewer, rotten-foliage, thick-green odor. It was a wide ravine that cut and twisted across town—a jungle by day, a place to let alone at night, Mother often declared.

He should have felt encouraged by the nearness of the German Baptist Church but he was not, because the building was not illumined, was cold and useless as a pile of ruins on the ravine edge.

He was only ten years old. He knew little of death, fear, or dread. Death was the waxen effigy in the coffin when he was six and Great-grandfather passed away, looking like a great fallen vulture in his casket, silent, withdrawn, no more to tell him how to be a good boy, no more to comment succinctly on politics. Death was his little sister one morning when he awoke at the age of seven, looked into her crib, and saw her staring up at him with a blind, blue, fixed and frozen stare until the men came with a small wicker basket to take her away. Death was when he stood by her high chair four weeks later and suddenly realized she’d never be in it again, laughing and crying and making him jealous of her because she was born. That was death. And Death was the Lonely One, unseen, walking and standing behind trees, waiting in the country to come in, once or twice a year, to this town, to these streets, to these many places where there was little light, to kill one, two, three women in the past three years. That was Death . . .