forty-five Tom Mixes, thirty-nine Hoot Gibsons, one hundred and ninety-two single and separate Felix-the-Cat cartoons, ten Douglas Fairbankses, eight repeats of Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera, four Milton Sillses, and one Adolph Menjou thing about love where I spent ninety hours in the theater toilet waiting for the mush to be over so I could see The Cat and the Canary or The Bat, where everybody held onto everybody else and screamed for two hours without letting go. During that time I figure four hundred lollipops, three hundred Tootsie Rolls, seven hundred ice-cream cones …’
Tom rolled quietly along his way for another five minutes and then Dad said, ‘How many berries you picked so far, Tom?’
‘Two hundred fifty-six on the nose!’ said Tom instantly.
Dad laughed and lunch was over and they moved again into the shadows to find fox grapes and the tiny wild strawberries, bent down, all three of them, hands coming and going, the pails getting heavy, and Douglas holding his breath, thinking, Yes, yes, it’s near again! Breathing on my neck, almost! Don’t look! Work. Just pick, fill up the pail. If you look you’ll scare it off. Don’t lose it this time! But how do you bring it around here where you can see it, stare it right in the eye? How? How?
‘Got a snowflake in a matchbox,’ said Tom, smiling at the wine-glove on his hand.
Shut up! Douglas wanted to yell. But no, the yell would scare the echoes, and run the Thing away!
And, wait … the more Tom talked, the closer the great Thing came, it wasn’t scared of Tom, Tom drew it with his breath, Tom was part of it!
‘Last February,’ said Tom, and chuckled. ‘Held a matchbox up in a snowstorm, let one old snowflake fall in, shut it up, ran inside the house, stashed it in the icebox!’
Close, very close. Douglas stared at Tom’s flickering lips. He wanted to jump around, for he felt a vast tidal wave lift up behind the forest. In an instant it would smash down, crush them forever …
‘Yes, sir,’ mused Tom, picking grapes, ‘I’m the only guy in all Illinois who’s got a snowflake in summer. Precious as diamonds, by gosh. Tomorrow I’ll open it. Doug, you can look, too …’
Any other day Douglas might have snorted, struck out, denied it all. But now, with the great Thing rushing near, falling down in the clear air above him, he could only nod, eyes shut.
Tom, puzzled, stopped picking berries and turned to stare over at his brother.
Douglas, hunched over, was an ideal target. Tom leaped, yelling, landed. They fell, thrashed, and rolled.
No! Douglas squeezed his mind shut. No! But suddenly … Yes, it’s all right! Yes! The tangle, the contact of bodies, the falling tumble had not scared off the tidal sea that crashed now, flooding and washing them along the shore of grass deep through the forest. Knuckles struck his mouth. He tasted rusty warm blood, grabbed Tom hard, held him tight, and so in silence they lay, hearts churning, nostrils hissing. And at last, slowly, afraid he would find nothing, Douglas opened one eye.
And everything, absolutely everything, was there.
The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which had also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.
And he knew what it was that had leaped upon him to stay and would not run away now.
I’m alive, he thought.
His fingers trembled, bright with blood, like the bits of a strange flag now found and before unseen, and him wondering what country and what allegiance he owed to it. Holding Tom, but not knowing him there, he touched his free hand to that blood as if it could be peeled away, held up, turned over. Then he let go of Tom and lay on his back with his hand up in the sky and he was a head from which his eyes peered like sentinels through the portcullis of a strange castle out along a bridge, his arm, to those fingers where the bright pennant of blood quivered in the light.
‘You all right, Doug?’ asked Tom.
His voice was at the bottom of a green moss well somewhere underwater, secret, removed.
The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and, far away, below, his toes creaking in his shoes. The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were sun and fiery spots of sky strewn through the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing his wrists, the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened.
I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!
He yelled it loud but silent, a dozen times! Think of it, think of it! Twelve years old and only now! Now discovering this rare timepiece, this clock gold-bright and guaranteed to run threescore and ten, left under a tree and found while wrestling.
‘Doug, you okay?’
Douglas yelled, grabbed Tom, and rolled.
‘Doug, you’re crazy!’
‘Crazy!’
They spilled downhill, the sun in their mouths, in their eyes like shattered lemon glass, gasping like trout thrown out on a bank, laughing till they cried.
‘Doug, you’re not mad?’
‘No, no, no, no, no!’
Douglas, eyes shut, saw spotted leopards pad in the dark.
‘Tom!’ Then quieter. ‘Tom … does everyone in the world … know he’s alive?’
‘Sure. Heck, yes!’
The leopards trotted soundlessly off through darker lands where eyeballs could not turn to follow.
‘I hope they do,’ whispered Douglas. ‘Oh, I sure hope they know.’
Douglas opened his eyes. Dad was standing high above him there in the green-leaved sky, laughing, hands on hips. Their eyes met. Douglas quickened. Dad knows, he thought. It was all planned. He brought us here on purpose, so this could happen to me! He’s in on it, he knows it all. And now he knows that I know.
A hand came down and seized him through the air. Swayed on his feet with Tom and Dad, still bruised and rumpled, puzzled and awed, Douglas held his strange-boned elbows tenderly and licked the fine cut lip with satisfaction. Then he looked at Dad and Tom.
‘I’ll carry all the pails,’ he said. ‘This once, let me haul everything.’
They handed over the pails with quizzical smiles.
He stood swaying slightly, the forest collected, full-weighted and heavy with syrup, clenched hard in his downslung hands. I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn’t forget, I’m alive, I know I’m alive, I mustn’t forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that.
The bees followed and the smell of fox grapes and yellow summer followed as he walked heavy-laden and half drunk, his fingers wondrously callused, arms numb, feet stumbling so his father caught his shoulder.
‘No,’ mumbled Douglas, ‘I’m all right. I’m fine …’
It took half an hour for the sense of the grass, the roots, the stones, the bark of the mossy log, to fade from where they had patterned his arms and legs and back. While he pondered this, let it slip, slide, dissolve away, his brother and his quiet father followed behind, allowing him to pathfind the forest alone out toward that incredible highway which would take them back to the town …
The town, then, later in the day.
And yet another harvest.
Grandfather stood on the wide