“Good-by?” She looked as if she’d never heard the word before.
His voice was unsteady. “Of course, if you absolutely insist I stay, Mildred—”
“No!” She braced herself and blew her nose. “You feel what you feel; I can’t fight that!”
“You sure?” he said.
“You’re the one that’s sure, Willie,” she said. “Get on along now. Take your heavy coat; the nights are cold.”
“But—” he said.
She ran and brought his coat and kissed his cheek and drew back quickly before he could enclose her in his bear hug. He stood there working his mouth, gazing at the big armchair by the fire. She threw open the front door. “You got food?”
“I won’t need …” He paused. “I got a boiled ham sandwich and some pickles in my case. Just one. That’s all I figured I’d …”
And then he was out the door and down the steps and along the path toward the woods. He turned and was going to say something but thought better of it, waved, and went on.
“Now, Will,” she called. “Don’t overdo. Don’t make too much distance the first hour! You get tired, sit down! You get hungry, eat! And …”
But here she had to stop and turn away and get out her handkerchief.
A moment later she looked up the path and it looked as though nobody has passed there in the last ten thousand years. It was so empty she had to go in and shut the door.
Nighttime, nine o’clock, nine-fifteen, stars out, moon round, house lights strawberry-colored through the curtains, the chimney blowing long comet tails of fireworks, sighing warm. Down the chimney, sounds of pots and pans and cutlery, fire on the hearth, like a great orange cat. In the kitchen, the big iron cookstove full of jumping flames, pans boiling, bubbling, frying, vapors and steams in the air. From time to time the old woman turned and her eyes listened and her mouth listened, wide, to the world outside this house, this fire, and this food.
Nine-thirty and, from a great distance away from the house, a solid whacking, chunking sound.
The old woman straightened up and laid down a spoon.
Outside, the dull solid blows came again and again in the moonlight. The sound went on for three or four minutes, during which she hardly moved except to tighten her mouth or her fists with each solid chunking blow. When the sounds stopped, she threw herself at the stove, the table, stirring, pouring, lifting, carrying, setting down.
She finished just as new sounds came from the dark land outside the windows. Footsteps came slowly up the path, heavy shoes weighed the front porch.
She went to the door and waited for a knock.
None came.
She waited a full minute.
Outside on the porch a great bulk stirred and shifted from side to side uneasily.
Finally she sighed and called sharply at the door. “Will, is that you breathing out there?”
No answer. Only a kind of sheepish silence behind the door.
She snatched the door wide.
The old man stood there, an incredible stack of cordwood in his arm. His voice came from behind the stack.
“Saw smoke in the chimney; figured you might need wood,” he said.
She stood aside. He came in and placed the wood carefully by the hearth, not looking at her.
She looked out on the porch and picked up the suitcase and brought it in and shut the door.
She saw him sitting at the dinner table.
She stirred the soup on the stove to a great boiling whirl.
“Roast beef in the oven?” he asked quietly.
She opened the oven door. The steam breathed across the room to wrap him up. He closed his eyes, seated there, bathed.
“What’s that other smell, the burning?” he asked a moment later.
She waited, back turned, and finally said, “National Geographics.”
He nodded slowly, saying nothing.
Then the food was on the table, warm and tremulous, and there was a moment of silence after she sat down and looked at him. She shook her head. She looked at him. Then she shook her head again silently.
“Do you want to ask the blessing?” she said.
“You,” he said.
They sat there in the warm room by the bright fire and bowed their heads and closed their eyes. She smiled and began.
“Thank you, Lord …”
All Summer in a Day
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Now?”
“Soon.”
“Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?”
“Look, look; see for yourself!”
The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.
It rained.
It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.
“It’s stopping, it’s stopping!”
“Yes, yes!”
Margot stood apart from them, from these children who could never remember a time when there wasn’t rain and rain and rain. They were all nine years old, and if there had been a day, seven years ago, when the sun came out for an hour and showed its face to the stunned world, they could not recall. Sometimes, at night, she heard them stir, in remembrance, and she knew they were dreaming and remembering gold or a yellow crayon or a coin large enough to buy the world with. She knew they thought they remembered a warmness, like a blushing in the face, in the body, in the arms and legs and trembling hands. But then they always awoke to the tatting drum, the endless shaking down of clear bead necklaces upon the roof, the walk, the gardens, the forests, and their dreams were gone.
All day yesterday they had read in class about the sun. About how like a lemon it was, and how hot. And they had written small stories or essays or poems about it:
I think the sun is a flower,
That blooms for just one hour.
That was Margot’s poem, read in a quiet voice in the still classroom while the rain was falling outside.
“Aw, you didn’t write that!” protested one of the boys.
“I did,” said Margot. “I did.”
“William!” said the teacher.
But that was yesterday. Now the rain was slackening, and the children were crushed in the great thick windows.
“Where’s teacher?”
“She’ll be back.”
“She’d better hurry, we’ll miss it!”
They turned on themselves, like a feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes.
Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.
“What’re you looking at?” said William.
Margot said nothing.
“Speak when you’re spoken to.” He gave her a shove. But she did not move; rather she let herself be moved only by him and nothing else.
They edged away from her, they would not look at her. She felt them go away. And this was because she would play no games with them in the echoing tunnels of the underground city. If they tagged her and ran, she stood blinking after them and did not follow. When the class sang songs about happiness and life and games her lips barely moved. Only when they sang about the sun and the summer did her lips move as she watched the drenched windows.