gasps, eyes streaming.
‘Please, please tell her to come back,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt anyone any more.’
The mother shouted through the clamor of bells. ‘Go downstairs and wait for her there!’
‘I can’t hear you,’ he cried, louder. ‘My head.’ He held his hands to his ears. ‘So loud. So loud I can’t stand it.’ He rocked on his heels. ‘If only I knew where Cecy was—’
Quite simply, he drew out a folded pocket knife, unfolded it. ‘I can’t go on—’ he said. And before the mother moved he fell to the floor, the knife in his heart, blood running from his lips, his shoes looking senseless one atop the other, one eye shut, the other wide and white.
The mother bent down to him. ‘Dead,’ she whispered, finally. ‘So,’ she murmured, unbelievingly, rising up, stepping away from the blood. ‘Sohe’s dead at last.’ She glanced around, fearfully, cried aloud.
‘Cecy, Cecy, come home, child, I need you!’
A silence, while sunlight faded from the room.
‘Cecy, come home, child!’
The dead man’s lips moved. A high clear voice sprang from them.
‘Here!I’ve been here for days! I’m the fear he had in him: and he never guessed. Tell Father what I’ve done. Maybe he’ll think me worthy now …’
The dead man’s lips stopped. A moment later, Cecy’s body on the bed stiffened like a stocking with a leg thrust suddenly into it, inhabited again.
‘Supper, Mother,’ said Cecy, rising from bed.
They cut the sky down to my size and threw it over the Michigan lake, put some kids yelling on yellow sand with bouncing balls, a gull or two, a criticizing parent, and me breaking out of a wet wave, finding this world very bleary and moist.
I ran up on the beach.
Mama swabbed me with a furry towel. ‘Stand there and dry,’ she said.
I stood there, watching the sun take away the water beads on my arms. I replaced them with goose-pimples.
‘My, there’s a wind,’ said Mama. ‘Put on your sweater.’
‘Wait’ll I watch my goose-bumps,’ I said.
‘Harold,’ said Mama.
I put the sweater on and watched the waves come up and fall down on the beach. But not clumsily. On purpose, with a green sort of elegance. Even a drunken man could not collapse with such elegance as those waves.
It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason. The beach was so long and lonely with only about six people on it. The kids quit bouncing the ball because somehow the wind made them sad, too, whistling the way it did, and the kids sat down and felt autumn come along the endless shore.
All of the hot-dog stands were boarded up with strips of golden planking, sealing in all the mustard, onion, meat odors of the long, joyful summer. It was like nailing summer into a series of coffins. One by one the places slammed their covers down, padlocked their doors, and the wind came and touched the sand, blowing away all of the million footprints of July and August. It got so that now, in September, there was nothing but the mark of my rubber tennis shoes and Donald and Delaus Schabold’s feet, down by the water curve.
Sand blew up in curtains on the sidewalks, and the merry-go-round was hidden with canvas, all of the horses frozen in mid-air on their brass poles, showing teeth, galloping on. With only the wind for music, slipping through canvas.
I stood there. Everyone else was in school. I was not. Tomorrow I would be on my way west across the United States on a train. Mom and I had come to the beach for one last brief moment.
There was something about the loneliness that made me want to get away by myself. ‘Mama. I want to run up the beach a ways,’ I said.
‘All right, but hurry back, and don’t go near the water.’
I ran. Sand spun under me and the wind lifted me. You know how it is, running, arms out so you feel veils from your fingers, caused by wind. Like wings.
Mama withdrew into the distance, sitting. Soon she was only a brown speck and I was all alone.
Being alone is a newness to a twelve-year-old child. He is so used to people about. The only way he can be alone is in his mind. There are so many real people around, telling children what and how to do, that a boy has to run off down a beach, even if it’s only in his head, to get by himself in his own world, with his own miniature values.
So now I was really alone.
I went down to the water and let it cool up to my stomach. Always before, with the crowd, I hadn’t dared to look, to come to this spot and search around in the water and call a certain name. But now—
Water is like a magician. Sawing you in half. It feels as if you were cut half in two, part of you, the lower part, sugar, melting, dissolving away. Cool water, and once in a while a very elegantly stumbling wave that falls with a flourish of lace.
I called her name. A dozen times I called it.
‘Tally! Tally! Oh, Tally!’
Funny, but you really expect answers to your calling when you are young. You feel that whatever you may think can be real. And sometimes maybe that is not so wrong.
I thought of Tally, swimming out into the water last May, with her pigtails trailing, blonde. She went laughing, and the sun was on her small twelve-year-old shoulders. I thought of the water settling quiet, of the lifeguard leaping into it, of Tally’s mother screaming, and of how Tally never came out …
The life-guard tried to persuade her to come out, but she did not. He came back with only bits of water-weed in his big-knuckled fingers, and Tally was gone. She would not sit across from me at school any longer, or chase indoor balls on the brick streets on summer nights. She had gone too far out, and the lake would not let her return.
And now in the lonely autumn when the sky was huge and the water was huge and the beach was so very long. I had come down for the last time, alone.
I called her name over and over. Tally, oh, Tally!
The wind blew so very softly over my ears, the way wind blows over the mouths of sea-shells to set them whispering. The water rose, embraced my chest, then my knees, up and down, one way and another, sucking under my heels.
‘Tally! Come back, Tally!’
I was only twelve. But I know how much I loved her. It was that love that comes before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that is no more bad than wind and sea and sand lying side by side forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the humming quiet days of droning education at the school. All the long autumn days of the years past when I had carried her books
