she shrieked, and listened. Only the faint ‘solo’ floated back, in a long-drawn, hollow tone. It could not be her name. Her name, called from a distance, sounded like ‘burn now, burn now.’ She stepped into the blueberry bushes and picked a few. They were still tinged with purple and sour. She squinted at the sky remembering the dusky brass color it had taken in the eclipse a month ago, though the sun had stayed visible and white. She had been disappointed, had hoped for a black sky with a flaming corona burning a hole in the darkness of midmorning. No such luck. The mournful call came again, and she stripped a handful of berries and leaves, chewed them as she climbed the hill back to the house and only spat them out at the fence.
She could see Jewell in the yard under the pin cherry tree, her white arms go up, hands raised to her mouth, calling, calling. When Mernelle came into her sight line she beckoned her to run.
‘The War is over, President Truman’s been on the radio and a baby is lost. Ronnie Nipple just come by for help. They want us to come help ’em look. It’s his sister Doris’s baby. And wouldn’t you know Mink and Dub is down talking to Claunch about selling off some more of the cows. It makes me mad I can’t drive. There sits the car and we have to walk right past it. Doris is visiting for a week, and this is the first day and look what happens. Seems they was all so tied up with listening to the radio tell about the Japs surrenderin’ and people goin’ hog-crazy wild, they’re dancin’ and screamin’, so that nobody saw the little boy, he’s just a toddler, little Rollo, you remember they brought him over one day last summer before he could walk, nobody saw him go outside. Ronnie, of course, blaming everybody, yelling at his sister, “Why didn’t you keep an eye on him.” They never did get along. So I told him we’d start walkin’ when I got you out of the blueberries and he said if he saw us on his way back from Davis’s he’d pick us up. Davis got a phone.’
‘Hooray, we don’t have to collect fat any more, or tin cans and used clothes to take to church. But they probably won’t need the milkweed pods any more, either.’
‘Guess so. And the gas rationin’ ought to ease off right away, they say.’
‘It didn’t sound like you were calling my name. It sounded like something else.’
‘I hollered “Rollo.” Thought if he’d got this far he could be somewhere in the bushes. But I guess not.’
‘Ma, it’s two miles.’ The strength of it took over the afternoon. Perhaps a baby had to be lost to end the War.
They walked through the August afternoon. The town truck had spread new gravel on the road a few days earlier and the loose stones and pebbles pressed painfully through their thin-soled shoes. Far away they could hear the hoots and blares of sirens, horns, bells, the booms of shotguns fired into the air from the farms along the ridge sounding like planks dropped on lumber piles.
‘One thing they said on the radio was that sewing machines and buckets and scissors will be in the stores pretty quick. Can’t be quick enough for me. I’m sick of using those scissors with the broken blade, twists everything you try to cut.’ Bees mumbled through the goldenrod growing along the fence lines. With a rush of feet and rapid panting the dog caught up with them, trailing his rope.
‘That miserable dog,’ said Jewell, ‘I thought I tied him up good.’ A sense of being too late hung in the dusty goldenrod. The steady grill of crickets burred in the gaping field. Grasses pointed like lances.
‘He can help look for the baby. Like a bloodhound. I’ll hold onto his rope.’ She thought about Rollo lost in the goldenrod, pushing at the stalks with weak baby hands, the air around him laced with bees, or deep in the gloomy woods the little face wet with hopeless tears, imagined the dog nosing along the leaf mold, then straining forward as he did when he picked up rabbit scent, pulling her after him, heroically finding the baby. She would carry him back to his mother through the snowstorm, the dog leaping up at her side to lick the baby’s feet, and she would say ‘Well, you’re lucky. Another hour and he’d be gone. The temperature’s going down to zero,’ and Doris crying gratefully and Mrs. Nipple rummaging in her nest egg money and handing Mernelle ten dollars, saying, ‘My grandson’s worth a million to me.’
‘I can’t believe we are walking on these rocks when there is a perfectly good car sitting in our yard and I can’t drive it. My lord it’s hot. You better learn to drive a car Mernelle soon’s you can so you don’t get stuck on a farm. I wanted to learn years ago but your father said no, still won’t have it, no, doesn’t like the idea of his wife drivin’ around. Besides, then we had that Ford that started with the crank, he said it was enough to break your arm to wind the starter up.’
The lane to the Nipples’ place was smooth and hard with a strip of thin grass up the middle. The maples threw a breathless shade. Old Toot Nipple had tapped the trees each March, but Ronnie didn’t make syrup and said he’d cut them all down for firewood one of these days. In the winter when the ice storms broke big limbs down into the lane he swore he’d do it the next good day. And never did.
‘Ma, say the counting thing, the way your grandfather used to count.’
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