millions, waving yellow; stern hickory, with hard nuts knee-deep in their shade; sweetgums that are a constant orange and red, frostbit colors in the hottest of July; silver maples, green with white lace undersides.
When a strong wind comes (and it will, as you pass) the maples rain down wingseeds and the goldenrods toss and the hickories bow down tattered and the sweetgums rattle like fire.
Wait. When it calms you’ll smell a thing like freshening rain, a scent from the northern counties. And in the quiet, one shrill cricket note will leap up. Go off through the trees, because the path ends there.
You’ll come upon him sitting in a wooden swing, his old head seen from the side frizzed white with hair and beard, leaning forward reading a book in his lap. By day his hair will be shot through with sun, by night with moon, or, lacking that, a lamp of kerosene beside him on an arm-rest green with moss. The sky is clear. No one has ever been to him in rain. Go up and tell him who you are. He will know why you’ve come.
From his place in the swing, he watches a young man stand at the edge of the darkening grove. He holds up a hand to greet him. All is tarnished by the sun, which is setting.
The stranger comes up and nods and says his name.
“I’m Emmett Ardaman,” returns the man in the swing. “Good to know you.” He motions for the man to sit. When he does, the swing creaks and a flock of black sparrows bursts up from a clump of trees as if catapulted. They twitter in the air chaotically and then return.
Emmett sees the young man now from arm’s reach, reddened in the light, and notes his face: skin drawn up too tight on his wide bones, awkward wide shoulders and big knuckles, but thin as a wisp below. He is sand-colored, with cornsilken hair, more than twenty and less than thirty years of age. His eyes are brown and certain and wounded.
Emmett marks his page with a sweetgum leaf and lays the book aside. “How did she come to leave?” he asks, and listens.
The young man tells of nights spent on her porch in summer, of them talking until the east turned rose-pink and the roosters flapped and called from all the hills. He tells of afternoons by creeksides, lying on her old grandmother’s quilt and watching birds high in limbs sing against the sun, and of all she said then, and finishes:
“She’s in a town, now. Unionville, it is. She said it was the buildings and the racket and the whirl that drawed her. She said it had been in her as far back as she could know, always sung in her like a song, to go that way. She said she had to try it for a while.”
Emmett twirls a leaf between two fingers, and then holds it to his mouth. He bites the stem with his tiny corner teeth and the mint smell carries through the warm air. Leaning forward to an apple crate beyond his feet, he pulls the oilcloth cover off and takes out a pencil and paper.
“And what is it like, that she’s gone?”
The young man grates his thumb across the planks they sit on. “It’s hard to say.”
“A losing? Losing something? Losing what?” Emmett lays the paper and pencil in his lap while he turns to light the lamp. The last glow of the sun has gone. When the wick takes fire he puts the globe back on and twists the copper-colored wick key to make a taller flame. Its brightness makes a circle in the dark. He picks up the pencil again:
“Like a puff blossom? Like a boy that picks one all feathery and dried out when summer’s gone, and he doesn’t breathe, so as not to blow the seeds away? And he holds it high, way up in the sun, just to see what all it is, inside, the way it’s made . . . and when he does, the wind steals it, scatters the seeds away and he’s left with a stub of a weed while they go spinning off in the breeze like dancers, white and frail like that? And he hasn’t blown his breath, not breathed one time, but still the thing is gone he took such care with? Is it like that?”
The young man sits silent, with his face upraised. He stares above the head of Emmett Ardaman, past the roof of the dark cabin beyond him, as if to watch a dandelion puff be picked bare in the wind and go sweeping to all the sun-bright corners of far countries. But there is no breeze to be felt and nothing moves in the darkness but droning gnats. Suddenly he smiles, and while he’s saying to Emmett, “It’s like that, yes . . .” he sees the man’s hand scratching rows of penciled words onto the paper in his lap.
“And what is it like, when it comes down?” he asks the woman.
The ground is still wet from a night’s rain, but the sky is clear. It is a thin, piping blue, taking more richness from the sun by the minute as it edges up a gold ball. The air is as clean as the woman’s face, as lucent as an apple skin.
Her hands convulse in her lap, the knuckles meshed as if to draw pain, while she considers. She rasps out, “Oh, sweet Je-e-e-sus,” in a hoarse broken voice and then sits with her head down, crying. Her hands break loose from each other’s grasp and flutter up by their own power to tremble in the air above her. Emmett pencils down some words and waits to ask.
She is fat and beyond fifty years of age. Her graying red hair is piled like a hive atop her head, caught with hairpins. Her face is unblemished and tight as a child’s, stretched full from inside. She wears a dress made from a single piece of cloth, no frills or tucks, plain brown fabric like a tent is made of. She wears no jewelry, and has come direct from a night-long healing and blessing time where she lost her voice from shouting praise.
“A bird? A growing thing? A vine? What is it like?”
“It’s wonderful,” she whispers, and then croaks out loud in the quiet air, “Ah-h-h-h, glory!” Her sweat has stained the dress dark in butterfly patches, beneath the arms and deep between her breasts.
Emmett wets the pencil on his tongue. “Like a field that’s just clay, hardened by the sun and worn down by things tromping across it, with crops about to die for lack of rain? And then a shower looms up, first just a hint of a cool wind, and the sun paling behind a little wisp of cloud, and then of a sudden it’s onto the field booming like a war, black humps of clouds, and the first drops scatter the dry dust knee-high like a fog? And then it pours down and drenches all the dryness, runs down in every crevice and snakehole, and quenches it until it can’t hold any more, then runs off brown and slaked and bubbling in little streams? And the plants that were wilted down rise up again, all green and wet? Is it like that, when it comes down in you?”
She nods in great sweeping strokes, her wide chin pounding her breasts. Her hands still flap like wings above her head, and her eyes are run over with tears so that she does not notice his pencil as it scratches words.
He is a glittering blur to her.
“Like busting up out of a jail, a place with iron bars? Like having wings for a summer just to glide, caught up in the waves of sun, floating like a dragonfly above a road that always winds into another road, and never ends? Is it like that?”
The hobo looks in Emmett’s eyes through smoke, his own eyes squenched to slits, red and watery against the thin curl of smoke from his cigarette. The noon sun pushes down warm upon their heads.
He wears a suit of feather-thin brown tweed, worn to the color of tree bark by days spent in sun and rain. He slides his palms across his thighs and studies what Emmett has said to see if it is true. The cloth he rubs has, in those spots, the sheen of caked soil fallen from a plow blade. His shoes are so festered and yellow, dust-caked, that they might be just dust and no leather at all, except for the eyes cut into them where corns poke through. He nods, and then speaks:
“And . . . and . . . and
