Conrad Aiken - Great Circle

When I got back, with the spade and bucket, she was crying. She was wiping her eyes with her thin dress, and I could see her white drawers. They weren’t very clean.

— What are you crying about. Do you want to go home.

— No.

— Well, then, what are you crying for.

— I won’t tell you.

— All right, then you can go home. I don’t want any crybabies with me.

— It was your mother.

— What do you mean.

— Your mother, she scolded me. She came out of that little house, and she was angry with me when she saw me. She said I ought not to be here alone, and I said you were coming back, and then she went away—

I put down the spade and bucket on the sand and went to the back of the hunting box, up above it, on the bluff, and looked down at it. Should I go and look into it, to see if there were any bottles there. No, it was like spying, or sneaking. The little door at the back was half open, and there wasn’t any sound, probably there was no one inside, but I didn’t like to go and look. Suppose Uncle David should be there, reading a book. Or drinking out of a bottle. And pretending that he didn’t know Molly and I were right there on the beach.

I gave Molly the bucket to carry, and I took the spade, and we went down through the beds of eelgrass to the mud flats, and began walking to and fro, pressing the mud with our feet, to see where the clams squirted. I began digging, and got some clams, but we put back all the small ones.

— Which way did my mother go.

— She went straight across to the pine woods.

— And there wasn’t anybody with her, Molly.

— No.

— And you’re sure she came out of the hunting-box?

— Yes.

— You saw her come out of it?

— Yes.

— and it wasn’t that I hadn’t tried to do my Latin lesson, either, because I had sat in my room all evening, with the kerosene lamp on the table beside the wildflower book, turning the flame down to stop it from smoking, and the mosquitoes humming on the hot window screens as loudly as if they were in the room, and Susan thrashing about in her bed in the room across the hall, and talking in her sleep, or groaning — how could I remember. Susan, will you keep still, please. Well, how can I get to sleep with this light on my ceiling. You’ve done it before, you can do it again, it isn’t my fault if they didn’t build the partitions up to the ceiling, is it? Well, anyway. Well, anyway! And how can I study Latin if you make all that noise. Who asked you to, I don’t care about your Latin, I want to go to sleep. Well, for goodness sake, go to sleep and let me learn this verb.

— I’m afraid you’ve got to do better than this, Andy. You’ve got only two weeks now till I have to examine you, you know. I think you’d better begin reviewing. And I think we’d better not do any more sailing.

He told me to tell Uncle Tom, and to ask Uncle Tom to hear me recite the verbs and nouns. I had a chocolate milk shake at the drugstore, and ate the thick brown froth off the top with a spoon. On the way home, I watched the tide spilling out over the dam, and afterwards went into the long bowling alley, at the edge of the marsh, to watch the livery stable men bowling. Smiley let me throw one of his balls, but I missed, and it went along the groove at the side. I didn’t want to go back to Powder Point at all. I wanted to go to Boston. I walked slowly along the Point Road until I got to the Soules’, and went down to the dyke, where Father had shown me how to whip-throw with apples. Then I walked all the way along the beach until I got to the Tupper landing stage, with the canoe on it. It was wet, and the paddles beside it were wet, somebody had been out in it. Perhaps Gwendolyn. I had never been out in a canoe. Why did they never ask me to go. Was it because I had been so foolish about Gwendolyn. I took up one of the paddles, and found it was much lighter than my oars. That must be because a canoe was so much lighter than a dory. I put it down again and looked quickly up towards the Tupper lawn to see if any one was there, but there was nobody, and I climbed up the grass slope past the imitation windmill and pushed through the oak bushes on the other side of the road and went down to the little pond below the Wardman house. Had the Tuppers been up into the marshes towards Brant Rock, along my favorite channel. And at low tide, too. Where Uncle David was always taking Mother. In that deep, steep channel, with the sides of stiff, red mud and the marsh reeds growing out of it. Where the tide was so swift that you could hardly row against it. Was that where they had been. Did they go up all the way, and find that last hidden turning, the narrow one that led almost up to the Long Beach. Perhaps a canoe could go even farther up, at high tide, than a dory. And much farther than a motorboat, of course.

I sat down under the cherry tree by Plymouth Rock Junior, and felt tired. I wanted to lie down. I wanted to stretch out as if I were in bed. I put the Latin grammar on the grass, and ground my forehead against it, as if it were a pillow, pressing my feet against the base of the rock. I wanted to be asleep. I wanted to be dead. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I closed my eyes and counted to five hundred by fives, and then said first the worst — second the same — third the best of all the game — the rhyme Mother always said for Porper when she blew out the light. One — two — three! Out. Goes. She. But I couldn’t get to sleep, so I opened my eyes, and watched the cherry leaves moving against the sky, and the clusters of wild cherries, which would soon be ripe. And I remembered the time when Susan and I had eaten too many, and Father made us drink a cup of mustard and water and we were both sick.

— the day of the storm, when the thunder went and came all day, moving in a great circle round the shore of the bay, crossing darkly over Kingston and Plymouth, from behind the Standish Monument, but never getting as far as South Duxbury, and then moving out to sea over the black hills at Manomet, the lightning stabbing down vividly from the belly of black cloud into the mass of white rain that hung over Plymouth and the sea, the thunder almost continuous. Before lunch, the wind rose to a steady scream, but on Powder Point the sun still shone brightly, and we tried to have archery practice. The wind blew the arrows every which way, blew our words back into our mouths, and Porper was always being flung down on the grass, and saying that he couldn’t breathe.

— Porper, you silly, stand here behind the corner of the porch, it’s nice and quiet here, you can watch the lightning just as well from here.

— What lightning.

— You see, the lightning over there, over Plymouth. And just listen to the thunder it sounds like lions.

— Where are the lions.

— At the zoo, don’t you remember?

— I want to see the lions.

Uncle David went in and got the box kite with the two enormous reels of twine, and Uncle Tom said we ought not to try it, the wind was too strong, and it might break away, but Uncle David laughed and said no, it was all right, he would hang on to it, and hitch it to the cart and give Porper a ride across the tennis court, or even down to the end of the Point. The wind almost blew it out of his hands when he took it out to the tennis court, and then he lifted it up over his head, staggering, and let go of it, while Uncle Tom ran past the porch with the cord, and the red kite gave a swoop to one side and then began to go up so fast that Uncle Tom just let the cord whizz through his glove, while the reel danced up and down on the ground at his feet.

— Andy. Susan. Go and get the cart. Where is the cart.

I pulled the cart from under the porch, but as soon as we tied the cord to the handle and tried to let it go the kite dragged it over on its side and yanked it in leaps and bounds over the tennis court, so that we had to sit on it and stop it. Uncle Tom and Uncle David both had hold of the cord, but it kept on pulling them step by step towards the Walker house, while Mother untied the cart again. It was hard to hear what people were saying in the wind.