What Dies in Summer (9 page)

A nurse woke me up, and I saw L.A. had now turned the other way in her chair. The nurse asked me how I felt and what my name was and where we were. In the background I could faintly hear
different people talking: a woman saying, “No, she was a good kid,” and another saying something about what happens when people turn away from God, and Dr. Colvin’s voice
somewhere saying, “Not on my watch.”

The nurse left and I went back to sleep.

Somebody shook my shoulder and softly said, “James, wake up.” I opened my eyes and saw Diana’s mom in her white uniform. For a second I thought she might be an angel.
“I’m sorry we have to keep bothering you,” she said. “We need to make sure you’re all right.”

“M’fine, Miz Chamfort.”

“I know you must be tired,” she said. “I heard you had a headache. How is it now?”

“Lot better,” I said.

“Dr. Colvin says your X-rays look fine.” She lifted my wrist and took my pulse while keeping an eye on her watch.

L.A. got up, stretched and walked over to look into my face with her eyes squinted half shut. Then she went back to her chair and worked herself into sleeping position again. She didn’t
open her eyes when Diana’s mom touched her arm on the way out of the room. I went back to sleep.

L
.
A
.
SAW
the old woman who gave me the stone before I did. We’d walked almost a mile along the
tracks to where they cut through the woods south of the river, our first major outing since I’d come back from the hospital. My head felt light and full at the same time and I knew I still
looked pretty bad, but everything was finally in clear focus. As we walked along the rails I was watching my sneakers and thinking about death when L.A. said, “Look.”

The woman was bending down near a wild plum thicket at the edge of the right-of-way ahead of us, digging out some kind of root with what looked like a sharp stick. She was almost a hundred yards
away but the instant I saw her she stood up straight and turned like a music-box dancer to face us, her eyes touching me all over like dusty moth wings. She looked like a tall rag pile with a straw
hat balanced on top.

“Come on,” said L.A. “Let’s go talk to her.”

The woman just watched and waited for us without moving, holding the stick in one hand and the root in the other. When we got closer I could see that there was only one button holding her old
gray sweater together in front. She was wearing a long dirty green dress with some sort of scarf cinching the waist, and black high-top tennis shoes that looked a lot like the ones Colossians wore.
A squirrel tail dangled from the string around her neck and a snakeskin bag hung at her hip. Her hair was braided into two thick black pigtails that reached almost to her waist.

“Hi,” said L.A. “Whatcha doin’?”

The woman looked hard at my face and then at L.A.’s. Her nose was crooked and seemed to be pointing to a spot on the ground to the left of my feet. She had a faint mustache and bright
little china-blue eyes that created their own light under the brim of her hat. Her face was sunburned and narrow and hot-looking. “I seek essences,” she said, her buzzing voice making
my face tingle. She held up the root in her long purple-veined hand. It was brown but otherwise it looked like a small bent carrot crusted with dirt.

L.A. bent forward for a closer look.

“It’s a root,” she pronounced.

“It’s tomorrow,” said the woman. “It’s thunder. It’s the mouse you didn’t see.”

Something made me look around. A mouse exactly the same color as the woman’s sweater ran away down the far rail, hustling busily along the hot shiny steel. I couldn’t remember ever
seeing a mouse out in the open like this, especially in broad daylight.

“What’s it for?” L.A. asked, still eyeing the root.

“It has uses. Too many to speak of.” The woman waved the question off. “What are your given names?”

“Lee Ann,” said L.A.

“James Beaudry,” I said. “What’s yours?”

“Rain. Marsh. Bone and Flower.” She fixed her eye on me, then touched the bruises on my face one at a time with the cool tip of her long knobby finger.

“He who did this is a troll,” she said. “But a turning will come.”

I looked at L.A., wondering what this was all about, but she only shrugged, apparently not concerned, though of course with her you never really knew. The woman put the root in her bag and gave
both of us another stare. A blue jay swooped down from the top branches of one of the plums and fluttered in the air in front of my face for a few seconds, seeming to look directly into my eyes,
then flapped back up into the tree and balanced on a branch, cocking its head to watch us.

“Two of you,” the woman said. “That’s rare. Where do you come from?”

“Harlandale Avenue,” I said.

“Where is that?”

I turned and pointed. “About a mile over there.”

“What creatures do you keep?”

“Jazzy,” said L.A. “She’s my dog.”

“The Lion Dog of emperors,” said the woman, nodding. “Do you eat grain?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“And flesh?”

“You mean meat?” I said.

“I do.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Do you worship?”

“I guess,” I said.

“No ma’am,” said L.A.

“You are familiar with the stars?” the woman said to me.

“Sirius and Procyon,” I said. “And Polaris, and the stars at the top and bottom of Orion, Rigel and Betelgeuse.”

She nodded, saying, “The Beast will kill again before he bows to you, James Beaudry Bonham, but there will be peace for the one you find and the one you betray.” She turned to look
at L.A. “And now you. The other knower.”

“I don’t know anything,” said L.A.

“Come with me.” The woman turned and led us along the edge of the plum trees to a grassy slope where there were a lot of different-sized white mushrooms growing in a big ragged
circle. It was like we were miles from civilization, except that from here you could see the big red Pegasus at the top of the Magnolia Building downtown, rotating slowly beyond the treetops. I was
thinking about the fact that we hadn’t told the woman our last names, or what kind of dog Jazzy was.

She showed us where to cross into the circle, then gathered twigs and dry leaves and stacked them in a small pile in the center of the ring. She did something with her hands over the pile and a
wisp of smoke came up through the twigs. In a few seconds orange flames licked up. Then she took something from her bag and sprinkled it on the snapping fire, and the smoke got thicker and whiter.
We sat cross-legged around the little blaze with our knees almost touching.

The woman took out a blue stone the size of a pecan, held it in the smoke for a few seconds, then put it in her mouth. “Give me your hands,” she said, sounding a little drunk with
the stone under her tongue. When we joined hands I thought I felt an electric shock through my arms. L.A. blinked a couple of times.

The woman said something in a language like nothing I’d ever heard before, and the blue jay flew down to land on the grass near us. It fluffed itself and looked at me with its bright black
eye. Closing her own eyes and lifting L.A.’s hand, the woman said, “This child bears what cannot be borne, and more there will be.” She took in a deep breath through her nose and
threw back her head. “Water and air, share her burden.” Then she looked into L.A.’s eyes. “When the time comes, you must strike true,” she said with a funny little
twisting flourish of her bony hand that for some reason seemed to mesmerize L.A. “The darkness will take back its own.”

She turned to me and said, “Close your eyes.”

I did, and saw the face of a bear. It opened its red mouth and said in a woman’s voice, “Dreamer, cast the stone.” Then the image disappeared with a small wet pop. I opened my
eyes.

“Well, that should do it,” said the woman, dusting her hands together. We all stood up, and immediately the ground began to tremble. A train whistle screamed and I looked down the
track, wondering what train could be coming at this time of day. The engineers didn’t sound their whistles on this part of the track either, because there was no crossing. But here the thing
came anyway, the big diesel engines rumbling and the whistle ripping the air.

I looked back toward L.A. and saw that the woman wasn’t with us anymore. Somehow she was fifty yards away on the other side of the tracks, gazing at us with a sad expression. Then the
train roared past, a dark metal storm crashing through the sunny space that separated us, racketing the earth with its end-of-the-world noise and gusting hot diesel smoke against our faces.

But loud as it was, the train wasn’t very long for a Texas freight. The last car passed, and when it was gone the woman was nowhere in sight. Once again I looked at L.A., who was watching
the train disappear around the bend, and then noticed there was something in my hand. I opened it and saw the blue stone, still wet, shining like an eye from another world. Above our heads the blue
jay flapped away across the right-of-way and into the woods beyond the tracks.

We never saw the woman again, but I kept the stone. Because I knew it was the center of something, full of meaning and warm with power.

BY NOW
I was convinced the apparition that stood at my bedside as I slept was trying to communicate something to me. Night after night I would dream
that I had woken up half a second too late, her words only a fading echo, but when I tried to ask her what she wanted I had no voice. Sometimes I had the dream several times in one night, and I
racked my brain for days trying to figure out a way to rig Gram’s Kodak to take a picture of the figure. I thought of strings and pulleys and weights but never solved the problem of how to
trigger the shutter at the right time. Once I almost asked L.A. to watch me sleep, then came to my senses just in time to bite my tongue. All she or Gram needed at this point was to find out the
only man in the house had lost his mind. I decided to keep working on the problem on my own and keep my mouth shut.

A lot of the time Gram seemed tired and sad, but she gave no sign whether it was the mystery of L.A. she was worried about, or something else. And tired or not, she had her routines. For her
this was the time of vegetables, and at least twice a week now she drove all the way down to Farmers Market at Central to walk along the rows of tables piled high with bright summer produce, coming
home hours later with paper bags full of cucumbers, fat vine-ripened tomatoes, pole beans and purple-hulls, new potatoes and all sizes and colors of peppers she’d haggled away from the truck
farmers and their wives down there. She was an absolute fiend for the fruits of the earth, carrying them into the kitchen like carnival prizes.

“No more than our just recompense for this damnable heat,” she’d say as L.A. pawed through the bags looking for the crook-neck squash she loved. Which was always there.

What little money Gramp had left her was pretty much gone, so Gram looked for deals everywhere. She’d stop every Friday at Canaday’s to buy what she called jit-burger for meat loaf
when it was marked way down on the last day they could sell it. But it absolutely had to be fresh. Jit was short for “just in time,” but the meat cutter knew her standards and never
tried to put any blinky meat over on her. He’d set two pounds of ground chuck—which I was pretty sure he sometimes snuck from that day’s tray—aside for her on Friday morning
and when she came in he’d dip his scarce mustaches and say, “
Buenas tardes, señora, tengo su carne zheet
,” and hold it up for her to sniff.

He knew I was trying to learn Spanish and if I was along with Gram that day he’d wink solemnly at me and say something like, “
Que tal, compa
?” or “
Donde esta su
caballo, hombre
?”

“
Bien,”
I’d answer. Or “
En el establo, capitán, y tuyo
?”

If the meat was okay, which it always was, Gram would say
, “Mil gracias, Serafino
,” and watch as he wrapped it.

“
De nada, señora
.”

She found clothes for herself and sometimes L.A. and me at secondhand stores, and had bought some old books for me at a flea market. At the time it didn’t occur to me that it was probably
exactly what she intended, but lately I’d been getting lost for hours at a time in these stories about show collies and their owners, who were called only the Master and the Mistress. The
dogs, who had names like Wolf and Lad, thought straighter and behaved better than most people I knew, including me, but I liked the stories anyway and would sometimes read through the whole day if
L.A. left me alone.