Lightning Bug Read online

  “I see. Latha Bourne…she don’t have any children?”

  “She aint married.”

  “I see. Well, tell me, son, where is she at, right now?”

  “I thought she’d just gone to pee but I reckon she must be making hockey too.”

  He laughs and says, “My, you sure talk brash, for such a little spadger.” Then he seems to get rather nervous, and says, “I reckon she’ll be coming back directly, then?”

  “I reckon.”

  “Well, uh, tell me, is there anybody living on the Dill Place?”

  “The Dill place?”

  “Yes, it’s up beyond your Uncle Murrison’s, first house on the right up beyond…. Or it used to be, anyway.”

  “You mean where that old blacksmith shop is?”

  “That’s the one. But it wasn’t actually a blacksmith shop, but a wagonmaking shop.”

  “That house has been empty since that blacksmith died, twenty year or more ago.”

  “He wasn’t a blacksmith. He was a wagonmaker. Well, I guess I’ll just mosey up there and take a look around. See you later, sonny.”

  Quickly he walks away. Very quickly.

  Scarcely are he and his flashlight out of sight when Latha returns from her errand of elimination. When she has seated herself again, I tell her,

  “There was a man here.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me his name.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Nothing. Just wanted to know who lived here now. I told him. Then he wanted to know if anybody was livin on the Dill Place, so when I said no he headed off in that direction, said he was just gonna look around up there.”

  Latha stares in that direction. I detect a quickening of her breathing. “What did he look like?” she asks. I have never heard her voice quaver quite like that before.

  “I couldn’t much tell. He was on the other side of a flashlight. Sort of tall, I guess. Seemed like a nice man.”

  She is silent a long time.

  Finally I have to remind her, you were going to tell me a story.

  She comes back from her trance, and smiles, and reaches over and rumples my hair. “Sure, Dawny,” she says. Then she asks, “Would you care to hear a strange tale about a dumb supper? Have you ever heard tell of a ‘dumb supper’?”

  “Caint say that I have.”

  “Well,” she says. “Once upon a time, in a month of May long time ago, a bunch of girls who were just about ready to graduate from high school decided to set themselves a dumb supper, which is an old, old custom that must go all the way back to the days of yore in England.

  “The idea [she, like all others, pronounces this “idee” ] is that you take and set out a place at the dinner table, just like you were having company, except you don’t set out any food. You put out the plate and the knife and fork and spoon, and the napkin. Then you turn the lamp down very low. A candle is even better. Then you wait. You stand behind the chair and wait to see what happens.”

  As in all her tellings of ghost tales, she says these words very somberly, and makes a dramatic pause, and I feel the thrilling chill that makes her ghost stories so much fun.

  “Well,” she goes on, “there were six of these girls, and they set out six places, and then the six of them stood behind the six chairs and waited, with only one candle to light the room. They waited and they waited. The idea is that if you wait long enough, the apparition—not a real ghost, Dawny, but a ghost-like image—the apparition of the man you will marry will appear and take his seat before you at the table.

  “Oh, of course it was all a lot of foolishness like all that superstitious going-on, but these girls believed in it, and anyway it would be a lot of fun. So they waited and they waited.

  “Sometimes, if a girl was wishing very hard that a particular boy would appear, somebody she was crazy wild about, then she might get hysterical and really believe that he had come! Imagine that, Dawny. But the other girls would just laugh at her.

  “Anyway, these girls waited and waited, but of course nothing happened. Some of them closed their eyes and mumbled magic words, and some of them prayed, but no boys showed up, and no apparitions of boys showed up. Until finally…”

  I suspend my breathing. It is as near to approaching an orgasm as a five-year-old boy could ever get.

  “Until finally there was this one particular girl who was wishing very, very hard, and she opened her eyes, and there coming into the room was a boy! With his hat pulled down over his eyes, he came right on over to her chair and sat down in it! And then in the candlelight she saw who it was! It wasn’t the boy she was wishing for at all! It was another boy, the one she had already turned down twice when he asked for her hand!

  “And then she fainted dead away.”

  I wait. “Well,” I say. “Then what happened?”

  “Well, after they got her revived, with smelling salts and cold compresses, one of the girls explained it all to her. Somehow that boy had found out about the dumb supper. The boys weren’t supposed to know, but somehow he had found out. And came on purpose. The other girls had thrown him out of the house, after this poor girl fainted, and told him he ought to be ashamed of himself. And maybe he was.”

  “Well,” I ask, “did she ever marry him?”

  “No.”

  “Did she ever marry the other one, the one she was wishing for?”

  “No.”

  “That other one, the one she was wishing for, his name was Raymond, wasn’t it?”

  Latha makes a little gasp, and then exclaims, “Why, Dawny, I didn’t know you knew about that!”

  “What was the name of the one who came to the dumb supper?”

  She does not answer.

  I leave her alone, but I cannot leave her alone for long. “Latha,” I say, sweetly as I can, “what was the name of the one who came?”

  “Won’t tell you,” she says, and her voice is the voice of a child.

  “Please tell me,” I beg.

  “No,” she says. “You’ll have bad dreams, and your Aunt Rosie will come down here and give me a talking-to again for telling you ghost stories.”

  “I will have bad dreams anyway,” I declare.

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “No. I won’t.”

  “Pretty please, with sugar and cream on it.”

  “No. Hush. You stop asking me.”

  “Was it Tull Ingledew?”

  “Law, no!” she laughs. “Back then he didn’t even know I existed.”

  “Was it Doc Swain?”

  “He was too old, and besides, he had a wife back at that time.”

  “Then who was it? Was it anybody I know?”

  “No.”

  “Please, please tell me.”

  “No.”

  “If you don’t tell me, I’m going to go away and never come back, and I’ll never ever love you anymore.”

  She laughs again. “Or, if not that, you’d be nagging me about it for the rest of my days, wouldn’t you?”

  “I just might,” I say fiercely.

  “All right,” she says. “His name was Dill. Every Dill. Isn’t that a queer name? It wasn’t Avery, but Every. He was William Dill’s boy, old Billy Dill who used to make wagons.”

  I break out in a rash of goose bumps. “What…whatever…what did ever…become of him?”

  “Nobody knows, child.”

  “Maybe…” I say, pointing up the road toward the Dill place.

  “Yes, Dawny, that’s what I’ve been wondering about too.”

  I suddenly ask, “Can I sleep with you tonight?”

  “Whatever for?” she asks, with a big smile.

  “To protect you.”

  She starts to laugh but decides it might hurt my feelings, which it would’ve. Instead she says, “Your Aunt Rosie wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Aw, sure she would. She don’t care where I sleep.”

  “But I don’t have any spare beds, except
that one that Sonora sleeps in.”

  “Why caint I just sleep in your bed?”

  She laughs. “My, my,” she says. “I haven’t ever slept with anybody in my bed.”

  “Never?”

  “Never not all night.”

  “Well,” I promise, “I won’t bother you.”

  She laughs a long gay lilting laugh. “You’d have to let your Aunt Rosie know where you are, and I bet you she wouldn’t want you spending the night down here.”

  I stand up. “I’ll be right back, fast as I can.”

  “Good night, Dawny,” she says, and waves. “See you in the morning.”

  “I will be right back,” I say.

  I run all the way home, which isn’t far.

  I burst in upon Aunt Murrison, who is reading her Bible by coal-oil light. I have always been a good liar, even then. I tell her that a whole bunch of kids are having a bunking party at Latha’s store; they’ve laid out a lot of pallets and are going to have a real jamboree of ghost-story telling and I will just die of heartbreak if I can’t join in.

  “Which kids?” she says, eyeing me with leaden lids.

  “Well, there’s Larry Duckworth, and Vann and Tommy Dinsmore, and Jack and Tracy and Billy Bob Ingledew, and—”

  “I bet them kids don’t want a little squirt like you hangin around.”

  “But Sammy Coe’s there too, and I’m older’n him!”

  “How come y’all are havin yore bunkin party at Latha’s place?”

  “Well, she’s treatin us to free soda pop.”

  “Hmm,” says Aunt Murrison. She mutters, “That crazy gal…” Then she says to me, “Well, you behave yourself, you hear me? Be a good boy and don’t bother them other kids.”

  “Yes ma’am!” I cry, and rushing out, holler back, “See you in the mornin!”

  So that is how I came to spend the night with my beloved Bug.

  (There remains just another short piece of bug business, and then I am done with these over-long prefatory hemmings and hawings. Another image symbolically related to lightning bugs: that of a book of matches being struck, one by one. It happened like this: with my beard and my pipe and my Harris tweed jacket I was fool enough to think that I could pass for a visiting psychiatrist, but the Keeper of Records at the Arkansas State Hospital said to me politely, “It isn’t that we are challenging your authority, Doctor, but our regulations require that we cannot give you access to our records unless we see something in the way of credentials, perhaps only your a.a.p.p. membership card…” So I went away and bought a doctor’s white smock and came back in the middle of the night and snapped impatiently at the night clerk on duty, “The file on Latha Anne Bourne, please. B-O-U-R-N-E. 1922–25.” But the night clerk looked at me and said, albeit pleasantly enough, “Which ward are you from, Doctor? I don’t recall seeing you around before. But I suppose you’re new. Perhaps your name is on my list here, let’s see….” One would think that my nerve, which has never been distinguished for its intrepidity, would have failed at this point. But I was extraordinarily dedicated. I went upstairs and walked the corridors and read the names on the doors of doctor’s offices, picking one at random. Then I went over to Ward A and read the list of patients, picking one at random. Then I went to a phone booth and called that same night clerk in the Records Office and said, disguising my voice, “This is Doctor Reuben. Please, would you very quickly get the file on Wilson Olmstead and bring it up and slip it under the door of my office? Thank you so much.” Then I quickly returned to the Records Office. The clerk was gone. But he had locked the strong wire gate to the Records Room. There was, however, a small opening at chest-level for the purpose of passing documents through, and I managed to squeeze through this. I did not dare turn on a light. I used up three matches finding the 1920’s section, and two more matches locating the b’s, and one more finding Latha’s file. Then I sat on the floor with it in my lap, and opened it, and used up the rest of my matches quickly reading it. It was a thick sheaf of papers, sandwiched between an Admission slip which said, “Committed, under protest, May 12, 1922, by married sister, Mrs. Vaughn Twichell,” and a small piece of paper which summarily remarked, “Escaped E Ward, method unknown, March 23, 1925.” Several times I burned my fingers because I was so absorbed with what I was reading that I did not watch the match closely. If there is no draft, a book match can be made to burn for a maximum of 36 seconds. This means that I had a total reading time of only about 7 minutes 45 seconds. But I am a relatively fast reader. And the glow of those matches, so help me, was quite uncannily akin to the pulsing flashes of a lightning bug.]

  “Dawny, close your eyes.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t want to watch me undressing, do you?”

  “But it’s pitch dark, I caint see you noway.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  “Okay.”

  Why is it, I wonder, that all those sounds of the summer night are louder indoors, when you’re lying in bed, than they are outdoors, when you’re sitting on the porch?

  “Well. Now you can open your eyes. But don’t look at me.”

  “Why caint I look at you?”

  “Because it’s so hot and we’d have to pull the covers up because I don’t have anything on.”

  “You mean you’re nekkid?” I begin to turn my head.

  Her hand presses the side of my face. “Don’t look.”

  “But it’s so dark I caint see nuthin noway.”

  “Maybe you can. I can see you.”

  “What’s wrong with lookin at you? I like to look at you.”

  “But I don’t have anything on.”

  “Who cares?”

  It is very hot, not a night for covers at all, not even a sheet. I look down at myself, at my undershirt, at my shorts. The faintest breeze comes through the window screen.

  “Do you sleep nekkid all the time?”

  “Just in the summertime.”

  “I never knew of anybody sleepin stark nekkid.”

  “Most people don’t.”

  “I reckon it’s a awful lot cooler, that way.”

  “Oh, it is.”

  “Can I sleep nekkid too?”

  “Dawny, I wish you wouldn’t say ‘nekkid.’ It makes it sound bad.”

  “Okay, can I sleep undressed too?”

  She does not answer for a while. Then she laughs a little and says, “Dawny, you’re commencing to make me nervous. If you ever told anybody, your Aunt Rosie or anybody, that me and you slept together, let alone without our clothes, do you know they would cover me with hot tar and feathers and ride me out of town on a rail?”

  “Aw, Latha! Do you honestly think I would ever tell anybody? I aint ever gon tell anybody anything about me’n you.”

  “Maybe,” she says, “maybe I better get a quilt and fix you a pallet on the floor in the other room.”

  I begin to cry.

  “Oh, shush, Dawny, a big boy like you!” she coos. “Lie still, and shush.”

  I keep crying.

  She reaches over and grabs me by the undershirt, and at first I think she’s going to fling me clean out of the bed, but she just tugs my undershirt over my head, and then pulls my shorts down and off my feet.

  “There!” she says. “Now shush.”

  I shush.

  It is hard, from here, to see through the window and watch any lightning bugs. But I don’t care. I have my own Bug beside me.

  “Close your eyes and go to sleep.”

  “I’m not much sleepy. Are you?”

  “Not much, I guess.”

  “Tell me a story.”

  “All right.”

  She tells me, not just one ghost story, but several, many. Some of these I have heard her tell before, but they are good ones, and the new ones which I have not heard before are very good indeed. They thrill me, they hold me, they seize me, they jolt me, they drain me. It is nearly as good as if I were full-grown and could mount her and ride her, over and over, again and again, till
the last drop of my seed were draught off. Often, in the grip of a mighty story’s climax, I have to squeeze her hand.

  She likes her own stories too, and gets carried off by them, which is why she is such a good teller…and which is why she has not noticed that I am staring at her. The moon has shifted from behind a tree, and some of its light comes into the room. She lies staring at the ceiling as she talks, one of her hands gripped by mine, the other hand resting upon her white stomach. All creation does not know a sight lovelier than her breasts. How does Tull Ingledew say it? Yes: “Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lillies.” I do not know what a roe is, but it has a lovely sound.

  “Latha,” I say, “I love you.”

  She turns, and does not seem to mind that I am staring at her, and that there is enough light for us to see one another. “Oh, Dawny,” she says. Then she reaches out her hand and rumples my hair and says, “I love you too, and if you were a growed-up man I would marry you right this minute.” She pulls me to her and squeezes me and then puts me back where I was. “Now let’s try to get some sleep.”

  We try to get some sleep, but we are both listening.

  We listen for a knock, or for footsteps on the porch.

  The night passes on. The symphony of the bugs and frogs never stops. The night cools.

  Footsteps. My heart thunders. But it is not my heart, it is Latha’s. I realize I am in her arms, my ear against her chest.

  A voice. A girl’s. It is Snory, coming home. Her screen door opens very slowly in a very slow WRIRRAANG, and light footsteps move across a floor, and to a room. She bumps against a table or something.

  Then it is silent again, and stays silent a long time,

  By and by I ask Latha in a whisper, “Do you think that it might really be him up there? Do you think it’s really Every Dill?”

  “Oh, I know it,” she says, and there is no fear nor alarm nor anxiety of any sort in her voice, but almost a kind of thrilled anticipation. “I know it is.”

  We sleep.

  MIDDLING

  ONE: Morning

  On this day of days, she rose, careful to touch the floor with her right foot first—though this practice was habitual, spontaneous, she was conscious of it as her first waking thought. Her second thought was: Today. Then she slowly dressed, in her multipatched denims and her faded chambray shirt. She put on her heavy shoes, which the night before she had carefully left in the position of the shape of the letter T. That T, she realized, could have stood for Tomorrow, or, now, for Today, although this was not the reason she left them in that position.