“They won’t bother us. Just stand still.”

Jim tightened his arms, Vinia tightened hers. She could smell his breath with the wild tart grapes still on it. And the harder the rain drummed on the tree, the tighter they held, laughing, at last quietly letting their laughter drain away into the sound of the bees home from the far fields. And for a moment, Vinia thought that she and Jim might be caught by a sudden drop of great masses of honey from above, sealing them into this tree forever, enchanted, in amber, to be seen by anyone in the next thousand years who strolled by, while the weather of all ages rained and thundered and turned green outside the tree.

It was so warm, so safe, so protected here, the world did not exist, there was raining silence, in the sunless, forested day.

“Vinia,” whispered Jim, after awhile. “May I now?”

His face was very large, near her, larger than any face she had ever seen.

“Yes,” she said.

He kissed her.

The rain poured hard on the tree for a full minute while everything was cold outside and everything was tree-warmth and hidden away inside.

It was a very sweet kiss. It was very friendly and comfortably warm and it tasted like apricots and fresh apples and as water tastes when you rise at night and walk into a dark warm summer kitchen and drink from a cool tin cup. She had never imagined that a kiss could be so sweet and immensely tender and careful of her. He held her not as he had held her a moment before, hard, to protect her from the green rain weather, but he held her now as if she were a porcelain clock, very carefully and with consideration. His eyes were closed and the lashes were glistening dark; she saw this in the instant she opened her eyes and closed them again.

The rain stopped.

It was a moment before the new silence shocked them into an awareness of the climate beyond their world. Now there was nothing but the suspension of water in all the intricate branches of the forest. Clouds moved away to show the blue sky in great quilted patches.

They looked out at the change with some dismay. They waited for the rain to come back, to keep them, by necessity, in this hollow tree for another minute or an hour. But the sun appeared, shining through upon everything, making the scene quite commonplace again.

They stepped from the hollow tree slowly and stood, with their hands out, balancing, finding their way, it seemed, in these woods where the water was drying fast on every limb and leaf.

“I think we’d better start walking,” said Vinia. “That way.”

They walked off into the summer afternoon.

THEY CROSSED the town-limits at sunset and walked, hand in hand in the last glowing of the summer day. They had talked very little the rest of the afternoon, and now as they turned down one street after another, they looked at the passing sidewalk under their feet.

“Vinia,” he said at last. “Do you think this is the beginning of something?”

“Oh, gosh, Jim, I don’t know.”

“Do you think maybe we’re in love?”

“Oh, I don’t know that either!”

They passed down the ravine and over the bridge and up the other side to her street.

“Do you think we’ll ever be married?”

“It’s too early to tell, isn’t it?” she said.

“I guess you’re right.” He bit his lip. “Will we go walking again soon?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Let’s wait and see, Jim.”

The house was dark, her parents not home yet. They stood on her porch and she shook his hand gravely.

“Thanks, Jim, for a really fine day,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

They stood there.

Then he turned and walked down the steps and across the dark lawn. At the far edge of lawn he stopped in the shadows and said, “Good night.”

He was almost out of sight, running, when she, in turn, said good night.

IN THE middle of the night, a sound wakened her.

She half sat up in bed, trying to hear it again. The folks were home, everything was locked and secure, but it hadn’t been them. No, this was a special sound. And, lying there, looking out at the summer night that had, not long ago, been a summer day, she heard the sound again, and it was a sound of hollowing warmth and moist bark and empty, tunnelled tree, and rain outside but comfortable dryness and secretness inside, and it was the sound of bees come home from distant fields, moving upward in the flue of summer into wonderful darkness.

And this sound, she realized, putting her hand up in the summer night room to touch it, was coming from her sleepy, half-smiling mouth.

And it was this sound, eventually, which sang her to sleep.

AUTUMN AFTERNOON

“IT’S A VERY sad time of year to be cleaning out the attic,” said Grandma. “I don’t like autumn, sometimes. Don’t like the way the trees get empty. And the sky always looks like the sun had bleached it out.” She stood hesitantly at the bottom of the attic stairs, her gray head moving from side to side, her pale gray eyes uncertain. “But no matter what you do, here comes September,” she said. “So tear August off the calendar!”

“Can I have August?” Tom stood holding the torn month in his hands.

“I don’t know what you’ll do with it,” said Grandma.

“It isn’t really over, it’ll never be.” Tom held the paper up. “I know what happened on every day of it.”

“It was over before it began.” Grandma’s eyes grew remote. “I don’t remember a thing that happened.”

“On Monday I roller-skated at Chessman Park; on Tuesday I had chocolate cake at home; on Wednesday I fell in the crick.” Tom put the calendar in his blouse. “That was this week. Last week I caught crayfish, swung on a vine, hurt my hand on a nail, and fell off a fence. That takes me up until last Friday.”

“Well, it’s good somebody’s doing some thing,” said Grandma.

“And, I’ll remember today,” said Tom, “because the oak leaves turned all red and yellow and fell down and I made a big fire out of them. And this afternoon I’m going to Colonel Quartermain’s for a big birthday party.”

“You just run and play,” said Grandma. “I’ve got this job in the attic.”

She was breathing hard when she climbed into the musty garret. “Meant to do this last spring,” she murmured. “Here it is coming on winter and I don’t want to go all through the snow, thinking about this stuff up here.” She peered about in the attic gloom, saw the huge trunks, the spider webs, the stacked newspapers. There was a smell of ancient wooden beams.

She opened a dirty window that looked out on the apple trees far below. The smell of autumn came in, cool and sharp.

“Look out below!” cried Grandma, and began heaving old magazines and yellow trash down into the yard. “Better than carrying it downstairs.”

Old wire frame dressmaker’s dummies went careening down, followed by silent parrot cages and riffling encyclopaedias. A faint dust rose in the air and her heart was giddy in a few minutes. She had to pick her way over to sit down on a trunk, laughing breathlessly at her own inadequacy.

“More stuff, more junk!” she cried. “How it does pile up. What’s this now?”

She picked up a box of clippings and cut-outs and buttons. She dumped them out on the trunk top beside her and pawed through them. There were three neat small bundles of old calendar pages clipped together.

“Some more of Tom’s nonsense,” she sniffed. “Honestly, that child! Calendars, calendars, saving calendars.”

She picked up one of the calendars and it said OCTOBER, 1887. And on the front of it were exclamation marks and red lines under certain days, and childish scribbles: “This was a special day!” or “A wonderful day!”

She turned the calendar over with suddenly stiffening fingers. In the dim light her head bent down and her quiet eyes squinted to read what was written on the back: