Then, the insidious thing began to take place. Aggie Lou started feeling better. The yellow sun looked bright, hot. The birds sang sweetly. She smelled the air like spring wine. But she was afraid to tell mother because mother would tell Clarisse and Clarisse would go ha ha oh ha ha, haha oh haha and yahhh for you! Aggie Lou realized, like a flash bulb going off, that she was getting well! Did the doctor know? Did mother guess? They mustn’t. Not yet. No, not yet.

And she began to feel like running in the sun, over the lawns, she felt like hop scotching and climbing leafy trees, and lots of things. But she didn’t dare say this. No, she pretended she was still sick and going to die. A weird thought came to her suddenly that she didn’t really care about that silver house on the hill, or the dolls, or the dress, it was just so good not to feel tired.

But there was Clarisse to be faced, and what if she got well now and Clarisse teased her? My, she couldn’t bear to think of it!

So next time Clarisse ran by like a pink robot on the grass, Aggie Lou yoohooed. “I’m going to die Thursday at three-fifteen. The doctor said so. He showed me a picture of my nice casket!”

And a few minutes later Clarisse rushed out of her house, her coat and bonnet on, heading down toward church to see what she could do to circumvent this!

And as she returned at twilight, Aggie Lou leaned out and said in a faint and poignant whisper: “I’m feeling worse!”

Clarisse stamped her foot.

THE NEXT morning a fly landed on the quilt. The fly walked around until Aggie Lou hit it. Then it lay quivering and then was silent. It didn’t make a noise. It didn’t buzz or twitch.

When father came up bearing breakfast on a tray she pointed at the fly and asked a question.

Her father nodded. “Yes, it’s dead.” He gave it no importance, he seemed preoccupied with something else. It was, after all, just a fly.

After breakfast, alone, she touched the fly and it did not protest.

“You’re dead,” she said. “You’re dead.”

An hour of watching and waiting revealed something to her. “Why, he doesn’t do anything. Just sits there.”

“How silly,” she said, forty minutes later. “That’s no fun.”

And she looked over at Clarisse’s house and then lay back, closing her eyes, and, presently, she began to smile, contentedly.

HOW IT came about three days later that Clarisse had her accident, no one knew. It happened for sure. After three days of Aggie Lou poking out the window, advising Clarisse as to her coming death, Clarisse ran to play softball in the street Wednesday afternoon with some other girls who played way out in the distances behind the boy fielders.

They were chasing long flies when the accident happened.

Homer Philipps smacked out a walloping three bagger and Clarisse ran to catch it and a car turned a sharp corner, and Clarisse was running along silently, when the car made her stop by hitting her.

Now, whether the car or Clarisse was to blame is one of those things you can talk about forever but never settle. Some say Clarisse didn’t look around—others say she did, but something compelled her to keep running.

The car lifted her like a leaf and tossed her. She tumbled and broke.

AGGIE LOU’S mother came into her room that night.

“Aggie Lou, I want to talk to you about Clarisse.”

“What about Clarisse?” asked Aggie Lou, breathlessly.

Two months later, Aggie Lou walked up to the cemetery hill and listened to Clarisse’s silence and not moving, and dropped some worms on the grave to help things along.

THE FEET WAITED inside the door, burning in their leather boxes. The feet waited inside a thousand doors and the day burned green and yellow and blue, the day was a great circus banner. The trees stamped their images fiercely upon clouds like summer snow. The sidewalks fried the ants and the grass quivered like a green ocean. And the feet waited, white with a winter of waiting, large and small feet, tender with six months of imprisonment, delicate and blunt feet, apprehensive and wiggling in warm darkness. And far and away and above came the muted and then the whining arguments about the season of the year, the temperature, colds, winter hardly over, or spring hardly over, rather. But this, said the whining voices, the insistent voices, was green summer, this was the day of the sun. And the feet worked their toes together and clenched the material of the socks in darkness, waiting.

There, just beyond the squeaking porch, the ferns were a green water sprinkled softly on the air. There waited the great pool of grass with its tender heads of clover and its devil weed, with its old acorns hidden, with its ant civilizations. It was toward this grass country that the feet were slowly inching. As the body of a boy on a sweltering July day yearns toward swimming holes, so the feet are drawn to oceans of oak-cooled grass and seas of minted clover and dew.

As the naked bodies of boys plunge like white stones and bobble like brown corks in the far country rivers, so the feet wish to plunge and swim in the summer lawns, refreshed.

Well, said a woman’s voice, well. A screen door opened. All right, said the voice, all right, but if you catch your death of cold, don’t come to me, sniffling.

Bang! Out the door! Over the rail! Watch the ferns! And into the lake of grass! Under the shady oaks! Off with the shoes, and now, running wet in the dew, running dry and cool under apple shade and oak shade and elm shade, a hot race over desert sidewalks, and the coolness of limes again on the far side, the touch of green ice and menthol, the feet burrowing like animals, feeling for old autumn’s leaves buried deep, feeling for a year ago’s burnt rose-petals, for anthills. The pompous, nuzzling big white toe, jamming into cool dark earth, the little toes picking at milky-purple clover buds, and now, just standing, the hot feet drowning in cool tides of grass. Time enough later, to venture tenderly out on cinder drives and rocky paths where the enemy, the shattered bottles, brown and glittering white, lie waiting to test one’s softened calluses. Time enough later for these marshmallow, winter-soft feet to slim themselves like Indian braves, paint themselves with colored dirts, bruise themselves with rocks and thorns.

Now, now, just the cool grass. The cool grass and a thousand other bare feet, running and running there.

HE WAS THE town. He was the town compounded and reduced, refined to its essences, its odors and its strewing.

He walked through the town or ran through the town any hour of the day or night, whenever the whim took him, when the moon drew him with its nocturnal tides or the sun brought him like a carved animal from a Swiss clock. He was small; with a handle you could have carried him like a black valise. And he was hairy as copper-wool, steel-wool, shavings and brushes. And he was never silent when he could be loud.

He came home from the cold night lake with a smell of water in his pelt. He came from the sands and shook a fine dust of it under the bed. He smelled of June rain and October maple leaves and Christmas snows and April rains. He was the weather, hot or cold. He fetched it back from wherever he was, wherever he had been. The smell of brass; he had lounged against fire station poles amid intervals of tobacco spitting and come home feverish from political conversation. The smell of marble; he had trotted through the cool tombs of the court house. The smell of oil; he had lain in the cool lubrication pit at the gas station, away from summer. Frosted like a birthday cake he entered from January. Baked like a rabbit he came in from July with world-shaking messages buried in his clock-spring hair.