The Summer of the Swans

by Betsy Byars

  “Is there supposed to be some sort of message in that story?”

  “Maybe.”

  She smiled. “Well, I just wanted to say that I’m sorry.” She thought again that she was going to start crying and she said to herself, You are nothing but a big soft snail. Snail!

  “That’s all right.”

  “I just found out about Aunt Willie going to see your mother.”

  He shrugged. “She didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “But it was a terrible thing.”

  “It wasn’t all that bad. At least it was different to be accused of something I didn’t do for a change.”

  “But to be called in like that in front of Aunt Willie and Mary’s mother. No, it was terrible.” She turned and walked into the woods.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m tough. I’m indestructible. I’m like that coyote in ‘Road Runner’ who is always getting flattened and dynamited and crushed and in the next scene is strolling along, completely normal again.”

  “I just acted too hastily. That’s one of my main faults.”

  “I do that too.”

  “Not like me.”

  “Worse probably. Do you remember when we used to get grammar-school report cards, and the grades would be on one part of the card, and on the other side would be personality things the teacher would check, like ‘Does not accept criticism constructively’?”

  Sara smiled. “I always used to get a check on that one,” she said.

  “Who didn’t? And then they had one, ‘Acts impetuously and without consideration for others,’ or something like that, and one year I got a double check on that one.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Yes, I did. Second grade. Miss McLeod. I remember she told the whole class that this was the first year she had ever had to give double checks to any student, and everyone in the room was scared to open his report card to see if he had got the double checks. And when I opened mine, there they were, two sets of double checks, on acting impetuously and on not accepting criticism, and single checks on everything else.”

  “Were you crushed?”

  “Naturally.”

  “I thought you were so tough and indestructible.”

  “Well, I am”—he paused—“I think.” He pointed to the left. “Let’s go up this way.”

  She agreed with a nod and went ahead of him between the trees.

  Chapter Seventeen

  There was a ravine in the forest, a deep cut in the earth, and Charlie had made his way into it through an early morning fog. By chance, blindly stepping through the fog with his arms outstretched, he had managed to pick the one path that led into the ravine, and when the sun came out and the fog burned away, he could not find the way out.

  All the ravine looked the same in the daylight, the high walls, the masses of weeds and wild berry bushes, the trees. He had wandered around for a while, following the little paths made by dirt washed down from the hillside, but finally he sat down on a log and stared straight ahead without seeing.

  After a while he roused enough to wipe his hands over his cheeks where the tears and dirt had dried together and to rub his puffed eyelids. Then he looked down, saw his bare foot, put it on top of his slipper, and sat with his feet overlapped.

  There was a dullness about him now. He had had so many scares, heard so many frightening noises, started at so many shadows, been hurt so often that all his senses were worn to a flat hopelessness. He would just sit here forever.

  It was not the first time Charlie had been lost, but never before had there been this finality. He had become separated from Aunt Willie once at the county fair and had not even known he was lost until she had come bursting out of the crowd screaming, “Charlie, Charlie,” and enveloped him. He had been lost in school once in the hall and could not find his way back to his room, and he had walked up and down the halls, frightened by all the strange children looking out of every door, until one of the boys was sent out to lead him to his room. But in all his life there had never been an experience like this one.

  He bent over and looked down at his watch, his eyes on the tiny red hand. For the first time he noticed it was no longer moving. Holding his breath in his concern, he brought the watch closer to his face. The hand was still. For a moment he could not believe it. He watched it closely, waiting. Still the hand did not move. He shook his hand back and forth, as if he were trying to shake the watch off his wrist. He had seen Sara do this to her watch.

  Then he held the watch to his ear. It was silent. He had had the watch for five months and never before had it failed him. He had not even known it could fail. And now it was silent and still.

  He put his hand over the watch, covering it completely. He waited. His breathing had begun to quicken again. His hand on the watch was almost clammy. He waited, then slowly, cautiously, he removed his hand and looked at the tiny red hand on the dial. It was motionless. The trick had not worked.

  Bending over the watch, he looked closely at the stem. Aunt Willie always wound the watch for him every morning after breakfast, but he did not know how she did this. He took the stem in his fingers gers, pulled at it clumsily, then harder, and it came off. He looked at it. Then, as he attempted to put it back on the watch, it fell to the ground and was lost in the leaves.

  A chipmunk ran in front of him and scurried up the bank. Distracted for a moment, Charlie got up and walked toward it. The chipmunk paused and then darted into a hole, leaving Charlie standing in the shadows trying to see where it had gone. He went closer to the bank and pulled at the leaves, but he could not even find the place among the roots where the chipmunk had disappeared.

  Suddenly something seemed to explode within Charlie, and he began to cry noisily. He threw himself on the bank and began kicking, flailing at the ground, at the invisible chipmunk, at the silent watch. He wailed, yielding in helplessness to his anguish, and his piercing screams, uttered again and again, seemed to hang in the air so that they overlapped. His fingers tore at the tree roots and dug beneath the leaves and scratched, animal-like, at the dark earth.

  His body sagged and he rolled down the bank and was silent. He looked up at the trees, his chest still heaving with sobs, his face strangely still. After a moment, his eyelids drooped and he fell asleep.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Charlie! Charlie!”

  The only answer was the call of a bird in the branches overhead, one long tremulous whistle.

  “He’s not even within hearing distance,” Sara said.

  For the past hour she and Joe Melby had been walking deeper and deeper into the forest without pause, and now the trees were so thick that only small spots of sunlight found their way through the heavy foliage.

  “Charlie, oh, Charlie!”

  She waited, looking down at the ground.

  Joe said, “You want to rest for a while?”

  Sara shook her head. She suddenly wanted to see her brother so badly that her throat began to close. It was a tight feeling she got sometimes when she wanted something, like the time she had had the measles and had wanted to see her father so much she couldn’t even swallow. Now she thought that if she had a whole glass of ice water—and she was thirsty—she probably would not be able to drink a single drop.

  “If you can make it a little farther, there’s a place at the top of the hill where the strip mining is, and you can see the whole valley from there.”

  “I can make it.”

  “Well, we can rest first if—”

  “I can make it.”

  She suddenly felt a little better. She thought that if she could stand up there on top of the hill and look down and see, somewhere in that huge green valley, a small plump figure in blue pajamas, she would ask for nothing more in life. She thought of the valley as a relief map where every thing would be shiny and smooth, and her brother would be right where she could spot him at once. Her cry, “There he is!” would ring like a bell over the valley and everyone would hear her and know that Charlie had
been found.

  She paused, leaned against a tree for a moment, and then continued. Her legs had begun to tremble.

  It was the time of afternoon when she usually sat down in front of the television and watched game shows, the shows where the married couples tried to guess things about each other and where girls had to pick out dates they couldn’t see. She would sit in the doorway to the hall where she always sat and Charlie would come in and watch with her, and the living room would be dark and smell of the pine-scented cleaner Aunt Willie used.

  Then “The Early Show” would come on, and she would sit through the old movie, leaning forward in the doorway, making fun, saying things like, “Now, Charlie, we’ll have the old Convict Turning Honest scene,” and Charlie, sitting on the stool closer to the television, would nod without understanding.

  She was good, too, at joining in the dialogue with the actors. When the cowboy would say something like, “Things are quiet around here tonight,” she would join in with, “Yeah, too quiet,” right on cue. It seemed strange to be out here in the woods with Joe Melby instead of in the living room with Charlie, watching Flame of Araby, which was the early movie for that afternoon.

  Her progress up the hill seemed slower and slower. It was like the time she had won the slow bicycle race, a race in which she had to go as slow as possible without letting a foot touch the ground, and she had gone slower and slower, all the while feeling a strong compulsion to speed ahead and cross the finish line first. At the end of the race it had been she and T.R. Peters, and they had paused just before the finish line, balancing motionless on their bicycles. The time had seemed endless, and then T.R. lost his balance and his foot touched the ground and Sara was the winner.

  She slipped on some dry leaves, went down on her knees, straightened, and paused to catch her breath.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I just slipped.”

  She waited for a moment, bent over her knees, then she called, “Charlie! Charlie,” without lifting her head.

  “Oh, Charleeeeee,” Joe shouted above her.

  Sara knew Charlie would shout back if he heard her, the long wailing cry he gave sometimes when he was frightened during the night. It was such a familiar cry that for a moment she thought she heard it.

  She waited, still touching the ground with one hand, until she was sure there was no answer.

  “Come on,” Joe said, holding out his hand.

  He pulled her to her feet and she stood looking up at the top of the hill. Machines had cut away the earth there to get at the veins of coal, and the earth had been pushed down the hill to form a huge bank.

  “I’ll never get up that,” she said. She leaned against a tree whose leaves were covered with the pale fine dirt which had filtered down when the machines had cut away the hill.

  “Sure you will. I’ve been up it a dozen times.”

  He took her hand and she started after him, moving sideways up the steep bank. The dirt crumbled beneath her feet and she slid, skinned one knee, and then slipped again. When she had regained her balance she laughed wryly and said, “What’s going to happen is that I’ll end up pulling you all the way down the hill.”

  “No, I’ve got you. Keep coming.”

  She started again, putting one foot carefully above the other, picking her way over the stones. When she paused, he said, “Keep coming. We’re almost there.”

  “I think it’s a trick, like at the dentist’s when he says, ‘I’m almost through drilling.’ Then he drills for another hour and says, ‘Now, I’m really almost through drilling,’ and he keeps on and then says, ‘There’s just one more spot and then I’ll be practically really through.”’

  “We must go to the same dentist.”

  “I don’t think I can make it. There’s no skin at all left on the sides of my legs.”

  “Well, we’re really almost practically there now, in the words of your dentist.”

  She fell across the top of the dirt bank on her stomach, rested for a moment, and then turned and looked down the valley.

  Chapter Nineteen

  She could not speak for a moment. There lay the whole valley in a way she had never imagined it, a tiny finger of civilization set in a sweeping expanse of dark forest. The black treetops seemed to crowd against the yards, the houses, the roads, giving the impression that at any moment the trees would close over the houses like waves and leave nothing but an unbroken line of black-green leaves waving in the sunlight.

  Up the valley she could see the intersection where they shopped, the drugstore, the gas station where her mother had once won a set of twenty-four stemmed glasses which Aunt Willie would not allow them to use, the grocery store, the lot where the yellow school buses were parked for the summer. She could look over the valley and see another hill where white cows were all grouped together by a fence and beyond that another hill and then another.

  She looked back at the valley and she saw the lake and for the first time since she had stood up on the hill she remembered Charlie.

  Raising her hand to her mouth, she called, “Charlie! Charlie! Charlie!” There was a faint echo that seemed to waver in her ears.

  “Charlie, oh, Charlie!” Her voice was so loud it seemed to ram into the valley.

  Sara waited. She looked down at the forest, and everything was so quiet it seemed to her that the whole valley, the whole world was waiting with her.

  “Charlie, hey, Charlie!” Joe shouted.

  “Charleeeeee!” She made the sound of it last a long time. “Can you hear meeeeee?”

  With her eyes she followed the trail she knew he must have taken—the house, the Akers’ vacant lot, the old pasture, the forest. The forest that seemed powerful enough to engulf a whole valley, she thought with a sinking feeling, could certainly swallow up a young boy.

  “Charlie! Charlie! Charlie!” There was a waver in the last syllable that betrayed how near she was to tears. She looked down at the Indian slipper she was still holding.

  “Charlie, oh, Charlie.” She waited. There was not a sound anywhere. “Charlie, where are you?”

  “Hey, Charlie!” Joe shouted.

  They waited in the same dense silence. A cloud passed in front of the sun and a breeze began to blow through the trees. Then there was silence again.

  “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.”

  She paused, listened, then bent abruptly and put Charlie’s slipper to her eyes. She waited for the hot tears that had come so often this summer, the tears that had seemed so close only a moment before. Now her eyes remained dry.

  I have cried over myself a hundred times this summer, she thought, I have wept over my big feet and my skinny legs and my nose, I have even cried over my stupid shoes, and now when I have a true sadness there are no tears left.

  She held the felt side of the slipper against her eyes like a blindfold and stood there, feeling the hot sun on her head and the wind wrapping around her legs, conscious of the height and the valley sweeping down from her feet.

  “Listen, just because you can’t hear him doesn’t mean anything. He could be—”

  “Wait a minute.” She lowered the slipper and looked down the valley. A sudden wind blew dust into her face and she lifted her hand to shield her eyes.

  “I thought I heard something. Charlie! Answer me right this minute.”

  She waited with the slipper held against her breasts, one hand to her eyes, her whole body motionless, concentrating on her brother. Then she stiffened. She thought again she had heard something—Charlie’s long high wail. Charlie could sound sadder than anyone when he cried.

  In her anxiety she took the slipper and twisted it again and again as if she were wringing water out. She called, then stopped abruptly and listened. She looked at Joe and he shook his head slowly.

  She looked away. A bird rose from the trees below and flew toward the hills in the distance. She waited until she could see it no longer and then slowly, still listening for the call that didn’t come
, she sank to the ground and sat with her head bent over her knees.

  Beside her, Joe scuffed his foot in the dust and sent a cascade of rocks and dirt down the bank. When the sound of it faded, he began to call, “Charlie, hey, Charlie,” again and again.

  Chapter Twenty

  Charlie awoke, but he lay for a moment without opening his eyes. He did not remember where he was, but he had a certain dread of seeing it.

  There were great parts of his life that were lost to Charlie, blank spaces that he could never fill in. He would find himself in a strange place and not know how he had got there. Like the time Sara had been hit in the nose with a baseball at the Dairy Queen, and the blood and the sight of Sara kneeling on the ground in helpless pain had frightened him so much that he had turned and run without direction, in a frenzy, dashing headlong up the street, blind to cars and people.

  By chance Mr. Weicek had seen him, put him in the car, and driven him home, and Aunt Willie had put him to bed, but later he remembered none of this. He had only awakened in bed and looked at the crumpled bit of ice cream cone still clenched in his hand and wondered about it.

  His whole life had been built on a strict routine, and as long as this routine was kept up, he felt safe and well. The same foods, the same bed, the same furniture in the same place, the same seat on the school bus, the same class procedure were all important to him. But always there could be the unexpected, the dreadful surprise that would topple his carefully constructed life in an instant.

  The first thing he became aware of was the twigs pressing into his face, and he put his hand under his cheek. Still he did not open his eyes. Pictures began to drift into his mind; he saw Aunt Willie’s cigar box which was filled with old jewelry and buttons and knickknacks, and he found that he could remember every item in that box—the string of white beads without a clasp, the old earrings, the tiny book with souvenir fold-out pictures of New York, the plastic decorations from cakes, the turtle made of sea shells. Every item was so real that he opened his eyes and was surprised to see, instead of the glittering contents of the box, the dull and unfamiliar forest.