“Why?”
“Because I say so.”
“You look funny, Mom.”
Mom went to the door and called, “Douglas, Douglas, oh Doug! Douglasssssss!” over and over. There was no answer. She stepped out into the night, walked under the lilac bush, and called again.
Silence.
She called twice more. Tom sat in the room. Any moment now, Douglas would answer from down the long narrow street, “All right, Mom! All right, Mother! Hey!”
But he didn’t answer. Mother came back and said, “Come on, Tom. We’ll take a walk.”
“Where to?”
“Just down the block. Come on.”
They walked down the dark street. The crickets were sounding louder against the darkening dark. They reached a corner, turned, and walked toward the West Ravine.
There was such a complete lack of life, light, and activity. Here and there, in the distance, dim squares of light glowed where people were still up. But most of the houses, darkened, were sleeping already, and there were a few darkhouses where the occupants still sat talking low night talk on their front porches.
“I wish your father was home,” said Mother. Her large hand squeezed around his small one. “Just wait till I get that boy. The Lonely One’s around again. Killing people. No one’s safe anymore. You never know when the Lonely One’ll turn up or where. So help me, when Doug gets home I’ll give him a sound thrashing.”
Now they had walked another block and were standing by the black silhouette of the German Baptist Church. In back of the church, a hundred yards away, the ravine began. He could smell it. It had a dark-sewer, rotten-foliage odor. The wide ravine cut and twisted across town – a jungle by day, a place to let alone at night, Mother often declared.
He was only ten years old. He knew little of death, fear, or dread. Death was the waxen figure in the coffin when he was six and Great-grandfather died, silent, withdrawn, no more to tell him how to be a good boy, no more to comment briefly on politics. Death was his little sister one morning when he awoke at the age of seven, looked into her crib, and saw her staring up at him with a blind, blue, fixed and frozen stare until the men came with a small wicker basket to take her away. Death was when he stood by her high chair four weeks later and suddenly understood that she’d never be in it again, laughing and crying and making him jealous of her because she was born. That was death. And Death was the Lonely One, unseen, walking and standing behind trees, coming from the country, once or twice a year, to this town, to these streets, to these many places where there was little light, to kill one, two, three women in the past three years. That was Death…
But this was more than Death. This dark, dark summer night was all things you would ever feel or see or hear in your life, drowning you all at once.
They walked along a weed-fringed path while the crickets’ chorus rose in a loud full drumming. He followed obediently behind brave, fine, tall Mother – defender of the universe. Together, they reached and paused at the very end of civilization.
The Ravine.
Here and now, down in that pit of black jungle were suddenly all the things he would never know or understand; all the things without names lived in the deep tree shadow, in the odor of decay.
He and his mother were alone.
Her hand trembled. He realized his mother was frightened. It was a shock for him. So, she, too, felt that nameless threat from that darkness, that malignancy down below. Was there, then, no strength in growing up? No consolation in being an adult? No worldly citadel strong enough to stand up to the dreadful attack of midnights? Doubts flooded him. He was suddenly cold as a wind out of December.
He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone. A unit in a society, but always afraid. Like here, standing. If he should scream for help, would it matter?
Blackness could come and swallow quickly; in one freezing moment all would be finished. Long before dawn, long before police with flashlights might come, long before worried men could rustle down the pebbles to his help. Even if they were within five hundred yards of him now, and help certainly was, in three seconds a dark wave could rise to take all ten years from him and —
The shock of life’s loneliness crushed his beginning-to- tremble body. Mother was alone, too. She could not look to the sanctity of marriage, the protection of her family’s love, she could not look to the United States Constitution or the City Police, she could not look anywhere, in this very moment, except into her heart, and there she would only find uncontrollable disgust and fear. In this moment it was an individual problem looking for an individual solution. He must accept being alone and work on from there.
He clung to his mother. Oh, Lord, don’t let her die, please, he thought. Don’t do anything to us. Father will be coming home from his meeting in an hour and if the house is empty —
Mother went down the path into the primeval jungle. His voice trembled. “Mom, Doug’s all right. He’s all right!”
Mother’s voice was strained, high. “He always comes through here. I tell him not to, but those kids, they come through here anyway. Some night he’ll come through and never come out again —”
Never come out again. That could mean death!
Alone in the universe.
There were a million small towns like this all over the world, with no lights, but many shadows. Oh, the vast loneliness of them. The secret damp ravines of them. Life was a horror lived in them at night, when at all sides sanity, marriage, children, happiness, were threatened by an ogre called Death.
Mother raised her voice into the dark. “Doug! Douglas!”
Suddenly both of them felt something was wrong.
The crickets’ chorus had stopped. Silence was absolutely complete.
Why should the crickets stop? Why? What reason? They’d never stopped before. Not ever.
Something was going to happen.
The silence was growing, growing; the tenseness was growing, growing. Oh, it was so dark, so far away from everything!
And then, a way off across the ravine:
“Okay, Mom! Coming, Mother!”
And again: “Hi, Mom! Coming, Mom!”
And then the sound of tennis shoes running down through the pit of the ravine as three kids came racing, giggling. His brother Douglas, Chuck Woodman, and John Huff.
The crickets sang!
The darkness pulled back, frightened, shocked, furious. Pulled back, losing its appetite at being so rudely interrupted as it prepared to feed. As the dark retreated like a wave on the shore, three children ran out of it, laughing.
“Hi, Mom! Hi, Tom! Hey!”
“Young man, you’re going to get a thrashing,” declared Mother. She put away her fear instantly. Tom knew she would never tell anyone of it. It would be in her heart, though, for all time, as it was in his heart for all time.
They walked home to bed in the late summer night. He was glad Douglas was alive. Very glad.
“Only two things I know for sure, Doug,” Tom whispered, lying in bed beside Douglas.
“What?”
“Nighttime