Grass Fires

A Short Story

by Jane Piirto 

Publication history:

Workshopped with Toni Morrison, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Vermont, 1977.

Piirto, J. (1979). Grass Fires. Louisville Review, 95-109. 

Piirto, J. (1995). Grass Fires. In A Location in the Upper Peninsula: Collected Poems, Stories, Essays. New Brighton, MN: Sampo Publishing.

GRASS FIRES

             Suppertime, and Mr. Peterson limps down the slanted sidewalk next to the old house. He leans against the thick maple, his feet covered by first windfallen yellow leaves, and he yells, in the loudest voice anyone has ever heard, for his children to come home. That is his work nowadays: he keeps track of his children.  

            “Dalton Murray! Wright Laughlin! Cranston Philip! Clayton Clifton! Beckwith Blake! Wendy Mamie!” The neighborhood, still in the twilight, echoes.

            “Get your asses in to supper,” he growls to the two little girls playing house under the high porch, among the stacked logs for the wood stove in the kitchen. Abigail Nellie and Wendy Mamie scutter quickly up the cracked walk, into the back porch, slamming the loose screen door, to the odorous kitchen, smelling of yeast and sweat.

            The neighborhood children are scared of Mr. Peterson because of how he yells and swears, and because of his limp. His own children are scared of him, too.

            Mr. Peterson pulls out a jackknife and slices a twig from the bayberry bush next to the maple. As the children run home from the hills and woods of the neighborhood, he cuts menacing swaths at them with the knife, and he switches them with the twig.

            Clayton Clifton is the last one home, as usual. “Get your ass in here, Clayton Clifton!” The small boy trips as he runs up the sidewalk. His overalls are muddy, and they have holes in the knees. The back pockets are frayed, and they flap.

            The house is ramshackle, with siding falling off, and no one sits on the high front porch because it creaks as if it will collapse. The boards are rotting and no one wants to fix them.

            Mr. Peterson limps up the sidewalk laboring and puffing, pulling himself straight-legged, one step at a time, up the steep cement steps, both hands on the pipe railing. Mrs. Peterson, in a flowered dress held with loose buttons, and a floured apron, her belly and breasts bursting and round, waits for him, smiling and friendly, and she moves to help him up the last step. As he hoists himself up, he swats her away, then pushes her stomach so that she cringes, but she still smiles.

            Their children have the fanciest names in a neighborhood filled with Shirleys and Bettes and Errols and Roys. Their grandma, Mrs.-Mrs. Peterson, as everyone calls her, gave them the names. She heard them in England, where she worked after she left Sweden and before she came here to be a maid for the mine bosses, back before World War I, and her name, they say, is Sonja. Mrs. Peterson’s name is Princess, and not a nickname either, Mrs. Peterson tells the neighborhood children. Mr. Peterson’s name is Siegfried Thor, but everyone who is a grown-up calls him Blackie because he is one of those Swedes with black hair and brown eyes, the Laplander showing through, they say.

            Mr. Peterson used to work underground at the Mather C iron mine, until he got laid up. The shaft car fell down the shaft on the night shift when he was in it. Mr. Peterson stays home now and he drinks beer with the neighbor men who work in the mines, in the back yards on Saturday nights, in the summer after supper and after the Finns have taken their saunas.

            Clayton Clifton sits in the grass listening to the men talk and he gets sips of beer from them. So do the other boys. The men talk about old times and about The Company and about the price of steel.

            Clayton Clifton mostly plays with Maxine, the kid next door, and with Beckwith Blake, his little brother. Everyone thinks Beckwith Blake is weird because he has buggy eyes and he drools and he is in the slow room at the Cleveland School. Clayton Clifton is supposed to take Beckwith Blake everywhere with him, to look after him, but Maxine takes care of him sometimes while Clayton Clifton goes up the top of Ore Street to play baseball on The Flats, the only flat field in the neighborhood, well not flat really, it has a rock outcropping by second base. Maxine is willing to take care of Beckwith Blake because she told Clayton Clifton she thinks Clayton Clifton is cute, the only kid in the neighborhood, with all the blondes, with black hair and brown eyes.

            Clayton Clifton hasn’t come home yet. Mr. Peterson keeps yelling, and it is way after dark, but Clayton Clifton hasn’t come home because he is home already, up in his and his older brother Dalton Murray’s bedroom smiling and giggling. He is thirteen and he has had three cans of beer from the six-pack he found under the jumble of blankets and underwear under Dalton Murray’s bed.

             Dalton Murray is twenty, and he is making out with Carol, their brother Wright Laughlin’s new sister-in-law. Carol is eighteen and comes over in the afternoons, now that she’s a part of the family, and she and Dalton Murray have a few beers while Dalton Murray tries to go all the way with her.

            Carol has a soft, fat belly, and she has pimples, but she laughs a lot, and so everyone has to laugh too. She used to be a waitress, but now she is getting help from the Welfare for her baby. The baby’s father said he was going down to Waukegan to try to get a job for American Motors, and he never came back, so Carol is stuck. When she has a few beers, while they are kissing, she always asks Dalton Murray if he will marry her. Dalton Murray says he will if she lets him go all the way. Clayton Clifton hid under the bed in the junk once and heard them screw.

            Clayton Clifton quits school on April 29, the day after his sixteenth birthday. He has never learned to read good, and the teachers are mean. He is in the eighth grade with all the little kids, and they tease him and call him Clay Cliffs. He stayed back a few years and all the kids he started school with are juniors, so he’ll never catch up. Clayton Clifton figures he can get a job in the mines and get enough money to marry Carol. Carol still comes over every afternoon, even after Dalton Murray married that girl from Negaunee. She drinks a few beers with Clayton Clifton and they screw. Clayton Clifton has been skipping school for a month.

            He and the Whiting boys, who live up by the Stone Wall, next to The Pit where the mine used to be, go up into The Woods, behind the houses in the evenings, to shoot birds with their .22s. Last night they had a fifth to celebrate Clayton Clifton”s birthday, and Clayton Clifton shot three robins with three shots. They were glad to see the robins back again because robins make better targets than the chickadees and chippies of winter.

            As he goes out past Blackie and Princess, who are sitting at the kitchen table drinking a beer, Blackie takes his jackknife away from the carving he is doing in the linoleum on top of the table, and he gestures like a stabber. Blackie yells, “Get your ass out of here! Quit school, hey? Now you’ll end up laid up like me with eight kids and The Welfare!”

            “Sure sure,” Clayton Clifton answers.

            He walks up The Corner four houses away, sits on the stone wall smoking a Lucky, and he gives the hoot for Paulie Wilson to come out. Paulie, who lives in the house across from The Corner, hears, waves in the lighted window, and comes out, hunching his arms into his studded leather jacket.

            “I’ll get a jacket like that now I’ll be working,” Clayton Clifton says to Paulie.

            It is too dark to go out shooting birds, and Paulie’s brother is out in his new Willys with his girl from North Lake, so they can’t go spotlighting deer, neither. Paulie’s brother has a good job at the new pelletizing plant. The Company is open pit mining now the undergrounds have run out of high grade. The deer are moving out from the cedar swamps now the snow is almost gone, easy targets, starved and feeding next to the country two-ruts.

            “Wanna light a grass fire?” Paulie says.

            “We gotta get a six-pack first,” Clayton Clifton says.

            The boys comb back their beautiful hair, patting the side wings into perfect D.A.s, running their palms backwards over their heads with light touches, pulling on their sideburns, wiping the Vitalis on their jean legs. They start walking down the hill.

            “Shit, wish we had a car,” Paulie says.

            “I’m going to get one soon’s I start working,” Clayton Clifton says. “A Jeep or a Chevy.”

            They begin to jog. Around the curves, the hill is a long one, lit by three dim lights, each a block from the others.

            “Remember when we used to shoot these lights out with slingshots?” Clayton Clifton stoops to gather up a handful of small pebbles from the top of the cold tar. He throws them, one by one, at the middle streetlight, halfway down the hill. It is only a high-powered light bulb with a corrugated tin guard above it, easy to hit. Paulie begins to throw pebbles, too, from the downhill side. Soon one hits home, and the light goes out.

            “Let’s hide and scare people,” Clayton Clifton says. The boys jump over the wall and crouch among the cedar trees in the black shadows, next to the remnants of the last snowbank, crusted and dirty, unmelted because the sun never gets to this side of the street.

            “Move your ass, I’m getting wet knees,” Paulie whispers.

            “Shit, I’m just as wet as you,” Clayton Clifton says. “Shhhh! I hear someone coming!”

            But it is only Mr. Wiitala, staggering and weaving up the hill, getting home a little late from his work at Makinen’s Paint Shop. No fun scaring a drunk.

            They wait, jostling and swearing at each other, smoking two cigarettes each. Then they hear voices from down the hill, and giggles.

            “Shhh!”

            It is Maxine and Hester. They’d know the voices anywhere, heard them all their lives. The girls are coming home from that freshman party, sissy stuff, a bunch of kids acting like clowns, probably ducked apples and shit like that. The two girls have stopped talking since they passed the light down below and saw this light was out. They are now whispering silhouettes, fingertips interlocked in fear of the dark street, which is as quiet as the cemetery. They are walking fast to get into the arc of safety from the light on top of the hill.

            The boys poke each other and leap over the wall, shouting like the soldiers in the war movies at the Saturday afternoon shows, going over the top. “Whoooo-eee! Let’s get Maxine and Hester!”

            The girls screech, scream, break hands, and run. The boys chase them, whooping, for a hundred yards, then stop, out of breath, laughing so hard they have to bend over.

            They turn back down the hill, walk to the highway, then along it next to the hospital, past the Swedish church with its high steeple past the high school behind its iron spiked fence, past the English church with bats in its belfry, to the front of the King’s Bar. They lean on the outside, one boot heel each up on the black shiny tile, under the blue neon sign shaped like a cigarette, smoking.

            Soon Heikki Donatello, who is twenty-one, and a friend of Paulie’s and Clayton Clifton’s older brothers, comes out. They get Heikki to buy them a six-pack at the grocery store next to the bar, and Heikki gives them a ride back up to The Corner. They sit on the Stone Wall.

             Their neighborhood is the only one in town with stone walls, and they are proud of them. The walls were built by Mather the Mining King, from Cleveland, Ohio. Or rather, they were built by men from the old countries, the boys’ grandfathers, when Mather built his mining-town estate in their neighborhood. It is called Mather Cottage, but to them it is a mansion.          

            Clayton Clifton’s mother Princess is a maid at The Cottage, like his grandmother was when she came from Sweden. She works there when they need extra help, when all the big shots come to town to check out the mines to see if they’re making enough money. It has a pool room that they call a billiard room, and a room with red plush couches where they smoke cigars and read books with leather bindings, and a room where there is nothing but clean sheets and towels and napkins that aren’t paper, called the linen room. The boys and the other kids have peeked into the windows when no big shots are there. The caretaker sees them and comes out and yells at them while they are running away.

            They drink two and a half beers each, stashing the last one in a big hole in the wall where a stone is loose. All the little kids leave secret messages in that hole; the boys used to too, but there are none there now.

            They throw the empties into The Pit, an old mine shaft, filled up with water. The cans hit the mush ice. The pit stinks in the summer and The Company has fenced it all around so no one will fall in. Once Mr. Juhanen drove an old car down and they pushed it in. They say the pit is bottomless. The water is soupy and green. The bottom must be piled with crap by now, about a mile down there, where the bottom is if there is a bottom. The neighborhood kids used to wonder if a deep sea diver could go down and come out in China.

            They walk back to The Corner and head up the bluff through the pines and over the rocks, slipping with their smooth soles on the pine needles. They walk sure-footed, though, even with the slipping, because they know the way in their sleep, blindfolded. This is their territory and they have played every inch of it, all their lives.

            “Christ, will those firemen shit when they try to get up to the fire!” Paulie laughs at the thought. “They’ll trip all over on these trails.”

            Clayton Clifton belches. He is out of shape from sitting  around and screwing Carol all winter. “Christ, sure will,” he says. “Remember when we used to guide those rockhounds from Alaska and Georgia and places like that, for a quarter?”

            “Yeah, they sure were dumb, coming all that way just to get this hematite rock.”

            They climb higher, holding on to the trunks of pine trees to guide themselves. The pitch is running, and soon their hands are gummy. They gather sticks, feeling at the bases of the trees, as they go up.

            “Remember the year they tried to pull hoses up here?” Paulie says.

            Soon they emerge from the pines onto Hematite Bluff’s grass fields. To the north the Northern Lights flame. “Good night for The Lights,” Clayton Clifton says, stopping to light a cigarette, taking a deep breath, cold, fresh.

            “Yeah. The town looks bigger, too, from here, all lit,” Paulie says.

            They hike higher through the snow-flattened dry grass, the glow of the town below them at their backs. The stars are bright in a clear sky. They reach the summit and sit with their backs against an outcropping. “Christ, it’s beautiful from up here, must be what it looks like from an airplane,” Paulie says.

            “I’m going to ride in an airplane someday,” Clayton Clifton says. “Maybe go down to Detroit to see the Tigers, or Milwaukee to see the Braves.”

            “Sure, sure, fancy, aintcha?” Paulie says.

            Clayton Clifton takes a fresh book of matches out of his back pocket. They check the wind with wet fingers, ritualists, though they know it is from the southwest. They gather loose, long dry grass, and they make a tangled pile. Then they teepee the pile with dry pine twigs from their pockets.

            Clayton Clifton sets the match book on edge, lighting one match pulled out and stuck into the book sidewise. He places the matchbook a little to the outside of the teepee, but in the loose grass. By the time the pile lights, the boys will be gone. The match book will be burned, and there will be no evidence of arson, except for the black bluff, where greener grass will grow. The fire always stops at the rocks which edge the bluff. They have learned to light the bluff from their older brothers and sisters, who learned it from kids who are now grown-ups and won’t admit they know how.

            “Wonder how Blackie and Mr. Wiitala and Hester’s dad and Maxine’s dad and them used to do it, before there were book matches?” Paulie wonders.

            The match lights and the boys run down the bluff, as surely as Indians. They sit on the wall at The Corner and wait, sharing the last beer. Hester walks past on her way home from Maxine’s house. She has her hair in braids again. Hester’s parents don’t believe in funny papers and lipstick and stuff like that, because of the Apostolic Lutheran Church, so Hester always sneaks to Maxine’s house before the dances to let her hair down and to put lipstick on.

            “Hi, Hester,” Clayton Clifton says. “Didn’t you have long hair earlier?”

            “Hi, Hester,” Paulie says. “It’s Spring Night.”

            “That was you guys who scared us!” Hester points. “We thought it was some of the little kids. Grow up! Boy, we sure were scared!” she says in a tone of voice to let the boys know they weren’t successful.

            “Hi, Hester,” Paulie repeats. “It’s Spring Night.”

            “Spring Night?” Hester looks up the dark bluff. “Really?” “Yup,” Clayton Clifton says. “Nothin’ to do, so we did it.”

            “I’m going to go get Maxine,” Hester says, and runs back down the street.

            By the time the fire trucks come, the grass on the bluff is aflame high above the town, though the kids can’t see the flames, because they are on the rocky side. Someone has called in the alarm, and the firemen in long black rubber coats are running up this stony side, bumping into pine trees, tripping on outcroppings and on their charred brooms that they use to beat out grass fires.

            There are ten kids, aged ten and above, sitting along the stone wall, kicking their heels against the stones, with four more teen-agers standing in the street in front of them. They glow in the red revolving light of the fire truck parked a little up from them. Some of the older boys are smoking cigarettes. None of the girls are.

            The fire chief strides up and down along the row of kids. Occasionally curtains part in a lighted house down the street, and an adult form appears. No adults come out of the house, though.

            “How long have you kids been sitting here?” the fire chief asks. “Did you see anyone come down the bluff?”

            “No, and we’ve been here all night,” Maxine answers.

            There is laughter from the group.

            “We’ve been playing. Kick the can, capture the flag, sardines, I-make-the-frying-pan-who-puts-the-egg-in? in The Pines.” She gestures behind her shoulder to the dark stand of virgin white pines behind the kids sitting on the wall.

            “We would have seen if anyone strange came into our neighborhood,” Hank Lehtomaki says.

            “Cleveland Location kids notice outsiders,” Paulie’s brother Matti says.

            The fire chief swears a few times. “I’m from Salisbury Location myself.”             

            “Cleveland always beats Salisbury. Those Cousin Jacks,” Clayton Clifton says. “You know Blackie Peterson? He’s my dad. He was born in Salisbury but then they moved to Cleveland.”

            Salisbury Location is only a mile away, over the other bluff near Lake Angeline, but it is as if it is on a distant planet, in this town.

            “Blackie? Yeah. Used to work the Mather C with him until I got laid up,” the fire chief says. He pats his fat belly. “Back problems.”

            “Yeah, well he told me all them Cornish Cousin Jacks live in Salisbury got to be foremen because they could speak English, not because they were good miners,” Clayton Clifton says.

            “Yeah, but the Italians were the worse, my ma says,” Hester, who is sitting demurely at the end of the line, says. “The Italians always liked the Finnish girls. My ma says they used to come to Cleveland and the Finnish boys would chase them.”

            “Hester, shat up,” Clayton Clifton says.

            “I was never a foreman. That’s them rich people on Strawberry Hill,” the fireman says. “But we Cornish make the best pasties,” he says, slipping back to childhood arguments among ethnic groups. “Hey, cut it out,” he said. “I’m asking you about the fire.”

            “Blackie told me Cleveland always beat Salisbury and we lit the best fires first in spring,” Clayton Clifton says.

            “Lit the best fires?” the fire chief says. “Now, you ain’t confessin’ you lit this fire, are you?” He gestures behind them to the bluff, well-aglow now, to the long profile of the hill, silhouetted in the smoky orange glow from the high flames on the town side.

            “He meant the lightning,” Maxine says. “Lightning always catches Hematite Bluff first.”

            “You, girl! You got a wise tongue,” the fire chief says. “Who’s your dad?”

            Clayton Clifton jumps down from his place in the row and he walks over to Maxine. He leans his back onto her knees and spreads them, his arms over her legs. He feels her thighs clamp the sides of his chest. He presses his arms down around her thighs in reply.

            “Don’t mind her, she always talks funny,” Clayton Clifton says. “Cleveland always was the best, is what she means.”

            The fire chief gets nowhere, like he always does. Clayton Clifton remembers Maxine’s thighs.

•

            Years later, when the Cleveland Location kids have become adults gone from the Upper Peninsula, only returning on vacations, Maxine is in the laundromat downtown. She is smoking a cigarette, leaning against the high folding table, with one eye on the clothes tumbling in the dryer, and one eye on the street outside. This laundromat used to be a small grocery store where the kids bought penny candy after school. But chains like A & P came into town during the boom years, and small grocery stores closed. Now A & P is closing, too.

            Across the street, where the Salvation Army used to be, and where there is a rock-strewn vacant lot now, she sees a disheveled man with baggy pants and a black leather jacket with studs on it, haltingly walk by, swaying. He begins to fall forward in slow motion, then catches himself, so that he looks as if he is doing the touching-toes exercise. Then he finds his balance again and stumbles on. It is Clayton Clifton.

            Maxine runs out of the laundromat, shouting, “Clay! Cliffs! Clayton Clifton!”

            The man turns, squints toward the voice, as if he is trying to focus his eyes, though it is a cloudy day and only three in the afternoon.

            “Clayton Clifton!” Maxine shouts again. Then she crosses over. “Clayton Clifton, how are you?”

            “Maxine?” He stares at her, swaying. “Maxine. F’r chrissakes! What you doin’ home? Last I heard you was in Wyoming!” He teeters back and forth, spittle coming from the side of his mouth. Then he stops swaying. He straightens and says deliberately and slowly, “Maxine. Let me buy you a beer.”

            “I’ve got clothes in the dryer. Wait a minute.” She takes his hand and starts across the street with him.

            “I’ll drive us. I have a car,” Maxine says. “Do you want to go to the Napoli?” She leans him against the hood of her station wagon. “Or somewhere for coffee?” She leaves him leaning there and runs in to the laundromat and piles damp clothes into her basket. She comes out.

            Clayton Clifton has waited to reply. “Nah, Franco kicked me out of da Napoli. Can’t never go back ‘dere. Le’s go to the Sunrise.” The Sunrise is the bar where all the town drunks hang out.

            By the time they get there Clayton Clifton has fallen asleep, so she drives them home instead. Princess comes out and helps her get Clayton Clifton into the house. He leans and stumbles up the sidewalk where Blackie used to switch his kids. He is a dead weight, and stinks.

            “He’s been on a bender for a week,” Princess says. “Just when he finally got another job.

            “It was that girl—Carol. Running off and marrying Beckwith Blake like that. Maxine, sure is good to see you, honey. How many kids you got now?”

            “Good to see you too, Princess,” Maxine says. She sees Clayton Clifton now, as he was, pegging green apples at her as she swings.

•

            Beckwith Blake and Clayton Clifton are sitting down the slope of their barn roof, on the side towards Maxine’s house. Their loud rooster won’t stop crowing. Maxine is twisting around on the swing beneath the apple tree. She likes to make herself dizzy, so she twists the ropes up, again and again, unwinding, over and over.   Clayton Clifton says, “You should drink a few beers, if you like to make yourself dizzy.”

            Maxine stops, planting her tennies firmly into the slanted dirt of the backyard hill. She shakes her head like a Labrador retriever shakes off water—with her whole body, right to her shivering tail, Clayton Clifton tells her.

            “God says you shouldn’t drink until you’re twenty-one,” she says.

            “Is God in Michigan? In the U.P.? Does he make the law that says that?” Clayton Clifton says, leaning over to wipe the spit off Beckwith Blake’s chin.

            “Stop spitting, Blake!” Maxine says from long babysitting experience. And she winds herself up again.

            “Abigail Nellie! Wendy Mamie!” yells a deep, harsh voice. Blackie’s.

            “They’re up the sandpile in The Pines with Shirley playing,” Maxine yells to him over the roof. She is babysitting her sister Shirley while her mother goes grocery shopping.

            “They’re up the sandpile with Shirley,” Clayton Clifton says to Blackie, scrambling over the other edge of the roof to talk to him.

            “Shit!” Blackie says. “Can’t you stop that damn rooster? I’m going to chop his head off, he doesn’t stop!” Maxine has felt that way herself, especially at sunrise in the summers, when that rooster won’t stop. Blackie limps back into the house, banging the door to the shed behind him.

            Clayton Clifton looks down at Maxine twisting. “Wanna take a walk in The Woods to Lake Angeline?”

            “Yeah,” says Beckwith Blake. “Wannago ta ‘gine?”

            Clayton Clifton says, “I meant Maxine and me, dummy.” Clayton Clifton is fourteen, and has just begun to jack off. At first he didn’t know what to do with it, but the older guys kept him up on things. He is the best beer-drinker, though. That gets respect. He has just had a couple of Dalton Murray’s beers, and he is feelin’ real good.

            “Oh, let him come, hey?” Maxine says. “He likes The Woods.”

            Maxine sways in the swing. She is getting older too, and her nipples show swollen beneath her t-shirt. “I have to wait until my ma gets home, though,” she says.

            “Yeah. Well, hoot me when she gets home,” Clayton Clifton says, though he knows the sound of their car well enough, a ’54 Ford, the Jubilee Special, with braces on its teeth. He scrambles over the tar-paper roof to the edge of the other side, and he drops to the ground in a ski-jumper’s crouch, just like old Joe Perrault and The Flying Finns, the Bietila Brothers from just down the street, made ski jump history, their skis are in the U.S. Ski Museum just the other side of town, they taught all the neighborhood boys, Clayton Clifton learned to ski jump before he learned to ski ride.

            He goes across the sidewalk into the shed, and then to the kitchen, which smells of yeast and sweat. His mother bakes a lot of bread. He turns right, to the bathroom, pees—a good beer piss. Blackie and Princess are sitting at the kitchen table drinking a beer. Blackie is carving with his jackknife, designs on the linoleum top.

            “Wanna beer?” Princess says, her eyes blinking from the cigarette smoke from the cigarette in her mouth.

            “He’s too young!” yells Mrs.-Mrs. from her chair in the front room, where she sits with her legs so fat they roll like foam over her shoes, water on the knee, they call it.           

            “Shat up, Ma!” Blackie says. “Wanna beer?” he says.

            “Nah,” Clayton Clifton replies.

            He climbs back up the roof, sure in his ankle-tied black gym shoes. He wants to have motorcycle boots.

            “Get some shoes, Clay Cliffs,” Maxine says. “Everyone’s wearin’ white bucks now.”

            “I beat up kids who call me that, Maxine.”

            “How did someone born in an iron mining town get that simpy name?” Maxine says, winding herself up again. “You sound like some guy in a book from England.”

            Just then Maxine’s mother pulls up.

            “I’m going to Lake Angeline with Clayton Clifton and Beckwith Blake,” Maxine yells to her mother, heading from the swing up the backyard hill to meet the boys who are heading on their side, to the gate their families hold mutually.    

            “Shirley’s across the street at The Pines’ sandpile with Abigail Nellie and Wendy Mamie,” she shouts to her mother.

            They are puffing, walking through the gout weed on the overgrown trail to the maple stand. Maxine picks a handful of wild tiger lilies, with a few ferns, and she stashes them on a rock to pick up on the way back.

            “Do you remember when Hank would get us boys and we’d chase you from the frog pond, you and Hester?” Clayton Clifton asks.

            “Ish!” Maxine says.

            They walk in silence for a few hundred yards. Then Clayton Clifton asks the question that has been on his mind. “Do you have any hairs growing?” as they pass into the white pine grove just before they’ll burst to the grassy granite bluff overlooking Lake Angeline, another old mine pit.

            Beckwith Blake says, “Yeah, I got some.”

            “He wasn’t asking you,” Maxine says, taking Beckwith Blake’s right hand.

            “Under your arms?” Clayton Clifton asks.

            Maxine is silent. Then, “Yeah,” shy, as she picks from just above their heads a white pine frond, rolling it in her fingers for the smell. “Two to a bunch and all together they make a peacock’s tail,” she says, fluffing the peacock tail onto Clayton Clifton’s nose, flirting.

            Clayton Clifton feels himself growing. He hopes she doesn’t see it, she wouldn’t know what it was, and he passes his hand back and forth once or twice in front of him as he jiggles in his walk, missing a step, as if he is adjusting his pants.

            She doesn’t.

            “On your bottom?” Clayton Clifton asks the question.      

            “I’m getting a few long hairs on my bottom,” Beckwith Blake says.

            “I wasn’t asking you,” says Clayton Clifton, leaning across Maxine to brush Beckwith Blake’s hair from his eyes.

            “He wasn’t asking you,” Maxine says, wiping Blake’s spit off his mouth, and then running ahead, taunting Clayton Clifton to come running after her. Clayton Clifton catches her and grabs her hand. They walk hand in hand over to the cliffs above the water which rises up the shafts, one inch or two per year. Then they sit down and don’t say a word until it is time to go back.

            As they head back, they hear Blackie, checking. “Beckwith Blake! Clayton Clifton!” Even Blackie’s voice sounds sweet and new from up here.

•   •