Indian Summer

A short story I recently wrote. It is created from the ideas presented in this painting: Indian Summer, by George Inness.

by Logan Zillmer

   I left her sitting there in the window sill, looking out onto the land that was overgrown. Jonah was in the house with her. It was Sunday, seven days after Father passed. The air was still warm, hot even, not humid so it was comfortable, even though the leaves had begun to change. The whole plot of land was calm, as if somehow it also knew he was gone, the Earth waiting to turn cold, knowing it held a good one in its belly. Father always called the natural world: the trees and the river and the tarpons and all else, the “Second Bible”. It was upon the first that he was strictly raised, and from this first, by the second, that he was weaned; though the spirit of God in him never died, as they say, in his turning from the church, because he had found it moving among the wild things in life. The wooden boat scratched along as I dragged it through the orange leaves, scraping the dirt from the bottom. There was a patch of dirt in the yard now where the boat had lain since last I was here. Father had kept only one cow, and she roamed around in the evening sun outside the window. Mother was talking to her. I remember Father saying, “A mechanic who keeps but one cow, by taking pains, can make her yield abundantly”.   The long reeds waved against my bare legs. The Sun beat down on my face. I spotted a bright white Magnolia near a log in the reeds.

   I watched Momma as she come out of the bedroom in her new dress. She had a smile on her face bright as the flowers on her dress. She spent nights a whole month making the dress, sometimes before Papa and I get up in the morning, before Papa and I saw to the milking and the trees, and before we went out to the river to fish and hunt sponges. We made our own breakfast, me and Papa, he’d say it’s a fair trade for meals and that Mommas’ gonna make two more today, we can handle one I expect. He grabbed her around the waist and she put her hand in his and he twirled her around the room and Jonah watched through the window holding his axe. Jonah loved Father and Mother. He said Papa was his whale. Papa always said nonsense and that he had got a heart from God too and it beat just the same, and just cause some don’t hear it don’t mean it ain’t true. Jonah didn’t care about making money; he always said “I thanks God for what let a man live as he is”. Jonah has a Seminole woman who visits to the farm sometimes and makes rush baskets and leaves them full of berries and fruits. I know Jonah loves her cause I seen him treat her like Father treats Mother, hugging on her neck and being sweet. Momma likes her too and sometimes she helps with things around the farm, and Momma taught her to keep her hands soft with vinegar after working with them in the yard and after washing. I jumped up and down and Momma and Papa danced through the light from the windows and through the dust they was kicking up and laughing. It was Papa that put her smile on, not so much the new dress, it was that he never forgot, he never backed out or said he was too tired. Papa knew how much this day meant to Momma every month. He said, “A poor man has to treat his wife right ‘cause he’s lucky enough she took his ring, and lucky more when the ring was only a promise, and more still when she realized that it might as well be a reed tied around her finger.” So he never said no, he never dragged or carried off slow. He put on that energy he’d stored up over the days. I know he looked forward to it like she did.

   I pulled the old wooden boat through the reeds toward the becalmed water. A loon called out somewhere from inside the fog; that same fog that rested there atop the crystal blue bayou since I was a boy and probably that same loon; that ageless mystical creature that always came down early and stayed late. The sun was breaking the horizon beyond the river. It had been cold the night before and the bayou was covered in a thick immovable fog, so much so that when we pushed out we couldn’t see five feet straight ahead. I lay in bed that morning, listening to the loon’s eerie tremolo. Father came in with the lantern and kneeled down next to my bed.

   I don’t know why but I always pretended to sleep when he come in to wake me. He always did talking quietly, telling of the day we were gonna have and what we were gonna do. This morning he told of our great loon hunt. “It’s a true hunter that catches his game in a mystical fog like this, son, and is only what such a beautiful bird deserves.” I dressed and we ate eggs. He told me again about the man he met on his way to Florida after the war. He was a strange and energetic man, but with a tremendous love and genius for nature, he would say. He carried a bag full of plants in a plant-press and nothing else but a few crackers and a few books; one he gave to father and father reads it to me. I always thought Waldo was a strange name but I understand some of it now. The strange man was also on his way to the Gulf Coast so they went together, and was a good thing they did because on more than one occasion they had ran into angry Rebels who were mad from the war and had spent the months after roaming areas of the South robbing and looting travelers, wearing long Rebel hair and riding sickly horses. One time Father said the man made him carry a notepad and one of the plant presses to show that Father wasn’t anything but this strange man’s apprentice. They would stand aside the road and talk about plants while the young, gaunt riders passed slowly by, looking on these two strange men and their things, thinking whether it would be worth the energy to rob them or not. They talked about religion, both of them growing up in the church, and of nature and how to see Him in all its parts. Father said it was the best trip of his life. And one day we seen that man’s face in a newspaper; he was protecting trees out west they said were bigger than a rich man’s house.

   We would hunt and kill when necessary, Father and I, but not for game, not for sport. We never caught the loon that morning with just a simple fishing net and a box, and I’m certain Father never thought we would. But this wasn’t apparent from the rigor with which he hunted, wrapped in heaven and haze. We turned around for hours on the river, guided only by ear, drawn forth as if by some beguiling, omnipresent siren, Father bent on the bow like George Washington, our aquiline boat pressing silently through the calm blue water, swirling the fog around our bodies like a horse running through smoke.

   Each of the horses have their own stall and shoes. “Each is not plural son,” he said, “each is singular.” I looked at him, the sharp dark eyes that had life and energy. “So, what should it be?” I looked back at what I had written. Again, I read it aloud, Father nodding along and slowing at the right moment to queue my change. I stopped pulling the boat for a moment and stood silently, listening again for the loon, but it was gone. It had disappeared somewhere among the fog like a ghost, an apparition, maybe passing into another time altogether with that same silent ease with which it moves so effortlessly through our hazy bayou. I looked down at the boat; it was wet from the rain early that morning. It was dark and black at the bottom.

   I stood over the box where he lay. I heard people speaking. He looked kind and like he still had that energy stored up inside him, trying to get out. The land was quiet. He grabbed mother’s hand and told her, “God is good that he lets me go to him, coming from you”. She wept and hugged his neck. She held a magnolia and looked out the window. Someone began speaking. I watched them standing in the river, the tarpon fished jumped all around and he put a white cloth over Father’s nose and mouth and dipped him backwards into the river. He was dressed in a white robe and I couldn’t hardly see him. The water was so full of light that I could only see my father’s dark clothes and when he went under I could only look away. Father walked out of the river and the light, the tarpons still jumping, the bright light glinting off their big silver bodies. He looked at mother who smiled. “God, though he gave us time, does not require it quantified for admittance at the Golden Gate. He accepts all who believe, at any point in their journey”. She leaned in and moved his pillow; he tried to sit up but she made him stay still. “For God does not punish those astray who return, nor does he hold higher those who never leave the comfort of these hallowed walls. There is room for all at the foot of the Lord.” The light was fuzzy and I was hot; the dank room swirled around my head and I suddenly became dizzy. I couldn’t find anything solid to look at or hold to. I felt air coming out and my mouth moving. The preacher stopped and looked at me with big terrified eyes; mother came and wrapped her thin arms around me. The hot air stopped coming out of my lungs. Ellie moaned on the new hay, her swollen belly rose and fell hard and fast. Her tail was wrapped up. I pulled at the little foal’s legs, trying to help. Then she lay on her side, breathing, resting. I looked at Mother, she was serene and calm; she was smiling. The foal lay at its mother’s side, wet, shiny-black on the new hay. The sun broke through the other side of the barn and shone onto the baby; dust danced in the beam of orange light. Father was proud and stood with his arms akimbo, looking on. Suddenly the mare rose to her feet. Her knees wobbled. “Whoa El, whoa now, not yet girl!” Father said to her, the one he knew for years as a friend, who trusted none but him. He moved toward her to calm her down, but, in a violent burst the umbilical cord broke, and blood ran from both ends, from both horses, out onto the new hay. He moved quickly then, running to the trailer. The exhausted mare flopped down again, almost crushing her baby; the foal moaned in pain and confusion. Blood trickled through the hard stalks of hay onto the earthen floor. Father returned with a soft rope in his hand; it had been boiled that morning. “See to the foal. Tie up that end so it don’t bleed out,” he instructed, handing me the rope. I knelt down in the blood and broken sac and wrapped the lace around the umbilical cord attached to the foal and pulled it tight. The blood slowed, and the little horse lay moaning. Pieces of hay were stuck to its body. Father calmed Ellie, and tied up the other umbilical end. Mother began to tear up, her eyes turned grey and heavy. She put her hands up to her face. “They’re all right Junie,” Father said with that earth-warm slow confidence, “just a little scare, you know she gets this way.” Chickadees darted among the wooden rafters and the orange dust. The cat prowled into the barn and looked at the mare and foal, both breathing heavily on the soiled hay. I filled a glass with the solution. I knelt down and put the umbilical in the solution and pressed the glass against the belly of the little horse, then shook it. I knew what to do. Father knelt next to the mare and slapped his hand on her flank twice, soft and slow. “She’s a beautiful girl, El,” he said. His eyes were soft and dark, and full of joy and relief. “For I, the Lord thy God, will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.” Mother and I were outside now, and I could smell the honeysuckle when I took deep breaths. “He doesn’t know a damn thing about Father! He wasn’t there when he was baptized again, he doesn’t know why!” I said. She understood and wept in her black dress.

   Late summers always have the same smell to them inside the house. I can still smell it. Like the sun has been heating up the wood all season; each day it warms another layer in the boards, and in the late summer, you can smell the deepest center of the wood. The house is somehow just as much a part of this earth as the trees growing outside. The aroma lifts up off the boards and sits inside the house like a thick blanket. He made his drink; dissolved sugar in a little water and added Kentucky whiskey after. His father always did it when he lived in Mississippi before the war, and taught him how; now I do it. He grabbed mother by the face and told her “I love you only.” She didn’t mind his rough hands or his dirty fingernails.

   And they were, not because he didn’t care; he wasn’t a rich man with a summer home here in Tarpon Springs like most folks, but because he and I were farmers and fisherman; we were men of the dirt and earth. He and Mother were one of the first here at the Spring Bayou except the few Seminole Indians, who had been here since we don’t know how long, hiding from white folks who made war with them. And we lived like we were the only, like we were on some island, just Mother, Father, Jonah and I, the Seminoles not wanting to be seen most of the time. It wasn’t safe for my father where he grew up during the war, and less so after. He never said why but I know he didn’t carry the Southern ideals like everyone else, and they knew he didn’t; Father loved Lincoln. He said he was right about the Nation’s degeneracy. He came to Tarpon after he learned of Lincoln’s death. He couldn’t pretend anymore, and everyone was coming home and making trouble for him. One night, he said he almost got strung up next to a couple negros that was planning on going to Oregon.  They used to tell me stories about it here before anyone started coming down from up north, and before the Greeks came and the sponge hunters. And I see all of it here, anyone can and he don’t have that, that pride they all carried with them from Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia, that pride that the men brought here. “But it hasn’t made a man a better husband that I’ve seen; it hasn’t done a thing but only make him look a better man among the men.” She looked into my eyes. Blonde wisps of hair reached across her cheek and nose and hung on the puffy shoulders of her dress. The purple and orange sun dropped out beyond the river and reflected in her big round eyes, they were afire like the leaves on the tree above us. She banged the heels of her shoes on the raw faces of the chopped wood. “Do you think my father is bad man because he is a gentleman,” she said, not asking, that one word telling me everything she wanted to say, “because he carries himself in a certain way?” A blue heron stood in silhouette among the reeds. “Everyone is looking for a clean blue cove to push out into, lying on their backs, faces to the sun,” I said. She stared at me with a face like an owl.

   Papa and me caught a loon one morning, he was injured, we found him laying in the reeds. We carried him through the yard and into the house. He had shiny red eyes. He let Papa and I hold him, but we had to take him out when he almost cracked the cat’s skull with his beak. He pretended not to see him coming then raised up and cracked him good. Papa said it’s a smart bird. But we fixed him right and papa said he’d be fine.

    My feet crackled over the dead leaves. Not many trees change in the place of my youth, but there was always one in the yard that lit up like a great fire. I looked back at it from the edge of the river. They always said they were lucky to have me, that I was their miracle. Mother had three miscarriages. She always said it was stress from the war that killed her babies, and that every one of them are still here, waiting for her to pass on, and that her soul would take theirs with it up to the Golden Gates. She said the same about father the day he passed away. I laughed aloud standing there next to the boat at the river’s edge thinking about Jonah. “Thas a awful lonely thing to say ma’am.” Jonah said, “Man’s soul like mister James ain’t gotta wait no more n’ it take a soul to travel, an I reckon that ain’t no time. Thas awful lonely, bein trapped like that here, specially them little unborns… thas awful lonely, awful lonely thing to say ma’am.” A slight breeze picked up; it was cool. It rustled the orange tree and the rush and the reeds. I could smell the river and the honeysuckle and the deep center of the wood. Most of the tarpons are gone now, but every now and then one will jump, silver-backed, out of the river and catch the warm rays of the sun. I saw one just then and thought of Father.

   One last time, I pushed the old wooden boat out into the fog of the Spring Bayou, out onto that timeless blue water. I called out for the loon, and listened. It was still warm, the Earth knowing whose soul had departed, that it wasn’t of a speculator, or a politician, a degenerate or a sot, and here was, this Indian Summer, its parting gift.