Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE gate to the farm was chained and the chain locked with a heavy padlock, so he parked the car beside the highway and walked the quarter mile down to the buildings.

The farm road was overgrown with grass in places and knee-high with weeds in others and only here and there could you find the sign of wheel-ruts. The fields lay unplowed, with brush springing up along the fences and weed patches flourishing in the poorer spots, where years of cultivation had sapped the ground of strength.

From the highway, the buildings had looked about the same as he remembered them, cozily grouped together and strong with the feel of home, but as he drew nearer the signs of neglect became apparent, striking him like a hand across the face. The yard around the house was thick with grass and weeds and the flower beds were all gone and the rosebush at the corner of the porch was dying, a scraggly thing with only one or two roses where in other years it had been heavy with its bloom. The plum thicket in the corner of the fence had run riot, and the fence itself was rickety and in places had disappeared entirely. Some windows in the house were broken, probably by kids heaving idle stones, and the door to the back porch had become unlocked and was swinging in the wind.

He waded through the sea of grass, walking around the house, astonished at how tenaciously the marks of living still clung about the place. There, on the chimney, running up the outside wall, were the prints of his ten-year-old hands, impressed into wet mortar, and the splintered piece of siding still remained above the basement window, broken by poorly aimed chunks of wood chucked through the open window into the basement to feed the old, wood-eating furnace. At the corner of the house he found the old wash-tub where his mother each spring had planted the nasturtiums, but the tub itself was almost gone, its metal turned to rust, and all that remained was a mound of earth. The mountain ash still stood in the front yard and he walked into its shade and looked up into its canopy of leaves and put out his hand and stroked the smoothness of its trunk, remembering how he had planted it as a boy, proud that they should have a tree like no one else in the neighborhood.

He did not try the door, for the outside of the house was all he wished to see. There would be too much to see inside the house — the nail holes on the wall where the pictures had been hung and the marks upon the floor where the stove had stood and the stairway with the treads worn smooth by beloved footsteps. If he went in, the house would cry out to him from the silences of its closets and the emptiness of its rooms.

He walked down to the other buildings and they, he found, for all their silence and their emptiness, were not so memory-haunted as the house. The henhouse was falling in upon itself and the hoghouse was a place for the winter winds to whistle through and he found an old worn-out binder stored in the back of the cavernous machine shed.

The barn was cool and shadowed, and of all the buildings it seemed the most like home. The stalls were empty, but the hay still hung in cobwebby wisps from the cracks in the floor of the mow and the place still smelled the way he had remembered it, the half-musty, half-acid smell of living, friendly beasts.

He climbed the incline to the granary and sliding back the wooden latch, went in. Mice ran squeaking across the floor and up the walls and beams. A pile of grain sacks were draped across the partition that held the grain back from the alley way and a broken harness hung from a peg upon the wall and there, at the end of the alley lay something that stopped him in his tracks.

It was a child's top, battered now and with all its color gone, but once it had been bright and colorful and when you pumped it on the floor it had spun and whistled. He had gotten it for Christmas, he remembered, and it had been a favorite toy.

He picked it up and held its battered metal with a sudden tenderness and wondered how it had gotten there. It was a part of his past catching up with him — a dead and useless thing to everyone in all the world except the boy to whom it had once belonged.

It had been a striped top and the colors had run in spiraling streaks when you spun it and there had been a point, he remembered, where each streak ran and disappeared, and another streak came up and it disappeared, and then another.

You could sit for hours watching the streaks come up and disappear, trying to make out where they went. For they must go somewhere, a boyish mind would figure. They couldn't be there one second and be gone the next. There must be somewhere for them to go.

_And there had been somewhere for them to go!_

He remembered now.

It all came back to him, with the top clutched in his hands and the years peeling off and falling away to take him back to one day in his childhood.

You could go with the streaks, go where they went, into the land they fled to, if you were very young and could wonder hard enough.

It was a sort of fairyland, although it seemed more real than a fairyland should be. There was a walk that looked as if it were made of glass and there were birds and flowers and trees and some butterflies and he picked one of the flowers and carried it in his hand as he walked along the path. He had seen a little house hidden in a grove and when he saw it, he became a little frightened and walked back along the path and suddenly he was home, with the top dead on the floor in front of him and the flower clutched in his hand.

He had gone and told his mother and she had snatched away the flower, as if she might be afraid of it. And well she might have been, for it was winter.

That evening Pa had questioned him and found out about the top and the next day, he remembered, when he'd looked for the top he couldn't find it anywhere. He had cried off and on for days, secretly of course.

And here it was again, an old and battered top, with no hint of the original color, but the same one, he was sure.

He left the granary, carrying the battered top along with him, away from the unloved insecurity in which it had rested for so long.

Forgetfulness, he told himself, but it was more than that — a mental block of some sort that had made him forget about the top and the trip to fairyland. Through all the years he had not remembered it, had not even suspected that there was an incident such as this hidden in his mind. But now the top was with him once again and the day was with him, too — the day he'd followed the swirling streaks and walked into fairyland.