THE BEGINNING OF FALL


Clark and Aimee took them home that night. The remainder of the party had been flitted between guests, avoiding loose skateboards and drinking A-Treat Birch Beer, watching boys move and talk, sweating and not talking to anyone at all.

Jennie was the first to be dropped off. She didn’t know who was going next, but as she went to bed she imagined the five of them all together in Clark’s car, Aimee pressed closely hot against Clark, didn’t she know about him? As they pulled out of Jennie’s stone drive onto Malachi Hill Road, in her head they whooped and peeled off, south to Louise’s house, Chloe stuck halfway out of the window, yelling at the flying leaves and black forest shooting past, big hot summer moon above flashing in breaks between the branches, the moonlight so big and so hot and so bright that it burnt like magnesium in tumbling little pools on the road in front of them. As Clark’s station wagon ripped through them they dashed about madly, spilling all over the brush on the side of the road and everywhere, into the woods, in through the windows of the car, onto them, their clothes, everywhere.

The first damp chill of the season was never truly cold by conventional standards, but after the long summer it felt as if it was. Inciting a sensation of apprehension, all of a sudden the whole earth smelled of approaching frost. She had slept with her windows open and felt a bit sore in the throat, half from being out late. She hadn’t remembered falling asleep but that it was quite hot at the party at Lennie’s house. She called Melinda to talk about it as her big white curtains stood straight out as the wind blew into her room. Melinda was practically asleep as she answered her personal line, and all of a sudden Jennie recalled her sourness, remembering that the girls had gone out late with Clark somewhere in his car. She didn’t know where. Half-lit Melinda had hung the phone back up before Jennie was even able to figure out what the truth was, and why they had dropped her off so quick.

She ate a breakfast of cereal and went out the back door, across the big open yard between the lane and the corn which was only beginning to come up now. She was gone, in jeans and an old-fashioned tan hook-and-eyelet coat. The morning was windy and cold, trees bowing all the way down to say hello. The grass was damp and there apparantly had been a heavy storm as she slept, thick broken branches lay about as evidence. She went right into the woods where the wind did not blow so hard, whipping her light blonde hair into her face and annoying her greatly. She was walking southeast, away from the little hill beyond where the party was the night before, in the opposite direction of her friends’ homes. They didn’t know these woods so well, south and east of Malachi Hill, running through Strussemeade Valley beside the Strussemeade Valley Country Club, north of the farms that marked the ends of the woods and the beginning of an altogther different land, where there were more roads, more homes, west of the little towns. Jennie lived further south than all of them, and these woods were practically her own little secret. Sometimes at night when Melinda, Chloe, and Louise slept over, she would steal them away to the country club where they’d run through the open grass, surreal in the night with it’s well-groomed divinity, sand and pools. But they’d never see these woods, a narrow and winding avenue of trees dark and empty.

She sat on a log and looked up a nearby hill to where a little rich boy lived that she’d see when she was younger also playing alone in the forest there. Now he was on the soccer team at Powder Valley and she didn’t know him.

At her feet were a little bunch of wild Amanita which had presumably sprung up after the rain the night before. Her mother loved to take Jennie out on expeditions into their big dense woods to pick wild mushrooms for Saturday’s cooking. The little Amanita drew her eyes down and across the flat ferny ground to search for something less deadly. There were beautiful bright morels popping up everywhere, these she walked over to and picked, placing in the basket she made with the front of her coat, dark rich soil getting all over.

She walked deeper in on a quest find more varieties, king bolete, or oysters, which were her mother’s favorites, perhaps something different for her mother to make a soup or something out of. The smell of the earth was so heavy as she approached a tiny little pond downhill from the lonely 11th hole of the Strussemeade Valley Country Club...