The Ravine

The courthouse clock struck nine and it was getting late and it was really night on this
small street in a small town in a big state on a large continent on a planet earth hurtling
down the pit of space toward nowhere or somewhere and Tom feeling every mile of the
long drop. He sat by the front-door screen looking out at that rushing blackness that

□

looked very innocent as if it was holding still. Only when you closed your eyes and lay
down could you feel the world spinning under your bed and hollowing your ears with a
black sea that came in and broke on cliffs that weren't there.

There was a smell of rain. Mother was ironing and sprinkling water from a corked
ketchup bottle over the crackling dry clothes behind Tom.

One store was still open about a block away— Mrs. Singer's.

Finally, just before it was time for Mrs. Singer to close her store, Mother relented and
told Tom, "Run get a pint of ice cream and be sure she packs it tight."

He asked if he could get a scoop of chocolate on top, because he didn't like vanilla,
and Mother agreed. He clutched the money and ran barefooted over the warm evening
cement sidewalk, under the apple and oak trees, toward the store. The town was so quiet

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and far off you could hear only the crickets sounding in the spaces beyond the hot indigo
trees that hold back the stars.

His bare feet slapped the pavement. He crossed the street and found Mrs. Singer
moving ponderously about her store, singing Yiddish melodies.

"Pint ice cream?" she said. "Chocolate on top? Yes!"

He watched her fumble the metal top off the ice-cream freezer and manipulate the
scoop, packing the cardboard pint chock-full with "chocolate on top, yes!" He gave the
money, received the chill, icy pack, and rubbing it across his brow and cheek, laughing,
thumped barefootedly homeward. Behind him the lights of the lonely little store blinked
out and there was only a street light shimmering on the corner, and the whole city
seemed to be going to sleep.

Opening the screen door, he found Mom still ironing. She looked hot and irritated but
she smiled just the same.

"When will Dad be home from lodge meeting?" he asked.

"About eleven or eleven-thirty," Mother replied. She took the ice cream to the kitchen,
divided it. Giving him his special portion of chocolate, she dished out some for herself
and the rest was put away, "for Douglas and your father when they come."

They sat enjoying the ice cream, wrapped at the core of the deep quiet summer night.
His mother and himself and the night all around their small house on the small street. He
licked each spoonful of ice cream thoroughly before digging for another, and Mom put
her ironing board away and the hot iron in its open case cooling, and she sat in the
armchair by the phonograph, eating her dessert and saying, "My land, it was a hot day
today. Earth soaks up all the heat and lets it out at night. It'll be soggy sleeping.

They both sat listening to the night, pressed down by every window and door and
complete silence because the radio needed a new battery, and they had played all the
Knickerbocker Quartet records and Al Jolson and Two Black Crows records to exhaustion;
so Tom just sat on the hardwood floor and looked out into the dark dark dark, pressing
his nose against the screen until the flesh of its tip was molded into small dark squares.

"I wonder where Doug is? It's almost nine-thirty."

"He'll be here," Tom said, knowing very well that Douglas would be.

He followed Mom out to wash the dishes. Each sound, each rattle of spoon or dish was
amplified in the baked evening. Silently they went to the living room, removed the couch
cushions and, together, yanked it open and extended it down into the double bed it
secretly was. Mother made the bed, punching pillows neatly to flump them up for their
heads. Then, as he was unbuttoning his shirt, she said, "Wait awhile, Tom."

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"Why?"

"Because I say so."
"You look funny, Mom."

Mom sat down a moment, then stood up, went to the door and called. He listened to
her calling and calling, "Douglas, Douglas, oh Doug! Douglasssssss!" over and over. Her
calling floated out into the summer warm dark and never came back. The echoes paid no
attention.

Douglas. Douglas. Douglas.
Douglas!

And as he sat on the floor, a coldness that was not ice cream and not winter, and not
part of summer's heat, went through Tom. He noticed Mom's eyes sliding, blinking; the
way she stood undecided and was nervous. All of these things.

□

She opened the screen door. Stepping out into the night, she walked down the steps
and down the front sidewalk under the lilac bush. He listened to her moving feet.

She called again.

Silence.

She called twice more. Tom sat in the room. Any moment now, Douglas would answer
from down the long long narrow street, "All right, Mom! All right, Mother! Hey!"

But he didn't answer. And for two minutes Tom sat looking at the made-up bed, the
silent radio, the silent phonograph, at the chandelier with the crystal bobbins gleaming
quietly, at the rug with the scarlet and purple curlicues on it. He stubbed his toe on the
bed purposely to see if it hurt. It did.

Whining, the screen door opened and Mother said, "Come on, Tom. We'll take a walk."
"Where to?"

"Just down the block. Come on."

He took her hand. Together they walked down St. James Street. Underfoot the
concrete was still warm, and the crickets were sounding louder against the darkening
dark. They reached a corner, turned, and walked toward the West Ravine.

Off somewhere a car floated by, flashing its lights in the distance. There was such a

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complete lack of life, light, and activity. Here and there, back off from where they were
walking, faint squares of light glowed where people were still up. But most of the houses,
darkened, were sleeping already, and there were a few lightless places where the
occupants of a dwelling sat talking low night talk on their front porches. You heard a
porch swing squeaking as you walked by.

"I wish your father was home," said Mother. Her large hand squeezed around his small
one. "Just wait'll 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 spank him within an inch of his life."

Now they had walked another block and were standing by the holy black silhouette of
the German Baptist Church at the corner of Chapel Street and Glen Rock. In back of the
church, a hundred yards away, the ravine began. He could smell it. It had a dark-sewer,
rotten-foliage, thick-green odor. It was a wide ravine that cut and twisted across town— a
jungle by day, a place to let alone at night, Mother often declared.

He should have felt encouraged by the nearness of the German Baptist Church but he
was not, because the building was not illumined, was cold and useless as a pile of ruins
on the ravine edge.

He was only ten years old. He knew little of death, fear, or dread. Death was the
waxen effigy in the coffin when he was six and Great-grandfather passed away, looking
like a great fallen vulture in his casket, silent, withdrawn, no more to tell him how to be a
good boy, no more to comment succinctly 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 realized 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, waiting in the country to come in, 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 summer night deep down under the stars was all
things you would ever feel or see or hear in your life, drowning you all at once.

Leaving the sidewalk, they walked along a trodden, pebbled, weed-fringed path while
the crickets rose in a loud full drumming chorus. He followed obediently behind brave,
fine, tall Mother— defender of the universe. Together, then, they approached, reached,
and paused at the very end of civilization.

The Ravine.

Here and now, down in that pit of jungled blackness were suddenly all the things he
would never know or understand; all the things without names lived in the huddled tree

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shadow, in the odor of decay.

He realized he and his mother were alone.

Her hand trembled.

□

He felt the tremble . . . Why? But she was bigger, stronger, more intelligent than
himself, wasn't she? Did she, too, feel that intangible menace, that groping out of
darkness, that crouching malignancy down below? Was there, then, no strength in
growing up? No solace in being an adult? No sanctuary in life? No fleshly citadel strong
enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of midnights? Doubts flushed him. Ice cream
lived again in his throat, stomach, spine and limbs; he was instantly cold as a wind out of
December gone.

He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone.
One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid. Like here, standing. If he should
scream, if he should holler for help, would it matter?

Blackness could come swiftly, swallowing; in one titanically freezing moment all would
be concluded. Long before dawn, long before police with flashlights might probe the dark,
disturbed pathway, long before men with trembling brains 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 tide could rise to take all ten years from him and—

The essential impact 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 instant, save into her heart, and there she would
find nothing but uncontrollable repugnance and a will to fear. In this instant it was an
individual problem seeking an individual solution. He must accept being alone and work
on from there.

He swallowed hard, clung to her. Oh, Lord, don't let her die, please, he thought. Don't
do anything to us. Father will be coming home from lodge meeting in an hour and if the
house is empty —

Mother advanced down the path into the primeval jungle. His voice trembled. "Mom,
Doug's all right. Doug's all right. He's all right. Doug's all right!"

Mother's voice was strained, high. "He always comes through here. I tell him not to,
but those darned kids, they come through here anyway. Some night he'll come through
and never come out again—"

Never come out again. That could mean anything. Tramps. Criminals. Darkness.
Accident. Most of all death!

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Alone in the universe.

There were a million small towns like this all over the world. Each as dark, as lonely,
each as removed, as full of shuddering and wonder. The reedy playing of minor-key
violins was the small towns' music, with no lights, but many shadows. Oh, the vast
swelling 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 realized something was wrong.

The crickets had stopped chirping. Silence was complete.

Never in his life a silence like this one. One so utterly complete. Why should the
crickets cease? Why? What reason? They'd never stopped ever before. Not ever.

Unless. Unless—

Something was going to happen.

It was as if the whole ravine was tensing, bunching together its black fibers, drawing
in power from sleeping countrysides all about, for miles and miles. From dew-sodden
forest and dells and rolling hills where dogs tilted heads to moons, from all around the
great silence was sucked into one center, and they were the core of it. In ten seconds
now, something would happen, something would happen. The crickets kept their truce,
the stars were so low he could almost brush the tinsel. There were swarms of them, hot
and sharp.

Growing, growing, the silence. Growing, growing, the tenseness. Oh, it was so dark,
so far away from everything. Oh, God!

And then, way way off across the ravine:

"Okay, Mom! Coming, Mother!"

And again: "Hi, Mom! Coming, Mom!"

□

And then the quick scuttering of tennis shoes padding down through the pit of the
ravine as three kids came dashing, giggling. His brother Douglas, Chuck Woodman, and
John Huff. Running, giggling . . .

The stars sucked up like the stung antennae of ten million snails.

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The crickets sang!

The darkness pulled back, startled, shocked, angry. 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 piled out of it, laughing.

"Hi, Mom! Hi, Tom! Hey!"

It smelled like Douglas, all right. Sweat and grass and the odor of trees and branches
and the creek about him.

"Young man, you're going to get a licking," declared Mother. She put away her fear
instantly. Tom knew she would never tell anyone of it, ever. 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. For a moment there he had thought —



Far off in the dim moonlit country, over a viaduct and down a valley, a train rushed
along whistling like a lost metal thing, nameless and running. Tom went to bed shivering,
beside his brother, listening to that train whistle, and thinking of a cousin who lived way
out in the country where that train ran now; a cousin who died of pneumonia late at
night years and years ago—

He smelled the sweat of Doug beside him. It was magic. Tom stopped trembling.

"Only two things I know for sure, Doug," he whispered.

"What?"

"Nighttime's awful dark— is one."
"What's the other?"

"The ravine at night don't belong in Mr. Auffmann's Happiness Machine, if he ever
builds it."

Douglas considered this awhile. "You can say that again."

They stopped talking. Listening, suddenly they heard footsteps coming down the
street, under the trees, outside the house now, on the sidewalk. From her bed Mother
called quietly, "That's your father." It was.