Autumn Street by Lois Lowry

Author:Lois Lowry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

11

THOUGH AUGUST, as Great-aunt Caroline had said, seemed to be the hottest month of the summer, the nights began to be cool. The summer slipcovers were still on the parlor furniture the rainy August night that Grandfather said, after the evening news, "I believe it's a good night for a fire."

I shivered. I remembered Grandfather's fires from winter, and there was a magic to them. There was the placement of the birch logs. The careful rolling of newspaper. The lighting, with a special long match. I was not allowed to do any of that, only to watch Grandfather. Later, when the fire was dying, I would be permitted to throw in one of the pine cones that were kept in a special basket. But that would be after Grandfather's magic.

"May I hold Gordon?" I asked Mama. "I want to show him the fire." She placed the baby in my arms as I sat on the rug in front of the fireplace.

Gordon had become less boring. He cried less now, smelled of spitup less often, and held his head high, looking around with blue, unfocused eyes. Sometimes he smiled at me. The grownups said that he looked like Daddy, and I wondered how they knew that, how they could remember, when I couldn't, my father's face.

Of Gordon's few baby skills there was only one that I admired. Sometimes, when Mama bathed him, I watched as he lay squirming and naked in her arms, and sometimes he peed into the air, high and arched like a rainbow, the thin stream bright against the sunny window behind him.

"I wish I could do that," I confided in Mama. She smiled.

"Well, you're a girl. Girls can't do that." I already knew that they couldn't. I had tried, myself, privately, in the bathtub, and met with humiliating failure.

"Can Daddy do that?"

"Goodness. I suppose he could."

"Charles can."

"Elizabeth! You haven't..."

I caught my error quickly. "Oh, no. I haven't seen him do it. But I meant that I suppose all boys can."

But I was lying. I had seen Charles do it, often, behind the lilacs. He aimed at ants.

I held Gordon, drowsy and powdered, on my lap, and played with his hands in the firelight. The flames licked the dry logs and snapped; sparks drifted up the chimney; a log shifted and fell.

"Do the magic, Grandfather. Do the magic for Gordon."

So Grandfather leaned forward, took a handful of his magic sand from its box, and sprinkled it onto the fire. For a few moments the flames turned blue, green, purple—for a few moments I saw in the fire all the colors of my paintings, my skies and mountains and hills, moving, alive, flickering and dancing against each other. Blending, the way I had blended my landscapes. There was sky in the fireplace. There was the Pacific, the horizon, the war, the past: the pale blue of places I had dreamed of; and the dark, awesome greens of places to which I was frightened to go.

The magic was over so quickly.

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