What Dies in Summer by Tom Wright Read Free Book Online

Diana asked softly.
    “Gram says they had different ideas about education in Europe.”
    For me Dr. Kepler’s words carried a certain kind of excitement even when they sounded discouraging, but Diana saw it a different way. “That’s too scary,” she said. Not
many things troubled her, but she had a certain concern for the fate of her soul. When Mrs. Pynchon said, “Nothing in this world means much to me if I can’t believe in something greater
than myself,” Diana nodded without looking up.
    Dr. Kepler said, “No one has brought us more unspeakable cruelty, more wars, more death, than the Prince of Peace and his peers with all their holy warriors. Perhaps we should look for
greatness somewhere else.”
    Diana shook her head unconsciously as she laid down the club five.
    But now I was remembering when Dr. Kepler had come back from seeing her internist, the year after I came to live with Gram. Listening to her, Gram had said, “Oh, Joan, no!”
    “Now, Miriam, the last thing I will have is you saying there is some higher meaning in this, that I am being called home to Jesus and we will understand it all in the sweet bye and bye, or
any of that happy nonsense.”
    “But Joan,” Gram had said, “is there no comfort for you?”
    “My comfort shall be in seeing to the completeness of my life and trying to be worthy of my friends.”
    Gram had hugged her and sniffled, and, watching from the hall, I’d felt a chill that seemed to go all the way down to the atoms in my bones.
    Now I thought of Colossians, who had no problem believing in things greater than himself because, on account of being off-and-on insane, he seemed to hear from them on a regular basis. I was the
one who had introduced him to Dr. Kepler, and they had hit it off in spite of the different things they thought were real. She hired him to do some yard work, but she seemed to enjoy his singing in
the same amazed way that I did. She said that in Europe before the war he might have been a luminary of the continental operatic stage, which I took to mean he could have been a singing star. But
she said he wouldn’t be the headliner very often because, always and everywhere, the best parts were written for the tenors.
    “But what a splendid villain he might have made!” she said.
    One day Dr. Kepler, in her straw sun hat and gardening gloves, was watching Colossians at work when L.A. and I arrived to deliver Dr. Kepler a loaf of dill bread Gram had baked for her.
Colossians was planting bulbs in the front garden and I got interested in the process and left the bread presentation to L.A. Watching him on his knees in the soft, dark earth, smoothly turning
aside a thick curl of the soil with his trowel, slipping a bulb from the sack beside him under it and moving on to plant the next bulb with no waste motion, his big hands barely seeming to move, I
realized for the first time how much more there was to raising flowers than just throwing out a few seeds, how if you wanted to do it right it was a matter not only of understanding but of somehow
joining with the soil and in a way befriending it.
    “Perennials are so wonderfully appealing,” said Dr. Kepler. “Something that will come again each year, almost a way of going on oneself.”
    “These amaryllis and hyacinth do you proud, missus. They faces be gloryin’ the Lord ever spring of the world.”
    “Let them glorify your strong hand, Colossians—there is nothing in the sky I wish to exalt.”
    “Why, land sakes, missus, you not believin’ on the good Lord?”
    “I believe in what I know,” she said. “I know the damned gangsters burned up my mother and my father and my three sisters in big ovens, and I know the smoke went away into the
sky. There must have been a great deal of it; maybe the good Lord saw it. Now I am only smoke that is waiting its turn to go up to the sky, and soon enough the gangsters will have their way with me
too. Their bones, and the murderers who walk among us,