LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ONE

      There are those days which seem a taking in of breath which, held, suspends the whole earth in its waiting. Some summers refuse to end.

      So along the road those flowers spread that, when touched, give down a shower of autumn rust. By every path it looks as if a ruined circus had passed and loosed a trail of ancient iron at every turning of a wheel. The rust was laid out everywhere, strewn under trees and by riverbanks and near the tracks themselves where once a locomotive had gone but went no more. So flowered flakes and railroad track together turned to moulderings upon the rim of autumn.

      ‘Look, Doug,’ said Grandpa, driving into town from the farm. Behind them in the Kissel Kar were six large pumpkins picked fresh from the patch. ‘See those flowers?’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      ‘Farewell summer, Doug. That’s the name of those flowers. Feel the air? August come back. Farewell summer.’

      ‘Boy,’ said Doug, ‘that’s a sad name.’

      Grandma stepped into her pantry and felt the wind blowing from the west. The yeast was rising in the bowl, a sumptuous head, the head of an alien rising from the yield of other years. She touched the swell beneath the muslin cap. It was the earth on the morn before the arrival of Adam. It was the morn after the marriage of Eve to that

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