It was raining on the first day of summer vacation in 1968. A boy sat on the steps of a small apartment building, considering his possibilities. He was tossing a pimple ball in the air with one hand and catching in with the other. He caught it most of the time, but when he missed, the ball would hit the steps and bounce off in one direction or the other, and the boy would throw himself after the ball, trying to catch it before it hit a parked car or bounced into the street. A clean catch was worth a point. If he missed the ball, and it hit a car, he lost two points. If the ball made it to the street, he lost three. If he caught the ball on one or two bounces, he lost only one point. If he caught the ball with his left hand, he added five points. (He was trying to get better using his left hand.) He’d been playing since 9:30 and his score was 119. He decided to play until he reached 150. He had to do something until after lunch, because his friends, Jimmy and Doug Harper, had to do chores in the morning and weren’t allowed out to play until after lunch.
The boy felt strange playing step ball on a rainy day, but this storm was strange. He had never seen rain like this. The boy liked thunderstorms and wild, windy downpours. If a storm was coming from the east, it would slam against the rear of the apartment and he could sit, his legs pulled up against his chest, under the small aluminum awning that protected a little rectangle of concrete in front of the west facing front door. From this dry spot, he could feel the wind swirling around him and look north up the hill toward Olney Avenue, through the tunnel of interlaced branches created by the huge sycamores and maples that lined the street. He liked the way the sycamore leaves would be tossed about by the wind, their wet, silvery backs shimmering in the shadows cast by the storm clouds.
This storm wasn’t really a storm at all. There was no wind, not even a zephyr (a word he had learned recently from a book on Greek mythology he’d found in the library.) The gentle rain fell straight down, like a curtain on a still evening, to the west as far as he could see, bouncing off the cars in the bank parking lot across the street and soaking the houses on Lawrence Street. The gentle rain stopped in the middle of 4th Street. He sat on completely dry steps, the sun warm on his thin, pale white legs that had only been given the freedom of shorts that morning. He’d seen sun showers, but this was different. Across the street, it was dark and wet, like you’d expect during a rainstorm. He could see edges of the clouds that ran to the north and south up and down 4th Street. He shoved the ball in his pocket when he reached 150 points, and turned his full attention to the rain.
The boy decided the weird storm must mean something. He had learned the word “omen” from a book of Celtic folktales and legends his fourth grade teacher had given him on the last day of school. That had been on Friday. He had devoured the book over the weekend, reading it late into the night, as there was no need to get up early the next morning. Mrs. McGill didn’t mind, as long as he was reading “good books,” which meant he had to wait until she fell asleep before slipping the comic books and Mad magazines from their hiding place under the sofa. For these two days, the magazines lay untouched, as Steven was lost in Niall of the Nine Hostages, Finn MacCool, Cuchulainn, and Sweeney, the madman. These stories were filled with omens, so this strange rain, he decided, must be an omen that foretold the events of this summer, the summer of 1968. If nothing else, he would turn ten in two weeks, on July 1st, and while that wasn’t strange, it that would make this summer special.
He wondered if there was magic behind the rain, but a quick look up and down 4th Street and a consideration of the people that lived in the apartments, row homes and duplexes didn’t suggest anyone magical lived nearby. There was the old house around the corner on Third, the one that all the kids knew as “The Witch’s House,” but he knew that the bent and gray lady who lived there wasn’t a witch. She was just Mrs. Umkauf, an old lady who was too weak and sick to go out or to keep her small front garden neat and tidy. He knew this because when his Mom had found out that he was shooting dried peas at her windows through straws with some other kids, she had taken him to the house, introduced him to Mrs. Umkauf, and arranged for him to clean up her yard for her and to go back every other week to keep it clean. His mother refused to let Mrs. Umkauf pay him, although she offered a dollar a week. The other kids still thought she was a witch, but it’s hard to convince yourself of that when you sit in her kitchen every other Saturday morning, eat a piece of cake or two with a cold glass of milk, while the witch told you stories about her long dead husband and her boys killed in WWII.
No, Olney was not a magical place, no matter how hard the boy tried to make it so. But then, what about the weird rain? The boy finally decided that rain had to stop somewhere. He knew that it could not be raining everywhere at once. You could tell that from the weather maps on the news. He’d been on buses and in cars as they drove in and out of rainstorms. He decided that this time he just happened to be at the right spot to see the edge of the storm. Could that be the omen? This being in the right spot? This seemed the only reasonable solution. He didn’t want to give up on the idea of an omen appearing to him because of the great stories in the Celtic book. He decided the rain was an omen, but he had no idea what it meant.
He wasn’t ready to give up on the possibility of magic, but he couldn’t just ignore the answers that made sense. It was like when he was younger and trying to sleep in Mrs. McGill’s living room. He’d lie awake staring at weird shadows on the walls and ceiling. He’d be frightened, until he could find what had made the shadow, perhaps the street light shining through the waving lace curtains, and then the monster would be gone, and he couldn’t see it again. Once he realized the monster was the shadow of a Hummel, he could only see the Hummel’s shadow, never again the monster. The loss of the monster left him feeling safer, and a little sad.
1968 could use some magic. It had started with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and every night Steven would watch Walter Cronkite grimly report the casualties, the reporters’s face growing more lined and drawn each bloody day. In April, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed and riots erupted all over the country. Steven and his mother didn’t own a TV, but they watched the coverage on Mrs. McGill’s color cabinet model in the upstairs apartment. Steven’s guts were tied in knots as watched the anger exploding in flames, overturned cars, shattered windows. He kept glancing out the window, expecting to see rioters running down 4th street. Mrs. McGill saw Steven’s distress and said, “Don’t worry, son. Rizzo knows how to handle rioters.” Steven remembered the picture in the papers of Frank Rizzo, the Police Chief, leaving a formal dinner of some kind, his tuxedo jacket unbuttoned over his solid belly and thick chest, a nightstick jammed in his cumberbund, fury darkening his pocked face, striding forth to do battle in the streets. Steven knew Mrs. McGill’s remark was meant to calm him, but that picture, that explosive anger heading out onto the streets, upset him as much as the pictures of rioters on TV.
Early that June, Robert F. Kennedy was killed in the kitchen of a hotel in California where he was speaking. Steven saw the murder on TV. The next day, his teacher suddenly broke into tears and walked out of the room. The children, even the trouble makers, sat quietly and waited for her to return. She was gone about ten minutes, and when she returned her eyes were red rimmed. She spoke haltingly to the class about the Kennedy family for a few minutes, then had everyone put away their things. For the last hour and half of the day, she read to the class from Treasure Island. For years afterward, whenever a TV show was interrupted for a news update, Steven’s guts would twist and his jaw would clench.
“There you are.” The soft whisper barely reached the boy’s ears and he twisted his neck to follow the voice to the open window of the apartment above his.
“Come on up, Steven. I need to see you.”
“OK, Mrs. McGill,” called Steven, his voice matching her whispered tone. Jumping to his feet, he gently opened the aluminum screen door, holding it carefully to keep it from banging while he pushed the heavy front door. He closed them with a learned delicacy at odds with his natural inclination to slam doors, to do all things at full speed, heedless of what he was doing at the moment, his mind driving his body to speed up, speed up, to get to the next thing.
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