All Flesh Is Grass Read Online Free PDF Page A

die. It was being strangled by the swift and easy roads that took customers to better shopping areas; it was dying with the decline of marginal agriculture, dying along with the little vacant hillside farms that no longer would support a family. It was a place of genteel poverty and it had its share of musty quaintness, but it was dying just the same, albeit in the polite scent of lavender and impeccable good manners.
    I turned down the street, away from the dusty business section and made my way down to the little river that flowed close against the east edge of the town. There I found the ancient footpath underneath the trees and walked along, listening in the summer silence to the gurgle of the water as it flowed between the grassy banks and along the gravel bars. And as I walked the lost and half-forgotten years came crowding in upon me. There, just ahead, was the village swimming hole, and below it the stretch of shallows where I’d netted suckers in the spring.
    Around the river’s bend was the place we had held our picnics. We had built a fire to roast the wieners and to toast the marshmallows and we had sat and watched the evening steal in among the trees and across the meadows. After a time the moon would rise, making the place a magic place, painted by the lattice of shadow and of moonlight. Then we talked in whispers and we willed that time should move at a slower pace so we might hold the magic longer. But for all our willing, it had never come to pass, for time, even then, was something that could not be slowed or stopped.
    There had been Nancy and myself and Ed Adler and Priscilla Gordon, and at times Alf Peterson had come with us as well, but as I remembered it he had seldom brought the same girl twice.
    I stood for a moment in the path and tried to bring it back, the glow of moonlight and the glimmer of the dying fire, the soft girl voices and the soft girl-flesh, the engulfing tenderness of that youthful miracle, the tingle and excitement and the thankfulness. I sought the enchanted darkness and the golden happiness, or at least the ghosts of them; all that I could find was the intellectual knowledge of them, that they once had been and were not any more.
    So I stood, with the edge worn off a tarnished memory, and a business failure. I think I faced it squarely then; the first time that I’d faced it. What would I do next?
    Perhaps, I thought, I should have stayed in the greenhouse business, but it was a foolish thought and a piece of wishfulness, for after Dad had died it had been, in every way, a losing proposition. When he had been alive, we had done all right, but then there’d been the three of us to work, and Dad had been the kind of man who had an understanding with all growing things. They grew and flourished under his care and he seemed to know exactly what to do to keep them green and healthy. Somehow or other, I didn’t have the knack. With me the plants were poor and puny at the best, and there were always pests and parasites and all sorts of plant diseases.
    Suddenly, as I stood there, the river and the path and trees became ancient, alien things. As if I were a stranger in this place, as if I had wandered into an area of time and space where I had no business being. And more terrifying than if it had been a place I’d never seen before because I knew in a chill, far corner of my mind that here was a place that held a part of me.
    I turned around and started up the path and back of me was a fear and panic that made me want to run. But I didn’t run. I went even slower than I ordinarily would have, for this was a victory that I needed and was determined I would have—any sort of little futile victory, like walking very slowly when there was the urge to run.
    Back on the street again, away from the deep shadow of the trees, the warmth and brilliance of the sunlight set things right again. Not entirely right, perhaps, but as they had been before. The street was the