The Summer Book Read Online Free PDF

last, a paper came sliding through the crack under the door.
    Berenice’s drawing was good. It had been done in a kind of painstaking fury, and depicted a creature with a black hole for a face. This creature was moving forwards with its shoulders hunched. Its arms were long scalloped wings, like those on a bat. They began near its neck and dragged on the ground on either side, a prop or perhaps a hindrance for the vague, boneless body. It was such an awful and such an expressive picture that Grandmother was filled with admiration. She opened the door and called, “It’s good! It’s a really good drawing!” She didn’t look at the child, only at the drawing, and the tone of her voice was neither friendly nor encouraging.
    Berenice remained seated on the steps and did not turn around. She picked up a little stone and threw it straight up in the air, whereupon she stood up and walked slowly and dramatically down towards the water. Sophia stood on the woodpile and waited.
    “What’s she doing now?” Grandmother asked.
    “She’s throwing stones in the water,” Sophia said. “She’s going out on the point.”
    “That’s good,” Grandmother said. “Come here and look at what she did. What do you think?”
    “Well, yes …” Sophia said.
    Grandmother put the picture up on the wall with a couple of thumbtacks.
    “It’s very original,” she said. “Now let’s leave her in peace.”
    “ Can she draw?” asked Sophia gloomily.
    “No,” Grandmother said. “Probably not. She’s probably one of those people who do one good thing and then that’s the end of it.”

The Pasture
     
     
    S OPHIA ASKED HER GRANDMOTHER what Heaven looked like, and Grandmother said it might be like the pasture they were just then walking by, on their way to the village over on the mainland. They stopped to look. It was very hot, the road was white and cracked, and all the plants along the ditch had dust on their leaves. They walked into the pasture and sat down in the grass, which was tall and not a bit dusty. It was full of bluebells and cat’s-foot and buttercups.
    “Are there ants in Heaven?” Sophia asked.
    “No,” said Grandmother, and lay down carefully on her back. She propped her hat on her nose and tried to sneak a little sleep. Some kind of farm machinery was running steadily and peacefully in the distance. If you turned it off – which was easy to do – and listened only to the insects, you could hear thousands of millions of them, and they filled the whole world with rising and falling waves of ecstasy and summer. Sophia picked some flowers and held them in her hand until they got warm and unpleasant; then she put them down on her grandmother and asked how God could keep track of all the people who prayed at the same time.
    “He’s very, very smart,” Grandmother mumbled sleepily under her hat.
    “Answer really,” Sophia said. “How does He have time?”
    “He has secretaries …”
    “But how does He manage to do what you pray for if He doesn’t get time to talk to the secretary before it’s too late?”
    Grandmother pretended to be asleep, but she knew she wasn’t fooling anyone, and so finally she said that He’d made it so nothing bad could happen between the moment you prayed and the moment He found out what you prayed for. And then Sophia wanted to know what happened if you prayed while you were falling out of a tree and you were halfway down.
    “Aha,” said Grandmother, perking up. “In that case He makes you catch on a limb.”
    “That is smart,” Sophia admitted. “Now you get to ask. But it has to be about Heaven.”
    “Do you think all the angels wear dresses, so no one can tell what kind they are?”
    “What a dumb question! You know they all wear dresses. But now listen carefully; if one of them wants to know for sure what kind another one is, he just flies under him and looks to see if he’s wearing pants.”
    “I see,” Grandmother said. “That’s good to know. Now it’s