The Summer of the Falcon
Read The Summer of the Falcon Online
Authors: Jean Craighead George
Jean Craighead George
A Biography of Jean Craighead George
J
UNE BURST THROUGH
the big walnut doors and ran up the dark stairs to her room. With a hoot she pushed up the window, stood on one foot, and kicked back the shutters. Quickly, before it was all gone, she threw open the closet and smelled the mysterious scent of the bats which had been hanging upside down in the corners all winter. She slid open the bureau drawer and sniffed the too sweet dust of the winter-working, wood-boring beetle. Then she closed her eyes and took in every musty smell, for they told her the routines of winter were done and the summer was beginning.
Downstairs windows were being hiked—long shoves that brought the sashes to the ceiling in that Victorian house. Tight doors were being shouldered ajar, and the sun and fresh air were racing into the tall rooms and dark corridors. Summer came pouring in, and the mysterious smells of a house locked for nine months blew out, clearing June’s head of school.
From her room that looked across the creek she could hear suitcases banging up the walnut staircases and sheets being snapped over beds.
The house was big and gray and sat far out in the country along a dirt road that followed the Yellow Breeches Creek from the Blue Mountains to Boiling Springs. A one-track railroad ran nearby. The house had been built by June’s grandfather for his bride and was an expression of his love. It sang out with the best of its day: rococo trim on pointed eaves, whirligigs on the windows, wooden flowers and leaves on the overhang of the porches—yards of Victorian gingerbread. Green lawns spread out around the house. The creek, wide, and deep enough for swimming, ran past the back porch.
June and her twin brothers knew it was the most beautiful house in the world. Whatever its oddities and drawbacks they did not see them. It glowed in their minds, for here they ran barefooted through rooms, up and down stairs and over the meadows and fields until their mother gathered them in in September and took them back to the city and the dark months of school.
The house was to have been sold after Grandfather Pritchard’s death. It might have been, had not June’s mother looked at the stream, the mountains, the vaulting rooms, and asked that it be kept for the Pritchard children so that they might have a sense of their past by playing on the land their ancestors opened.
Then, knowing other members of her husband’s family would share the house, she said, “and each wife will have her own table, stove, and refrigerator, so the women will not squabble.”
June stepped neatly out of her shoes. Last year she had kicked them off. She chuckled at the memory of how young she had been to do that. One grows a lot in a year, she said to herself as she placed the shoes under the bed. She unpacked her shorts and shirts and dresses and library books. As she arranged her clothes, a mouse in the top drawer circled nervously in its nesting material of old newspapers and mattress stuffings. June did not bother to remove it; each summer a mouse was there, and each summer, annoyed by the opening and closing of the drawers, it eventually moved off to the quieter interiors of walls and floors and wainscotings. Nature had a way, the children learned at Pritchard’s, of accommodating itself to the comings-and-goings of human beings.
June closed her eyes and heard the creek rushing over the milldam. She could hold the happiness no longer. She ran: out her door, down the back steps—two at a time—over the porch, across the yard to the stream. Gathering speed, she jumped off the end of the canoe landing, sailed through the air, and grasped the tree-tied rope. She swung out, kicking, and looked into the green water. She swung back over the land and saw the grass and stones. And she almost hit Rod as he came out of the creek beside the sycamore roots.
“Hi!” he said with an open smile. June dropped onto the grass. Rod sat down beside her. Rod was her cousin, twelve years old. He had tight, curly hair, wide-set brown eyes, and angular knees and elbows. All the Pritchard men were wiry, but Rod was knotty.
He was the most imaginative person she had ever known, and could quickly bring her to anger or laughter as they struggled to live in a friendly way, side by side.
Rod always started the summers nicely. This year he said, “Junie, let’s be friends every single day this year. Even on the day we go home.”
June’s blue eyes stared into Rod’s brown ones as she remembered the parting last summer—fisticuffs and tears. She said, “Are you sure you mean it?”
“Toe four jays!” he answered. She had almost forgotten their private language. Some of their friends spoke pig Latin or had secret passwords to hold them together, but Rod had outdone them all. He had created a whole new language, complete with verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs. He had taught it to June, and she had loved it with envious jealousy, because she so wished she had invented it. “Feet squawl,” was the verb “to be.” It was declined, “toe squal, heel squil, knee squad (I am, you are, he is).”
As June remembered, she slowly translated “Toe four jays.” Rod had said, “I promise forever.” Her heart warmed. She laughed. Summer and good fellowship filled her. “All right,” she said. “Let’s be good friends!”
Rod squinted down on his white toes that had just escaped shoes, and added, “I also promise I won’t smash the next city of Clayforbia we build.”
The city of Clayforbia had begun the day they had discovered a bank of clay in the bend of the creek. They had dug out a bucket of the white slippery earth and shaped it. Rod had made a house. He’d placed it on the bank. June had drawn a road beside it with a stick and had made a neighboring house. Then, street by street, a city had emerged along the banks of the creek as they duplicated the world into which they were growing. Other boys they knew built small railroads, the girls played “house,” even June’s brothers at her age had hollowed out a tree in which they cooked and slept—but Rod and June had a city.
Late in the summer Rod and June began to bicker, then to tease, and finally to fight, not about anything, really, but the squabbling seemed imperative. Finally June got so angry she hid Rod’s bathing suit on a hot summer noon and climbed onto the porch roof where he could not find her. Rod called, looked for her, grew angry. Then he ran to the creek with a croquet mallet and smashed Clayforbia to dust. June saw him from up high. Slowly she came down from the rooftop and walked to the city. Rod stood in the ruins staring at her. The mallet fell from his hand as he stomped away.
So last summer had ended. Now a new one was beginning.
June walked toward the canoe landing. “I don’t think I want to build a Clayforbia this year.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Well, I’m in my teens now, thirteen. And I feel differently about some things.”
“You do?” he said in awe. “Like what?”
“Well...” she floundered, “well, I must sit nicely now, not hunch over. And I must speak in a low, refined voice, not scream, and...” She could hear her mother’s voice telling her the new rules. She could still see her bedroom door swinging closed, feel the warm air, and feel the indignation as she was told how to behave, not like a child any longer, but like a woman. The only thing that made this bearable was the knowledge that her brothers had been given a “growing-up” lecture by her father, that most of her friends had begun to “learn the rules.” But to June the rules seemed unreal—and unfair.
Rod came toward her with blotter-interest. “Are you getting to be a lady or something?” he asked. She spun off and ran over the railroad tracks and down the cow path into the meadow. She wished for someone to talk to, someone or something that would listen to the loneliness of her confusion.
Rod followed her over the tracks. “Do you suppose, Junie,” he called tentatively, “that this all has something to do with having babies?”
“Go away,” she screamed in rage. “Go far, far away. You’re just awful.” Rod shrugged and turned back. She heard his toes crunch the cinders on the railbed, then his legs catapulted him back to the house. He seemed so free as he ran. Boys were lucky; they could do what they wanted. They also got the exciting things to do, like lawn mowers. Girls got the dull chores, like weeding.
She waded into the creek to watch a water strider fight the current to stand still. Suddenly her foot struck slickness and she reached down to find a new supply of clay. Her anger left. She thought of clay houses and stores, and the cozy walls of Clayforbia.
And then her mother called. June could see a yellow dress shining through the marshmallow bushes as the voice came from the back porch. “Juunieee.”
She called again, “Juuniee!”
June hummed defiantly.
Then came a louder call—her brother Don. “June, where are you? We have something for you!”
June splashed out of the water and ran toward the house. The family was clustered on the porch. There were her brothers, Don and Charles, and her cousins, Jim and Rod; Uncle Paul and Aunt Helen, her mother and her father— all peering at something in a bushel basket. June slowed to a walk and crossed her fingers. She had been promised a pet this summer and her family was smiling as if this were the moment. She whispered Rod’s secret language, “Lee, prod bennet squawl spid et gill.” Translated, “Oh, please let it be alive and young.”
In the basket, braced on a stub of a tail, was a robin-sized sparrow hawk, North America’s smallest falcon.
Her hands cupped the screaming bird and she lifted it to her cheek. A blue talon dug her hand, the other clenched her shirt. The falcon was afraid, and he clung tighter and tighter. June held it close, for she knew that all young life is scared and unsure.
Don gently pried the claws from the blouse, wrapped his palm around its feet, and presented her with the bird.
“Here is a lady’s falcon, for a lady,” he said.
She again took the screaming baby of the wild in her hands. The bird stopped fighting and chirped softly.
June placed him deep in the basket, but as she released him, he shot out a blue foot, broke the skin of her hand, and screamed in rage.
“Fierce King Alexander,” she said. “His name has got to be Zander.”
Her brother Charles smiled in approval. “Soon we’ll ‘jesse’ him and start his training,” then sternly, “and get yourself in a work mood...training a falcon is tedious and demanding.”
Her father raised one eyebrow as he looked into the basket. At times his rigid rules made June sad. She could not always fit them. At other times his rules were the shield she seemed to need. Now she tried not to hear him. “June, you must take daily care of that bird. You’re tending a bit of life. It will be totally dependent upon you for its comfort and existence. If you’re going to neglect it, let it
go.
”