He had been raking leaves, the day before….
He raked and thought, Ted ought to be doing this. I’m going back to the base. Back to Texas. Tomorrow I’m going. I ought not to be raking up the yard. Officers don’t rake leaves.
It was a cold day—October. The wind came all the way from Canada, from Saskatchewan or Manitoba or Alberta, with polar cold and the raw smell of muskeg, of permafrost, of something arctic. He’d heard the Alaska-based people talk about that weather.
And it came down from the north to U.S.A., making the prairie states chilly in October.
He wondered why he pushed up the pungent leaf-heaps with the wooden rake and shoved them to the gutter, and he knew. To burn them. To make a sweet-smelling pile and add to the good ozone of Green Prairie his own private incense, his somber contribution. Maybe, also, as a symbol. Burning autumn leaves, like burning bridges.
He fished in a pocket of his slacks, thinking how unfamiliar some pockets became when you wore mufti, how unfamiliar the uniform would feel for a day or so. He lit a match and it blew out, so he found a piece of paper, cupped his hands, got the newsprint going, watched words about “strike threatened in River City plant” blacken and vanish. He thrust the paper into the middle of the breast-high pile, on the windward side, and there was streaming smoke, then a bright blaze and soon a soul-satisfying conflagration. It ate gray holes in the leaf pile and sent a soft-looking, slanted fountain of smoke down Walnut Street. Cars had to slow but the people in them came through the smoke laughing and they waved because they, too, would soon be burning their leaves, stopping cars—mulching roses, getting out storm windows, nailing weather stripping around doors, taking coal into their cellars.
She came.
Wearing an orange-red knitted suit. With her large beautiful eyes and with her black hair done up under a knitted hat. He could see her hips move and her breasts and the immobile “V” in front of her and feel his nerves jump.
“You’re going tomorrow, aren’t you, Chuck?”
“So Uncle says.”