Autumn Street Read Free Page A

darting from the head, aiming for the kitchen counter, seizing an entire head of lettuce.
I could almost hear the hideous primordial munch. I shuddered.
    "Where will you keep him when he gets to be big?" I asked Anne. Her small turtle lurched suddenly from his inverted-dish island and submerged, darkening the colors of his painted American flag.
    "He'll escape by then," she said, matter-of-factly. "He'll go out in the woods at the end of Autumn Street, because there's more to eat out there. That's where they all go. There are probably a hundred big turtles out there already. Tommy Price's turtle disappeared three years ago, and someone said they saw it in the woods, eating ferns. They could tell it was his because it said
Mammoth Caves
across its back."
    Mammoth Caves.
The phrase sent exhilarated, apprehensive chills down my skinny back. A hundred monstrous prehistoric creatures lurking, munching ferns, in the woods at the end of my grandfather's street: and one of them, already grown to ominous proportions, with the words
Mammoth Caves
stretched, elongated, across his mossy, reptilian shell.
    I was so terribly frightened of caves, of the whole concept of caves, of dark passages with convoluted turnings, farther and farther into unfathomable blackness, into places where there were no sounds but perhaps a dimly heard dripping, of rock-encrusted walls
that wept, and the sound of your own heart beating in a dark much darker, more frightening, than the dark of your worst nightmares. I shivered at the thought that in one place, one dark opening too vast for comprehension, one Mammoth Cave, there would be echoes, that if in the blackness you found the place to stand, on ground that had never been exposed to light or to the experience of human sound, you could call out, and your voice would return to you. From all the passages where you had been, from the place where you stood in the dark so heavy it smothered you, and from the places you had not yet felt your way along, your message would return: thundering from the unfelt walls, disguised and distorted by a higher pitch from a turning far ahead, or eerily in whispers from the tunnels behind. All at once, your own voice: your
voices,
coming at you, murmuring, indistinguishable, in harmonies or discord; and you would have to stand there all alone and listen to the answers that came at you from inside yourself.
    I was only six when I knew that about caves and about echoes and knew that I could never go into the woods at the end of Grandfather's street, because in those woods I would have to face the monstrous turtle that prowled, dragging
Mammoth Caves
with him through the ferns and trees, trampling the fragile wildflowers, waiting, probably for me.
    "They eat meat, too," said Anne, who was older than I, and who saw nothing in my silence beyond childish interest and admiration. She went into the kitchen, beyond the round table that still, for me, loomed like a scaly-limbed, slow-moving reptile, and took a small bit of hamburger from the refrigerator.
    "Probably," she said primly, feeding her small flagged pet from her fingers, "the big ones would eat people."
    I fled: fled running down the shaded sidewalk to the safety of my grandfather's house, to the kitchen where Tatie always welcomed me. The brown bulk of her was nothing like the sluggish brown creatures I feared, and I put my arms around her waist, buried my head against her apron, so that she stroked my hair, rubbed my back gently until I was no longer afraid, and then said, "There. Nobody gonna get you. You go wash your face, find Jess, and tell your Mama that dinner be ready soon."
    Upstairs, in the big house, Jess was helping our mother fold and put away the intricately embroidered baby clothes, all freshly washed and ironed. Mama was waiting for a baby to be born.
    And babies were part of the war, too. Standing in the dim shadows of the wide front hall, outside the parlor, I had heard an elderly, distinguished caller say