The League of Berries & Laurels: Book the First - First Chapter (Pt. IX - End of First Chapter)
Continued from:
You can purchase The League of Berries & Laurels: Book the First in print.
“Grandma,” the boy shouts and puts the saucer with its mug upon the table. Freely he walks to her, and is shown due affection, held in hand as she walks to the other armchair and retires elegantly into place.
“What is the commotion?” She asks of them, her eyes, amongst features undeniably the effect of age, retaining to them yet a brightness. To this question, the grandpa simply looks over, the tiered table of a height to allow for looking over it, to one another, now with hands pouring tea.
Preceded by Ulie stepping near and hesitating, the question “Have you ever heard of the League of Berries and Laurels?” he asks.
“Heard of the League of Berries and Laurels? I remember I took the picture leaning over there against the mantle.” Nonetheless, pointing with unchecked assurance, she appears unfazed by the picture’s absence.
“Did you know Dardanelles?” J.J. asks the grandmother of a friend, interestedly.
“I know Dardanelles for the most arrogant of men, and almost a liar. I know on the day that picture was taken my friends and I were just learning our house to hold our tea and fancy dress party when we almost dropped our trays. All across my backyard were more boys than you could count and their dismal little tent somebody was just coming out from, apparently after some commotion I don’t know what. I screamed get out, and everyone only looked to me in my costume. I put the tray on the furniture and marched right up to them and asked who tore up the lawn. It was in pieces and muddy, and they were all mud-covered and bloody. I looked at Dardanelles and said who are you? Without blinking, that Dardanelles told me he was the lame Ermine Knapp and lived on Lincoln, but I knew the sweet-hearted Ermine, and the boy was not before me. Then Paul and John told me they were Toot and Whistle and live in the treehouse of a tree or somesuch nonsense. All of them, the whole league, lied to me as I walked around getting madder and madder and mud on my fringe. Then I shouted, you, with that stupid looking carrot in your hat, what is your name?”
“It wasn’t stupid.”
“Far from it,” J.J. also feel nothing less than compelled to say.
“It was like a symbol,” Ulie says, looking to J.J. to confirm the thought.
“Yeah, like a mark of honor, because he was best.”
“This I know, but at the time, it was a carrot, nothing more. To be the best for taking a bite out of someone’s ginger root, to this day I never heard a stupider notion. And that boy looked at me huffing and puffing I was so mad. I said when my parents get home and hear about this and see what you did to the lawn you will be in great trouble. What do you think he did? He told me his name and where he lived. Now that I knew, I shut my eyes and committed it to memory several times. Guess what? They did not leave. When I opened to the sight of them all expectantly, almost hushedly waiting, seeing the new camera we had for our tea and fancy dress party they ruined, they were so bold to ask will you take our picture? No, no, no, I protested absolutely. I said no. I said no, I said do you have any idea how much a camera costs, and if I said I would take your picture you would probably break it or I do not know, steal it from us, or enact some other prank you are all plotting. You look like schemers. J’accuse.”
“Were they plotting a prank?”
“Blame me if they were not, would you? They all repeated his name and where he lived to mock him and pushed him forward to ask they get a group photo taken. He told me they wanted to take it at the monument, and that if I could go, they would be out of my yard. I could have screamed, I was so flush, until my friends began to murmur it made some sense.”
The lingering amazement looks on into the frame taken up as they disregard any exchange of glances that may be taking place past its glass and the great content of the narrative.
“Wow.”
“Wow.”
“My lads,” the grandfather has leaned forward and looks large into the space the frame lowers for. “We have drained our victuals and you have heard a tale well worth the hearing, and, if I may, the true telling. In my estimation, delighted as an old man living out a quiet life can be about a visit, it is not right for boys to be a sedentary audience in a dainty living for more of a Saturday than can be stomached, but they should hope to have their own stories to tell when they are one hundred and eighty-three. Be so good, gentlemen, as to follow me in to the kitchen with the tray for serving chocolate, and we will get you provided for for your walk back home.”
“O boy, do you have new candies? Do you remember those candies we got the last time? Those were something.”
“Do I? There’s no better confection in the candy aisle than I got here last time.”
“Not only candies, but jams and breads. My pots have been puttering, my oven muttering, and every recipe is perfect on which you will be fed fat.”
“I’ve got the tray. Let’s go.” With this, the boys run up to the slow grandfather’s heels, and some rhythm seals behind the kitchen’s double door. The grandmother looks on the snow, and it has lightly started to fall, disappearing into the perfect contours. Atop her head, hands perfect the double fall of her hair, and she listens to her own advice when she feels she should sit up straighter.
In the kitchen, the boys sit at a chair of the rustic table. The glass of the window pane has taken on a subtle effect of the temperature inside and out of doors. A shift of the light almost makes a warm human dimple circle on the cold pane, express, and fall away, but none look out, all inward from that plane, two to the readying sweets.
“Let me tell you lads, the pockets of a winter coat can contain a veritable ocean of provisions. Let me say, you will be sent off with enough for your own appetites and no few items I will think to leave with you but that are for your mother and your father and your brothers and sisters too, candles, and ginger medicines, breads of my latest making, which I will let you both have a sweet bun now if all these make it to them.”
“Oh boy.”
“We will.”
“Here you are, you both know the game. Grandson, you will split it in two, and J.J. you will choose which part is yours.”
A very exacting eye watches of the untethering of an airy dough for advantage, and both are held, one moving somewhat higher. With a point of the finger does J.J. indicate the imperceptibly slighter of the two. Dried fruit hops across the table.
“It is a day for shivering. Would you care to learn a lesson the league was careful to maintain once warmth was lost to this outdoors which eternal must be shouldered? To never hunker, but to walk without apparent burden of the bitter winter, it lends one a nobility and trains nerves never to carry unduly on one’s frame a feeling which need be nothing like the boulder Atlas bore. The league would often carry more in their coats than would allow us to shove our hands away, all enfolded toward the center, knowing no good in this, if breath could not be gotten deep to center. In bands we would stride freely to whatever business of the league was afoot, and this kept us limber and strong.”
Upon an area of the table are breads in wax paper bundled up as well with jam in wax paper, upon each a small edge with a wooden handle. Aside these are jams in jars, and honeycombs, and there are sections of marzipan, candles too, but scoops of licorice wrapped up and proportioned out into as much as can be carried is action of the greatest interest to them. Dried fruits are provided, those for the adults unable to consume the other offerings with any gusto or free of all regret. With this, much about the story being mulled over, an almost pacific imagination can be seen playing itself out, the chewing the gears to drive them on, pulls tossed in with fingers like coal-shovels the fuel.
From where the loud build of the house is loudest, in the bright front hall and foyer, the hands that had placed all the goods upon the table carries in two distinct coats. At the ends of both arms, the mittens are clipped. First, one is laid away, and the other coat stuffed. On the table a neat arrangement awaits aside its same area the bare corner of the table had proportioned. That coat gets walked out of the kitchen and down the hall, hung there upon a hook. Around the kitchen the myriads of cooking wares have all already been neatly filed away and polished, now that the week’s products have been cooked. The last items disappear all into the coat but for the table’s crumbs.
“Alright, you two, up and say goodbye to grandma on your way to go.”
They take different routes, and the two that had been sat in silent contemplation stand and say farewell and goodbye, respectively, to the elegantly dressed lady, whereupon she draws close her grandson, and rubs away the the cares in the world just behind his ear. She addresses herself to the discomfortable J.J. and jots him just upon the cheek.
With all their jackets and their hats on, they are helped not at all with the boots, still transitioning from snow-covered to the puddles around their placement. As the grandchild looks on the happiness on the faces, now that are being left behind, he dashes back in, removing the progress he made with the boot, and unreservedly hugs grandmother. Deeply felt, he departs as sincerely and places his head near the chest of his grandfather, just as he was sitting down, and then sustains a kindred moment of affection that does not last but fleetingly in this, or any, life. If the arms that too are wrapped around the child are to be believed, it may truly return in life’s good time as well.
J.J. waits, ready now, and waving, and, soon as the boots are done being struggled with, they walk with steadier paces than when they shivered and struggled in the snow. Their careless way trails toward the train tracks. The door behind them, left opened, starts closing.