Late Autumn

This was written in Henry Dakin's hand on the back of the original photograph:

Oldest Fuerte Avocado in northern California, planted 1912. This photograph taken in 1931 when it bore over 2300 fruit, and I had this enlarged for my avocado exhibit at the state fair; where I took Third Sweepstakes besides prizes on individual varieties. I also took 1st prize on Royal Isabella (Concord) grapes and 2nd prize on dried Imperial Prunes. This picture will be in the 1500 copies of the Avocado Association Year Book for 1935.

"Late Autumn" was written by Ruthalee Dakin Mauldin and included in El Portal, the annual Phelan Literary Awards publication of San Jose State College, 1941, when she was a senior. It is fiction to the degree that names have been changed.

You don't have to read this story. It's rather a family affair, so maybe you won't want to. That's what I like about stories; they are like people. You can look at them if you want to, but if you don't want to, you don't have to; or you can pick them up for a while, and then forget them for a while, and when you come back, maybe they're there, and maybe they're not.

Anyway, last Sunday was a perfectly beautiful winter-is-coming day. Midterms were coming too, but they just didn't count when my cousin Andy drove up in his new car with his mother, and Aunt Claire, and her two children, and asked if I'd like to go for a ride with them. Would I!
I squeezed in between young Nancy and her baby sister, Martha Jean. We had soon left the valley and were in the mountains. It had rained. Everything--the air, the madrones, the redwoods--made one think of the lettuce fresh from the refrigerator. The tires made crisp noises on the pavement, and we talked about the gay, stupid things families talk about.

Aunt Peg had suggested that we go to the ranch for apples; so, after many miles of smooth highway, we turned up the narrow, rutty, private road and stopped at the cottage. As I struggled out to see if Mr. Charles were home, a hearty "Hey, there!" greeted me from the vine-screened porch.

The man and I followed as the others drove on, up past the big, old farm house to turn around. They started past us toward the cottage again, but he stopped them.

"It's all right to park here. I'm alone now, you know. The renters moved out last week."

It all seemed so still. The rain had washed all the noisiness out of the air and seeped into the sandy soil with it. My aunts got out slowly, drinking in the beauty of the wooded farm. They had been here often, of course, for Mr. Charles was their brother-in-law. Back in the old days when their sister had been alive, they had come here for summer vacations. Aunt Peg's family had been little, then; Aunt Claire, a high school girl; and Mr. Charles' two children, very small for he had married late in life and even now didn't look old for his seventy-odd years.

"I haven't any apples picked," he said in his strong voice, inclining his head toward them a little, trying to see what they wanted him to do. "But it won't take long to pick some." Turning toward the house he offered, "Would you like to go inside and look around?" he took a key case from his pocket and fingered through the keys with worn, stubby fingers, indelibly lined with earth, the fingers of a man who loves the soil.

"My goodness!" said Aunt Claire. "It's been ages since I've been in there."

As he stepped up to open the door, he brushed past a huge triangular iron dinner gong that hung there rusting. Not so many years ago small, determined hands had rung it to call Mr. Charles from the orchards to dinner. I wondered if the voices of Aunt Claire's children as they played now, calling the inevitable farm kittens, raised any haunting memories in his mind; but their shouts didn't seem to disturb the silence after the rain; he gave no sign.

Andy and I followed him as he went down to the barn. We had been together in the old days, probably following him around just like this. He took a bucket from the old carriage room and went to the orchard where he climbed trees and picked our fruit with the rough carelessness of familiarity. Each of us pulled off a firm, red apple and took a generous bite, oh, how good! Full of the rich sweetness of the passing autumn, the snap of approaching winter, and the trickling of the rains.

We carried on a slow conversation, asking him questions sometimes.

"Do you think you'll have much rain?" Andy asked once.

He turned to us, breathing a little hard. "Yes," he said, "but it doesn't hurt things much on account of the storm ditches Father put in when he cleared the land."

His father's storm ditches were symbols, tangible things to be busy at, imprints on the earth kept visible, yesterday and in the present, undeserting.

Andy and I continued our random remarks until he turned to us again.

"Do you remember Mrs. Hilton?"

We nodded.

I went to see her the other day. She always gives me a cup of tea. My, the children are real young ladies and gentlemen.

"I always go to see somebody after I get my errands done. Can't do much here when it's so wet.

We knew it wasn't the wet earth. It was custom. Probably as a young man when he was at home, he had taken his mother in to town if the errands warranted taking the carriage. We knew that in the summers we had been here, he had taken some of us in to show us off to elderly ladies and other folks who belonged to the Farm Bureau. But inevitably he returned to the farm. It was part of him. The apple trees were old, but they were heavy with fruit, so heavy that untended branches split down the trunk from the weight. The corral behind us was thick with scented weeds, but once the hooves of old horses and young, spirited beauties had worn it smooth. The cow corral held only rotting wagons, but once there had been cows there who had given pails of rich, foaming milk, and had had wobbly, wondering-eyed calves. We knew! We had seen and we had imagined, and now the grey emptiness was splashed with the colors of vivid memories.

He came down all too soon, with his bucket full. The aunts had come from the house and were munching apples, too. The children were running up and down the road and hugging the kittens. Aunt Claire was having trouble keeping up with them. She had been to a dance the night before, and one leg ached.

"What's the matter?" asked Mr. Charles as we walked back to the car.

"Oh, all the men I danced with were so darn tall! They kept swinging their feet forward, like this, and I had to swing my leg way back to keep from being stepped on."

"Don't they have any consideration for their partners?" he asked. "You know, when I was in San Francisco, the year before I went to work for Mrs. Grey, I went to a dancing school there. Every once in a while they'd have a fancy-dress ball. Well, the instructor's sister, Mrs. Wendell, was quite somebody, and she came to one of these balls with a great long train, -- beautiful thing! But during the evening I found myself on this train, and I couldn't get off. I was embarrassed! Ha! By gad! But nothing happened. Every time she moved I was in the air.

It was one of his favorite stories, and he told it with pride and amusement. He could have talked all day, but we were in the car, ready to go.

"You're looking well, Richard," said someone for the third time.

"Yes. I have to keep well, if I'm going to be alone all winter. I have to get out, you know and keep the ditches open."

"Do you have rubber boots?" asked Aunt Claire.

"No, I haven't," he said, "but I have to get 'em. You know, if my feet just imagine they get wet, I get a cold right away."

"We'd better start if we're going to get home by supper," suggested Aunt Peg.

"Thanks for bringing them over," he said to Andy, inclining his head with a look that was glad yet shy and wistful, a little.

"Well, thank you for everything, " said everybody. "Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye."

I didn't look back and wave and wave, as I sometimes have; so I didn't see him standing there, short and stocky, with his good-bye smile, and that apologetic look in his kind eyes; but I know just how he looked, trudging back to lock up the big empty house where he hasn't lived much since that summer when Mrs. Charles died. Her people found that, with his grief and his bachelor ways, he couldn't take care of his small children; so they were taken away. And I know how he looked when he jogged back down the hill to his cottage to eat his home-made soup, and listen to his radio and read his Bible, and remember, and sometimes write letters.

He gave me a letter he'd written me and forgotten to mail. It told about the renters being gone, and his hating being alone now more than ever.

It is raining tonight, and I hate to look at it raining up there, and washing all the sounds into the sandy earth. That's why I'm glad people are like stories: you can look at them for a while, or you can forget them awhile. I can't look at his life very long, as he's living there now. Maybe you could. Maybe I'm sensitive. But maybe it's because, even though I don't know much more about him than you do, he is my father.