Oleanders in June

Chapter Two-1

Chapter Two

Mrs. Poplar was sitting on the love seat at the front of the house when Alfred came downstairs a little before ten o’clock. Her hands moved up and down with thin green thread as she embroidered a tea towel. Her eyes twinkled into a smile when she looked up at him.

“Off to the festival, dear?”

“We are.” He took his jacket from the rack near the door. “Will you be joining us?”

“No, I’m afraid my day is better suited to staying around the house. My hip would only slow you down.”

Footfalls echoed as Mathias came down the stairs. He was in pressed clothes with a fresh shave, and his hair was slicked back with thick curls pulled into place. He looked between Alfred and Mrs. Poplar.

“Ready to be off?”

Alfred held the door open as Mathias took his jacket from the coat rack. The day had already grown warm and left the air heavier than the night before. Alfred made to slip on his jacket but thought better of it as they stepped into the sun. A light breeze met them on the street, and honeysuckle seduced his nostrils as they crossed the nearest intersection to make their way south toward the ocean. Mathias appeared to be more at ease in the heat despite his shirt fitting snuggly across his chest.

“I had the suit tailored for my induction into the medical society at the university,” Mathias explained. “It’s one of my better shirts.”

“How is one inducted into a medical society?”

They passed a house where children played a game in the yard. He watched them jump and shout as the ball flew from one side of the fenced space to the other.

“The society only accepts top scoring students. It’s all a matter of exam scores and clinical performances. It’s quite a difficult process to apply, but it reflects well when applying for positions after graduation.”

“Is John in the medical society?”

“John is in everything,” Mathias snickered, “but not in the way he should be.”

“How do you mean?”

“John is the sort that doesn’t give much thought to the purpose of societies and organizations. To him they are just standard credentials that every student should have behind his name. He wants his name to be attached to them all without any real effort in association.”

“Like a collection.”

“Precisely.”

They let a young couple take the sidewalk in front of them. Down the street a line of pedestrians crossed at the next intersection, women’s parasols bobbing above them as they walked, shading them from the late May sun.

“Why do you study medicine?” Alfred asked as they fell back into pace.

“I want to be a pediatrician.”

“A pediatrician?”

“To treat children.”

They caught up to the group of pedestrians and slowed as they crossed the next intersection. The morning continued to heat up around them.

“Is treating a child so different than treating a man?”

“They are quite different. I believe they are much more susceptible to certain illnesses.”

“Because they are so small?”

Mathias laughed wholeheartedly at the simple question and shook his head.

“It’s more a matter of their development. Their bodies haven’t reached the capacity of an adult’s body. Consider a yearling tree. In the wild it has planted roots and acclimated to its surroundings, but it is still not as strong as the seasoned trees around it. Winds, floods, disease, nearly anything could affect it.”

The crowd thickened as they continued down 16th Street.

“Likewise, consider the same yearling if uprooted and replanted in a yard. Its body is now introduced to new soil and with that comes new enemies—different insects, an altered soil chemistry, perhaps various new weather phenomena. Until it has taken root and become acclimated to its new environment, it goes through a period in which it is vulnerable to anything new. Everything it experiences for the first time is unprecedented until it learns how to respond for self-preservation.”

“Children don’t have that sense of self-preservation?”

A breeze carried the salty scent of the ocean through the crowd, and the fronds of palm trees rustled overhead.

“Perhaps it’s learned. The sea air does women good for vapors and nervous tendencies, but it seems to bring about issues for young children.”

“Such as?”

“Headaches, runny noses, sore throats. It’s a growing phenomenon that we can’t seem to place well enough to diagnose consistently. The truth is we never know for certain with children if it is a more tender reaction to what men pass off as minor irritants or something altogether different.”

“You mean it’s a matter of interpretation?”

Mathias smiled at his words.

“Yes, to some degree I would say children are up for even greater interpretation.”

Having been caught up in the current of the crowd, they crossed Avenue O and saw the first signs of the festival: flags flying overhead, their red, green, and yellow colors small sails flapping in the wind. As the people in front of him mingled and moved about, Alfred remained distracted by the gathering of locals until they reached the other side of the street and the group thinned. He halted at the edge of the walkway and found himself looking out beyond the faces of passersby and into the rushing waves of the Gulf of Mexico.

Alfred stood entranced. Waves began far out at sea and grew in complexity as they neared the shore, breaking as they met the shallows before reaching up the sandy beaches like tendrils and pulling what they could back out with them. Before him was the beach, an uneven landscape of light brown sand that blended tenderly into the water’s edge. The sky was a bright blue, and over the waterline wisps of slender clouds pulled like taffy across the smooth glass of the sky. The force of the ocean wind rushed upon him. A sensation started in his forearms and spread up his biceps and across his shoulders until goosebumps covered his skin. The warmth of the ocean wind was fresh and different from the balmy air that circulated the island. It was sweeter somehow. The fruit of the scene was brighter than what he had experienced farther inland: all along the beaches were swimmers in their swimming suits and bathing trunks splashing in the water. Sunbathers rested in the shade of large umbrellas that had been nestled in the sand.

It captivated him.

Mathias called to him from farther down the row. Alfred pulled his eyes from the water and made his way toward the gate. He glanced once more at the ocean’s colors over the water as they moved with the crowd. Mathias led them into a line of young couples and excited children.

“First time seeing the ocean?”

“It’s magnificent.”

They scooted forward with the crowd, the smell of popcorn wafting on the ocean breeze.

“It’s not always this peaceful,” Mathias noted. “You should see it when it storms.”

A small gate came into view, dwarfed by the oversized flags that whipped and popped overhead. Mathias paid their way in, earning them each five game tickets. Mathias pocketed the tickets and threw on his jacket, straightening it a little at the collar but remaining unfrazzled as the wind flapped the material around his waist like a cape. His brown eyes were bright with excitement and he bit his lip as he took in the festivities. All around them the carnival bustled with children running from one game stall to the next, parents paying for amusement, and vendors selling popcorn, cotton candy, and roasted peanuts. It was a spectacle of color and motion, inundating them from every direction. Alfred’s head spun with it all.

He felt Mathias nudge his arm and followed his gesture to a row of games. “Let’s have a go at them!”

Alfred followed him past a popcorn vendor to the first booth, where a wooden table supported several milk jugs at odd distances, some on the table with others on blocks of varying height so that none were exactly the same. A young boy tossed rings at the jugs, missing the first four and clipping the spout of a fifth with his final throw. The boy stomped his feet as his father pulled him away toward a man juggling bright green balls.

“What’s the aim?” Alfred asked, scanning the table of milk bottles.

“To get rings around as many bottles as you can.” Mathias traded one of his tickets for five rings and weighed them in his hand. “The key is to focus on just one jug and perfect the throw.”

He threw his first ring with a loose wrist. It bounced off a bottle and rolled off the table. He threw a second one that nearly missed the spout altogether but clipped the top. His third throw was lighter and steadier, the ring whizzing through the air and landing perfectly on the spout with a ting as it fell onto the neck of the bottle. He gave a broad smile and puffed his chest at the vendor, who shook his head in defeat. Mathias squinted and tossed the last two rings, missing with the fourth and ringing the neck again with the fifth.

“See? Easy.” He turned to the vendor. “What do I get?”

The man stretched up and pulled a tomato-red pennant from a peg board. Mathias waved it triumphantly in the air, and Alfred found his enthusiasm contagious as his housemate gave him a challenging grin.

“Care to try?”

Alfred bit his lip as he considered the game, but felt a pull to see the rest of the festival. “Let’s explore first.”

Mathias gestured down the aisle where a row of games filled both sides. Beyond that, a small octagon pen of wooden planks sat in the middle of the street, making the fence just high enough for a goat to lift its head over the wood and nibble at a child’s hand. Sheep wandered inside the pen with a saddled donkey. An older man with a thick grey beard shouted over the crowd advertising an adventurous ride around the pen, while a younger man that Alfred deduced was his son hoisted a small girl onto the saddle and began to lead the animal around the wooden border, scattering sheep and goats as he walked. Another man in a yellow vest held a large snake, its body wrapped around his shoulders and arm, next to a brightly painted sign that promised exotic animals like the city had never seen before.

Mathias led them toward a vendor cart that offered roasted peanuts and bought two bags, handing one to Alfred with an eager grin. All around them the festival was alive with color and noise as Alfred cracked open a peanut shell and tasted the salty bitterness of the treat. Looking back toward the gate, Alfred lost sight of the edge of the carnival as the crowd blended into the maze of booths and the sounds of the petting zoo; the city buzzed in excited tones as a deep voice came from the crowd.

“Mathias.”

An older gentleman approached them. He was slender and nearly eye to eye with Alfred, only his thinning grey curls losing what little height the younger man had on him. A confident nose preceded his bright blue eyes, and he carried himself patiently, as if years of thoughtful living had taught him to consider his path before misdirection led him into inescapable conversations. He paused at the peanut cart and paid the man a nickel in exchange for a bag.

“Ah, good day, Mr. Jeffries,” Mathias greeted him.

“That it is,” he replied flatly, cracking a peanut shell over the ground and letting his eyes fall on Alfred. “And who might you be?”

“This is Alfred Ridgeway of the Weather Bureau.”

The man stuck out his hand and gave a tight grip as Alfred shook it. “Daniel Jeffries.”

“Mr. Jeffries owns a tailor shop on the Strand,” Mathias explained.

The man ignored his introduction as he popped a peanut into his mouth and kept his eyes on Alfred.

“The Weather Bureau, you said? You’ll be working with Isaac Cline then.”

“Yes, sir, as an assistant observer.”

“It seems the government should invest a little more time in their equipment if they want to boast a bureau that does more than predict the weather. It appears we’re no closer to seeing a hurricane before it arrives than a decent summer day to swim by.”