"Now listen now, Jacob, Mary Ellen was a fine enough woman til she married that Marcus Malloy. She and I grew up together on North Street and I guess I knew her as well as anybody else, or better. Except for her moonin' about sometimes more than the rest of us, she was on the way to makin' some man a right fine wife, right up til that June. Remember how warm it was that summer, Jacob? And land, the blackberries - at night the air was full of them - never smelled berries that way before or since, far's I recall.
"Well, a sure summer for being bewitched, that's what I say."
"Well, you wouldn't know nothin' about it, you were all full up on being the shiniest new brakeman the Orangeville Limited ever seen that summer to be thinking on any moonshine. Lord, took me a deal of sewin' and fixin' my hair and pourin' on extra of my mother's lavender scent to even get you to turn your head away from them blamed cable cars."
"Well, you did"
"Did what?"
"Turn my head away from them cars. Guess you did it pretty good - twenty years later and I'm still lookin."
"Oh, Jacob, how you talk."
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"Ah, Marcus, will you look at the clouds."
"Is it you perhaps - a cloud? Oh at times like now, I wonder I can touch you at all. You're all blowing milkweed down, light and full of the air and sunlight as summer itself."
"There now! Am I real enough?"
A small bird sat up straight and eyed the spot where a quiet pile of rusty brown and green which he had taken to be leaves was suddenly agitated and inundated by flying and disorderly white. Then a clatter of sound sent him into flight, chased by the great shock of human laughter.
The two of them lay then in the yellow green grass like two leaves blown together and caught by spider web and twig until the North wind should come and blow them away again.
And after awhile Marcus Malloy pushed his tangled hair from his eyes and sighed a full sigh and Mary Malloy smiled a small smile and murmured, "Don't rock the boat now, I'm listenin' to your heart."
