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“I hate to say it,” I admitted over the great piles of red and orange leaves gathering in the empty meadow of Jay’s garden, “but Jordan might have been right.”
Jay, seated politely on a wrought iron bench he swore he’d had brought in from some French ruin, nodded as if his head were lifted and let loose by the tender hand of the dying autumnal breeze. I half expected him to float off with it, as relaxed as he was, and the sight gave me momentary pause. It took until Jay leaned forward toward me in expectation before it occurred to me that I’d begun a thought and not ended it.
“When she said life begins anew in the fall,” I finished. I leaned on the handle of the rake I’d dug out of Jay’s storage shed--after, of course, fighting several spiders, and doing so with bravery befitting a veteran such as myself. “At the Plaza she said that. I can’t forget it.”
Jay pulled a face and brushed a fallen leaf off his pants. “Don’t remind me.”
I hummed softly in sympathy before returning to the satisfying work of raking leaves. I’d been over this morning just to check on my neighbor, seeing as he’d only just been freed from the sling after being shot, and had looked out the French doors in his bedroom to find massive swathes of leaf litter covering the dying grass of his yard. Not even Gatsby magic could hold autumn’s earthly slumber back from the greenery surrounding us.
Jay let this go on until I made the grave error of raking the pile too closely toward his feet. At first, he simply let me go on, saying, “You know I have four men hired to do this very task, old sport.”
“And they’re due Friday,” I reminded him. “It’s Monday and the leaves were up to my ankles.” I stopped then to again lean on the handle of the rake, the metal spines of the tool digging into the soft, wet earth where I had already pushed the leaves away. The grass, brown and shining with the leaf-damp, sprung up at awkward and unexpected angles after being freed from the weight of detritus, and now the familiar scent of leaf rot greeted me with each bracing breath. It could have been considered unpleasant but something about it, as Jordan had proclaimed just two months ago, refreshed me in a way springtime never managed.
“I’d rather do it than let you stress your shoulder. I don’t mind it,” I assured Jay after catching the worry in his expression. “Really, Jay. I’ll finish this up and catch the ten train to work. I don’t mind.”
He hesitated for a moment, as if in consideration, before nodding again and responding in contrast, “Well, I do.”
He kicked at my pile of leaves in such a manner that at first glance I might’ve considered it an accident. After all, he’d looked off toward the Sound at that point with the faintest smile as its mists traveled to kiss his paling tan. The cooling autumn sunlight lay upon him in one fair burst, setting his hair aglow like the amber waves of grain we sang of returning to after the Armistice.
This was a much more forgiving November, and I was a more forgiving man than I was back then, so I shrugged off Jay’s meager kick and began the quick work of re-gathering my pile as more leaves tumbled down from the trees above. At this rate I’d finish in time for us to have breakfast before I had to go, as it was only half past eight at the latest.
I turned away long enough to capture a few new arrivals only to turn back and find my pile, my precious pile of leaves, had been dismantled once more. Jay now sat back against the bench with all the smugness of a cat--but underneath it, the giddiness of a child. This lasted until that brilliant grin of his almost knocked me flat on my back. I stood strong by the skin of my teeth.
“Jay.”
“Nick.”
“Oh, so now the ‘old sport’ disappears?” I gripped the handle of the rake with white knuckles as Jay’s grin turned into a laugh. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten my name.”
Jay smothered his laughter behind his hand. “I could never. You’re all I’ve got.” He held his hand out to me and by God, I almost took it without a second thought. This strange familiarity had brewed between us over the past few months and I found myself turning from him with more reluctance than I had anticipated.
Jay’s hand dropped after a moment but his smile, dimmed as it was, stayed in place. Still the clouds above had come to cover the sun once more, leaving us awash in grey as though the whole world had faded from the vibrancy that had ruled us all summer long. Even the brilliant leaves in their crimson and sulfur hues seemed to die out as I raked them all together again in silence.
To his credit, Jay allowed me to gather up quite a pile in spite of the fact that I stubbornly refused to simply move my gathering out of his reach. He might have to stretch out to destroy the pile now that it had grown as much as it had, though.
And he did. I turned to catch Jay almost slipping off his bench in order to spread my pile back out over the browning grass, and when he saw that he’d been caught, he froze with his shining eyes trained on mine. I somehow did not find it within me to stop him as the inevitable happened and he finished the kick.
I sighed with great gusto, hoping it would be enough to convince Jay I had really been inconvenienced by this, and began to yet again pile the leaves together. Jay sort of slumped on the bench.
I managed to build a substantial pile near his bench and moved on to rake from the far corner of the garden when the final kick occurred. I heard it before I saw it, of course, with the great rustle of a thousand maple and sycamore leaves firing up at once, and when I turned I found that my beautiful menagerie of autumnal grace had been scattered over several feet of Jay’s yard. Jay himself stood in the middle of it all, looking more ridiculous than I thought I would ever see.
Several bits of leaf matter had come to rest in his carefully maintained hair, not at all helped by the oil he used to keep it in place. He stood there with his lame arm hanging to the side and the unburdened one crossed over his stomach in one miserable attempt at nonchalance. After a moment of peering back at me he cleared his throat and made some effort to brush himself off.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked, and the words might’ve come across as accusatory toward anyone else. But even I couldn’t miss the softness in my voice as it crossed the lawn to reach Jay.
Jay brushed his shoulder off with a shrug, now no longer meeting my eyes. “Nothing. I just got up from the bench. That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“Of course. Why do you ask?”
Now I shot him a real, withering look, one that he caught with a glance and responded to with a beaming little smile. Who ever needed the sun, then, with Jay across the garden like that?
I stood strong against it, however, as I had had enough exposure to Jay’s charms by now that I might have stood a chance at holding my own against him. Some days.
I took as deep a breath as my lungs would allow. “So I suppose you don’t mean to stand in the middle of the pile I just built?”
“Oh?” Jay looked down at where his shoes remained buried under the now-settled leaves. “Am I in your pile? I’m afraid I hadn’t noticed, old sport. I’ll pay to have it replaced at once.”
I wilted over the handle of my rake with a long, theatric groan, which prompted Jay to pick himself out of the pile he’d destroyed with the care I would have rather he’d shown before making the effort to destroy my hard work. He paused only long enough to reach down and brush off the legs of his pants before crossing the dying meadow to my corner of the hedges.
“Really, Nick,” he said in that old gentle, lilting way. “It’s a great misfortune of mine to have been crafted as clumsy as I am.” An unbearable sort of sadness entered his voice then, tender and grey like the sky above us, and I almost believed him until I looked up and saw the telltale light in the bottomless depths of his eyes. Like sirens swimming at the bottom of the sea, the light there almost lured me toward drowning in them.
Once Jay had my gaze, he knew he’d won. He nodded solemnly and continued, “I do hope--” He took one step into my new pile. “--you’ll find it within you to forgive me, and--” The other foot dragged its way into the depths of the massive new pile I had scraped together, and now Jay stood knee-deep in both wet, older leaves and dry, cracking ones. “--and that you’ll shake my hand.”
I kept my eyes locked on Jay’s rather than allowing myself to take his hand where he’d extended it out to me from his place in the very center of my pile of leaves. I knew what he meant to do. It seemed out of character for him, certainly, but ever since he’d allowed Daisy out of his trembling, tiresome grip, he’d lapsed back into gentle waves of childlike behavior at odd times, and though this often enabled me to do the same I couldn’t allow it this time. Or, rather, I wouldn’t.
But Jay remained as doggedly determined as he always had, and he seemed more than willing to stay there like an autumnal maypole, surrounded by leaves instead of May flowers and only missing a dozen ribbons to flow from a crown atop his head. He stood there with his hand extended toward me and a sweet smile on his face even after I had finally ripped my gaze away from him to instead look out across the slate grey of the Sound as it sloshed sluggishly against the chilling buffet of November wind.
“Won’t you shake my hand, Nick? I’m afraid I can’t let this rest until it’s settled, you see. On a matter of principle.”
I let my eyes wander lazily back to him as though I wouldn’t rather look at him than anything else in this world. “...I’m not sure I can forgive you for this, Jay. That leaf pile was a family heirloom. It was all I had left of my family, all of which lay dead in the Middle West by now, of course. How else would I afford my cottage?”
Jay nodded again with that same grave solemnity. “Yes, yes, I understand completely and I can assure you I am simply sick with guilt over the matter. Are they buried next to mine in San Francisco, then?”
“Yes. Under great piles of leaves.”
“What a great comfort the autumn must be for you, then, old sport.”
I mirrored his miserable nod and let my eyes slip shut, pretending for a moment to appear emotionally crushed by his clumsy destruction of my family’s final gift to me. I have no idea how I refrained from breaking character. I’d never been one for acting, but playing with Jay had become more natural to me than anything else in life.
When I looked again, Jay still hadn’t dropped his hand. Against my good sense I finally reached out to shake it.
After caring for Jay for two months, I had mistakenly been given the impression that he was somehow frail. Sure, he must have been for the first several days of bed rest, when I would come to care for him in the strange personal way I felt called to after being the one to call the ambulance and press his life back in through his shoulder until help arrived. I’d been there with him before work, on my lunch break, and after work. Every spare second, I’d spent caring for him, even though I knew he had servants, because I had grown so fearful that losing Daisy would have done him in even as his body healed from the gunshot.
It hadn’t. I wouldn’t give myself credit for that, as I had seen his strength wane almost paper-thin over those weeks, and it had left me with the impression that Jay wasn’t nearly as strong as I had always supposed him to be.
This was false.
The second I took Jay’s hand, his fingers locked around my hand like a vise. He yanked me forward with such sudden, unexpected force that I yelped like a kicked dog and fell without grace toward the fading earth below us.
I crashed into the pile with my hand still tangled with Jay’s, but that hardly lasted long enough for it to become a problem before Jay had let go of me to fall to his knees beside me. He’d all but ruined his poor coppery pants but I knew by now that most all things were disposable to this man, not because he could replace them at the snap of his fingers but because he never felt he had owned them to begin with.
“Jay, what are you--”
A wayward handful of leaves filled my mouth.
“Oh, sorry, dear--friend. Old sport.” Jay brushed off my lips with an uncomfortable tenderness while I spat like I’d been poisoned. He laughed at me. I couldn’t blame him. I knew I looked like a fool, or a madman, spitting and cringing and groaning on the ground at his side.
Jay didn’t flee from any consequence, and I supposed he wouldn’t have even if I’d had it within me to threaten a similar end toward him. I didn’t get up, either, as Jay seized his opportunity to continue shoveling leaves over top of me. I laid there, and I let him.
I stayed utterly still without any force on his part for reasons completely unknown to me.
Still, I couldn’t help but ask this grown child, “Why are you doing this?” I paused. “Not that I’ll stop you.”
“Oh? Why am I doing this?” Jay repeated with just a hint of teasing and two handfuls of leaves. Half of them stuck to his palms as he laid the gathered clump like an offering over my chest. My pounding heartbeat seemed all the more evident under the thick layer of detritus. “I thought I was honoring a treasured Carraway family tradition.”
I let him continue for a moment as nothing but the cry of gulls interrupted the serenity of autumn wind and the Sound’s familiar hiss against the shore. When his hands rose over my chest again I took the opportunity to lash out from under the leaves, my filthy hand wrapping over his thousand-dollar watch.
“We could be buried together.”
Jay met my eyes for a moment, vivid and electrified against the backdrop of an empty grey sky only interrupted by stark black branches striking out above us like claws to rip open the cloud cover. He nodded with boundless trust and collapsed into the leaves at my side, careful to fold himself just so to avoid landing back on his bad shoulder.
I laughed in spite of myself and rose only enough to shovel leaves from my side of the pile to cover Jay while my laughter spread to him. He at least had the foresight to attempt to cover his mouth, though I would admit my aim was better than his. It wasn’t long before Mother Nature had tucked us in under a thick blanket of leaves.
Jay and I lay there, completely still in wonder at our own absurdity.
I would have sworn his fingers pressed their way between mine without his permission, or mine. But under the thick cover of leaves not even Mother Nature herself would’ve been able to catch a glimpse of the silent union, and so neither of us felt the need to withdraw.
Not even when green light cut silently through the fading morning mist.
I lay there with Jay for a moment after that, waiting for him to rise and stumble off blindly in the direction of the Sound as I had seen many nights before, and leave me there under the sodden cover of the dying earth. I wouldn’t have blamed him. The uncut string of his life must still have been knotted to something in his past, and why not the finger of a forgetful girl who no longer lived across the water?
Jay shifted beside me to sit up. I waited for him to leave.
“Miss Baker was right,” he agreed softly, his eyes only for me. “I do think life has begun again with the fall.”
I stared back at him before breaking into a grin rivaled only by Jay’s.
Jay stood, his whole suit ruined from stem to hem by mud, and reached out for me one last time. I took his hand and left the pile to find myself in exactly as ruined a state, but I found I didn’t mind. It couldn’t have been nine yet.
Jay kept his hand in mine, his undying hope glowing from every line of his face as he asked, “Are you still going to leave me or do I have to go back to ruining your piles?” He kicked a heft of leaves over my shoes.
I let go of his hand. Jay’s expression fell, and I couldn’t bear to look at it as I turned away. I walked away from him by several paces…
…and grabbed the rake.
“Would be a shame if I missed that ten o’clock train.”
Jay blinked at me as though I’d thrown dust in his eyes, and then he began to laugh. And like a child he tore back through the pile we’d shared only moments ago, leaving the whole square as though I had never touched it. I watched him for just a moment before dropping the rake to join him in the gleeful reconstruction of all the natural, wild things we had once tried to beat back into order.