Of Mice And Men - year 9 homework

By Jack Swan

In the far distance the Sutter Buttes mountain range towered against the empty northern sky. The sandy crags jutted into the azure expanse, the blue hues made all the more vivid as the orange light of sunset streamed out from Lake County. The air was a stagnant pool, with just-too-much heat, just-too-many bugs, and humid to the point where it was hard to tell where sweat ended and the damp air started.

The shadows wandered lazily across the grass, strolling towards the banks of Sacramento River, and beyond it Yuba County and Nevada. A solitary breeze briefly swept through the evening, rippling the clear water of the river and sending a ripple of energy through a stout willow tree.

The movement caught George’s eye as he scanned out of the window. The air was marginally cooler inside the wooden walls of the homestead, walls that were obsessively covered with pictures and paintings. But of the paintings that made up the quilt of colour over the wood few could be sold at auction; most were childish scribbles and blobs of mismatched colour. Often they were crude interpretations of rabbits, more often than not smeared in vivid and shocking red. Each one held, in its bottom corner, a single word, each time written in huge spidery letters: Lennie.

“Mister Milton?”

George’s head snapped round to see a diminutive black woman in a sharp white dress step softly out of the adjacent room and gingerly shut the door behind her. Stroking his unshaven chin he walked up to her.

“How’s she doin’?”

“She... she ain’t good, sir. She’s weak, she’s got difficulty breathin’... I don’ think she’ll make it through the night.”

George paused, looking away from the nurse. He knew that this would come, but he had never thought about exactly what he’d do. Should he bring Lennie? No, Lennie wouldn’t understand, and besides, it would tear him apart to tell the whole truth. But he shouldn’t lie either.

“Can she talk?” he asked in a hushed voice.

“She won’t stop,” the nurse replied earnestly, “But that’s pretty much all she can do.”

Frowning, George pushed pass the nurse and crept into the tiny bedroom. A wave of perfume and septic washed over him as he stepped inside.

“Lennie?” came a meek, fragile voice.

“’Fraid not, Mrs Beech.” George stepped past a table with a cracked ceramic flowerpot teetering precariously atop it and round to look at Aunt Clara tucked tightly into a battered quilt covered in a faded flower motif. The old woman smiled weakly at him as he sat down on the bedside.

“That negro nurse is very nice,” she chirped in her incessantly positive tone. “Does whatever I ask, no questions, no delays. Always with a smile. Kinda like you, when you used to come round an’ play.” George smiled softly, both at Clara’s kindness and her chronic blindness of just how he had treated Lennie as a boy. 

“Which reminds me – you boys found work yet?”

“There’s a ranch down at the south of the county, got two places goin’. We got work cards; we’ll pick up the bus’n Yuba City tomorrow.”

“Well, that’s good to hear,” Clara smiled. They sat in silence, each of them trying to stave off where the conversation would inevitably lead.

“Did... did the nurse say how I’m doin’?”

George turned away with a stifled sigh. He could lie slick and easy to employers, but it would be far more difficult to do it here. The words choked out of his mouth like sandpaper on his tongue.

“She said ya’ll be fine in a week, s’long as you stay in bed.”

Clara’s eyes sparkled, drilling into George. Her mouth twitched. “George Milton. Ya always were one fer tellin’ yer li’l stories. I can see it in yer eyes. What’s the truth?”

George paused again, his mind frantically pushing through a maze of emotion and indecision. When he finally wrenched the words out they caught on a heavy lump of emotion deep-seated in his throat. He finally blurted the words out, trying to get the ordeal through as fast as possible.

“The nurse says... she doesn’t think you’ll last. She thinks that you’ll be... be gone by the mornin’.”

Aunt Clara’s face barely fell. She simply looked away. Coughed. Her eyes glazed over; she fell utterly silent. When she came back from the catatonia she didn’t look directly at George, rather she gazed aimlessly through the dusty window. A bird swung across the distance farmland.

“Well,” she eventually whispered, “I knew it’d happen sometime.” She slowly twisted her head to look at George. “Where’s Lennie?”

In George’s mind an image was conjured up of the Lennie’s huge bulk lolloping curled over on the porch, ‘petting’ whatever unfortunate furry rodent he managed to snatch from the dusty floor next. The image segued into the same huge figure standing dumbstruck over Aunt Clara’s frail and decaying body, eyes streaming in pure unadulterated remorse.

“He’s out back,” George finally grunted.

“Would you be a dear an’ bring him in?” Clara smiled humbly. George wouldn’t have wanted to deal with the fallout of the situation, the endlessly repeated questions from Lennie – but he owed it to Clara to let her see her sole surviving relative one more time.

*

When they re-entered the room Clara was examining a faded photograph in a shimmering bronze frame. The glass was misty around the edges from hundreds of finger smudges. Clara looked up from the photo, clasped tightly in fingers as bony and jutting as Lennie’s handwriting, and coughed heavily.

“Hello Lennie,” she said warmly.

“Hi Aunt Clara,” he bubbled. The solemnity of the situation was lost on him.

“Pull up a chair, Lennie,” Clara wheezed. “You too, George.” As the chair legs screeched across the wooden floor she rolled over to face the two men. “You recognise this photo Lennie?”

Lennie leant over and squinted at it. “No, Aunt Clara. Who is it?”

“That’s you!” she beamed, pointing at the boy with the proportions of a seven-year-old and the thickset shape of someone twice their age. A man with a keen moustache and a Stetson hat stood above the boy, and a plain-featured woman rested blankly on a chair beside him, her hand on the young Lennie’s shoulder.

Clara admired the photo for another few seconds, a sense of melancholy drifting across her face. George huffed quietly as he remembered the hundreds of times Aunt Clara had told the short and sour story of how Lennie had ended up with his Aunt Clara, and instinctively scowled at the two adults on the photo.

“Lennie,” Clara eventually croaked as she laid the photo down, “I got something important to tell you.”

“I’m listening Aunt Clara. I always listening.”

“Lennie, I’m going away for a long time. A long... vacation. And it’s going to be very nice, so I might not be comin’ back.”

“Can I come with you?” Lennie asked. Clara chuckled weakly, dissolving into a hacking cough.

“I’m afraid not, Lennie. Not right now, at least. But hey, I’m sure that you’ll come an’ join me some time in the future. But until then I’m afraid you’ll have to be without me. I’m selling the house an’ most of my belongings, but I don’t think it’ll get much. But that doesn’t matter, dear, because I’m going to be very happy where I’m goin’.”

“Where are you going?” Lennie wondered. Aunt Clara raised a wizened hand and clasped Lennie’s paw as tight as possible.

“Far, far away, Lennie. Even I’m not sure jus’ where I’m goin’. But it’s gonna be very nice, and maybe a few years from now you can come along too.”

Lennie cocked his head sideways and blinked as the thought lumbered lazily across his mind.

“Who’s gonna look after me, Aunt Clara?”

Aunt Clara’s eyes shimmered again in their sunken pink pits. “I can’t think of nobody better than George.” 

The two turned their necks rigidly to face him.

Inside George’s spirit fell slightly. He was now custodian of Lennie by the irrefutable word of Aunt Clara. He didn’t let his face change even the slightest, though. “I’d be happy to,” he lied.

There was some truth in the statement. To be brutally honest he had been hoping that he could unload himself of the herculean burden of Lennie here, and disappear down into Sacramento or beyond. He liked Lennie. Most of the time. But the second Aunt Clara had suggested he take the leash of Lennie his mind conjured up a gallery of disasters created by Lennie.

But, again, Aunt Clara’s word – when it came to Lennie – was law.

“That’s good to hear,” she smiled. “I hear you’ve got yourselves work down on a ranch south of the county. I hope it goes well.”

“We got work?” Lennie frowned, brow plunging in concentration.

“Er, yeah,” George stammered for a pretext to try and protect Lennie from any more emotional burdens – and himself from any more physical ones. “We, ah, best get packing so we can set off for Yuba City early in the morning. Lennie, if you start packing some stuff...”

“Okay George. I’ll do that.”

Lennie reared up, head nearly scraping the dusty, cobwebbed ceiling. He pushed aware George as if he wasn’t there; brusquely dragging the door shut behind him his heavy footsteps stomped down the corridor.

“George, you’ll know he’ll try to put everythin’ under the sky in that suitcase.”

“That’s the point,” George snapped. Immediately he closed his eyes and dropped his tone. “Sorry, Mrs Beech. It’s just that...” he trailed off, the lump in his throat swelling back up again. His eyes began to sting. 

“Ah, jeez...” George sniffed.

He hadn’t felt like this in years.

“You been awful kind to me, Mrs Beech,” he finally spluttered, turning to look her in the eye. He tried to ignore the fact his eyes were flooding over like Imperial Valley back in 1905. “It’s gonna be god damn – sorry, awful hard to go on without ya. An’... an’... I wish I could repay ya for bein’ so kind to me all these years...” He trailed off into silence as he diverted his efforts in trying to hold back the storm of tears.

“George, George,” cooed Aunt Clara. She gave a frail grin. But it was the warmest grin George had ever seen. She laid her grass blade-thin fingers on George’s calloused and tough palm.

For the first time in years he really felt something there, as light as a feather yet as palpable as a block of wood.

“All you need to do is to make sure that Lennie is okay. Keep him out of trouble, and get him out of it if he is. Look after him.”

“I will, Mrs Beech.”

“George!” she intoned, her delicate grip tightening. “Promise me.”

George looked into her eyes one last time and saw the rawest sincerity he had ever seen in another human being ever. It rubbed over into him.

“I... I promise, Mrs Beech.”

“That’s good to hear,” she smiled tiredly, and fell back into the bed. In seconds she seemed to age, her face growing more haggard and tired. Another fit of coughing rolled through her, sending George wincing. As it finally cleared she turned to him once more and said, tiny and dying voice creeping through a throat layered with phlegm: “Now don’t let me keep you waiting. Send the nurse back in. She’ll take care of me. You two just pack up, pack up and go. You got jobs to do. I... I just got to wait for the good lord to find me.”

*

George and Lennie’s footsteps crunched rhythmically on the gravel of the long road leading to Yuba City. The pale blue sky had darkened from a rich Caribbean blue to a modest ocean sapphire spanning most of the sky, clashing only with a golden-red smear in the far west. A single star began to glimmer through the evening. Crickets chirped, leaves rustled, water sloshed onto the shore of the Sacramento River.

“George?”

He shut his eyes in a mix of resignation and preparedness. “Yes?”

“Why did we go now? It’s gettin’ cold.”

“Cause we gotta leave early in the morning tomorrow.”

“When’s Aunt Clara leaving for her vacation?”

George didn’t turn with Lennie to look at the two yellow-glowing windows imprinted upon the silhouette of the Sutter Buttes. He was already looking forward.

“George?”

He knew he would have to answer at some point.

“Soon, Lennie,” he grunted in reply, eyes locked to the horizon and the faint orange blur from Yuba City in the distance. He swallowed and spat, batting away a tiny insect with the back of his hand. Lennie, for the most part, stayed silent.

Behind them one of the lights winked out.

----

This is a good two or three years old now and I haven't really bothered to proofread before posting, but if you do have any comments and criticism I'd be happy to hear it!

PS - Year 9s - do not copy this, Mr Godfrey will recognise this and catch you out!