folklore: the novel

i. seven

 "Are there still beautiful things?"

Lush greens painted the expanse of Forest Park on an unusually temperate summer day in St. Louis. Magnolias, oaks, and birches covered the acres, planted so abundantly that they created their own skyline, blocking out the progressing skyscrapers rising on either side end of the park. These trees knew the splendor of the turn of the century in that great World's Fair 30 years prior, and they now looked down upon a wild expanse, made all the wilder by the two little girls who climbed and romped, played adventurers and shrieked with delight every muggy day that summer of 1932. 

Veiny shocks of leaves shook on the tallest tree in the park, an old hickory planted prior to and surviving through much of the Gateway to the West's history thus far. This tree had known St. Louis through the tumult of wars, the ruckus of train engines first coming through stations, and the many footsteps of those brave enough to venture further out to California and the mountains. Now, just as importantly, it held two seven-year-old girls on their final day of the hazy months of summer. 

Inez, lithe and lanky, looked down branches below, where her close friend Betty Bowery was being suspiciously quiet. She squinted through the covering, trying to locate her friend who had made a surprising promise today to face her fear of heights. Her hands gripping the rough bark of the tree, Inez reached down and jammed her left knee into a jag in the bark and swung under the layer of green that hid her friend. As she swung, the satisfying swish of the old tree's leaves gently brushed past her braids, her hair meticulously woven and tied back with ribbon that morning by her mother. 

The bond of imagination, of creating new worlds was the invisible string that had kept Betty and Inez as close as they were. When businesses in this town, like many others in the United States at the time, began shuttering their window and as the grownups became worried, Betty and Inez stayed blissfully unaware as often as possible, preferring the world they made to the one they had to live in at home. 

Forest Park was already full of worlds and memories, haunted and holy by the fairytales the girls had already heard from their own mothers. Borrowed nostalgia with a fresh look was a perfect canvas for the quick, confident storytelling of two little girls. Today was their last day together for the summer. The next week was the start of school for Inez, and as the girls were from opposite sides of the park, the schools and circles they ran in were very different most of the year. This final romp was to be their best of all, if only Inez could get Betty to look up instead of down at the very hard ground below. Short, pitched breaths rattled, and Inez knew Betty would need distraction to keep going.

 "Remember what my mama says?" Inez shouted forcefully down to a still unseen Betty Bowery. Petite and with long, waving blonde hair, Betty was usually easy to spot as a bright white spot amidst the deeper brown and green hues of their summer playground. Inez, not hearing a response, thus struck out to venture lower in the tree, when she heard a decisive thwack! down below, and shuffling indicating Betty was again trying to climb. 

"She says the taller the tree, the better the view..." a wobbly voice floated up. 

"And?"

 "And the closer to the sky, the better blue."

"Exactly. Now am I going to have to tell my mama that you are questioning her?"

 Inez's mother, Marjorie Augustine, was both girls' hero. She was the starting off point for Inez's imagination and even for grown-up women a bit of a myth of what a woman could do. In 1904, while Betty's mother was being shown around the Fair to visiting royalty and high society for the marriage market, Inez's mother was participating at the Junior Olympic Games, which allowed girls from far and wide to be taught archery by the female Olympians, and then to compete themselves. Marjorie had remained an adventurer and always insisted that girls must play as hard as boys do out in the world, and Inez, who was as rambunctious and rowdy as her brother, was proof of that belief carried out.