When Jacob came home from the last day of second grade, everything felt the same as it had last summer. He felt the humidity on the back of his neck and smelled the hanging, pungent odor of mud and growth. When he came inside and ate the snack his mother made him everything felt the same and when he laced up his sneakers to go play with his friends everything felt the same. When he stepped outside the door everything smelled, looked, tasted, felt and sounded—something sounded different. Jacob cocked his head to the side, listening, in an almost animal gesture. There was something distant, something different, something floating through the hanging muck of summer air, penetrating just enough until—he heard it. It was a jingling of bells, a twinkling of sound, a song, a song that sounded so familiar to Jacob. As the sound grew louder he began to pick up the tune. Duh da, duh da, duh da da da duh, duh da, duh da, duh daa daa. What were the words? The song grew louder, and images grew clearer in his mind. He had heard his mother sing the song once, and his friends too; they spun around in a circle, laughing. The music grew louder. He could hear their laughter pushing through the cloud of memory and then—there were the lyrics, as clear as the letters in his name, as clear as the date of his birth:
All around the mulberry bush,
The monkey chased the weasel.
The monkey stopped to pull up his sock,
Pop! goes the weasel.
He had remembered them. Overjoyed, he brought his head back down from its tilted listening/thinking position and began to run out into the street, but was stopped suddenly in his tracks as he confronted something huge and white hovering above him. The smile drained from his face in his moment of surprise, but his eyes quickly scanned upward and saw that the white obstacle was really just a truck, and it wasn’t really white at all, but covered with big pictures of ice cream and candy and on top was a speaker, and there was the song.
A penny for a spool of thread,
A penny for a needle—
That's the way the money goes,
Pop! goes the weasel.
That was the second part! His eyes moved from the pictures of ice cream across the truck and there was the window and then there was a man. He leaned out the window across the short, false counter and looked at Jacob with a warm intensity. “Hello Jacob!”
“Hello!” he cried out. He was digging in his pockets, looking for change, surely the ice cream man didn’t take credit. His dad had taught him about credit. It was paying for something when you didn’t have the money. He kept digging, reaching deeper and deeper into his pockets, searching, trying to get them to reveal their secrets. His tongue was stuck out in intense focus, his fist balled up in the deepest crevice of his right pocket; he had almost forgotten all about summertime, the smell, the taste, the air, the snack his mom made him, going out to play with his friends, that song in the distance—what were the words?—the truck, the pictures of ice cream, even what it was he was looking for; he had almost forgotten the warm man smiling behind the counter before he spoke:
“That’s okay, Jacob. You don’t have to pay here.”
Jacob looked up confused. His tongue crept back into his mouth and his fist fell out of his pocket. “I don’t have to pay?”
“Nope! You can have it for free.” The man leaned forward and grinned; his teeth were yellow and crooked, and they were rimmed in a layer of brown, but this didn’t tarnish Jacob’s view of him—his dad had crooked teeth.
“But ice cream trucks don’t have credit.”
“Credit? Well, you’re quite the smart little second grader, aren’t you?”
“Well. I do pretty good.”
“That’s good, son. It’s good to do good. Always do good by others; that’s what my daddy said.”
“My daddy taught me about credit. He said it’s paying for something when you don’t have the money.”
“That’s right. You can have this one on credit.”
And then there it was, a vanilla chocolate swirl in a cone. It was exactly what he had wanted. Jacob immediately took a bite off the top and his teeth hurt after.
“What do you say?”
Jacob looked up. He quickly swallowed his bite and said, “Thank you!”
The ice cream man smiled in return and watched Jacob continue eating his ice cream cone. He munched and munched and licked and took bites out of the top of the cone. He seemed to have forgotten all about going to play with his friends. “Hey Jacob?”
He looked up again, slightly startled. “Yeah?”
“Is that all your daddy taught you about credit?”
“Well…” He thought for a moment. “Well, yeah, I guess. Why? Is there something else I should know?”
“You are quite the inquisitive young man. Do you know what inquisitive means?”
“Asking lots of questions.”
“Right you are. Well, the thing about credit is, you usually have to prove that you’re going to pay it back eventually.”
Jacob looked confused and a slight grimace of worry crossed his face.
“What I mean is…well, sometimes people will show that they’ve paid things off in the past. That shows that they have credit. Or they will give the person something of value until they pay them back, so they know they’ll come back.” The ice cream man leaned farther out the window and peered down at Jacob. He had an expression of concern glued to his face and the more the ice cream man talked the more worried he appeared. “But Jacob, looking at you, I don’t see anything of value, and I doubt being in second grade you have any experience paying off debts. Hmm. How will I know you’ll come back?”
Jacob had turned white and had not taken another bite of his ice cream since the man began this particular line of conversation. He had nothing with which to assure his credit, and he had not anticipated this when he accepted the ice cream.
“Hm.” The ice cream man had seemingly leaned farther out of the truck than was possible; his face was bearing down on Jacob, his teeth jutting beyond his lips. Then suddenly he transformed, recoiling, his face brightening once again into intense summer joviality. “Jacob, my boy. I’ve got it! All you must do to assure your credit is take a ride with me in my truck, and if you can do that alright, well by golly, you can have ice cream from me any time you like!”
Jacob’s face brightened instantly; he would love to ride in the truck, and play the song for all his friends. His friends…he had forgotten them. But perhaps they could get ice cream on credit too. “Well I can do that!”
“Then by God son, we’ve got ourselves a deal.” The ice cream man shot his hand out like a cannon, and there it was hovering, just in front of Jacob’s face, just like the chocolate vanilla swirl in a cone had been, just right there waiting to be taken. Wanting to match the ice cream man’s enthusiasm, Jacob shot out his hand, but something stopped him mid swing, his hand only inches away from the man’s. The brightness of the ice cream man’s face faded into disappointment. “What’s wrong little Jacob?”
He didn’t know why, but something had stopped his hand, and he stood there for a long moment looking at the ice cream man with one hand outstretched and the other clutching a melting ice cream cone. Jacob lowered his outstretched hand. “I think I need to finish my ice cream cone first before it melts.”
The ice cream man’s smile faded to confusion for a moment and then back to cheeriness. “Well, that’s quite alright, young Jacob. Take your time.” The ice cream man was patient.
Jacob ate his ice cream cone very deliberately, biting the cone down as he went until he had come to the very last nub with a little bit of melted light brown ice cream in it.
“All done?”
“Almost. One bite left. That’s always the best bite.”
“I agree. There’s nothing like finishing something.”
Jacob tossed the final piece of cone into his mouth and savored it, chewing it thoroughly and swallowing it. “All done!”
“Excellent. Would you like to finish our business arrangement?”
“You mean going for a ride?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. You aren’t going to go back on your word. Are you?”
“I never shook, so I haven’t actually said I will.”
“You are a smart little boy. Of course, you’re right. But you implied that after you finished your ice cream you’d come for a ride with me, so it’s only right to follow through on your implication.”
“You mean like…being an indian giver?”
“Did your daddy teach you that?”
“Yes.”
“Well he’s a solid fellow in my book because that’s exactly what it’s like.”
Jacob looked up at the truck, and the speaker on top was still whining out that tune: Duh da, duh da, duh da da da duh, duh da, duh da, duh daa daa. And below that the pictures of ice cream and next to that the ice cream man smiling with his big crooked teeth—and weren’t they like his dad’s?—and he didn’t want to be an indian giver; his friends would make fun of him for that, and this time when Jacob shot out his hand he didn’t stop mid swing.
In the summer smell and the hanging musk of earth, Jacob’s friends had forgotten him; their stickball game a source of intense attention and focus, the whereabouts of their friend an ancillary detail shelved somewhere in deep memory. Since the time school had let out at three o’clock, an eternity had passed; forests had been conquered, trenches had been dug, the old well in the center of the circle had produced golden liquid, and now Joe DiMaggio was at bat with Lou Gehrig pitching.
“You can’t be Lou Gehrig!”
“Why not?”
“He didn’t pitch.”
“So what, you were Joe DiMaggio, and he didn’t pitch.”
“Yeah, but usually Jake is Lefty, and he pitches.” All at once the boys realized that Jake wasn’t with them, and they had no explanation for it. They looked around at each other for a moment until one of them said, “Guys, where is Jake?”
“I don’t know; I really hadn’t thought about it.”
“Me neither.”
The three entered into a momentarily introspective reprieve from their usual chatter, until they heard something ringing, far away in the distance.
“Say, boys. You hear that?”
“What?”
“That ringing in the distance. It’s far away; listen.”
They all listened. It was the quietest they had been since that distant foggy memory of three o’clock.
“I can’t hear it.”
“Shh.”
Through the dense thickness of the summer air came a sound, piercing through. “It’s a song.”
“What song is it?”
“Shh.”
They listened, all three heads cocked to the side. The sound was getting louder. “Duh da, duh da, duh da da da duh, duh da, duh da, duh daa daa,” one boy piped up. Then another joined in: “Duh da, duh da, duh da da da duh, duh da, duh da, duh daa daa,” and soon they were all singing together and dancing in a circle in the sand of what used to be home plate; “Duh da, duh da, duh da da da duh,” and all at once they cried, “Pop goes the weasel!” and broke into hysterical laughter, breaking their spinning circle and falling backwards.
One boy pointed at the other. “Do you remember the words to the rest of it?”
“I think I remember part of it. All around the mulberry bush…” He faded off, his memory failing him.
“I remember it,” the other boy piped in. “Jimmy’s got the whooping cough, and Timmy’s got the measles, Jacob’s in the graveyard lot, pop goes the weasel.”
Simultaneously one boy yelled, “That’s not it!” and the other said, “That’s it!” but after becoming lost in their banter, they had not noticed the song growing louder and louder, nor the small squeal of tires turning onto their circle, nor the sound of the engine pulling up beside them, but when the shadow of the truck blocked out the sun, they turned around.