Page 57

By Jack Joseph Smith

hope he didn't because he thought he couldn't be by himself anymore. I guess he didn't want anyone else around if he couldn't be with his family. I wonder if he was there when we were undressing and then went away because he knew we really wanted to be there and he didn't want to frighten us. Gee Danial, next time we go to the apple trees lets really look around for Mr. Metzes and tell him we like him cause he has such pretty apples and all and we know he must be happy when he wakes up in the morning and looks at his trees. I bet no one else in Mount Lebanon would ever sleep in a place like that at night; especially when there are insane people walking around in Kennedy forest all the time. Mr. Metzes must be brave and if he saw us today he must think we are brave too. I'm really happy Danial and I really love Metzes field. It's so much fun to run so far. I guess I better go home now. Are you guys going to play any more or anything. No, I'm going to go home too. Bye Bye See you tomorrow. Okey. We went back many times and through many springs, the place Mr. Metzes had gone away from became our home of love and life and dashing humor and singing joy we carried in our souls for the rest of our lives. I thought of him when I ran as an achient child that burned a sighn in the heavens in the beginning of each spring on the coming years. That field would be covered with the same high wild wheat and I would burn it from one end to the other when the wind was blowing away from the appletrees. I was never found out and I used to stand below the hill in front of my home and watch the flames twist in sacrifice

Original Scan

Page 57

AI Interpretation

GPT

The longing to find Mister Metzes deepens into a vow of return, and the field is remembered as a lifelong home of love, humor, spring fire, and sacrificial wildness.

The strongest movement is from one afternoon's adventure into something almost sacred and permanent. Burning the wheat turns the place into ritual memory, as if childhood freedom and destruction are both offerings made under his vanished gaze.

Claude

The boy reasons tenderly that Mr. Metzes 'didn't want to frighten us' and slipped away during the undressing, and resolves to come back 'and tell him we like him'. Then the narration leaps forward decades in a single breath: the orchard becomes 'our home of love and life and dashing humor and singing joy we carried in our souls for the rest of our lives'. The vow hardens into private ritual - the speaker as 'an achient child that burned a sighn in the heavens' each spring, setting the 'high wild wheat' alight 'when the wind was blowing away from the appletrees' and watching 'the flames twist in sacrifice'. The misspellings ('achient', 'sighn', 'appletrees') are scan-backed and preserved.