Six Books for a July Hammock

By two o'clock the yard has gone still. The grass is pale at the edges, the sprinkler has left its dark arc on the walk, and the air under the two maples is the only air that moves. The hammock hangs where it has hung since May, its ropes creaking whenever the wind bothers to try. Nothing much happens in this hour. That is the point of it.

Somebody has put a glass of tea on the grass within arm's reach. Somebody else has come out of the house with a pillow and gone back in without it. The hammock swings once, twice, and settles. The light comes down through the leaves in coins and lays its money on the page.

The Hour the Yard Takes a Nap

Every month has an afternoon, but July's is the deepest one. The heat has been in since long before breakfast, and it has nowhere to be. It sits on the yard like a big animal that intends to stay. The dog has abandoned the shade of the porch for the dust of the drive, a choice the whole house respects. The birds are quiet. The only sound is the cicada's long electric whine and, farther off, a neighbor's mower — someone who has decided that the grass was worth the sweat. He will learn.

It is not an hour for errands. Even the mail waits in the box. The porch is too bright on the east and too bright on the west, so the two maples get the afternoon by default, the way they do every July. Between them hangs the hammock, the best furnished room in America.

There is no hurry in a hammock. It settles, and then it settles again, until the person in it agrees to the same pace. The light has lost the yellow eagerness of June; it is July light now, white and patient, and it takes a good while to cross from one edge of the page to the other. A book opened here is opened gently, the way a door is opened in a sickroom. The reading waits on the light.

Choosing What the Afternoon Can Hold

By the time the Fourth has come and gone, the house has decided what the month will be read with. On the porch table there is a small stack — six books, each one put there by a different hand. No one remembers exactly who started the stack. It simply grows there, the way the blackberries grow along the fence. One came from the porch shelf, one from a nightstand, one from the bottom of a beach bag that has been in the closet since September. None of them is new. That is the first rule of the July hammock: the book must be old enough to have been missed, light enough to hold over a drowsing face, and willing to be put down at the bottom of any page at all.

There is the Illinois one, Dandelion Wine, in which a boy's grandmother bottles the whole summer and the boy learns that some days are worth saving. Tennis shoes, screen doors, the smell of cut grass — it reads the way the afternoon smells.

There is the Alabama one, To Kill a Mockingbird, which some houses take down every July the way other houses bring out the wedding china. A girl in the long heat of Maycomb, a brother, a friend who appears only when school lets out. Southern light does not compromise, and neither does the book.

There is The Yearling, the Florida one, a boy and a deer in the scrub. It is the heaviest of the six, not in weight but in consequence, and the hammock takes some of the sting out of it. Bad news arrives softer when it is heard from a hammock. Its sentences run slow as creek water.

There is Summer, the one Edith Wharton set in the hills of Massachusetts, leaving the drawing rooms behind for the green country. It is named for this month and belongs to it the way the magnolias belong to the South. The prose stays cool the way a cellar stays cool.

There is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, of course. Boys run away in July and float on the river on a raft. The Mississippi is the longest hammock in America, and the book knows it.

And there is The Country of the Pointed Firs, thin as a pressed leaf — a summer visitor in a fishing town at the end of a Maine road. It reads the way a window sounds when it is open on the harbor. Nothing in it raises its voice. The quiet is the point.

Six books, and every one of them agrees to interruption. This is what makes hammock reading possible. The page does not mind being left open, facedown, while the reader watches a cloud take its own sweet time across the gap in the leaves.

Half a Page, Then the Light

Reading in a hammock follows its own arithmetic. A page, then a pause. A paragraph, then the flight of a jay. A chapter wants more attention than the hour can rightly spare. The books that work here are the ones that let a sentence stand alone, the way a good porch lets a good story stand alone, supported by nothing but the summer air.

The afternoon builds itself out of these small holdings. Somewhere in the first chapter the reader's eyes close. The book stays open on the chest, rising and falling. The eye follows the words until the heat takes over, and then the story goes on somewhere below the page, in the country where naps and novels keep company.

Company is the other half of the afternoon. This is not a solitary pleasure, whatever the postcards say. In the second hammock, or in a lawn chair pulled into the shade, someone else reads at the same unhurried speed, or dozes with a book open on the ribs, and the shared slowness is the point. A question floats across the yard — “still awake?” — and the answer comes back, “still here.” It is a kind of conversation.

The tea glass sweats. The ice has melted down to wedges the size of a thumbnail. Somewhere in the house a radio mentions the heat, as if the afternoon needed a news bulletin. The sprinkler comes on, and the yard fills with its long swish and hiss. A child's voice calls from somewhere out of sight. The page keeps its place without being held. The hammock does the holding.

The Six O'Clock Slack

Toward evening the light changes its angle, and the air remembers how to move. The cicadas take a breath between rounds. Somewhere in the kitchen a pitcher clinks against glass. The book is closed now — not finished, but closed — and laid flat on the grass exactly where the tea glass stood. The place is kept by nothing more than the fold of a wrist, or the afternoon's memory.

July does not mind. Tomorrow there will be another afternoon as long and as generous as this one, and the stack will still be on the porch table. One book will go back to the hammock. One will go to the lawn chair. One will disappear into a beach bag and come back with sand in its crease, which July considers a compliment. A borrowed one turns up on a neighbor's porch next week, and comes home a little heavier for the travel. The reading will proceed at the speed of the season.

What the hammock gives is permission: to read slowly, to sleep in company, to wake and find the book still open at the same sentence and not care. The sentence will be there in the morning, same place, same patience.

The first fireflies come out, blinking their small uncertain lights. The dog stands up and stretches, which means supper. The hammock rocks once, twice, empty, and the ropes creak a little in the new cool. The six books wait on the table.