This novelette is a recollection of one memorable day in the childhood of Seth, the narrator, then nine years old. It is told as a first-person narrative, more than thirty-five years later. The title refers to the weather phenomenon of a period of cool temperatures in June. The story takes place in middle Tennessee.

On this unseasonably cold day Seth's mother forbids him to go outside barefoot, but he disobeys her, wanting to "rub [his] feet over the wet shivery grass and make the perfect mark of [his] foot in the smooth, creamy, red mud." But before he can get out the door, Seth notices something unusual: "Out of the window on the north side of the fireplace I could see the man...still far off, come along by the path of the woods." The boy watches the man follow a path where the family's fence...