AN EXCERPT:
When we were children we sometimes tried to play with our sister Opal, but we were too many voices for her and she always wandered off. She loved night, when we all went to our beds. We stopped running in and out of the back door, stopped racing up and down the path to the rocky beach, stopped shouting “Look, look!” louder and louder than each other the way you have to do when there are seven brothers and four sisters in a house, even if one of them, most days, doesn’t say a word.
Mom and Dad hardly ever asked us to be quiet. They wouldn’t have made so many children if they didn’t like the noise and crowd. What they said to us most was “Go play outside in the air, Loves,” or Mom might say “Come and sit a minute,” before catching a young one of us up onto her lap. We played together on the beach, in November with our feet stuck into rubber boots, in July barefoot and long-limbed in cut-off shorts. Opal sometimes wore boots in summer, or in winter might be seen running away along the curve of the shore, the white soles of her feet slapping against wet stones. She was always going away from us. We never caught her looking back.
We were too many voices for Opal, we knew, but we followed her still. At such a distance we followed, that perhaps it can't be called following. We followed by watching from the windows. Or by standing on the shore, throwing stones, braiding seaweed, collecting little heaps of pure white stones and oyster shells, waiting for her to come home from wherever she wandered alone.
One early spring we all stood in a scattered line on the beach facing the bay. Sis, the oldest, held Baby. Hazel and Colin had their hands in each other’s coat pockets, the only thing they did that really gave them away as twins. Samuel, Christopher, and Michael poked at the stones with short sticks. James and Una kept an eye on the clouds. Mostly, we all just stood staring at the cold sun on the surface of the water, and we were sort of quiet, the way February and March could make us. Tom stood by Sis and handed strands of wet seaweed and empty crab shells up to Baby. We had rocks in our hands and we fumbled about with them, passed them from one palm to another, rubbed them with our thumbs. We heard Opal’s voice come to us from behind.
“Throw ‘em in,” she called.
We twisted our heads around, to make sure she had really spoken. We saw her standing on the cusp of the hill that bends down from the yard. Her dark hair had grown long, all the way to her elbows, and it blew to one side in the slight breeze. We only looked for a moment and then pulled our eyes away and threw our rocks into the water like she wanted. We threw our hardest and our best. We threw with elegance and gusto for Opal who never played with us. When we turned again to see if she had loved the throws our arms had made, she was nearer, sitting on a big, beached cedar log behind us.
“Throw them so far,” she said, waving one thin-fingered hand in a wide arc over her head.
We squatted in loose jeans and scooped up the most we could hold. Tiny pebbles and flakes of shell stuck in the creases of our palms, larger stones rested on top. Even Sis knelt down to reach for rocks with one hand while she balanced Baby. All together we swung our cupped hands forward through our knees and released the rocks into the air. They fell as a chorus, Una’s and Tom’s, Michael’s, Samuel’s, all of them, dashing the sun’s light on the surface of the saltwater. Circular pulses traveled outward in large rings.
We were proud of the beautiful motions. We would have made them again, thrown with more force and grace for this sister. We wanted to please her even though she wasn’t the oldest, or the baby. When the last, lightest rocks had sunk to the bottom we waited for her call. We looked back to the cedar log, up to the top of the bank, and both ways down the beach, but she had escaped us. Sis shifted Baby and said, “Well.” We turned back to the house, poking each other’s backs on our way up the hill, smiling, and dusting the knees of the little ones...
Nimrod International Journal
- Fall/Winter 2007, Vol. 51, No. 1
Second Place in Nimrod International Journal’s Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize
- Fall/Winter 2007
- Judged by A. G. Mojtabai