Starfish (13 page)

C
OLD
M
ORNING
D
EW
• F
ISHING THE
S
TREAM
• R
ED
B
LOOD
• S
TARFISH

LIONEL STARED
up into an early-morning sky. Purple, yellow, orange, and gold all combined and stretched across the faint light from tree line to tree line. Lionel felt the weight of his grandfather's buffalo robe over him and wondered how it had gotten there, as it hadn't been around him when Mr. Hawkins was talking about the horses.

Lionel threw off the robe, even heavier now that it was wet with the morning dew. He sat up and looked over at Corn Poe and Junebug. They were still sleeping, wrapped now in the saddle blankets and some bedrolls that Lionel figured must have belonged to the Hawkinses. Beatrice and Mr. Hawkins were nowhere to be found.

He wandered over toward their crude outhouse, took care of his business, and then cut back across the meadow, past the garden and toward the stream. The meadow was also wet with the morning, and in a few short steps his bare feet and the bottom cuffs of his leggings were soaked. Lionel looked with pride at their little garden and saw that the black raven he had seen when they first arrived at the little lodge had returned and was sitting on the straw man's shoulder, busily working on one of the pearl buttons of the ivory dress.

“Hello, again,” Lionel called, but the black bird ignored him, concentrating on his task at hand.

The raven pecked and pulled relentlessly until he had the shiny button in his beak; then looked at Lionel with a cold black eye and flew away, disappearing somewhere over the Great wood. Lionel continued on to the stream to see if the grizzly bear that he and his grandfather had seen fishing had been through during the last couple of days.

Lionel walked up the rise to the stream and found Beatrice standing waist deep in one of the pools, peering, with her arm half-cocked, into the swirling water. Mr. Hawkins was standing above her on the bank, tying off what looked like the back of a wicker chair, made from the rough whittled branches of slippery elm and pine boughs.

“Ya see, I'll simply slip this on the downward side of the stream, and what do ya know? They're trapped,” Lionel heard Mr. Hawkins say over the rush of water. He set his weaving into the water, blocking its downward flow. “They ain't got nowheres to go but back upstream, and that is something I'd like to see, with you standing there just waitin' on 'em.”

Mr. Hawkins looked up, instinctively reaching for the large pistol that he wore in his belt, but immediately dropping his hand when he saw that it was Lionel standing on the shore.

“Beatrice, look who's come to join us,” Mr. Hawkins shouted over the water as he danced from rock to rock, crossing the stream to Lionel. “How did you sleep last night, Lionel? I slept like the rock of Gibraltar, myself. No joke, like the rock of Gibraltar.”

Mr. Hawkins pulled the pistol from his belt and sat down on the soft, moss-covered bank. He threw down his heavy saddlebag and pulled a small black notebook from inside.

“Now, give me a minute here, Lionel, I just need to make a note. This crick here seems to change course a bit every time I see it,” Mr. Hawkins said, setting the narrow nub of a crude pencil to the page. “That's water for ya, though, ain't it? It'll find a way to go where it wants to go. Not much you can do about that, not much at all.”

Lionel looked over Hawkins's shoulder at the scribbled notes and various rough penciled sketches of trees, rocks, and animals that covered the open pages.

“I'm not sure why, but I do like to make notes of me and the Junebug's travels. I'm hoping we won't always be on the move like this, and if we do settle back down, I keep thinking that he may want to recall some of what we've seen.”

Lionel saw that Mr. Hawkins's latest chronicle was a drawing of the brook trout that they had had for dinner and a sketch of the stream and its various pools that were laid out directly before them. Lionel sat down next to Mr. Hawkins, and Hawkins handed him a canteen. “Have a drink of that. Just filled from the stream. That's good cold water.”

Lionel took hold of the canteen and drank. Mr.

Hawkins was right. The cold water felt good going down his throat, and he drank it in greedy gulps.

“Well, now, there's a way to catch a fish that I ain't thought of; maybe you could just drink up all the stream's water and then we could just walk on out there and pick them fish up,” Mr. Hawkins said, breaking the lead on his pencil before finishing his sketch. “Good Lord, I've got to find a way to get some more pencils. This one is about done.”

Lionel looked up at his sister, who stood patiently in the stream as Mr. Hawkins pulled a small jackknife from his pocket, flipped open the blade, and worked on getting the last bit of lead from what remained of the pencil.

“I'm hoping to get a couple more weeks outta this one yet,” Mr. Hawkins said, maybe more to the pencil than Lionel. “Just a bit more…”

But the pocketknife slipped, sliding into Mr. Hawkins's finger instead of the pencil's soft wood.

“Will you look at that?” Mr. Hawkins announced dropping the pencil and knife and examining his finger. “I cut myself.”

A small trickle of blood, red blood, Lionel noticed, appeared on Mr. Hawkins's thick finger. It fell in tiny droplets onto the green moss where they sat.

“Ah, it's just a tiny cut, but all the same. That little pencil sure is making me work for it, ain't that right, Lionel?” Mr. Hawkins asked, wiping the blood onto his pants.

Lionel stared at the faint blood-streaked lines across Mr. Hawkins's trousers and the dark red droplets that sat in half bubbles on the clumps of moss around their outstretched legs.

“What is it, boy? You ain't squeamish on a little blood, are ya?”

“No, sir,” Lionel explained. “I just didn't figure on yer blood being red like mine.”

Mr. Hawkins looked puzzled for a moment, his face slowly slipping into a big grin. “Why, of course my blood is red.” Mr. Hawkins laughed. “What color did you expect it to be? Purple, or maybe green?”

“No,” Lionel stammered, “I guess I just didn't know. I mean your skin's different than ours.”

“My skin, oh my goodness, my skin.” Hawkins coughed through his boisterous laughter. “No, Lionel, I'm sorry. I suppose you're right. How would ya know unless ya seen it?”

Mr. Hawkins found this to be rather amusing and it took him some time to control his laughter. “Ya know, Lionel, I suppose I should take it as a good sign that ya ain't never seen none of our blood.”

Mr. Hawkins went back to sharpening the pencil between small bursts of steady laughter. “In all my travels, that's the first on that one. Red blood.”

“Where are ya from, Mr. Hawkins?” Lionel asked as Mr. Hawkins's laughter subsided.

“Why, that's a good question, Lionel. I'm from a bit of the all-over, really,” Mr. Hawkins answered, slowly exposing the remaining lead. “I know that things have changed down where you're from, but the fact remains that you're still
from
there. Your people been here for a long time. My people, whoever they are, been scattered all over the world.”

“So, you don't know where you're from?” Lionel persisted.

“Well, kinda. I ended up here outta Texas. Like I was sayin', I was with the army and now, on this particular mountain, well that's a whole other story. Before Texas, I was on the coast in the Carolinas, back east. Before that, I know that my mother was born down in the islands, somewhere's south of Cuba. You can hear a bit of that in my voice, I reckon, but not too much anymore. Ya know a long, long time ago I hear that my folks is from some part of Africa, but I ain't never been there.”

Mr. Hawkins leaned over and pulled his saddlebag closer. “I suppose I don't know which is worse, being taken from the place you're from or having where you're from taken from you. Either way, it's a sorry state of affairs that we both better learn to make the best of 'cause it ain't gonna change. It's done, and that ol' clock ain't gonna turn itself back.”

Mr. Hawkins threw open the flap of his saddlebag and fished around until he found a small, well-worn wooden box. “Let me show you something.”

Mr. Hawkins opened the box and removed an object that was wrapped in red silk. Lionel thought at first that it was some sort of strangely shaped rock.

“Here ya go,” Mr. Hawkins said, “but be careful with it. My mother gave me that. It's from the island where she was born.”

Lionel took it from Hawkins and held it gingerly in his hand. It was as hard as a rock but as light as a pinecone. It had five stubby appendages surrounding its center, and when Lionel turned it over, he noticed a hole in the middle that could have very well been a mouth. Surrounding the mouth and trailing out of each limb, there were hundreds if not thousands of what looked like hairs, orange hairs: little orange hairs, with a mouth that had turned to stone.

“You know what it is?” Mr. Hawkins asked.

“No, I never seen nothin' like it.”

“It's the knobby star,
Piaster giganteus
.”

“Piaster giganteus?”

“Yeah, it's a starfish.”

Lionel turned it over in his hand again. “This is a fish?”

“Kind of.”

“This was alive?”

“Yep, just like you and me. They live in the saltwater down in the oceans. You ever seen an ocean?”

“No, but I seen pictures back at the school. The captain told me that they're so big you can't see the other side. I saw a picture of the army men on the boats. They was fixin' to cross 'em.”

“Yeah, I'll bet they were,” Mr. Hawkins said.

“How did it die?” Lionel asked.

“How did what die?”

“The starfish.”

“I don't know 'cause I wasn't there, but I reckon it was like these fish here that we pull outta the stream. Sometimes when you take something out of where or how it's supposed to be, it'll just…well…it just dies.”

“Everything?”

“Naw, not everything, some things change, they adapt,” Hawkins said, taking the starfish back and wrapping it in the red silk handkerchief.

“Can I look at the starfish again some time?”

“Why, of course you can. whenever you like, as long as you're careful. It means a lot to me as it's the only thing I got left that my mother ever give me, well exceptin' the purple and green blood that flows through these veins.” Mr. Hawkins laughed.

Lionel looked upstream to his sister. Beatrice reached down, submerging herself in the pool, then resurfaced with a flapping brook trout in her bare hands. It reminded Lionel of the time that he and his grandfather had sat in this very spot and watched the grizzly bear do the same.

C
OLD
B
ISCUITS
• W
INTER
S
TORES
• P
IRATES AND THE
E
XPLORERS OF
A
FRICA
• A
N
A
GREEMENT

FOR THE NEXT
half hour, Beatrice pulled fish with greater frequency. Lionel stood observing from the shore while Mr. Hawkins went back up to the lodge to get the cook fire going. Lionel watched the growing number of fish as they lay packed in moss, gasping for their final breath. He had enjoyed the fish the night before and knew that he would eat them again for breakfast, but now, after seeing the starfish, he did so with an awareness that wasn't present until this morning.

Lionel thought about his grandfather and wondered when he would return. He wondered what his grandfather would think of the starfish and these new thoughts that now raced through his head. Lionel decided that he would say a prayer thanking the fish for their lives. He sat down on the bank with one hand on the bear claws around his neck and sang a low song.

Beatrice caught another fish, threw it up on the bank, and then crossed the pool to join Lionel. He thought about stopping the song and telling Beatrice about the starfish, but instead he kept singing, and they were soon joined by Junebug and Corn Poe, who appeared on the opposite bank looking disheveled and wiping the night from their eyes. Lionel grew quiet.

“I'm thinkin' that a swim is the only thing that's gonna get me goin' after a sleep like that,” Corn Poe announced, stripping off his clothes.

Beatrice gathered the fish, smiled at Lionel, and disappeared in the direction of the lodge.

“I suppose that's right, leave the bathing hour to the menfolk. It's only proper,” Corn Poe continued, slipping into the icy pool. Junebug followed, then Lionel; and soon the three of them were swimming where their breakfast had just been caught.

They ate the fish with cold biscuits and spent the rest of the day looking over and repairing the Hawkinses' gear. Mr. Hawkins showed them their traps and the pelts and skins they had gathered over the course of the long winter. Lionel and Beatrice told Mr. Hawkins what their grandfather had taught them, and he soon put them to work in the smokehouse curing the meat and tanning the hides that lay in bundles, bent and tied in stiff squares.

This continued for the rest of August, with the five of them falling into a pleasant routine that felt the most settled since Beatrice and Lionel had fled the school. They spent the days preparing the lodge for winter, tanning the hides, smoking meat, and preserving the vegetables from their overflowing garden and the abundant huckleberries, blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries that began to cover the hills.

They saw the grizzly bear with greater frequency as he also chose to spend his late-summer afternoons in the berry patches eating his fill for the long winter that lay ahead. They also took walks in the Great wood, sometimes to hunt, but mainly just to take in, as Mr. Hawkins put it, “its magnificence.”

This strange consortium sat around the fire at night always in the open air, and Mr. Hawkins told them stories from the war, the Carolinas, and the few tales of piracy and the high seas that he still remembered from his mother's island.

Lionel loved these times and grew closer and closer to Corn Poe and the mute boy, Junebug. They often stole away in the afternoons after their chores were done to act out Mr. Hawkins's tales of piracy or to fish and swim in the stream.

They found a sprawling section of fallen trees in the Great wood that became one of their favorite spots. There, they would engage the pillaging pirates or the gruff sea captains that hunted them down, depending on what Hawkins's tales and that day's imagination dictated. A clearing opened onto a broken jumble of giant tumbled trees now lying dead and dying in star-shaped patterns stretching as far as their eyes could see. Lionel loved to run along their immense trunks and climb through their extensive branches, which, while still perpendicular to their base, reached up as opposed to out, their tips in some cases as high as the standing trees that still surrounded them. The fallen trees' exposed roots were now the bows of great ships, the extending branches their masts and rigging. Corn Poe thought that they could walk the trunks all the way to Canada and never have to touch the ground.

When they weren't engaged in piracy on the high seas of the Great wood, they wandered the rocky crags that surrounded the small lodge in the meadow, pretending to be lost somewhere in the ancient wilds of Africa—not recognizing themselves for the pioneers and explorers that they really were.

As the nights became colder Mr. Hawkins suggested that they sleep indoors around the crumbled fireplace, although he continued to sleep out of doors, the pistol and rifle always at his side.

Beatrice seemed happy, but also became more withdrawn. She slept inside with them, but as the cool weather approached, her coughing returned; and many nights Lionel would wake to find her sitting upright and staring into the fire, trying to catch her breath, or standing at the lodge's thick-glassed windows, looking out into the night sky.

One morning they woke to find Mr. Hawkins and his bedroll covered in a light powder of snow, but the snow had all but melted by mid-morning, and the day turned out no different from the rest of these last days of summer. Beatrice agreed with Mr. Hawkins that they could all stay in the little meadow as long as they worked together and didn't ask each other too many questions about why they each needed to stay there instead of moving to a more suitable climate.

On the morning of the second snow, they awoke to find Mr. Hawkins covered in another light dusting. He was sitting by the open-air fire, talking to their grandfather.