by Alan Cumyn
In the afternoon, though, he had Nurse Debbie. She was just barely old enough to be a nurse, and she had creamy skin and playful green eyes and was more beautiful than anyone Owen had ever seen except for Sylvia. She brought a box of toy soldiers and a scale model truck and sat on the edge of Owen’s bed and told him about how strange it felt to not be living at home.
“Why don’t you live with your family?” Owen asked.
“I finished with my school, and now I have this job,” she said. Her family lived almost twenty miles away.
“What about your husband?” Owen asked. “You could live with him.”
“I haven’t got a husband,” she said, smiling. It seemed strange to Owen that someone so radiant didn’t have a husband.
“Well, I could be your husband,” he said. “Except I’m going to marry someone else.”
Nurse Debbie was so warm and easy to talk to, so Owen told her all about Sylvia, especially about seeing her in the golden light that night at her piano lesson, and messing up her Valentine heart-box, and going to her birthday party. He kept looking out the window for her but hadn’t seen her yet.
Later on, when Nurse Debbie brought Owen a glass of apple juice, she asked him what Sylvia’s last name was.
“Tull,” he said. “Sylvia Tull.”
They all came to see him that afternoon — Margaret and Horace, Andy and Leonard and Eleanor and Sadie and Uncle Lorne and Lorraine. Eleanor apologized sincerely for breaking his finger. She said it was all her fault. It was her added weight on the door that had brought it down and sent Owen up and into trouble. Andy lent him his double issue of Captain Volatile battling the Temptress Serpina. Sadie brought him a bouquet of wildflowers she’d picked from the riverbank, and Leonard lent him his magnifying glass in case he wanted to take a close look at the pores on his skin, or the stitches on his finger whenever the cast came off. Then Horace said it was time to go.
Afterwards Owen sat in bed looking out the window, the tiny cars bringing the tiny people here and there. He knew that in every car there was a conversation going on, and he tried to imagine what it was for each of them.
He had a long sleep, and when he woke up there was a note on the table next to the bed. In a girl’s writing, in pencil, it said:
Dear Owen,
I came to see you today with my father because a nurse called me and said you were in the hospital. You were sleeping though so I didn’t want to wake you up.
Well, sorry you broke your finger.
Have a good sleep!
Sylvia
It wasn’t the words so much as the note itself, the wonder of it. That she had come all the way to the hospital and stood there by his bed, watching him sleep. She had pressed her pencil right here and here and here, and written his name and hers, and then disappeared like the Bog Man’s wife. Only her spirit was still there, on the paper.
Have a good sleep! the note said, and it was from Sylvia so Owen took it as a commandment. He closed his eyes immediately and thought of her, as if the thought alone might pull her back and wrap her fingers again around the pencil and create another moment as pure and breathless as this one.
The Expedition
OWEN STARED AT THE paper on the kitchen table. He was home from the hospital. He had a three-color pencil that he’d sharpened himself, and his broken finger was resting on the edge of the paper, holding it down. He started with “Dear Sylvia” and then stared hard at her name to make sure that he’d spelled it right.
Then he couldn’t think of what to say.
It felt like he’d been away for years and had come back a changed person, like those princes of old who would go on expeditions and end up being stolen by pirates and held for ransom. Andy had told him all about it. If your relatives didn’t hand over money or jewels or gold, the pirates would just slit your throat and throw you into the sea. In ancient times, according to Andy, the mail was so slow that it could take years just for your ransom note to get back to your relatives, and then they could take a long time saving enough to buy you back. Sometimes when they did get the money together they weren’t sure where to send it. So all in all it was probably best if you escaped on your own, preferably stealing the pirates’ own ship and then sailing back home in triumph.
There was going to be an expedition that afternoon, and Owen thought he might write about that for Sylvia, but since it hadn’t started yet he wasn’t sure what to write.
While Owen had been away, Horace had taken down the old front porch, which was rotting. He hadn’t gotten around to putting up a new one yet. He was waiting for his friend Wilkes to give him some extra lumber that Wilkes’ father had in the family’s country home up north. Wilkes’ father was holding onto the lumber until the new outhouse was built, but after that, whatever was left, Horace could have it. But the outhouse builder was having a busy season, and anyway his daughter was getting married out east in a couple of weeks. But after that probably he could get around to building Wilkes’ father’s outhouse, so then Horace could have the extra lumber. As long as he got a truck. Lorne’s was laid up, but Horace’s friend Alex had a truck that he borrowed from his brother in Norwick whenever his brother didn’t need it to court the Willow girl in Limeoak who was going away to stewardess school at the end of the month. So after that the truck could be had for the asking.
In the meantime there was no front porch on the house. The door just opened to outer space and a drop of several feet. The boys loved to launch themselves from the front door at full sprint to see how far they could jump into the yard.
Margaret said absolutely that Owen could not jump out the front door while his finger was broken. So Owen had to do it when she wasn’t looking, and he couldn’t yell the way Leonard and Andy did when they jumped off.
It felt a bit like parachuting. The boys had in fact spent a whole afternoon making a parachute from an extra sheet that their mother kept in the linen closet for guests. But the guests never seemed to come, so why not make a parachute? They poked a series of very small holes around the edge with their father’s awl and tied six feet of string to each hole, then tied the other end of each string to Andy’s Ranger Scout backpack, which he strapped on before launching into the unknown. He had to fiddle with it a long time to get the strings the right length so that the parachute could open properly on such a short drop.
They’d nearly perfected the parachute when their mother came by to see what they were doing.
“Where did you get that sheet?” she demanded. Andy turned and leaped out the door, and would have got away except that the parachute got caught on a big nail that had been left sticking out of the doorframe. There was a loud rip! as Andy came back down to earth.
Margaret was so angry she jumped right out the front door herself and nearly landed on top of her firstborn son. Instead she landed in the hole that Horace hadn’t gotten around to filling in yet. She might have broken any number of things, but fortunately only slipped in the mud, so that she looked even worse than the guest sheet that the boys had converted into a parachute.
At lunch time the brothers sat like silent prisoners and looked only at their cheese broccoli soup. Afterwards they cleaned up without a whisper. Then they set off on their expedition so they could be captured by pirates, then escape with the pirates’ own boat, which they could then use to be pirates themselves.
It was a clear day at the end of the summer, in one of the last weeks before school started again. The air was so fresh and bright that there was an extra blue to the sky, almost a gray blue, like it was lined with steel. And even though it was warm in the sun, there was a taste of cold in the shadows, as if winter were trying things out. When Owen ran down the path through the woods and out along the riverbank, he could feel the taste of cold in his lungs, and he knew that summer was just about over.
They had spent days scanning the surface of the river for signs of a giant squid. The
y had kept their eyes peeled for unusual ripple patterns and had climbed some of the big willows near the river to scan the depths of the murky channels near the middle. They had thrown rocks into the deeper pools near shore to scare the monster to the surface.
The squid had left many clues. There was a broken rowboat sunk in the shallows and surrounded by weeds, which looked like it had been wrecked by a sudden lashing from an enormous tentacle. The boys had found several fish bodies floating upside-down near the shore, completely intact and possibly frightened to death after seeing the beast. And they had also come across traces of inky black scum that might have been left over from the squid’s poison. Leonard had started to touch it but Andy held him back. The book of giant squids from the library showed actual drawings of the monsters eating cows and ships and squirting their victims with deadly ink.
But this expedition wasn’t about finding the squid. It was a pilgrimage, Andy announced. He said that many of the people stolen by pirates in the old days had started out looking for God.
The boys didn’t know how to begin. Leonard thought that God would probably be up in the highest tree on the highest point of land, close to the sky, but Andy said it didn’t work that way.
“God doesn’t live up in the sky in Heaven,” Andy said.
“Of course that’s where He lives!” Leonard said. “With the baby Jesus and all the lambs!”
He had learned that in Sunday school. But Andy said that after Sunday school, you learn that the story about God up in the sky is just that, a story.
“It’s metaphorical,” Andy said.
“What’s that?” Leonard asked.
“Metaphor means a story for something else,” Andy said. “The story about God up in the sky really means that He’s everywhere all at the same time!”
“He’s everywhere?” Owen said.
“He’s in the hills, in the rocks, in the water, in the ground...”
Leonard started laughing
“What?”
“Well, if God is everywhere, then he must be in toilet paper too! And cheese broccoli soup!”
“And glue!” Owen said.
“God is in worms!” Leonard said. “We don’t have to go anywhere to find Him. Just look under a rock!”
“You shouldn’t make fun of God,” Andy said.
“God is in drain pipes,” Leonard said. “God is in nose wipes!”
“Stop it!”
“We could just sit right here and God would come to us!” Leonard said.
“God is here already,” Andy said. Then, quietly — “He’s listening to everything you say.”
Owen looked around. There was a bit of a breeze and the grass was bent brown, tired from so much summer. Just for a second it did seem possible that God was in the rocks and the trees and the sky and your old pair of socks, that He was listening to what you said and thought about Him.
“Eleanor says that God is a girl,” Leonard said then. “A big girl scientist spirit who made the universe work like a clock.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life!” Andy said.
“Yeah, well, she’s older than you and a whole lot smarter,” Leonard said. “And you’re in love with her!”
Sometimes brothers know exactly what to say to make the ground unsteady. Andy pushed Leonard so hard he went tumbling down the bank and fell into the river in a reedy section where the mud was black and a hundred frogs jumped for cover all at once. Owen could see that Andy felt terrible, but not as terrible as Leonard, who was all wet and black with gunk. Besides that, he’d lost his glasses in the mud.
“What did you have to do that for, you big bully?” Leonard said. Andy went down in the water to help find the glasses. Owen stayed on the shore because he still had the cast on his broken finger and he wasn’t allowed to get it wet.
“I am not in love with Eleanor!” Andy said as he was groping along the bottom, and just the way he said it, Owen knew for sure that he was. And he knew in that moment that this love business was undefeatable. It captured even older brothers who were strong and brave.
They went over every bit of the river bottom where those glasses could have been. They felt with their fingers and their toes, and made little dives, only to come up empty-handed, their hair and clothes and faces muddy with silt. The water wasn’t very deep and there was no current right there to take the glasses away. And although it was muddy it wasn’t that bad, so there was no good reason why they couldn’t find the glasses. They just couldn’t.
“See what happens when you make fun of God!” Andy said. He sat down in the sun and peeled off his swampy clothes. The chill in the air filled his skin with goose pimples.
Leonard said, “You have to keep looking! You’re the one who lost them!”
“I’m taking a rest!” Andy said, lying back, trying to get out of the breeze.
Leonard left the water and took off his clothes and laid them out to dry.
He said to Owen, “You have to help me ’cause I can’t see very well without my glasses.” So Owen took off his clothes and waded into the murky water with Leonard and felt around with his right hand while he kept the other one with the cast on it stuck high in the air so it wouldn’t get wet.
Leonard and Andy argued about whether God punished you if you made fun of Him or Her. Andy said God hated it when you didn’t appreciate all the things He did to make your life better, like bring the sun up every day on time and make sure there was enough air for you to breathe and breakfast cereal in the morning to keep you alive. Leonard said factories made breakfast cereal, not God. But Andy said where do the factories get the wheat and chemicals to make the breakfast cereal? And Leonard said from the fields and the laboratories. And Andy said where do the fields and laboratories get them? And Leonard said from Mother Nature, the scientist clock woman who was God.
“So there! You admit it!” Andy said, wading back in the water.
“Admit what?” Leonard said.
And just then Eleanor and Sadie came out from where they were hiding and stole Andy and Leonard’s wet clothes and Owen’s too, which were still dry.
“Hey!” Andy said, and he started racing after the two girls.
He would have caught them too, except that Eleanor stopped and turned around, and said, “You’re naked!” which made Andy stop suddenly and dive into the water.
Then Eleanor and Sadie started to run away, so Andy again called out, “Wait! Hey! Give us back our clothes!”
“What will you give us?” Eleanor asked. Leonard and Owen came swimming up beside Andy then, staying low in the water to keep hidden. Andy said that if the girls would just bring their clothes down to the shore and then go away, Owen would give them his Indian Brave flashlight.
And Leonard said right away, just loud enough so the girls could hear, “But you broke that a long time ago in the haunted house!”
“You idiot,” Andy said to him.
“But that’s cheating,” Leonard said.
“We can’t trust you!” Eleanor announced, and she started to gather up the clothes again.
“Wait!” Andy yelled. “You can’t just leave us here!”
“Why not?” Eleanor laughed.
“Whatever you want!” Andy said, still crouching in the water. “You just name it!”
Eleanor said it had to be something the boys could give them right there, a fair exchange, and the boys said that would be okay.
“But you haven’t got anything!” Eleanor said. Then she whispered something to Sadie, who shook her head. No. She whispered again, and Sadie kept shaking her head. Eleanor kept whispering and arguing.
Finally Sadie nodded her head. Yes.
“We’ll give you your clothes back,” Eleanor announced, “if Leonard will give Sadie a kiss!”
“Don’t you mean Owen?” Andy yelled.
&nb
sp; “She means Leonard,” Eleanor said. Sadie’s eyes dropped and Leonard made a low groaning noise that sounded like a frog close to death.
“I’d rather walk home naked!” Leonard said, falling back into the water.
“Shhh!” Andy said.
“I’ll crawl home in the mud!” Leonard said. “I’ll cover myself with leaves!”
“You’re hurting Sadie’s feelings,” Owen said, and it was true, her eyes were puffy.
“Who cares?”
Andy called back to the shore, “He won’t kiss her unless he’s wearing his clothes. No naked kissing!”
“That would be all right,” Eleanor said, but Sadie was shaking her head now, and she started to walk away.
Eleanor talked to Sadie and Andy talked to Leonard and slowly they brought the two together. Andy whispered, “You don’t have to kiss her. Just make sure you get our clothes back!”
“Which ones are Leonard’s clothes?” Eleanor asked, because by now they were all lumped together and soggy. Andy said to just bring them all. But Eleanor said she wouldn’t.
“Just bring Leonard’s and Owen’s then,” Andy called back, and he explained that with his broken finger Owen was a medical case and needed to get out of the water soon. Finally Eleanor agreed and brought down what she thought were Leonard’s and Owen’s clothes, leaving the biggest, soggiest things behind.
“You can’t look!” Andy said.
“Of course we can look!” Eleanor said, and she seemed so sure of herself that Andy didn’t even argue.
“Be quick and they’ll hardly see anything,” he said to Leonard and Owen.
“No way!” Leonard said.
“Well, just cover yourselves with your hands!”
Owen tried to get out of the water but his feet only took him part of the way and then they stopped. Leonard was the same. Their clothes were right there on the shore but the girls were watching, and it seemed an impossible thing to do.