The Year We Sailed the Sun

by Theresa Nelson

  Three lousy bucks.

  “Three lousy bucks?”

  I didn’t mean to push him, really. I only thumped him in the arm again—no worse than before—but it must have caught him a bit off balance this time, because he tripped over the hay bale behind him, sat down hard, and dropped his crutch.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, red-faced, picking it up for him.

  He shrugged. “It’s all right,” he said.

  But he wouldn’t look at me.

  “No, I mean it, I didn’t mean to—it’s just—ah, come on, Jimmy, you can’t even get a good layin’ hen for three lousy bucks. How’re we ever gonna buy a cow?”

  Now he looked at me. “You want to buy a cow?”

  “I do,” I said. And I sat down on the bale beside him then and tried to explain it to him, dollar by dollar—the whole bloomin’ plan, cows and all—but the more I talked, the more tangled it got and the sillier it sounded.

  “Ah, shut up,” he said finally, plucking a straw out of his coat collar.

  So I shut up.

  What was the use?

  It was a terrible plan, wasn’t it? Nobody buys dolls the day after Christmas. . . .

  My teeth were chattering worse than ever now, like a box of coffin nails, shook up. I blew on my hands to warm ’em, but it didn’t do any good.

  “You’d better go back in,” said Jimmy. “They’ll be lookin’ for you, won’t they?”

  I sighed. “Sooner or later.”

  He nodded and stood up. “Well all right, then,” he said, giving Hyacinth a pat on the nose. “I guess I’ll see you around, when we get some news.”

  “See you around,” I muttered.

  I stuck the three bucks in my pocket. I meant to say more—I wanted to say thank you—but it caught in my throat somehow.

  Three lousy bucks . . .

  Still, he looked so little all of a sudden, pushing the barn door open.

  I ain’t little. I’m just short.

  “Hey, Jimmy!” I managed to croak out, just before he disappeared.

  He turned around. “What?”

  “Your song was good. On Christmas night.”

  He didn’t grin, exactly. “Thanks,” he said, touching his cap. He started to leave again.

  “I didn’t know you could sing.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me, as if I’d lost my mind. “Well, a’course I can sing. All the Brannigans can sing. They’d be ashamed of me if I couldn’t.”

  Which Brannigans did he mean? I wondered. Wasn’t he the only one left, out of all of ’em, when their house burned down?

  I didn’t ask it out loud—I would never have asked him—but I guess he must have seen it in my face.

  “Sometimes I forget,” he answered, before he scrambled over the fence.

  All day long I kept trying to put it out of my head—Jimmy standing there holding the money in his fist, so proud of those wadded-up dollars, and Mickey Doyle gone rushing off to Boonville without a single one of ’em, and me just sittin’ here stuck again, stopped cold again, like the river, the whole godforsaken froze-up Mississippi.

  I could feel it out there still that night, pressing on my eyelids, though we were too far away to see it, really. I looked for it from the window, before we went to bed, but I couldn’t make it out with so many houses in the way. But when I climbed under the covers and closed my eyes, there it was, same as ever, just as clear as glass. As clear as the air itself—so sharp and cold, it hurt my chest, remembering.

  And there we are, Bill and me, just the two of us—only it’s broad day now—in that other frozen time, the winter after the Fair. We’re picking our way through the ice shards that pile up along the shoreline, just below the bridge: jagged and dangerous-looking, like splinters of the ice mountains in Gran’s fairy book, or broken bits of her good white platter when I dropped it at dinner. . . . Ah, for pity’s sake, Julia . . .

  “Careful, J,” says Bill, “mind where you step, now. They could slice you wide open if you ain’t careful.”

  But he ain’t scared of ’em himself. He climbs over like they’re nothin’ and heads for the middle of the river, where the ice is slicker, smoother, whiter, as flat as a tabletop, and I scramble after him, like always. They closed the harbor days ago, after the ice gorge broke loose upstream and crushed a twenty-ton barge, till it was no better than a pile of matchsticks. We’d heard the crack and boom of it all the way from home, like thunder in the clear blue sky. But now there’s only the sound of our own footsteps crunching along, and our breath rasping in the sharp-cold air, and my heart beating like a drum in both my ears. . . .

  And something else somehow, above all that—a peculiar kind of high-up humming, everywhere and nowhere—all around us and above us and below us, too—as if the ice itself is singing to us. And the closer we get to the middle, and the smoother it is under our boots, the higher and keener the sound gets—like the highest note Papa used to play on his fiddle, the one like a needle in our ears, that made us screech and laugh and run outside, and a glass broke once, though no one was touching it.

  “Do you hear that?” I say to Bill. “It’s Papa playing! He’s teasing us again!” And Bill looks up at me now—all this time he’s been trudging along with his hands in his pockets and his eyes searching everywhere, squinting in the brightness—the sun’s bouncing off the ice every which way, till you can hardly bear to see. I don’t know what it is he’s hunting for, but when I say that about Papa, he looks up at me like he’s coming out of a cloud, and there’s light in his face. . . . But then he listens and frowns again and shakes his head and jerks me back from the smooth part, the lovely white ice in the middle. “Stay away from there, J,” he tells me. “It’s too thin when you hear that; it sounds higher in the thin spots, where the river wants to break through. If it gives way and you go under the ice, you’ll be gone forever, dead as a duck. We’ll never find you in a million years, do you understand me?”

  And he’s pulling me even farther away now, back toward the terrible, sharp ice teeth, the broken-china bits, but I try to get my hand loose; he’s holding it so tight, it hurts. “Let go, Bill! I know it’s him, I heard him, didn’t you hear him?”

  And for just a split second—a half of a half second—when I turn my head, I can see him; I can see Papa standing there, fiddling. And he sees me, too, I know he does. He looks right at me and closes one eye. But then I blink and he’s gone, there’s no one there at all, and then there’s a cracking sound below me and it’s the ice, it’s coming apart, it’s splitting under my feet, and my left boot goes through and fills up with icy water and I open my mouth to scream, but the cold sucks the breath right out of me and before I can make a sound, Bill is dragging me back; he’s got me again. “What did I tell you, J? Didn’t I tell you, for Pete’s sake?”

  “But he was there,” I say. “I saw him,” I say. “He was playing his fiddle and I heard him and then I saw him!”

  And Bill says I couldn’t have, I didn’t. “It was only a trick of the light,” he says, and he won’t listen, he never listens, no one ever believes me, but I know what I saw—I saw what I saw, with that shining ice singing, and the sun so bright in my eyes, and Papa playing his fiddle, same as always.

  February

  Chapter 26

  Quinquagesima Sunday

  Dear Mary,

  Well hello from your sister in St. Louis, that’s me, how are things in Jefferson County, I am in good health and hope this finds you the same. I am sorry I never did write to you before this and by the way why didn’t you neither, did the twins swaller your pen? Ha ha. I take this one in hand now because Sister Sebastian says we can either catch up on our New Testament or write a letter to a loved one, so that’s you and this is it, I don’t know Bill’s address in Boonville, do you? Hazel said what do we write about and Sister said the news of the day, so I guess this will be short because nothing intrusting ever happens around here, everything is exackly the same as you remember.

  Well I bet
you didn’t know I could spell Quinquagesima. I never even knew I wanted to but Sister put it on the chalkboard and now I have spelt it twice. She says it means the Sunday before Lent when all the fun starts, so what are you giving up this year? I bet your wondring what we are doing in the classroom on a Sunday but don’t ask me because they don’t tell us anything exept keep quiet. I saw the docter’s buggy out front, I’m afraid its Betty whose got sicker again, she started out with the measles like all the rest of us and I’m worried I gave them to her, I guess I gave them to everybody but we all got well and she didn’t, hers turned into something else, Marcella says probly newmonia like dead Cecilia, remember her, or maybe menunjitis or insefa-something but I don’t know, nobody knows, they keep saying just another week and then another week, I counted up to six now, they were going to take her to the hospital but it was always too cold for her to go outside and then they thought she was better once so they let her come to the parler on game night, we finely played bunco like they promised, remember on that first day and she loved it, she didn’t win anything really but they gave her the most bon bons anyway and she laughed harder than anybody when Sister Gabriel rolled three twos and got the booby prize but then she got sick again, Betty I mean, she was shaking like a leaf the next morning but we couldn’t wake her up and that was more than a week ago but she’ll be all right don’t you think? They don’t know how strong she is, remember when she carried that ladder to the coal shute and besides Sister says not to worry, the docter is giving her medicine but shes a sick little girl and it would be good to pray for her so I was thinking maybe you could too, your better at it than me anyhow and you always remember the words. And you still have your rosery right? If you ever have time I mean when all of them babies are asleep, do they ever sleep at the same time, I know your real buzy but if you ever have a chance. Well I guess that’s all the news, the sun was out for a coupel of days but the paper says another snowstorms headed this way so I guess Ill be here if you need me, I have no defanit definut imedeate plans at present.

  Sincerely your sister,

  Julia C. Delaney

  The crows were the first to feel the storm coming. The first crow, first thing, Tuesday morning—just the one, to start with—an old feller with a broken wing, pacing back and forth on our window ledge and peering in, like he meant to, squawking us all awake before the sun was done rising.

  Hell’s bells, what a racket!

  How’d he ever manage to get up so high, with a hurt like that? I wondered.

  But by the time we went down to breakfast, he’d figured out how to get down, too—unless there was another broke-winged crow just like him. He’d sent for his cousins, it looked like. “A murder of crows,” Sister Genevieve called ’em, and she stomped to the back stoop, waving her broom, and set the whole flock screeching and flapping away, scattering in a dozen directions.

  “And don’t come back!” she hollered, shaking her fist at ’em.

  It wasn’t like her, really, to be getting so riled up. She was cheerful as apples, most days, even if she was the world’s worst cook. But she hadn’t been herself at all this week. I’d stopped by the kitchen yesterday and found her standing over a pan of biscuits, blotting tears with the corner of her apron. “Burnt,” was all she’d said, waving a hand at the mess.

  And they were, too. Burnt to a crisp: black as tar, with the smoke still billowing.

  But I knew it was more than the biscuits, and it wasn’t just the crows—who were back in no time anyhow, in case she wanted another crack at ’em. I saw the crippled one pecking around the dustbins not an hour later, and by the ten o’clock bell, the sky was thick with ’em. I didn’t know there were so many crows in all Missouri. Didn’t they have sense enough to fly South for the winter? You’re too late! I wanted to tell ’em. You should have gone with the geese! But of course they wouldn’t have heard me. The air was too full of their cawing. Even with the windows shut tight we could hear it all morning, off and on, though it didn’t look much like morning anymore, what with all the black wings shutting out the sun.

  Betty would have loved it, if she’d been here. Had they waked her with their caterwauling? She’d be standing right by me at the window, if she wasn’t sick. She loved crows like she loved anything that crept or crawled or trotted or flew or had any brand of a heartbeat—Mary’d seen her one time feeding cracker crumbs to the ants in the laundry. Poor Sister Bridget had had a terrible time, getting rid of ’em.

  But Betty was still upstairs in the infirmary, so Sister Bridget was, too, I guess. They said she wouldn’t leave Betty’s bedside. Everything was topsy-turvy now; the whole House was different. You wouldn’t think one little kid with hay in her hair could make such a big hole in the place when she was missing, but she’d been everywhere somehow or other; she was always there like the air we breathed, and I’d never even noticed, till she wasn’t.

  Maybe the crows knew, too. Maybe they’d come to say goodbye; that was what I was afraid of. That was the thought that sat on my chest all morning, choking me.

  But I wouldn’t ever have said it. It was Hazel who said it.

  “Crows in the coffeepot, coffins at night,” she whispered at the noon meal, arching her eyebrows, and I slapped her face and Winnie started wailing and Marcella banged her fork on the table and said, “Shut up, shut up, will you ever shut up, for God’s sake?” And then Sister Sebastian was swooping in, quick as a crow herself, saying, “Hush now, Winifred,” and “I never heard such rubbish, Hazel. Crows are creatures of the Lord, just the same as the rest of us. It’s only this weather stirring them up—the change in the wind—can’t you hear it blowing?”

  We heard it, all right. There was no way to miss the moaning in it, rising every minute now. And no sooner had the last black tail feather disappeared, than the snow the paper had promised started sifting down on Morgan Street—only a few lost flakes, long about midafternoon, and then great waves of it, sheets of it, whirling and blowing, with little bits of ice mixed in. You could hear it when it hit the windowpanes, tapping like tiny fingers.

  But there was no real change upstairs, they told us. Not that anybody would tell us much of anything. Betty was holding her own; that was all Dr. McGill would say at first, when I saw him heading out the door near dark and went running after him.

  “So she’s not—she ain’t—” I tried again. “She won’t die, will she, sir?”

  He didn’t answer right away. He looked about a million years old. Still he took my hand in both of his, steady as can be. “Not if we can help it,” he said.

  And then it was Wednesday.

  Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.

  Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.

  Remember, man . . . Remember, man . . .

  Sister Maclovius’s voice droned on and on as we stood in the chapel, waiting, while she dipped her thumb in the bowl beside her and marked our foreheads with the ashes in it—little black cross after little black cross—one plaid girl at a time.

  Remember . . . Remember . . . Remember . . .

  It should have been the priest saying it, really, if only the priest had been here. Or if we’d been at church, like the rest of the world, this first day of Lent. But they couldn’t take us anywhere in the middle of a blizzard, and Father Dunne couldn’t leave his boys today. The snow was heavier than ever now, with no sign of slowing down yet, piling up in deep white drifts out the downstairs windows. So Sister had burnt the dried-up palms from the last Palm Sunday (they made the best ashes, she said), and prayed over ’em quite a bit, and told us how fortunate we were to be safe here together, especially on Ash Wednesday, which was a day for remembering, after all, she said, the point of it all—she stopped there and cleared her throat, as if it was giving her some sort of trouble—and then she asked if any of us could say what that point might be. But we all just stood there, dumb as shoe leather, so she told us the point herself: that life was short in this vale
of tears, and our Father in heaven never put us here to stay, but was only waiting for that day of days—known to him alone—when he would call us home.

  “Amen,” the others answered.

  But I couldn’t find the wind for it.

  She was talking about Betty, wasn’t she? She was saying it without saying it and I couldn’t stand it, that was all. I couldn’t stand around waiting and waiting and never hearing, so I went to see for myself, while no one was watching. I slipped out the back, ashes or no ashes, while the others were still getting theirs, and ran upstairs. We weren’t allowed in the infirmary, but I didn’t care what I caught; I must’ve given her the bug in the first place, and I’d take it back, if I could, if it would make her better, and anyhow no one stopped me. They never even saw me go in. The room was white as ever, but dimmer than I remembered, and no one was there at all, I thought at first; there were just two rows of white beds, empty, neat as pins, with the curtains pulled back, mostly—

  All but one, at the end, by the window.

  I remembered that window.

  And sure enough, there was Betty, fast asleep on my old pillow, and Sister Bridget in the chair beside her.

  She didn’t look so sick, really. Betty, I mean. She was paler than she used to be, and her cheeks were a little thinner, but if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know, except for the sound in her breathing—a sort of a rasping, rattling sound it was, not as loud as a snore even. Just a little rougher, maybe—

  But that wasn’t so bad, was it? Half the House was always snoring, if you woke up to listen. . . .

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” said Sister.

  And she was. But I only nodded, because my voice had stopped working again.

  Still, that was enough, I guess. Sister Bridget smiled and held out a hand, and made room in her chair for me, and we sat there together for quite a while, not saying another word.