Elizabeth Brinsfield
I am five when we buy the house on the island. We drive from the outskirts of the city to verdant country along a bay. My ancestors are from this side of the water, my grandparents born in nearby towns, but we never see extended family during these trips. I see death, imagined and real. I climb the tree in the backyard, and from there, the lighthouse on the shoal four miles up the river flashes in the darkness and calls the sailors to safety. I pretend I am lost and someone finds me. I go to a room in my head. I have to keep it tidy. I have to go in there and sweep it every day.
The house is two down from the dock where skipjacks bring in oysters from the bay. The watermen leave their sails up to dry in light winds and walk home along the paved road. They are regal because of what they do—they are the queen’s hunters. One day I am outside on the porch. It is a magnificent porch because it is just a wooden floor, painted white, with thin colonial columns at the four corners. It is a nice size, wider than you might think, and I can play my imaginary games as if I am playing in the living room, but this room has only one wall. Across the way the children are running around, and they see me. They are two boys and a younger girl. One of the brothers grabs the sister, and she starts yelling like he’s hurting her, and he pushes her up a ladder they have by the tree in the yard. It is a short tree—with apples or plums. There is a rope dangling from it, which the brother ties around the girl’s neck. He takes the ladder away after she is up there. She swings back and forth. The pipes of my throat ache and empty into my chest. I run to tell my mother, but my parents come out to my playroom-porch, and the children are gone. There is no sign of them, no one hanging from the apple-plum tree.
Another day I am out on my playroom-porch with the dollhouse furniture in the unfinished dollhouse. I have an orange miniature piano with a printed piece of paper glued on for keys, a tiny wind-up turntable. In the rooms, I set my little mice dolls dressed in historic outfits. My older sister is reading under the tree beyond the driveway. At the edge of the driveway, by the forsythia, my father digs away at a mound of dirt. We are leaving soon for a week of school, and he’s doing chores before we head home. His shovel comes up—it’s dripping blood—and he swears. My sister and I make our way from our places to see. He’s dug open a nest of sleeping bunnies. Two of them are dead. He rescues two more. There is no sign of the mother. My father explains she will not come back for her babies now. We take them in a cardboard box on the car trip home. We stop at a strip mall amid cornfields and buy feeders at a pet store. We feed the bunnies milk for several days. I remember my sister’s long limbs under her dress the dusky hue of the ocean. The dining room walls with creamy velvet.
The next time we cross the drawbridge, we stop at the penny-candy store. My mother gives us each a dollar. We share our small brown-paper bagfuls of candy with neighbor girls. The girls have a screened-in porch, and I play with their naked dolls. They turn a jump rope for my sister—Cinderella dressed in yellow / went upstairs to kiss her fellow—when a boy runs through the elms and pines of the front yards, like a banner, announcing a dog and snake fight at the meadow. The children parade to the turn in the road and gather around the fight. The black dog rises like a giant bird in the reeds. The striped snake curls up and springs toward the bird-dog. I am afraid the dog will die. Dog, dog, fly away home. I want to leave, but my legs won’t carry me. The dog catches the snake with its mouth and locks its teeth. In the end, the snake stretches out like a long, thick rope on the ground. I can’t take my eyes from its grassy grave even when the other children run up to the blacktop with the dog. I want to be running with them, but instead I am swimming inside a sea-meadow the color of emeralds, bright reeds reaching around me like water.
My last memory is of the playground off a brick street. We play on the jungle gym, and I pretend it is a parapet, and I am married to the lighthouse keeper. My mother calls to us, and we run to the swings, and she is reciting Up in the air and over the wall / Till I can see so wide when I see the little boy. One moment he is alone by the willows—then he is gone—my sister’s flip-flops touch the sand. I tell our mother, but a heavy wind rustles the leaves. Always I wonder about the boy at the windy playground—I can never remember if it is my dream or my movie.
I go back to the tree even after we sell the house. I climb to the spot where I can tuck in, where a large limb meets the trunk ten feet above the ground. A breeze shifts the tire swing, the watery dock and knocking boats, the field where my sister and I ran with the other children. I am in my tidy room. Apparitions have been ordered like seasons: girl, bunnies, snake, the boy—
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Elizabeth Brinsfield is a teacher living in Iowa. Her writing has appeared in the Kenyon Review and Passages North, among other places.