Aunt Lettie used to have Easter out on the big side yard at her Tudor-style home. There were daffodils and irises that were planted by the former homeowner, and it was picturesque and seasonal. She would call over her brother, Uncle Esau, and he would haul out the canopy that she had been married under—to that no-good, two-timer Emmanuel. They would haul out the dining room and kitchen tables from the house, and Lettie would deck the tops with lace tablecloths and silver settings. That was where we had Easter, when we had Easter there.
The Tudor-style house was on a beautiful lot, even more beautiful than the bulb flowers that grew there. At the back was a hill, and as you descended it, you came across a row of reeds that folded into a section of the river. It was real shallow there, even as a child I could wade in it and only have it reach waist high. Still, there were herons, and there were small fish—minnows maybe. By the time Aunt Lettie served the ambrosia salad, we might hear the evening bullfrogs.
Now, we weren’t supposed to go down to the river alone, but all of us, the kids and the young aunts, and the cousins—we had all waded around down there after one Easter dinner or other. The water was always freezing as it was early in the year, but it felt refreshing. It washed out the heavy load of food. It washed out any bad conversation with distant relatives. And it perked me back up for when Mama inevitably lingered for a fourth and fifth cup of coffee.
I was eight years old the year of the last Easter at Aunt Lettie’s. Stocky. My hips didn’t ever fit well within the skirts Mama bought me, and she was cruel when she tried to force the buttons shut. I wasn’t particularly liked by the cousins or the young aunts at Easter, and the elders got tired of speaking with a child for long. I had once strayed away to pick an iris, and Aunt Lettie turned beet-red and then beet-purple screaming at me, that I didn’t know better that the flowers were for everyone to look at, and that I had ruined it. So I sat silently at the Easter table, and didn’t eat much, only taking bites when Mama was turned away in conversation.
There were two cousins sat down near the end by me, close in age, Martha and Pete. They were Uncle Robert and Aunt Penny’s kids, and I knew flat nothing about the lot of them, save for their names and the fact we were all related somehow. Pete was a bit older than me, missing a front tooth, and had the shade of a shiner, as Mama called it, on his left eye. Martha was skinnier than me, but her hair was unbrushed, and her lips were dry and cracked.
As the adults were busy, I turned my attention to Pete’s shiner. I cocked my head at him, sizing him up and down, trying to look a bit discriminating in opinion.
“Now, how’d you go and get that shiner, Pete?” I asked, feigning an air of exasperation. I had been the victim of Mama speaking in such a tone plenty of times.
Pete, however, didn’t react the way I did when Mama spoke to me like that. He scowled, a bit ferociously.
“Shut it,” he hissed. “None of your business.”
I blinked. I was used to being told things weren’t my business, that was for sure. I wasn’t certain, however, how to process such contempt from someone my own age. I weighed my options and turned to Martha.
“Martha, go on—how’d Pete get that shiner?”
Martha looked at me blankly, sucking on her dry lip in such a way that it made a vulgar little squelch.
“I said—ain’t your business!” said Pete, leaning in across the table. “Or do you want to make it your business?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to make anything of anything if Pete was asking. Up close, his eyes were muddy and sunken, like he had been sick or sleepless for some time. He didn’t look like he was nine—there was an age about him, like he had been real grown up for some time.
Embarrassed to have been scolded, I folded my hands in my lap into fists. But I didn’t ask Pete again how he got the shiner—while I’m older now and can make my guesses, I suppose I never did learn exactly how it happened.
There was a tense moment of us three children ignoring one another. Pete shoveled sweet potatoes into his mouth, grunting as he did so. Martha had been served a heap of food—Aunt Lettie’s Sunday roast, sweet potatoes, green and yellow beans, two rolls—but she hadn’t taken more than a half-bite from anything on her plate. I felt a twinge of jealousy in my belly that she didn’t get hungry like me, and that’s why her Mama didn’t beat her for eating like a little piggy.
I looked up to see if mama was watching us kids talking at the end of the table. She was deep in conversation with Aunt Lettie, who had had enough sherry that she was telling Mama again the first time she knew Emmanuel was a no-good two-timer—and how she was a good Christian, and prayed he would change, but the Devil had taken as much a liking to him as he took to the bank manager’s daughter Judy.
I eavesdropped on Mama and Aunt Lettie for a little while, until Martha spoke up.
She pulled a lock of her mussed hair around her finger, and twirling it, looked out in the direction of Mama and aunt Lettie. Then, after a moment, she said, “I hate all of you so much.”
Pete grunted as she said that, and reached over to her plate to help himself to one of her rolls.
I didn’t know what to say to that comment. She had said it softly enough that I was sure that only me and Pete had heard it—but even if it had been louder, I had the sense that none of the adults would pay her any mind. I glanced over her, and found that her dress was stained at the collar. From her hair to her clothes to her lips, it seemed that no one ever paid Martha much mind.
I wondered if I should pay her no mind too, but she looked back at me and stared for a beat. After a moment, she brought a finger to her lips and gave me a single, solitary hush.
I blinked slowly at her, watching as she slowly rose from the wooden dining chair and eked it away from the table across the lawn. She hopped down from the chair, and stole herself away from the canopy, down the hill at the back of the yard. I knew she was headed for the river.
Not only did I know that, but I knew I had also just been sworn to a secret with someone who said plainly that she hated me. I didn’t know why that felt so wrong, but my stomach began to turn, and I felt the cool breeze of the late afternoon a bit stronger at the back of my neck.
I turned to Pete to see if he had any interest in where his sister was running off to. He had slid her plate over and placed it atop his own, and was making quick work of Martha’s untouched dinner. After a moment of inhaling the food, he paused and looked up. His little brown eyes scoured over my face with an intensity I’d never seen before, and he held eye contact as he paused to take a thick sip of milk.
After he swallowed, he said, “Now, don’t be going around snitching.”
I froze, my hands again balled into fists at my lap.
“I wasn’t,” I whispered back, feeling my shoulder blades rise up like shields on either side of my head.
“‘Cause if you snitch even once,” said Pete, turning to spit onto Aunt Lettie’s yard before finishing, “I’ll make sure you ain’t ever do it again.”
My forearms went cold, and I could feel the small hairs on them standing upright. It was as if he wasn’t speaking, no—it wasn’t Pete at all. It was someone much older, much crueler, nesting comfortably in that gap-toothed scowl.
“I won’t tattle, Pete,” I said, rubbing my arms to try to bring down the goosebumps.
He gave another grunt and went back to Martha’s plate. I listened to the sounds of his eating the way a prey animal tracks every sound of its predator. Each crunch of gristle. each snap of vegetable skin. The sick feeling in my stomach sloshed around sharply, creeping up into the back of my throat.
I became acutely aware of his teeth, which seemed more pointed and abrupt than any other child’s teeth I ever saw. It wasn’t just that he was too cruel for his age—no, there was something beyond age altogether. It was as if he had long exited civil society and found that he excelled in a more animal life. He was feral. I did not know how to tame a feral child—nor how to even speak to one. It was in my best interest to remain silent.
Soon Martha’s plate was empty, and he tilted the remnants of the glass of milk back into his mouth, and then burped loudly. Again, none of the adults seated about us looked over. After a moment of pause, he grunted to address me, and with his burning eye contact, made the same gesture that Martha had made—he lifted his finger to his lips and gave a single hush.
I found myself staring slack jawed as he boldly shoved back from the table and strutted down the hill after his sister. The two seats in front of me were now empty, the tablecloth heartily soiled by Pete’s manner of eating. I looked over to Mama to see if she had taken any notice, but she was still ensconced in Aunt Lettie’s marital woes.
I looked around the table to find Uncle Robert and Aunt Penny. They were seated up by Uncle Esau. Uncle Robert and Uncle Esau were in an impassioned conversation, gesturing at each other with open cans of Coors. I knew Uncle Esau must have brought the beer himself because Aunt Lettie made it a point to remind us every time we saw her that she had never had so much as a drop of liquor in her forty-eight years of life.
Uncle Esau leaned in across the table to speak at Uncle Robert, who bobbed his head along in the conversation and let out a greasy laugh here and there.Iit didn’t seem like he actually found the conversation much funny—rather, it was him providing the response to Uncle Esau’s call.
I let my eyes follow Uncle Robert’s other hand and to my confusion saw it was balled up between Aunt Penny’s shoulder blades. I glanced at her face. She seemed quite removed from the conversation, which while it was pattering on next to her and quite loudly at that, seemed not to alter her expression in any way. Her mouth was folded into a thin frown, but it was so thin that it could have merely been a thinking face. Her blue eyes were wide, but as I squinted across the table into them, I saw that she seemed not to be thinking about much at all. Every once in a while, her hands darted to her plate and she cut off a bite to eat, shoving it rapidly into her mouth and chewing for far longer than the bite required.
At eight years old, I wasn’t sure what to make of what I was seeing. I knew I didn’t like it. I felt like someone owed Aunt Penny an apology, but who or for what eluded me. I thought about asking Mama for a moment before Pete’s admonishment for not minding my business rang out again in my ears. My face grew hot pink, and I stopped staring at Aunt Penny, instead staring at the double-stacked plates that Pete had eaten from.
With no one to talk to and bad feelings curling around in my baby-fat belly, I realized that I too wanted to go down to the river. I thought of sliding my chair back, but immediately felt nervous that Mama’s eyes at the back of her head would detect my movements. I considered my options for a moment, and then slowly slunk down in my chair until my feet reached the ground. From there, I scooted my backside off the chair to the ground, and then finally dropped down, hiding myself under the lace-covered table.
I looked across to the side where Martha and Pete had been sat, and after a long while of building my nerve, I leapt across the underside of the table and emerged on their side. Pushing myself up into a crouch, I slowly inched along behind the backs of the seated grown ups. After a few moments of this effort, I was mostly concealed by the back of the Tudor-style house, and I at last rose from my crouch.
The sun had shifted, and the shaded backyard was rather cool in the early spring. I descended the length of the hill tremulously, hoping that Martha and Pete wouldn’t get the wrong idea. I wasn’t coming down there after them—well, I was, in time—but not in pursuit of them. It was simply a matter of us three all having business, childhood business, in the shallow elbow of the river.
My foot hit a rock jutting up from the hillside, and I found myself tripping over myself a few times, coming down hard on the earth and dirtying up my blue Easter dress. My thigh hurt bad from where I had fallen, and I had to take deep breaths not to cry. I wondered to myself if Pete had cried when he got his shiner. He didn’t seem the type to. That mollified me, and after I caught my breath, I rose to my feet and continued down the hill.
At the base of the hill, I kicked off my patent leather Mary Janes and rolled down my stockings, sticking them into my right shoe for safekeeping. Then, I picked a thin looking spot in the cattail reeds and pushed them in two, creating a little opening into the river.
I emerged on the other side in clear, ice cold water. I could see my feet immediately beginning to purple below the surface, and I felt that clean feeling come into my heart. I stepped onto a river rock for a little boost, and began hopping from rock to rock in order to progress along the river bank.
Other than the gurgling of the river, there was little sound—no bullfrogs or herons. I lingered a moment. No sound of Pete and Martha neither. Where could they have gone? I hopped a few more rocks before jumping back down into the wake.
I had gone a few more yards before hearing something. It was a whistle, coming from a part of the river a bit farther up the bend than I had ever strayed before. I faltered in place and listened to the tune, which was jaunty but meandering. It had the distinct quality of sounding bored. As the tune dove down in key, I approached the source of the noise.
The river bank curved, and just beyond it was another thatch of reeds. They had clearly been shoved aside by human hands, and I crouched behind them and peeped through the opening. On the other side, I could see Pete sat up on a rock by the side of the bank, looking over at Martha. Martha was crouched down, running her hands along the bank.
I leaned forward to see what she had found. At her feet was a brown bowl-shaped pile of reeds, which she had pulled herself into. I thought for a moment before recognizing it as a nest, a swan’s nest. I had seen trumpeter swans up the river with Mama the year prior, their white bodies shining incandescent under the setting sun.
I watched as Martha shuffled around inside the nest, seemingly trying to get comfortable. Her face showed a look of great struggle, and she shifted to and fro for a long while before jumping back to her feet. When she stood, I saw at last what else had been occupying the nest—four speckled eggs, the size of both my fists placed beside each other.
I marveled at the eggs—I had seen a cygnet crossing the road once when in the car with Mama, but never had I been so personal to the swans. I started to stand to meet Martha, ready to ask her to let me take a closer look.
Martha reached down into the nest and scooped up one of the eggs. With as much force and hate as a girl her age could muster up, and then some force and hate beyond her years, Martha threw the cygnet egg against the side of the rock that Pete was sat on.
Pete stopped whistling, but didn’t say anything. He watched the egg white and the black stain of the would-be cygnet slough down the side of the slick rock, turning his head to one side.
I felt my lungs fully deflate as I too watched the baby swan spatter down into the river. I looked up and Martha already had another egg in her hand. She reared back and spiked it where the first egg had been smashed.
It burst with more energy than the first egg, streaking Pete’s bare feet with egg white. He scuttled his legs away quickly, a disgusted frown curling across his face.
I found myself bursting through the reeds. My face was hot. My eyes welled up with tears, though I could not articulate then why I took such offense to what they were doing. I knew it was wrong to destroy, and I knew that there was something wrong with Martha to destroy so easily.
“Stop,” I choked out, stumbling toward Martha.
Martha looked up at me, and then turned, lifting up the third egg. She looked back into my eyes and smiled before she threw the egg against me as hard as she could.
The egg connected with the bodice of my dress, smashing against my rib cage. I looked down and found the blackened, slimy interior of the egg trailing down the front of my dress, mixing in with the dirt from my earlier fall to make a muddy batter. Bits of shell clung to the decorative buttons at the center of my chest.
My hands curled at either side of my chest, and I felt my breathing go fast and shallow. I couldn’t look away from the remnants of the cygnet egg. My vision began to narrow and the cool spring air had become oppressive and tight.
“You’re killing them,” I heard myself say to Martha. “You’re killing them. You killed them. You killed them.”
Martha stared emptily back at me as she held the final egg within her hands. She seemed to be mulling over my words, but couldn’t place them or make them make sense to her. She chewed her lip, looking down at the egg in her hands, and then back to the one that had splattered on my chest.
She stood mutely as I continued to call her a killer for a few long moments. Then Pete was beside her. He reached over and took the egg out of her hands. He held it up above him for a second, as though it were a trophy. Then, he brought it down with his body weight, bringing it down under the water, and smashing it at the bottom of the river bed.
Martha let out a small noise as Pete did this, but I could not detect any emotion in it. It seemed purely instinctive.
Pete spat at the spot in the river bed where he had smashed the egg, and then looked up at Martha.
“Finish what you start. Always,” he said. He then resumed whistling, walking back to the gap in the reeds and disappearing behind them.
Martha and I both stared at each other for a moment, neither of us quite sure of how to proceed. The fear that had been curling in my stomach all day expelled itself at once, and I doubled over to vomit into the river. The vomit floated out on either side of my legs.
Looking down at the vomit, I found myself screaming a keening, awful scream. I heard an echo, and looked up to find Martha screaming back. Both of us screamed into each other’s faces, my scream stained with fury and indignation, hers marred by that innate sense of wrongness she carried. There came the shouts of adults from the top of the hill, which made me scream louder, and then made Martha scream louder in turn. We continued to howl until Uncle Esau and Uncle Robert shoved aside the reeds and recovered us from the river bend.
I was punished. Of course I was. Mama didn’t care about the particulars. She saw only a ruined dress, covered in mud and egg, and her daughter knee-deep in river water that she was never supposed to have been in before. The backs of my thighs were purple for a long time, and not from the cold river.
I tried to tell Mama what Martha had done many times. What i had seen. I wanted her so badly to make sense of why a person would do that. Of what makes a girl destroy something so innocent as an egg for no good reason. But Mama had no patience for the existential questions of an eight-year-old. Moreover, she was immensely embarrassed that I had defied Aunt Lettie so soundly.
Aunt Lettie never bothered having Easter dinner again after that year. When it came time the next year, the annual call never came through. She hosted one Thanksgiving years later, but other than that, never thought to invite us by. I instead saw her at Christmas, which we celebrated at Nana O’Malley’s house. We both grew older as the years went by, and eventually she saw me enough of an adult to tell me the story of two-timing Emmanuel.
I went on to see Pete and Martha, and Uncle Robert and Aunt Penny at family gatherings, too. I tried to ask Mama and Aunt Lettie what their secrets were, but while I was more adult in some ways, there were things that they simply wouldn’t tell me. Perhaps they were things that they didn’t know, or rather, things that they didn’t wish to consider.
I tried to ask Martha on a few occasions why she killed the cygnets, but every time I got close to her, I could feel Pete looking up at me. Watching me closely. Evaluating what I was going to do with a beastly precision. I didn’t have the courage to ask. And I doubted that Martha would be able to tell me even if I ever could be that brave.
There are times when I can’t sleep, even now, and I think back to that trumpeter swan’s nest. I think of the fact that the swan wasn’t there to see Martha destroy its children, or maybe it was—lurking just beyond the reeds, too scared to defend its own babies with Pete looming over us. I think about the sound it must have made when it found all of its babies dead. It’s a thought so awful that I stay up half the night.
There is one other thing. As time passed, Pete grew to be much bigger than his daddy, Uncle Robert. He got real big, and strong too. And one Christmas, clear as day, I saw Uncle Robert come to dinner with a shiner.
I won’t make that my business.
CASSE-COUILLES 