QUIET! QUIET!

1 2 9 R Q U I E T ! Q U I E T ! O L I V I A C L A R E f o r Y The daylight had stalled, as it does for children. We lay on our backs in the grass. You were counting – twenty-four thousand grass blades, you said – when the wind came, and your shirt was a sail. I’d be twelve, and you ten, by October. When I looked toward the Atchafalaya and the sun and away from you, I played a game I’d win if I held my eyes open while I said your name to myself, and then my name. My shirt was a sail. Melanie slept between us, straight as a snake sunning itself, her eyelids quivering. That summer she was eleven. I put some dirt in her hand. ‘‘Stop it,’’ you said. ‘‘But she’s dead,’’ I said. ‘‘See?’’ You had your ear to her chest. I remember her green-checked dress, your hand on her stomach. ‘‘She’ll wake up,’’ I said. ‘‘Wake up!’’ You said you didn’t hear a thing, with your ear on the skin her heart was under, and I told you her blood had stopped, because girls don’t like blood. ‘‘Kiss me,’’ said Melanie, with closed eyes. ‘‘Then I’ll wake up and I’ll kiss you.’’ 1 3 0 C L A R E Y ‘‘Who?’’ you said. ‘‘Both of you!’’ Instead I ran to the twisted tree half-dead from fire or rot and stood and counted to a number I can’t remember. Among leaves on the ground, I found a pair of lensless glasses with black square rims, and when I came back I was wearing them. ‘‘Look!’’ I said. ‘‘Who am I?’’ But you were looking at two boys across the river doing cartwheels in a line in a windmill rhythm. You sat on your knees, hands in your lap. You had no brothers. I considered this – if I’d been your brother, I’d have stayed at your house every night. I’d have looked like your mother, from St. Landry Parish, Opelousas, who had lines around her eyes as intricate as in a Dürer woodcut, and who said she’d been too pretty too young too often. I’d have been handsome, and would have asked you, What is it you need? How are you tonight? Where are you? Not in the grass near the Atchafalaya where everyone looked. I know if I find you, I will have to leave everywhere I’ve looked, and I do not leave anywhere easily. Where didn’t I look? Where you are. The boys across the river had started another windmill line of cartwheels. Melanie sat up. She was taller than both of us. ‘‘I see their peckers,’’ she said. ‘‘You’re an asshole,’’ I said. ‘‘An ass-lip.’’ ‘‘Please don’t call her that,’’ you said. She told me my fly was unzipped, and I checked and it wasn’t. She hadn’t looked at my fly but at my eyes. I saw you check your fly. She told us she’d put pepper on us, pepper all over both our peckers. Toward the river from the road a man came with his thigh-high dog. The man held a hat; the dog ate flowers and pushed its nose in the dirt. For dirt, we had a game – I made my hands a cup, and you’d pour in dirt, and I’d unlace my hands until the dirt poured out a small hole at the bottom, and the game was called Hourglass. The man with the dog sat on a cleared patch of ground, and the dog ate flowers, and I got up and sat on the side of you nearest the dog, and the man talked to the dog and said hello to us, and we, not being the kind of children who’d been brought up to be more civil Q U I E T ! Q U I E T ! 1 3 1 R than necessary, said nothing. Was that our irredeemable mistake? Wolf in the grass – a dog and...