Salamanders
by Pete Murphy
Chapter
6
I remember a thing about Miss Mattsen. We were about nine or ten,
something like that. Some of us were younger. Zack and Connie and me were the
oldest. I'm not sure about Curtis. Finn was a year younger than me, Freddie two
years younger. Billy was the youngest one in school. Five others weren't old
enough yet. They stayed back at El Yoyo with Miss Coleman while we were at
school.
I liked Miss Coleman.
And I liked Miss Mattsen.
I liked her eyes, kind eyes, sometimes sad, old for her face, like...a
mother's eyes you know about but can only remember trying to touch. She was
about Miss Coleman's age and lived alone until that last Easter when her cousin
came from New York to stay with her. She'd said it was her cousin. He stayed
until March, then left. I don't believe anybody ever met him. She'd looked
strange for about three days after that. Older.
I remember the look. She'd told us we were inadvertent people.
We blinked at her and folded our hands on the desks and knew she
meant our group in the back left side of the classroom near the windows.
"Inadvertent," she said again and glared at me, then at
Finn and at Freddie and Curtis and Connie and even at Zack, all eight of us in
turn and let the silence cut into our throats as we tried to swallow and wished
we could shut our eyes from her, but couldn't. Our eyes just opened wider and
froze. The silence swelled and pulled the blood up into the tips of our ears
and grew hot. We gripped our hands harder.
She sat at her desk then, and the screech of her chair made Billy
jump. She stared at us for a long time. We froze and watched her. Her hands
shook a little and she bit her bottom lip and the water flowed up and filled
her eyes. She looked up at the clock and blinked and a tear slid down her cheek
and slipped into the corner of her mouth. Her head shook at us slowly from side‑to‑side
and another tear fell onto the desk.
"Go home," she said.
We were frozen.
She wiped her eyes with the heels of both hands, held them there.
"It's three o'clock now, children. Go home. Class is dismissed."
The whole class got up slowly and filed quietly out the door and
onto the porch, down the steps into the schoolyard, leaving her alone.
Sully suggested we stop being "inaverlent".
"Inadvertent", I told him. Connie suggested we find out what it
meant.
The group of us decided, since it was our fault (she'd clearly been
looking at us), we'd go together to ask Miss Dublin about it. Miss Dublin had a
lot of books and lived in a little house with three dogs, a bunch of cats ‑
Zack counted twenty‑seven once but stopped counting because they were
hard to keep track of ‑ and a duck. Certainly she would help.
Let's see," she said, riffling through the pages. The eight of
us gathered around the table. We were the oldest, the school‑aged part of
the Salamander Gang.
"Says here...says..." she adjusted her glasses.
"Unintentional, not done on purpose, accidental. There's more here. Let's
see..."
We were drifting back outside, heading home. Connie thanked her.
At Morgan's Stream we sat on the bank and watched the leaves float
through the ripple and bounce back against the stones and spin off like little
carousels around the bend. Curtis found a salamander half eaten by a crayfish
under a stone. He picked it up and studied it for a moment, then flicked it
onto the stony slope across the stream. The salamander, struggling with its two
remaining legs, pulled itself across the stones until it was caught with the
swirl and spun off out of sight. Curtis watched it go.
"She cried because we had no purpose," he said.
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We all lived in the same house, thirteen of us. We never knew where
we came from. Miss Coleman didn't even know. There were other houses some of us
remembered little things about, but mostly we just spoke about El Yoyo and
tomorrow. We never talked about success and fame, just about where Alfred would
be today (Alfred was a turtle that hung around the pond). Or when Cecily's
flower would fall over.
We knew nothing about evil. We'd never heard of integrity.
Competition never crossed our minds. You did your best. That was enough.
Enjoying friendships meant more than being better.
We didn't need zookeepers. We had soft jungles. We didn't know
'practical', only 'necessary', like washing up for supper if you wanted to eat.
We knew the world. What we couldn't find, Miss Coleman could tell us
when we sat out in the yard and watched the sun roll off toward the hills.
She'd read to us. And we could smell the magnolia in Mississippi in the summer.
We knew it was some other "one and only" place far away but we could
smell it. We knew the honeysuckle and we knew the roasted chestnuts in the snow
but we'd never known the honeysuckle and the magnolia together in the musky air
near the bayous where the giant crayfish died in the sun and your fingers felt
clean next to the swamps. Damn, it was neat. And people lived there!
But this was our place: El Yoyo. We were the morning of it.
How could we think to be other than the Morning as we watched it
float down out of the trees against the hill and skip and roll itself across
the yard to join us in our spots under the house the way it did? The taste and
smell of it let us know: We were safe. No matter that the sky was black and the
wind blew back against the sky again from other places, times too far away, it
still came whistling in on us ‑ with the kid across the road who had no
chin ‑ and toyed the dirt at us the way you'd splash a dry kid at the
pond. We felt the Morning come, under the house.
We had to keep the applebutter sandwiches from the cobwebs and
protect them from the Morning playing at them with the dew. Fourteen in all:
thirteen of us, the extra for the kid who had no chin. Boy, he could smile.
They were times too brave. We were the brave, to keep our innocence
so close. Our applebutter dreams had kept us whole, and now we'd have the
Morning for a day.
It never left, and never stayed the same. The Morning, I mean. Like
us, it wandered through the day and washed its face and hid its treasures in
the weeds at ten o'clock: The new girl kept a tooth in a jar under the porch.
She said it was from... Istanbul, I think. Like eggs and biscuits, milk, fresh
from the cow, the Morning sun crept in against the stream behind the hill and,
new again, refreshed, climbed on fences and in trees looking for another thing
to be.
Nobody wondered where to go. The Morning, like the yard, was
everyplace, as far as you could run. If it wasn't in our eyes, it didn't have a
place.
At Morgan's stream the Morning's wind could blow at the "Africa
tree" and show us how the sun was just the ice‑cream on a cone. It
could look like that, the Morning could, waiting with us in the yard with Amos
the sticky cat that laid on Cecily's flower once and never did again.
Morning played magic with the clouds and moved the sun, sent messages
to the old man with the mail who would even come along the road each day
looking for our place, wishing he could stay, and toss us each a smile out of
that funny broken face and shuffle back again into the dust around the bend,
looking for a place.
We knew it wasn't there. It was here: El Yoyo.
The Johnson girls ‑ we called them that like they were one ‑
could never even ever fool us. But they'd try. They were twins, foreign twins
from Poland someone said, and "starry stuff you couldn't find no place,
'cept in the clouds".
Finn'd tell them they could "go eat worms with that
stuff", laughing. The Morning knew: Emma was the one who napped with Sully
along the row of tulips in the shade, tulip clean, pigtail perfect, ribbon
bright, her doll kept in a box. Connie'd sleep out in the pasture heaped among
her ragdolls and her sack of flowers.
At naptime, Morning never napped. It stroked Emma's hair and Sully's
eyes and blew the flies away from Freddie's open mouth under the porch and sat
with Curtis on the hill so he wouldn't be alone staring at the sky, then ran
with all the salamander hunters to the stream among the sycamores.
The logs next to the bank gave worms and thousand-leggers up if you
could slip your fingers fast enough into the mulch. The breeze was cool on your
face in the shade and the water cold, lapping at your feet in the soft mud, and
the rocks cool on your hands as you flipped them over onto their backs and back
again into their beds.
Finn was the best. He'd always find the salamanders first. Zack just
liked to watch, sitting at the curve of the water where the bank was high and
the grass dry, his toes digging into the gravel beneath the stream. Billy'd
pick a spot smack in the middle of the stream and plop down and stretch his
arms out to catch a couple inch slab of it in his lap. Shane sat in a tree.
Connie waded in the shallow parts, her long white dirty cotton dress floating
with the bugs around her ankles in the swirl.
Emma’d laugh her funny foreign laugh. Emma laughed so much we
understood it and laughed with her.
The Morning called us back just when the sun ambled off alone beyond
the hill and waited for us, peeked through the window as we ate. The daily
prayer, humming with the fan, reminded us that there were things too big to
figure out, but still we thanked a stranger for the food and passed the bread,
the French fries and the corn.
"I want a leg."
"Three chickens just ain't born with seven legs."
Finn told us how he knew that wasn't true: He'd "seen a one‑legged
hen walking with a cane out by the well". Connie shook her head and gave
him hers and took a wing. A bowl of string beans looked "like Billy when
he cries". Connie poured the milk.
Billy always fell asleep then. He'd crawl onto the bedroom floor ‑
wall‑to‑wall mattresses almost to the door ‑ and take his
spot with Joshy and the red sheet, the smaller one
with chickens along the bottom.
Then we'd gather in the yard around our oak and watch the Morning
change its shirt. The birds came home and ate among the chickens in the dust of
the yard and the goats pranced in to lay with us and the flies in the cool dirt
under the tree. Cecily talked to her flower by the road, and Finn and Marshall
played spitfire in the leaves. Zack sat straight up in a rocker on the porch,
watching all of us (His legs too short to lean the chair back). Sully and Emma
took the swings. The new girl and Warren inspected the tooth in the jar from
Istanbul and Connie climbed the tree and sat with Shane to watch us feel the
Morning settle down and spin the dust along the fence. And Emma’d laugh.
Then there was the washing at the double row of sinks and the
giggles in the hall and the stealing of the sheets, the swapping back and
moving off in groups around the mattressed floor to settle down and the lights
gone out and the thoughts of possibilities and reasons in the dust out in the
yard.
We were in the only place there was.
The sun had gone to find out why the sky had slipped away. The
Morning, we knew, was sitting with the chickens in the oak, waiting through the
applebutter dreams. We were in our place: We'd never be lost.
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