Cat's eye

Those with target marbles call out the names of their wares: purie, purie, bowlie, bowlie, the two-syllable words drawn out into a singsong, the voice descending, the way you call dogs, or children when they’re lost. These cries are mournful, although they aren’t meant to be. I sit that way myself, the cold marbles rolling in between my legs, gath ering in my outspread skirt, calling out cat’s eye, cat’s eye, in a regretful tone, feeling nothing but avarice and a pleasurable terror. The cat’s eyes are my favorites. If I win a new one I wait until I’m by myself, then take it out and examine it, turning it over and over in the light. The cat’s eyes really are like eyes, but not the eyes of cats. They’re the eyes of something that isn’t known but exists anyway; like the green eye of the radio; like the eyes of aliens from a distant planet. My favorite one is blue. I put it into my red plastic purse to keep it safe. I risk my other cat’s eyes to be shot at, but not this one. I don’t collect many marbles because I’m not a very good shot. My brother is deadly. He takes five common marbles to school with him in a blue Crown Royal Whisky bag and comes back with the bag and his pockets bulging. He keeps his winnings in screw-top Crown preserving jars, donated by my mother, which he lines up on his desk. He never talks about his skill though. He just lines up the jars. One Saturday afternoon he puts all his best marbles—his puries, his waterbabies and cat’s eyes, his gems and wonders—into a single jar. He takes it down into the ravine somewhere, in under the wooden bridge, and buries it. Then he makes an elaborate treasure map of where it’s buried, puts it in another jar, and buries that one too. He tells me he’s done these things but he doesn’t say why, or where the jars are buried.

Chapter 13

T he raw house and its lawn of mud and the mountain of earth beside it recede behind us; I watch them out of the back window of the car, from where I sit jammed in among the boxes of food, the sleeping bags and raincoats. I’m wearing a blue-striped jersey of my brother’s, a worn pair of corduroy pants. Grace and Carol stand under the apple trees, in their skirts, waving; disappearing. They still have to go to school; I don’t. I envy them. Already the tarry, rubbery travel smell is wrapping itself around me, but I don’t welcome it. I’m being wrenched away from my new life, the life of girls. I settle back into the familiar perspective, the backs of heads, the ears, and past them the white line of the highway. We drive up through the meadowy farmlands, with their silos and elms and their smell of cut hay. The broad-leafed trees become smaller, there are more pines, the air cools, the sky turns an icier blue: we’re heading away from spring. We hit the first ridges of granite, the first lakes; there’s snow in the shadows. I sit forward, leaning my arms on the back of the front seat. I feel like a dog, ears pricked and sniffing.

The north smells different from the city: clearer, thinner. You can see farther. A sawmill, a hill of sawdust, the teepee shape of a sawdust burner; the smokestacks of the copper smelters, the rocks around them bare of trees, burnt-looking, the heaps of blackened slag: I’ve forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.

Men stand on corners, outside general stores, outside small banks, outside beer parlors with gray asphalt shingles on the walls. They have their hands in their windbreaker pockets. Some have dark, Indian-looking faces, others are merely tanned. They walk differently from men in the south, slower, more considering; they say less and their words are farther apart. My father jingles his keys and the change in his pockets while he talks with them. They talk about water levels, the dryness of the forest, how the fish are biting. “Chewing the fat,” he calls it. He comes back to the car with a brown paper bag of groceries and packs it in behind my feet.

My brother and I stand at the end of a ramshackle dock beside a long blue craggy lake. It’s evening, with a melon-colored sunset, loons calling in the distance, the drawn-out rising note that sounds like wolves. We’re fishing. There are mosquitoes, but I’m used to them, I hardly bother to slap them. The fishing goes on without commentary: a cast, the plop of the lure, the sound of reeling in. We watch the lure to see if anything is following it. If there’s a fish, we’ll do our best to net it, step on it to hold it down, whack it over the head, stick a knife in back of its eyes. I do the stepping, my brother does the whacking, the sticking. Despite his silence he is poised, alert, the corners of his mouth tensed. I wonder if my eyes are gleaming like his, like some animal’s, in the pink dusk.