Starfish

by James Crowley

  Lionel looked up at his sister, who stood patiently in the stream as Mr. Hawkins pulled a small jackknife from his pocket, flipped open the blade, and worked on getting the last bit of lead from what remained of the pencil.

  “I’m hoping to get a couple more weeks outta this one yet,” Mr. Hawkins said, maybe more to the pencil than Lionel. “Just a bit more…”

  But the pocketknife slipped, sliding into Mr. Hawkins’s finger instead of the pencil’s soft wood.

  “Will you look at that?” Mr. Hawkins announced dropping the pencil and knife and examining his finger. “I cut myself.”

  A small trickle of blood, red blood, Lionel noticed, appeared on Mr. Hawkins’s thick finger. It fell in tiny droplets onto the green moss where they sat.

  “Ah, it’s just a tiny cut, but all the same. That little pencil sure is making me work for it, ain’t that right, Lionel?” Mr. Hawkins asked, wiping the blood onto his pants.

  Lionel stared at the faint blood-streaked lines across Mr. Hawkins’s trousers and the dark red droplets that sat in half bubbles on the clumps of moss around their outstretched legs.

  “What is it, boy? You ain’t squeamish on a little blood, are ya?”

  “No, sir,” Lionel explained. “I just didn’t figure on yer blood being red like mine.”

  Mr. Hawkins looked puzzled for a moment, his face slowly slipping into a big grin. “Why, of course my blood is red.” Mr. Hawkins laughed. “What color did you expect it to be? Purple, or maybe green?”

  “No,” Lionel stammered, “I guess I just didn’t know. I mean your skin’s different than ours.”

  “My skin, oh my goodness, my skin.” Hawkins coughed through his boisterous laughter. “No, Lionel, I’m sorry. I suppose you’re right. How would ya know unless ya seen it?”

  Mr. Hawkins found this to be rather amusing and it took him some time to control his laughter. “Ya know, Lionel, I suppose I should take it as a good sign that ya ain’t never seen none of our blood.”

  Mr. Hawkins went back to sharpening the pencil between small bursts of steady laughter. “In all my travels, that’s the first on that one. Red blood.”

  “Where are ya from, Mr. Hawkins?” Lionel asked as Mr. Hawkins’s laughter subsided.

  “Why, that’s a good question, Lionel. I’m from a bit of the all-over, really,” Mr. Hawkins answered, slowly exposing the remaining lead. “I know that things have changed down where you’re from, but the fact remains that you’re still from there. Your people been here for a long time. My people, whoever they are, been scattered all over the world.”

  “So, you don’t know where you’re from?” Lionel persisted.

  “Well, kinda. I ended up here outta Texas. Like I was sayin’, I was with the army and now, on this particular mountain, well that’s a whole other story. Before Texas, I was on the coast in the Carolinas, back east. Before that, I know that my mother was born down in the islands, somewhere’s south of Cuba. You can hear a bit of that in my voice, I reckon, but not too much anymore. Ya know a long, long time ago I hear that my folks is from some part of Africa, but I ain’t never been there.”

  Mr. Hawkins leaned over and pulled his saddlebag closer. “I suppose I don’t know which is worse, being taken from the place you’re from or having where you’re from taken from you. Either way, it’s a sorry state of affairs that we both better learn to make the best of ’cause it ain’t gonna change. It’s done, and that ol’ clock ain’t gonna turn itself back.”

  Mr. Hawkins threw open the flap of his saddlebag and fished around until he found a small, well-worn wooden box. “Let me show you something.”

  Mr. Hawkins opened the box and removed an object that was wrapped in red silk. Lionel thought at first that it was some sort of strangely shaped rock.

  “Here ya go,” Mr. Hawkins said, “but be careful with it. My mother gave me that. It’s from the island where she was born.”

  Lionel took it from Hawkins and held it gingerly in his hand. It was as hard as a rock but as light as a pinecone. It had five stubby appendages surrounding its center, and when Lionel turned it over, he noticed a hole in the middle that could have very well been a mouth. Surrounding the mouth and trailing out of each limb, there were hundreds if not thousands of what looked like hairs, orange hairs: little orange hairs, with a mouth that had turned to stone.

  “You know what it is?” Mr. Hawkins asked.

  “No, I never seen nothin’ like it.”

  “It’s the knobby star, Piaster giganteus.”

  “Piaster giganteus?”

  “Yeah, it’s a starfish.”

  Lionel turned it over in his hand again. “This is a fish?”

  “Kind of.”

  “This was alive?”

  “Yep, just like you and me. They live in the saltwater down in the oceans. You ever seen an ocean?”

  “No, but I seen pictures back at the school. The captain told me that they’re so big you can’t see the other side. I saw a picture of the army men on the boats. They was fixin’ to cross ’em.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet they were,” Mr. Hawkins said.

  “How did it die?” Lionel asked.

  “How did what die?”

  “The starfish.”

  “I don’t know ’cause I wasn’t there, but I reckon it was like these fish here that we pull outta the stream. Sometimes when you take something out of where or how it’s supposed to be, it’ll just…well…it just dies.”

  “Everything?”

  “Naw, not everything, some things change, they adapt,” Hawkins said, taking the starfish back and wrapping it in the red silk handkerchief.

  “Can I look at the starfish again some time?”

  “Why, of course you can. whenever you like, as long as you’re careful. It means a lot to me as it’s the only thing I got left that my mother ever give me, well exceptin’ the purple and green blood that flows through these veins.” Mr. Hawkins laughed.

  Lionel looked upstream to his sister. Beatrice reached down, submerging herself in the pool, then resurfaced with a flapping brook trout in her bare hands. It reminded Lionel of the time that he and his grandfather had sat in this very spot and watched the grizzly bear do the same.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  COLD BISCUITS • WINTER STORES • PIRATES AND THE EXPLORERS OF AFRICA • AN AGREEMENT

  FOR THE NEXT half hour, Beatrice pulled fish with greater frequency. Lionel stood observing from the shore while Mr. Hawkins went back up to the lodge to get the cook fire going. Lionel watched the growing number of fish as they lay packed in moss, gasping for their final breath. He had enjoyed the fish the night before and knew that he would eat them again for breakfast, but now, after seeing the starfish, he did so with an awareness that wasn’t present until this morning.

  Lionel thought about his grandfather and wondered when he would return. He wondered what his grandfather would think of the starfish and these new thoughts that now raced through his head. Lionel decided that he would say a prayer thanking the fish for their lives. He sat down on the bank with one hand on the bear claws around his neck and sang a low song.

  Beatrice caught another fish, threw it up on the bank, and then crossed the pool to join Lionel. He thought about stopping the song and telling Beatrice about the starfish, but instead he kept singing, and they were soon joined by Junebug and Corn Poe, who appeared on the opposite bank looking disheveled and wiping the night from their eyes. Lionel grew quiet.

  “I’m thinkin’ that a swim is the only thing that’s gonna get me goin’ after a sleep like that,” Corn Poe announced, stripping off his clothes.

  Beatrice gathered the fish, smiled at Lionel, and disappeared in the direction of the lodge.

  “I suppose that’s right, leave the bathing hour to the menfolk. It’s only proper,” Corn Poe continued, slipping into the icy pool. Junebug followed, then Lionel; and soon the three of them were swimming where their breakfast had just been caught.

  They ate the fish with
cold biscuits and spent the rest of the day looking over and repairing the Hawkinses’ gear. Mr. Hawkins showed them their traps and the pelts and skins they had gathered over the course of the long winter. Lionel and Beatrice told Mr. Hawkins what their grandfather had taught them, and he soon put them to work in the smokehouse curing the meat and tanning the hides that lay in bundles, bent and tied in stiff squares.

  This continued for the rest of August, with the five of them falling into a pleasant routine that felt the most settled since Beatrice and Lionel had fled the school. They spent the days preparing the lodge for winter, tanning the hides, smoking meat, and preserving the vegetables from their overflowing garden and the abundant huckleberries, blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries that began to cover the hills.

  They saw the grizzly bear with greater frequency as he also chose to spend his late-summer afternoons in the berry patches eating his fill for the long winter that lay ahead. They also took walks in the Great wood, sometimes to hunt, but mainly just to take in, as Mr. Hawkins put it, “its magnificence.”

  This strange consortium sat around the fire at night always in the open air, and Mr. Hawkins told them stories from the war, the Carolinas, and the few tales of piracy and the high seas that he still remembered from his mother’s island.

  Lionel loved these times and grew closer and closer to Corn Poe and the mute boy, Junebug. They often stole away in the afternoons after their chores were done to act out Mr. Hawkins’s tales of piracy or to fish and swim in the stream.

  They found a sprawling section of fallen trees in the Great wood that became one of their favorite spots. There, they would engage the pillaging pirates or the gruff sea captains that hunted them down, depending on what Hawkins’s tales and that day’s imagination dictated. A clearing opened onto a broken jumble of giant tumbled trees now lying dead and dying in star-shaped patterns stretching as far as their eyes could see. Lionel loved to run along their immense trunks and climb through their extensive branches, which, while still perpendicular to their base, reached up as opposed to out, their tips in some cases as high as the standing trees that still surrounded them. The fallen trees’ exposed roots were now the bows of great ships, the extending branches their masts and rigging. Corn Poe thought that they could walk the trunks all the way to Canada and never have to touch the ground.

  When they weren’t engaged in piracy on the high seas of the Great wood, they wandered the rocky crags that surrounded the small lodge in the meadow, pretending to be lost somewhere in the ancient wilds of Africa—not recognizing themselves for the pioneers and explorers that they really were.

  As the nights became colder Mr. Hawkins suggested that they sleep indoors around the crumbled fireplace, although he continued to sleep out of doors, the pistol and rifle always at his side.

  Beatrice seemed happy, but also became more withdrawn. She slept inside with them, but as the cool weather approached, her coughing returned; and many nights Lionel would wake to find her sitting upright and staring into the fire, trying to catch her breath, or standing at the lodge’s thick-glassed windows, looking out into the night sky.

  One morning they woke to find Mr. Hawkins and his bedroll covered in a light powder of snow, but the snow had all but melted by mid-morning, and the day turned out no different from the rest of these last days of summer. Beatrice agreed with Mr. Hawkins that they could all stay in the little meadow as long as they worked together and didn’t ask each other too many questions about why they each needed to stay there instead of moving to a more suitable climate.

  On the morning of the second snow, they awoke to find Mr. Hawkins covered in another light dusting. He was sitting by the open-air fire, talking to their grandfather.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  NEWS FROM THE OUTPOST • LIONEL’S FEATHER • THE BEST OF TIMES • THE RETURN OF TOM GUNN

  THEIR GRANDFATHER had been wandering the foothills and mountains for a week, trying to shake the scouts that the army post had sent to the Milk River to spy on him. He did this for two days and then circled back after what would appear to have been a satisfactory hunt but was actually a concerted attempt to keep the government men guessing as to what his recent forays into the mountains were really about. By his third attempt, he had successfully lost them within a day, but he’d continued to wander for the past week to ensure that they weren’t following him to the lodge in the meadow.

  Lionel was so happy to see his grandfather that he felt as though he had actually flown from the crooked door to where Grandpa sat with Mr. Hawkins at the fire.

  “I see yer still growin’,” Grandpa laughed, as Beatrice, Corn Poe, and Junebug joined them. “I might have mistaken you for a wild band of lowdown dirty renegades if I didn’t know better.

  “And you,” Grandpa said, placing his big hand on Corn Poe’s head, “I should’a known I’d find you here.”

  Corn Poe squirmed joyously from the attention.

  “Why didn’t y’all tell me you was his kin?” Mr. Hawkins asked, handing their grandfather a tin cup of coffee.

  “Hell, I’ve known ol’ Avery John Hawkins since before all of you were even born,” Grandpa said, accepting the coffee.

  Grandpa explained that he and Mr. Hawkins knew each other a long time ago when Mr. Hawkins first came to Montana with the government. Then he told Mr. Hawkins about the troubles that waited for them below, and that Mr. Hawkins was sworn to secrecy, to which Hawkins nodded.

  Grandpa informed them all that the government was still frantically searching for the prize horse Ulysses, despite the approaching winter. Grandpa suspected that the search was being spearheaded and driven by Jenkins and Lumpkin.

  Rumors were circulating through the outpost that a group of boys from Heart Butte had supposedly seen the horse, but that last they heard, Beatrice and Lionel were heading to Canada. This led to an exhaustive search that yielded little result, leaving Sergeant Jenkins more irate and suspicious than ever. Grandpa also said that the reward for the return of the horse had been raised to $100 cash money, and that this had him concerned as to what their next move should be.

  Corn Poe inquired about his family and their reaction to his decision to run away and join a ruthless band of renegades. Grandpa seemed to be trying to soften the blow a bit, but told him that Big Bull, after a series of rants and raves, had given up on the boy and figured him dead.

  “Well, you told him that I was a notorious outlaw running with a gang of miserable horse thieves, didn’t ya?” Corn Poe pushed, borrowing some language from one of Mr. Hawkins’s pirate tales.

  “No, I said nothing to that effect. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t know what’s happened to any of you,” Grandpa answered, which set Corn Poe to sulking, but only as long as his attention could bear to fixate on one subject.

  Beatrice and Lionel eagerly showed off their accomplishments in their grandfather’s absence. They showed him their firewood stores, the late summer abundance of the garden, and the fish trap.

  Grandpa stood over the stream, impressed with the tight weave of branches, but he appeared to be lost in thought.

  “I’m not sure that the Suyitapis would like this,” Grandpa said, packing his pipe.

  “The Suyitapis?” Lionel asked.

  “The underwater people. Spirits. out of respect the old ones taught us not to disturb their world. You’re old enough now so I’ll leave it to you to decide.”

  Beatrice stared deep into the swirling pool as Mr. Hawkins, Junebug, and Corn Poe appeared on the upper bank.

  “Always something to learn,” Mr. Hawkins said as he made the note in his book. “Yes indeed, always something.”

  Lionel thought about this and decided he would respect the old ones’ way. Beatrice must have agreed, because the next time Lionel returned to the stream, he noticed that the fish trap had been dismantled and the sticks neatly stacked on the shore.

  Grandpa fit easily into the renegades’ routine, and this odd assembly continued making preparations for
winter and enjoying each other’s company on these last of the long, sun-filled days. The days grew shorter and the evening snows more frequent, with the tops of the surrounding mountain peaks already covered until next spring.

  The group sat around the open campfire at night telling stories and taking in the last of this season’s stars. Grandpa joined them on their long expeditions, hunting or otherwise, into the Great wood. on one particular trip, he appeared suddenly under the great canopy and presented Lionel with an eagle feather.

  “He musta wanted me to give it to you,” Grandpa said, tying the feather into Lionel’s now longer hair. “I stepped away from y’all, looked up, and there it was, floating down.”

  Beatrice was watching when the feather floated down and noticed that her grandfather had been standing under what appeared to be a large nest. Beatrice failed to share this observation with Lionel.

  Lionel sat proudly that night at the fire feeling that now, with the feather in his hair and his bear claws, he at least looked like the great horsemen and like his fellow warrior Beatrice. The group saw, as they had begun to see with greater frequency, something that Mr. Hawkins called the aurora borealis; a night sky that reminded Lionel of the color-streaked morning when he had first seen the starfish.

  It was on this night that Grandpa announced it was time for him to return to the Milk River, so as not to arouse the suspicions of the government.

  The next morning Grandpa rode out of the meadow with a list of supplies from Mr. Hawkins, a list that included a box of yellow pencils. Grandpa promised to return soon with word and hopefully, a plan that would take them through the winter. He said that it might be time to head up to Canada, but also thought that it wasn’t necessary at the moment to make a firm decision.

  Lionel and Beatrice watched their grandfather disappear into the tree line, and soon a melancholy fell over the meadow. Even the usually boisterous Mr. Hawkins, who had enjoyed their grandfather’s company, became withdrawn and sullen.