Tourmaline

by Joanna Scott

  “Big deal,” he said. “A stupid old pipe.”

  “You think so,” Harry retorted.

  “Let’s go, Ollie.”

  We were not playing. We were not Jakos One through Four who could make ourselves understood without even speaking aloud. We were not at all inclined to mix nonsense and different languages. Patrick shrugged. I couldn’t decide whom to side with. I let Patrick take my hand in his, but still we just stood there.

  “Stupid old pipe,” Patrick said.

  “Look, Patrick. Just look inside, will you? You dumbhead.” Harry turned the pipe so one end faced Patrick and inserted his flashlight at the other end.

  “Jeepers!” Patrick clutched the pipe to steady it against his glasses. “Let me see!” I tried to shove Patrick aside. “It’s my turn. Patrick, come on. Patrick!”

  “Holy cow.”

  “I want to see!” I stomped, splashing all of us with water, but still my brothers ignored me.

  “Wow!” Patrick peered into the pipe as though into the lens of a telescope. What was so amazing? Patrick was looking at a star. On the star was a colony of martians. The martians waved at Patrick. I waited for Patrick to wave back.

  “It’s a diamond,” he whispered. Harry smiled smugly while Patrick stared into the pipe, mesmerized. I didn’t know what else to do but curl myself into a powerful bundle of five-year-old fury and head-butt Harry in the stomach. He held himself upright. I slipped and fell into the water.

  “Pigsnot!”

  “Shitface!”

  “What trash can did you crawl out of?”

  I reached for Harry’s ankle, he grabbed Patrick, and to my immense satisfaction they both lost their balance and fell.

  I decided it was time to start crying. Harry said he’d hit me if I didn’t shut up, so I cried louder. As we waded back to shore, Harry mocked me with his imitation wailing. Patrick joined in. We were all crying. We were all pretending to cry. We were laughing, the world was ridiculous, we were ridiculous, it was an October night on the island of Elba, we were soaked, the moon was shining, and we were having fun.

  Patrick had held on to the pipe, but his flashlight was drenched, and when he shook it, the light flickered and went out, leaving one working flashlight between us. Patrick blamed Harry. Harry blamed me.

  We took off our shoes, and while Patrick wrung out our socks, Harry let me look into the pipe.

  What had Patrick said? Jeepers. “Jeepers,” I said.

  There was a star trapped inside the pipe. Not a star with martians. Rather, a crystalline star that absorbed the beam from Harry’s flashlight but still glowed with its own light. It had no color. Instead, it emitted a mysterious gleam both from within and from the surface of the facets. A lustrous mosaic of atoms, like water frozen into ice, ice congealed by extreme conditions and transformed into a permanent, uniform substance. The star of Elba.

  Harry shook the pipe gently but the star wouldn’t come out. We argued about how to dislodge it. We considered carrying the pipe home and cutting it open, but we were too impatient. Harry inserted a twig into the pipe and tapped it against the crystal. The twig snapped in two. Patrick found a sturdier stick, which Harry plunged into the pipe. Nothing happened. He tried again. There was a loud popping sound, and Harry threw the pipe aside. We didn’t see the splinters of glass flying out the opposite end, but we saw them scattered when Harry shone his flashlight on the ground. Glass, not diamond. Just pieces of glass, an old bottle or jar, that had been lodged inside an old pipe.

  We stared at the ground rather than meet one another’s eyes. Luckily, we were far away from civilization, and there were no witnesses to our stupidity. Not even Nat.

  “Nat!” Patrick said. “Where’s Nat?” I asked.

  Had anyone seen Nat? No, Patrick hadn’t seen Nat. Harry hadn’t seen Nat. I hadn’t seen Nat. Where was Nat?

  Strange that he hadn’t been drawn by Harry’s shouts or the noise of our fighting. We listened for his footsteps. We waited in silence for a moment, and then we began calling for him.

  “Nat!”

  “Nat, we’re over here.”

  “Nat, come on.”

  “Nat, where are you?”

  “Nat!”

  “Nat!”

  “Nat!”

  We still had no idea that ever since the fever his hearing had been erratic. We assumed that if he were near enough, he could hear us.

  “Nat?”

  “Nat!”

  We left our shoes and socks drying on the grass and headed together in the direction Nat had gone, beyond Monte Giove toward Capo Sant’Andrea. We had to walk slowly in our bare feet. I held Harry’s hand. Patrick led the way with Harry’s flashlight.

  At one point we heard a noise of paws scrambling over pebbles. Patrick swept the light across the slope rising to our right. The beam illuminated the eyes of some animal — a wood rat or squirrel crouched in a clump of heather. The animal stared at us for a long minute, we stared back, then it slipped away, melting into the earth.

  We were chasing a ghost. No, not even a ghost. The idea of a ghost. The farther we went, the more hopeless we felt. I began to feel itchy all over and kept having to pause and scratch myself. Harry tugged me along. I was hungry. I was tired. I was preparing to cry, but Harry cut me short: “Whatever you do, Ollie, just don’t start crying, okay?”

  Where was Nat? I wanted to find Nat and go home. “Nat?”

  We were all thinking the same thing — how right it was that of the four of us, Nat was the one who’d gotten lost. Nat’s fate had always been clear. We’d always known that Nat was destined for trouble. The question we asked ourselves as we wandered along in the dark was, What kind of trouble?

  “Nat!”

  “Nat!”

  “Nat, come on, it’s not funny anymore!”

  Nat, we found out later, hadn’t lost his way at all. He’d followed the creek toward Capo Sant’Andrea just like he’d said he was going to do. And after twenty minutes or so, he’d heard Harry calling behind him. He was pleased to find that for the time being he could hear with perfect clarity. He heard his brother calling his name. But he also heard something else, something he recognized as the sound of someone breaking rocks, the clacking of stone against stone.

  Nat headed away from the creek and up the steep bank, across an empty road, across a field, between rows of cypresses, and along a narrow footpath. At the end of the path he came to a segment of the unfinished stone wall marking our father’s land.

  In the center of a clearing was a wide, brackish pool. Opposite the wall, on the other side of the run-off water, beside a sheer granite wall glittering in the fading light with specks of quartz, was our father. He balanced on one knee. With a rhythmic, mindless motion, he was knocking a stone the size of a baseball against the granite.

  On an island measuring 223.5 square kilometers, in the gray of twilight, in the middle of nowhere, Nat Murdoch happened to find his father breaking rocks in the woods of Mezza Luna. Nat couldn’t believe what his eyes were telling him, and he staggered back in astonishment, fell into the dirt, and sat there, trying to sort out his confusion.

  Only if something is possible can it be true.

  “Dad?”

  But reality, as our year on Elba had taught us, is full of surprises. Nat liked a good surprise. He decided that the scene of our father pounding rocks under a rising moon was more of a surprise than a coincidence.

  “Dad?”

  One. Two.

  “Dad, hey!”

  Three. Four.

  “Dad!”

  “Huh?”

  “Hi.”

  “Nat?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I asked you first.”

  “It’s late. Does your mother know you’re here?”

  “No.”

  As Murray rose to his feet, dust blew in ribbons around his ankles. He was barefoot, dressed in a T-shirt and suspenders, his left eye
was swollen, the lid bruised, he had a sore crusted on his lower lip and a stripe of black bristles on his chin.

  Nat started to unlace his shoes. Murray called, “Don’t you dare.” “Why not?”

  “Go home, Nat.”

  “No.”

  “I am your father. You are my son. Fathers tell sons what they can and cannot do.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Murray slowly waded across the shallow pool toward Nat. He caught his toe against a rock, winced, but managed to pull himself out of the water. He collapsed beside Nat, who was still sitting in the dirt with one shoe off, one shoe on.

  “Nat, something occurs to me.”

  “What?”

  “I thought you had some trouble with your hearing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought you couldn’t hear.”

  “I can hear fine.” Nat could hear fine. He could hear what he wanted to hear. Some of the time. Most of the time.

  “You can hear me now. And now? And now?” Murray let his voice soften into a whisper.

  “Yeah and yeah and yeah. Stop bugging me.”

  “I’m allowed to bug you. I’m your dad.”

  Murray leaned back, resting his folded hands on his belly, and gazed into the night. Nat asked Murray what he was thinking. Murray grunted. Nat stretched out beside him. After a while Murray began to speak aloud. He used the formal tone of someone delivering a lecture, though he didn’t seem to care whether or not Nat was listening.

  He said something about Babylon. Which made him think of Balthazar. B-words. Any old B-word snatched out of the blue.

  What is Babylon? What should Nat already know, and what was Murray trying to teach him?

  He rattled on about Eros and Erasmus. Epistolary jests. Expression and imagination. Something along those lines.

  “Dad, umm…”

  I-words. I I I I I.

  M-words. Man. A man. Amen.

  N for no. No…ah. Drunken Noah, ho ho ho.

  Here was a name Nat recognized: Noah, like in Noah and the Ark! Murray said something about Pan. Something about Proteus. Something about Pico. P-words. Something about Pico boasting that what he’d written would only be intelligible to a few. Something about parabolic fervor. More P-words. Late-antique Platonists. Mysteries cease to be mysteries when they are promulgated.

  “What’s promulgated? ”

  Murray told him to look it up. Nat reminded Murray that he didn’t know how to read.

  Murray said, “Learn to read and then look it up.”

  Paradigm. Purtroppo. Proud. Murray must have felt a last little stab of pride as he rested on the grass with one of his four sons beside him. Fathers and sons. It was then that he remembered that scene in Turgenev’s First Love, where the son glances down a lane and sees his father slap his mistress.

  Pretension.

  “Personally I never had much of a taste for Turgenev.” “What’s Tur…tur…turga…”

  “Turgenev. Russian author of the nineteenth century.” T-words. The taming of the passions. Tripartite life. Tiresias. Trinity. Tourmaline.

  “Tourmaline. I know what tourmaline is.”

  “You do, do you? Tell me, my young sage.”

  Tourmaline is unsurpassed even by corundum in variety of hue, and it has during recent years rapidly advanced in public favor. G. F. Herbert Smith. Gemstones.

  “Tourmaline is a kind of rock you can find.”

  “Mmm. What else?”

  “It’s pretty, I guess.”

  “How is it pretty?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just pretty. All rocks are pretty.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they are.”

  Think about it, Murray. The beauty of rocks. The stuff of the earth, whether abundant, generally available, or rare.

  Pause. Hmm. Dad was gathering himself, preparing to say something of great significance, something he’d been wanting to say for a long, long time.

  “Nathaniel. Nathaniel, listen.”

  A subtle warning embedded in his father’s tone of voice. The double click of Nat’s name. Nat sat up as if on an elastic hinge.

  “Nathaniel, I’m —”

  Don’t!

  Don’t what?

  Our father was about to say something he shouldn’t say, something Nat didn’t understand and didn’t want to know. How could he be stopped? The best Nat could hope for was to distract him, keeping him occupied until…

  “Dad, I —”

  “— was going to say —”

  “— there was this rock —”

  “I have to —”

  “— this rock, you know, we want to find it, well, there’s lots of rocks we already found, actually Harry finds them, he finds everything, it’s not fair, every time we’re looking for something Harry finds it.”

  “— to say —”

  “And then there was this one rock, you know, well Patrick thinks it’s tor…ter…”

  Funny how often a word slips from your mind when you need it. Nat looked to Murray for help. What had they just been talking about?

  But Murray was trying to explain that he —

  Nat interrupted, saying anything that came into his head so he wouldn’t hear what Murray was trying to tell him. “And then we, you know, um, we were just, then Patrick, I don’t know, that’s just what he did, and Ollie, he’s such a brat because, that time we found the spiders, actually it was Harry, he’s always finding things, you know, Dad, but still I don’t see why we have to be brothers all the time, I wish I didn’t have any brothers. If I didn’t have brothers…”

  Ei fu. “What I’m trying to say…what am I trying to say?” Keep talking, Nat. Don’t give Dad the chance to —

  “Actually there’s not a law, we don’t have to if we don’t want to, but since, I don’t know. Dad, tell me about something. Dad? Dad! I want you to tell me about, oh, any old thing, or else I’ll tell you.”

  Able was I.

  “About once, you know, when, you know, um, well, so, Dad, are you listening, you have to listen, you have to pay attention.”

  They kept at it long into the night. Whatever nonsense Nat threw at Murray, whatever nonsense they exchanged, was from Nat’s point of view merely a way to buy time. As if — and this thought only came to him much, much later — as if, with enough time, he could succeed in paying off our father’s debts.

  “What’ll Mom say when we tell her?”

  “Maybe we don’t have to tell her.”

  “Yeah, like she’s not going to notice there’s three of us instead of four.”

  “We can say we weren’t there.”

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  We were sitting on the narrow beach at the edge of Sant’Andrea. Behind us the stack of boulders rose up steeply, though only for a few feet. At the top of the rocks was an area cordoned off by a chain-link fence, and sleeping gray gulls bordered the edge.

  While we talked we picked up little stones and threw them one by one into the sea. Whatever we happened to be saying, we’d pause whenever a stone was in midflight and listen for the splash.

  Cluck, chuck, silence, splash.

  “Is Nat lost forever?” I asked.

  “Shut up, Ollie.”

  This was a sadness I’d never felt before, sharp and clear and deserved. Nat was gone. Nat had been a little bit bigger than me and a little bit smaller than my big brothers. Without Nat I felt unbearably small, as small as the pebbles disappearing into the dark sea. A sob shuddered through me. Harry shoved me so I toppled over into the wet sand. I cried louder. Patrick clamped his hand over my mouth and promised I’d get it good if I didn’t shut up. Why did everyone everywhere always have to tell me to shut up?

  Most of the houses on the point were boarded up for the winter, but a few were lit with a warm orange light. Wouldn’t it be better if we were inside one of those houses? How would we ever get home?

  Patrick took off his glasses and ru
bbed the bridge of his nose, a gesture that made him look ancient to me. I wondered how he had grown up so fast.

  “Some day,” he said.

  “Some day what?” Harry prompted.

  “Some day we’ll remember this and it will all be like it never really happened.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Penso —” Harry began, but Patrick barked, “Speak in English!” “I think we need a plan.”

  “Like what kind of plan?”

  “Like a plan to find Nat.”

  “The question is, will we find him before the wolves eat him up!” I started to cry again. Harry hit me. Patrick hit Harry. Harry said, “Race you!” I ran after Harry. Patrick just sat there. We taunted him. He threw fistfuls of sand at us.

  The night wore on this way. We kept meaning to resume our search for Nat but kept forgetting about him. We fought, we played, and eventually we flattened a patch of sand to make a smooth broad bed. We stretched out side by side. As we grew drowsy we counted the stars. There weren’t many that night because the moon was so bright, like a bowl of liquid light. We remembered the glass star Harry had found inside the pipe. Idly, we wondered if the real star of Elba even existed. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fake, Patrick pointed out. I gazed at his face. He’d put his glasses on and looked very wise.

  Sleep crept from our toes to our ankles to our knees.

  “Poor Mom,” Harry said quietly.

  Patrick yawned. Harry and I yawned.

  “Let’s pretend we’re in a war,” I said.

  “OK,” Patrick replied. His eyes were closed. Sleep had reached our elbows. Our necks. We could hear the explosions of battle. Enemy soldiers were advancing, but we were well-hidden and well-armed. The calcite in Harry’s pocket was a bomb so powerful it could blow the entire island to smithereens. Imagine that. In the place where Elba had once risen out of the sea, there would only be water carpeted with the refuse of wood and metal, flesh and bone.