PICNIC
The water under the trees was clear light brown. I can see it now, cool and still in the
shadow of the bridging trunks, and clear brown as the tea that mother used to
bring us when we were small and sick abed.
A little
further along, the creek would bend and dip and trickle in riffles of white
foam over greenly mossed stone and velvet brown mussel shells. We hunted for live mussels to pry open the
shells and poke around the slippery occupant for a possible pearls. We never found any pearls, but always the
gold of sunlight glinting through the cool brown shadows.
Sometimes
we emerged from the dappled shade scratched and bleeding from a brush with the
low hanging branches, or with toe stubbed or cut by the sharp fragments in the
creek bed. But the only real tragedy
occurred on our very last picnic at that meadow, for after that, we could never
go back again.
The kitten
was small and gray and soft and fast as a fluff of milkweed. My sister had wheedled it just the last week
from a farmer’s wife who lived about two miles down the road from our
house. Sister carried it very tenderly
all the long dusty walk home, cradled kangaroo-style inside her blouse. She dressed it in doll clothes and wheeled it
around in her little reed carriage. She
fed it milk from a saucer and made it a bed on the porch in an old box.
On this
particular Sunday, she persuaded Mother, against Mother’s better judgment, to
let her bring the kitten along on our picnic, and she tied a pink ribbon on its
neck with a tinkle bell so it wouldn’t get lost.
While we
were wading in the cool brown water of the creek and slipping around on the
slimy mossy stones, Mother and the hired girl were spreading out the picnic
cloth on the grass and setting out the covered bowls of fried chicken and
slivered raw vegetables and apples and bread-and-butter sandwiches. The kitten catnapped under the biggest box
elder and would not go near the water.
When lunch
was done, the leftovers were packed away and the paper plates and napkins and
trash stacked in a tidy pile to burn. We
cut willow switches and toasted marshmallows over the little fire. When the last marshmallow was eaten and the
last stubborn embers doused with brown water from the creek, and we were
already to go home after a perfectly wonderful day, sister remembered her
little cat.
“Here,
kitty,” she called. “Time to go home
now. Here kitty!”
The kitten
wouldn’t come. We never were quite sure
exactly what happened. First it danced
and pranced around the meadow, daintily hopping from stone to stump to
flower. Then, suddenly, bell tinkling,
it ran up a tall tamarack . . . branch stub to branch stub to the very top . .
. and then it whipped around up there like a witch on a broomstick, all the
while screeching out the wildest caterwauling.
Quietly,
Mother herded us into the old LaSalle and we drove away in the dusty
sunlight. And, as I said, we could never
go back to picnic at that meadow.
Carla Harris
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