The child was watching the fish in the pond, thinking that he would not stop, now that he had begun. He wanted to move the fish around, to remove them from their various prisons, to interrupt their monotonous, seasonal journey from pool to tank and back again.

Why should they not have the rest of the garden, the rest of the world?

Why should they not have the dangerous sun as well as the soft, warm water?

The word pool spread over the child’s brain, soft fins at his temples and then as an echo and then as a spiral.

When he hit the surface of the water with his palm, the fish moved in a jerky, hysterical fashion, turning sharp corners, their paths becoming rectilinear.

Gone the gentle undulations, the swishing of membrane through liquid. Enter the straight paths and intersections of fear.

The child looked at the drops of water on his palm. Suns in every bead of it and colours non-existent in the world.

The word world moved lazily behind his forehead, followed by the word water. And the word weep was in there too, trying to come forward.

His mother was working on the other side of the garden. Mud on her shoes, canvas gloves covering her hands. Digging to set in marigolds. Rust and yellow.

The child moved towards her, carrying a small burlap sack full of toy soldiers in one hand, his rabbit in the other. When he was near his mother he began to arrange the members of his tiny army in order of size, making a clucking noise that had nothing at all to do with soldiers. Perhaps, Maud speculated, the sound had something to do with horses. She would, she decided, buy him some toy horses. Hoping for the day when the syllables he spoke coincided with his activities.

By the time she had set in four plants he had moved away from the soldiers who remained behind in a rectangular block, perfectly organized upon the lawn. Maud paused to watch her child’s progress across the yard, knowing that he would stop, once again, at the small rockbound pool.

He would stay there, more than likely, for the rest of the afternoon.

Pure sun today. Maud looked across the length of the property up the hill to the graveyard where the older stones gleamed from between clumps of cedars and the trunks of giant oaks. Not too much activity there. No funerals. A few widows perhaps, dragging yards of crape and carrying watering cans. This desperate desire to make something grow out of earth that held someone’s bones. Maud kept her gardening close to the house, had not planted even a single geranium at the spot where Charles was buried, flanked by his parents. Pansies for her little friends in the children’s hearse were more important. They had their own little garden right here.

She had visited Charles’ grave only once; a strange, black-veiled creature she had been then, groping blindly from stone to stone, empty-handed, struggling along in her cocoon of crape. As she had expected, several spiders had made their webs between the marble columns on the front of the stone, from wingtip to wingtip of the angel that stood on top of it and in the grass adjacent. It had started to rain and, concerned about her already greying skin, Maud had hurried away from the spot, convinced that all was well there. She hoped to God that no over-zealous caretaker would decide to remove the webs, believing in her heart of hearts that the ground for miles around would shudder with Charles’ wrath were that to take place. She thought also that, were it possible, she would have an entire sepulchre made for him from the webs of energetic spiders. An odd image this had produced in her imagination; a gauzy tentlike structure, festooned with wild, uncultivated roses, quivering in the breeze. More like the cradle of an enchanted princess than the grave of an ordinary undertaker.

Now, in her own garden, she began digging again with her little spade and within seconds struck something hard, unyielding. Subsequent attempts to budge the object produced the sound of metal against metal. Finally, she was able to slip the spade beneath the object’s underside and lever it out of the ground to the side of the flower-bed where it rolled for a few inches before coming to a stop. Another cannon-ball. It left a smooth, spherical indentation in the earth where it had rested for some seventy-five years. Maud placed the roots of four or five marigolds there and quickly set the soil in around them. She would have one of the men come out to fetch the cannonball, put it in the barn with the others. She hadn’t the least idea what ammunition such as this was meant to accomplish, whether it was meant to explode, to cause fire, or to shatter bones. Whatever the case, she would keep it for the military historian who lived in the hotel across the street. The one with the strange young wife who some said had gone to live in the woods alone. Maud, however, had seen her several times during the winter and so was inclined to discredit the story.

The child clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, imitating horses. Then he breathed through his clenched teeth, imitating the wind in the poplar trees.

Her task completed, Maud leaned the spade against the wall of the house and began to walk towards the boy. As she got nearer, she saw that he was talking to the carp, moving his mouth in a repetitive fish-like manner. She hoped whatever he was saying would somehow relate to fish, or at least to marine life in general – even to water.

Then she picked out his words on the breeze.

“Keeping,” he was saying, looking now at his mother, something approaching contempt altering the features of his small face. “Keeping, keeping, keeping.”