FERN AND I were down by the creek. She was standing on a tree branch above me, bouncing it up and down. She was wearing a pleated tartan skirt, the kind that needs a large pin to hold it together in the front. Fern’s had no pin, so the skirt flapped like wings around her legs. She was wearing nothing else. Her potty training had improved and she’d been out of diapers for months.
On the down bounce, I could sometimes, by jumping, reach her feet. That was the game we were playing—she would dip the branch and I would jump. If I touched her feet, I won. If I didn’t, the win was hers. We weren’t keeping score, but we were both pretty happy, so we must have been about even.
But then she tired of the game and climbed out of my reach. She wouldn’t come down, only laughed and dropped leaves and twigs on me, so I told her I didn’t care. I went off purposefully to the creek, as if I had important business there, though it was too late in the year for tadpoles, too early in the day for fireflies. On the ledge, I found the cat and her kittens.
I took the gray one and I didn’t give him back even though his mother was crying for him. I took him to Fern. It was a way of boasting. I knew how much Fern would want that kitten, but I was the one who had him.
She swung down as fast as she could. She signed for me to give him to her, and I told her he was mine but I would let her hold him. The moon-eyed mother had always been skittish around me, but she’d never gone anywhere near Fern. She would never, even in the hormonal soup of motherhood, have allowed Fern to take her kitten. The only way Fern would ever have gotten her hands on that little gray was if I gave him to her.
The kitten continued to mewl. The mother arrived, and I could hear at a little distance the two blacks down by the creek, bawling on the ledge where she’d dropped them. Her hair was up and so was Fern’s. What happened next happened fast. The mother cat was hissing and spitting. The gray kitten in Fern’s hand was crying loudly. The mother struck at Fern with her claws. And Fern swung the tiny perfect creature against a tree trunk. He dangled silently from her hand, his mouth loose. She opened him with her fingers like a purse.
I watched her do so in my memory, and I heard Lowell saying again how the world runs on the fuel of an endless, fathomless animal misery. The little blacks were still crying in the distance.
I took off, hysterical, for the house to get our mother, make her come and fix this, fix the kitten, but I ran smack into Lowell, literally right into him, which knocked me to the ground and skinned up my knees. I tried to tell him what had happened, but I was incoherent with it and he put his hands on my shoulders to calm me. He said to take him to Fern.
She was not where I’d left her, but squatting on the bank by the creek. Her hands were wet. The cats, living and dead, were nowhere to be seen.
Fern leapt up, grabbed Lowell by the ankles, somersaulted clownishly through his legs, her freckled butt exposed and then decorously covered as her skirt fell back into place. There were burrs in the hair on her arms. I pointed those out to Lowell. “She’s hidden the kitten in the brambles,” I said, “or she’s thrown him into the creek. We have to find him. We have to take him to the doctor.”
“Where is the kitten?” Lowell asked Fern both aloud and with his hands and she ignored that, sitting on his toes, arms wrapped around his leg. She liked to shoe-ride that way. I could do the same with our father, but was too big for Lowell’s feet.
Fern rode a few steps and then bounced off with her usual feckless joy. She grabbed a branch, swinging away and back again, dropping to the ground. “Chase me,” she signed. “Chase me.” It was a good show but not a great one. She knew that she’d done something wrong and was only pretending otherwise. How could Lowell not see that?
He sat on the ground and Fern came, rested her chin on his shoulder, blew in his ear. “Maybe she hurt some cat by accident,” Lowell offered. “She doesn’t know how strong she is.”
This was intended as a sop to me; he didn’t believe it. What Lowell believed, what Lowell has always, to this very day, believed, was that I’d made up the whole thing just to get Fern in trouble. There was no body, no blood. Everything was fine here.
I searched through the ragweed, purslane, dandelion, and horse nettle. I searched through the rocks in the creek and Lowell didn’t even help me look. Fern watched from behind Lowell’s shoulder, her huge, amber eyes glittering and, or so I thought, gloating.
I thought Fern looked guilty. Lowell thought I did. He was right about that. I was the one who’d taken the kitten from his mother. I was the one who’d given him to Fern. It was my fault what had happened. Only it wasn’t all my fault.
I can’t blame Lowell. At five years old, I’d already established a reliable reputation for making things up. My aim was to delight and entertain. I didn’t outright lie so much as add drama, when needed, to an otherwise drab story. The distinction was frequently lost. The Little Girl Who Cried Wolf, our father used to call me.
The more I searched, the angrier Lowell got. “Don’t you tell anyone else,” he said. “Do you hear me, Rosie? I mean it. You’ll get Fern in trouble and I’ll hate you. I’ll hate you forever. I’ll tell everyone you’re a big fat liar. Promise you won’t say anything.”
I truly meant to keep that promise. The specter of Lowell hating me forever was a powerful one.
But keeping quiet was beyond my capabilities. It was one of the many things Fern could do that I could not.
A few days later, I wanted to go into the house and Fern wouldn’t let me. It was another game to her, an easy game. Though much littler than I, she was also faster and stronger. The one time I got by, she grabbed my hand as I went past, yanked me back so hard I felt a pop in my shoulder. She was laughing.
I burst into tears, calling for our mother. It was the effortlessness of it all, Fern’s easy win, that had me crying in rage and frustration. I told my mother Fern had hurt me, which had happened often enough that, since it wasn’t a serious injury, it wasn’t a serious allegation. Children roughhoused until someone got hurt; it was the way families worked. Mothers, having warned everyone that this was what would happen, were generally more irritated than concerned.
But then I added that I was scared of Fern.
“Why in the world would you be scared of little Fern?” Mom asked.
And that’s when I told.
And that’s when I got sent to my grandparents.
And that’s when Fern got sent away.