2

 

THAT EVENING SARA picked at her boiled greens and fresh catfish fried in crispy butter. She couldn’t get the laputa bird out of her thoughts. It jumped and swirled and swam, claiming all her focus. When she judged Granny was done eating and ready to take her place in the old rocking chair on the porch, the way she did every night, Sara knew the time was right.

“What were they, Granny? I saw them, but . . . what were they?” The dark, muggy air seemed to draw in closer, as though it wanted to hear the answer, too.

“The laputa? Why, it’s a harbinger, child.”

“A harbinger?”

“That’s right. A harbinger is like an introduction, tellin’ of things to come.”

Sara frowned. “A harbinger of what?”

Granny rocked in a slow, methodical rhythm, her gaze darting about as if she were following the movements of things in the swamp and the thick, night air. Sara had often wondered about Granny’s active eyes. Even when she’d be telling her stories, her eyes were never still. Sara had decided it was just one of those things old folks did; some peculiarity that she rather hoped she’d never understand. Not first-hand, anyway. Now she wondered if there was more to it than that. Now she wondered what other strange creatures might live unseen in Granny’s bayou.

“Laputa is a harbinger of knowledge.”

“What knowledge?”

“Knowledge of the truth of things. Understandin’ of the power that the Deep Places have to offer.”

“But that’s just it! I don’t understand, Granny.” Sara wanted a simple answer. She wanted to hear that that underwater bird was some rare, strange species that no one had officially discovered yet. She wanted to hear that it wasn’t a bird at all; just some kind of odd, sort of musical fish. She most definitely did not want to hear that it was the beginning of something. Especially when that something made her skin shudder and bump in a cold, shivery way.

“Anything I tell you now, child, won’t mean much.” Granny sighed. “The understandin’ will come in its own time.” She focused intently on Sara. “But nothing will come at all if you decide you don’t want to go any further.”

“But . . .”

“No buts, girl. The next thing you have to do is choose. Do you want to learn more, or do you want to return to your home and your family full time? No more summer visits. Or do you want to learn the swamp-works, like me, and my mama before that, and so on and so on back to the Beginnin’?”

“I don’t even know what that means, Granny. Beginning of what? Beginning when and where?” Sara was having a hard time figuring out where all this was headed. She felt as though she’d suddenly become an exchange student in her own life. Words that had nice, solid, comfortable meanings had been turned strange, foreign, and ungraspable. Sara pulled her knees up to her chin and squinched in on herself to become as small and tight and safe as possible.

All this talk about choices was hard. So far in her young life Sara hadn’t been allowed to make many choices at all. Everything had been decided for her based on what her parents thought was best, or on the pecking order between her and Amy-Dean and Michael. The only time Sara got to make a choice about anything was when it wasn’t important or didn’t seem to matter to anyone else.

The choice Granny was talking about sounded as though it would matter a great deal, and not just to Sara, but to everyone. It sounded big. Too big for her—a small, plain girl—to choose correctly, or choose right now!

Granny sensed the turmoil raging through Sara. “Don’t fret, child,” she said in soothing tones. “You don’t need to speak tonight. You’ll be here a few more days yet. Just keep your eyes and your mind open.”

Granny creaked her way out of her rocking chair, glanced once more at Sara, then made her way across the old porch and through the front door to prepare for bed.

Sara could hear her tossing the leavings from their dinner off the back deck for the fish and ‘gators to feed on, and then washing dishes in the big, galvanized bucket filled with soapy water kept for just that task. The clinking and clanking finally stopped and it sounded as though Granny had settled into her big, Spanish moss bed. Sara sighed, unfolded herself, and went inside, too.

There were no mirrors in Granny’s house, which had made Sara uncomfortable at first when she had to brush her teeth or hair. But tonight it didn’t matter at all. Her mind was a whirlwind of worry, confusion, and an excited kind of thrill, too. As she dipped a dented, tin cup into the boiled-water barrel to rinse her teeth, she was struck by how, in a heartbeat, Granny’s house, nestled in the swamp, had become the least boring place she’d ever been.

Sara brushed her normally straight, brown hair. She ran her hand down its length on one side, feeling a little wave and frizz that was only there during her time in the humid air of the swamp. Pulling a lock in front of her eyes, she wondered for a moment what it looked like here. Once, during her first visit, she’d complained and demanded to know why Granny couldn’t have even a tiny shard of a mirror just to help a girl keep herself neat. Granny had looked at her as though she were announcing the sky had cracked in two.

“Mirrors are only reflections,” was her cryptic reply. “If things go the way I hope, you’ll be learnin’ to see the real, not the image.”

Sara let go of her hair. She dropped the hand holding the brush to her side. Seeing the laputa bird chased her thoughts around and around, sending them off to places they’d never been before. If the laputa hadn’t flown (swum?) by just as she was filling the old bucket, if it had been there all along, that would mean that the change was in Sara, in how she was seeing things. Could that be what Granny had meant all these years about keeping her eyes open?

She put her hairbrush down on the heavy, wooden plank that served as a kitchen counter. With careful, measured steps she walked to the window overlooking the back deck. She peered out into the night and felt the breath rush from her lungs. She gripped the windowsill to keep herself steady. For an instant it felt as though the whole cabin tilted beneath her feet.

Something was different!

Sara had seen the swamp at night plenty of times. She’d seen it in the rain, the wind, under a full moon, and in deep darkness when only starlight touched the foliage with faint, cold silver. She’d rarely been able to make out any details beyond the strange, dark trees with leaves like black holly that surrounded Granny’s shack, or the long, dank skeins of Spanish moss dripping onto the sodden ground. Now she looked out on a bayou grown alien.

A faint, pearly-green glow picked out the features of the terrain with a delicate, sparkling grace. It wasn’t intense or bright, but it trapped Sara’s breath with its strangeness.

“Granny? GRANNY!!” she called, unable to look away from the eerie landscape.

“Hmmmpff? Wha’?” Sara could hear her grandmother’s muffled, sleep-dulled voice and the rustling of the moss as she heaved herself to a sitting position to see what all the ruckus was about.

“Granny! Everything’s different! There’re lights in the swamp all of a sudden! What is it?”

Granny craned her neck and looked toward Sara standing before the back deck window. “Oh, that,” she grumbled in what Sara considered an inappropriately calm response. “Go to sleep, girl. Nothin’ there in the night that weren’t there in the day. We’ll talk more in the mornin’.”

With that, Granny plumped her moss-and-lichen pillow, pulled her threadbare blanket up to her chin, and curled herself into a comfortable position facing the wall.

After a few moments, Sara realized that staring and blinking and rubbing her eyes wasn’t helping anything. She padded to her bed on the far side of the cabin and huddled beneath her own blanket, keeping a wary eye on the greenly glistening bit of swamp visible through the window.

After a time, that watchful eye blinked longer and slower, until it closed on its own.