War in the air, and yet the air is soft. Rotting jasmine and ripe skunk cabbage. Frogs in the sawgrass marsh. The basso profundo statement of a water buffalo, out of sight somewhere upstream. From farther off, a pock-pockity-pock. Not rain, but human hands skittering across drumheads of alligator hide. It sounds random unless you know the grammar. Just a pockity-pockity, while dawn drifts in like an afterthought.
Some of the family take this in. Most do not. The father sunk in his devotions, eyes closed, fingers moving over prayer beads. The mother at her daily rinse, naked to the waist, while a mist stands stationary above the sliding water. Mist speckled with midges that glint and vanish.
The older child is lollygagging on a blanket set squarely in the mud. She’s no baby, she can poke about when she wants. She can run when she remembers about running. At the age of three and spare change, maybe four. Certainly old enough. Though often she just sits, sucking her thumb and looking about her. She does this whenever her parents are distracted, which means frequently. She looks as if she is supervising the world, though like any child she is merely curious.
Some children are more alert than others. This girl is one of them. Elphie, the Nanny calls her. Elphie, get down from there. Elphie, mind your tongue. Elphie, get your finger out of—Elphie.
A green child in a green green world. Maybe green is as invisible to her as concepts of time, gravity, justice. She’s only a child on a blanket. Through the haze the sun bleeds, a wound leaking through gauze. She hears the dip of paddles from some unseen canoe down the river. Two bugs meet on the satin edging of her cotton playground but as they’re of different congregations they pass by without acknowledgment. One is the color of new-split bamboo and the other wetly black.
The mother, the father, the child, and Nanny. Also the team of bearers and guides.
Something has caused this day to lift out of the morass of everyness. The girl hears a cry across the water, a human cry, as of someone startled. The sound of a human being set upon by some unimaginable aspect of the morning.
Her father concentrates his grip on his beads and screws his eyes more tightly closed. Her mother shifts a shawl to cover one of her breasts, but only one; even on a dangerous morning something might be seducible. Nanny comes to squat upon the far edge of Elphie’s blanket. She finds Elphie’s hand and holds it without remark. This as much for her own comfort as for the child’s, Elphie being the kind of person who doesn’t elicit the consoling gesture.
War is in the air. She has caught the hint, though she can’t yet know what war is. She takes her thumb out of her mouth and dries it along the smooth, smudged blanket. Nanny says, “Oh, I think that was a morning dove, don’t you?” A lie about what peace sounds like. If there is such a thing. Elphie glances at Nanny but keeps her own counsel. Well, that’s a bit rich; Elphie has no counsel to keep at the time. She will come to know Nanny as something of a failure.
The black bug has gotten interested in a loose pink thread on the blanket. Elphie watches it. “Oooh, the nasty,” says Nanny, and flicks it away. “This place. And its bugs. Melena, dress yourself. Even the backlands abhor a harlot.”
Elphie won’t remember any of this actual talking. She is slow to speak herself, according to family legend. But with what other tool does she have to consider the start of everything? Words, words alone, and the lustrous peril of the wicked world.