Lively Stones

First Peter scooped another little melon ball of flesh from his arm and fed it gently into Second Timothy’s joyful, upturned lips. When Second Timothy had licked his older brother’s fingers clean, First Peter went to the medicine cabinet for bandages and scissors. Right arm days are hard for a middle child.

When he’d neatly trimmed the dressing, First Peter gathered Second Timothy up to his lap with his pitted left arm. He ran his fingers through the boy’s dark hair, humming as the sea drove its armies against the rocks all round the house of stone, as Father’s calf lowed on the hill. First Peter had taught and fed and sent six siblings to the war in the western sky, and though he was a second son and a priest with a sacred duty, he did not want Second Timothy to go.

We should love universally and without favor, he knew, and we should disdain the things of the present world that is ever passing away. But he loved Second Timothy, all bruised knees and sharp shins and sweat and the smell of worms, and he did not want to see him go into the sky to fight the storm of birds and never return. In every other one of his siblings First Peter saw an absence already, already the passing away, but in Second Timothy there was only presence.

Second Timothy covered First Peter with kisses, pressed tenderly on the bandage when it slipped and the blood showed, then drummed a happy cadence on his older brother’s thigh. He jumped up and ran outside, a bright and lively blur against the seal-grey shingle, the pounding sea, the lowering stonewashed sky.

First Peter went to the door to watch him throwing stones against the grey surface of the water. His mother was on the porch with the girls, sewing the sharkskin suit all sleek and toothy that Second Timothy would wear to the west. It was nearly finished, he saw sadly, and First Timothy's hair had grown long and his head hollow. It would not be long. He went and blessed his mother, who looked up at him and hummed through stitched lips.

She patted a place by her knee and First Peter sat down beside her. He winced as she took her needle and sewed the holes in his right arm together. First Peter, when he was younger, thought that mothers must be happy and proud to see their children float away to war, must be relieved even that they were gone from this offensive spit of rock. But now with this heaviness in his own heart he thought that mothers might be saddened even by the ascension of their sons. He watched her fingers pressing the holes in his arms together and had the thought that she might be saddened even by him. He found himself wondering for the first time what things she kept sewn up in her heart. Of course she could never say. Maybe that was for the best.

First Peter went back inside. He cracked the door of the huge cold pot-bellied iron stove where three dozen archaeopteryxes fluttered madly in the ashes, banging their beaks against the storm-facing side and crying war, war, ever-war. First Peter fished out two dead ones and set them on the counter for the girls to pluck. There was one with a broken wing, still alive. A strange one, that First Peter had noticed before. He grabbed it and set it on the slate floor. It hopped toward the window on the far side of the house and First Peter shook his head in wonder.

Every archaeopteryx longed to fly to where the ravens and the crows held court, to the great maelstrom from which the devil birds strove to reach the Holy Isle, to kill what birds they could, as every ancestor wishes to kill his degenerate descendants. But this one kept stubbornly hopping toward the east. Watching it struggle across the floor in opposition to all reason, First Peter had a dizzy sense of things going wrong, of the order being broken. He prayed that it meant that things at last were changing, that this wounded creature was a harbinger, and that soon the whole swirling avian maelstrom would be swept away into the rising sun and scatter down in a hurtless shower of ash and feather.

Then the war would be over, and the skies would clear, and no more children would fly west. Perhaps First Peter's arms and legs and sides would have time to truly heal and would never again weep blood in the agonizing night. Perhaps even James would have rest then and walk across still waters as though on dry land. Perhaps the women's lips would be loosed at last, and they would sing along with every broken stone that the good days had arrived, and Father would come down from the pastures with the fatted calf, and there would be peace at last.

Or perhaps it was a stupid broken-winged antecessor-bird whose walnut brain had grown confused–through many desperate clangs against iron walls–about who even his enemies were, what even his final purpose was.

First Peter went up to the chapel room and prayed for their final victory. After a time, he heard James come into the house, and First Peter went down to him in the room with the big stone table. The skin beneath his elder brother’s tunic was still shining, though crusted here and there with water, salt, and blood. He smelt strongly of the sea. With his hook hand he pulled a wrapped bundle of sharkflesh from his creel, and First Peter set it out on plates for the two of them. James's huge arm muscles quivered with exhaustion as he ate. First Peter thought his whole body trembled with a storm inside.

"How did the ocean carry you?" First Peter asked, according to the old formula. Like the grim no-news of the war, James's answer never varied.

"By boat and not by faith," grunted James, his head bent to his meal. "But I got a big one today. Will nourish you and Third John and the rest well when Second Timothy's gone."

Something about the way he said it, something in the wet clay set of his eyes, made First Peter bold. He said, quietly, "I do not want Second Timothy to go."

James's head snapped up. First Peter could see where the shark's rough skin had rubbed one cheek raw as James had wrestled it down there in the depths.

"Did some sister's stitch slip to put such whispers in your mind?" James growled. "Or a demon come out of the sky to possess you?" His eyes narrowed. "Or did you come up with that on your own?"

First Peter's heart pounded: he knew his peril. The clocks in the room ticked ominously. Far away he could hear the fatted calf's tragic bleating, as if in warning or compassion for a fellow creature soon to suffer. The archaeopteryxes’ wings beat vainly against the walls of the stove.

"Forgive me, brother," he said quietly. "If we were never weak, we would not need faith."

James snorted. "Give yourself a weak moment down there, and you'll be food for the mako."

First Peter bowed his head, feeling fire in his arm, dull pain in his other limbs. His downcast eyes were on the sharkbite wounds on his brother’s big forearms. “It is hard,” he said, in contrition and sympathy together. “God knows it is hard.”

James slammed his hook down into the cracked wood of the table with a sound like thunder.

“That is why. Because it is hard. The storms are on the ocean and the sharks do not sleep. The hungry birds drive toward us in their millions, and they’ll pluck out our eyes and pick our bones clean. The war must go on. It must be won. If we are ever to see the good days, we cannot falter for even a moment. If we do, we are lost.”

"Of course," said First Peter, humbly. But he was James's confessor as well as his brother, and he knew that James wrestled with more than sharks out there beyond sight of land. Yet whatever was said in the chapel where James spoke true was locked as tight as if sewn behind a woman's lips. So he grabbed James’s hand, the one without the hook, and pressed the broken, chapped flesh with all the strength his own scooped-out arm could offer.

First Peter did not sleep well. He never did on right-arm days, and his mind was more troubled than usual. In dreams he was tossed like James’ boat on the unforgiving waves. High above it seemed a bird was calling. He could not tell what it was saying but knew that he wanted to follow where it led.

In the dark before Matins he went down to the stove where all the archaeopteryxes, save one, lay still. He opened the grate and pushed away the sleepily ruffling others until he found the foolish broken one and set it on the floor. It looked at him with big dark eyes, then started hopping toward the east wall of the stone house.

First Peter walked beside it until it reached the wall. The archaeopteryx fluttered vainly against the stone, getting once so high as the window where a swatch of moonlight shone dimly through the eternal fogs. It let out a soft cry, and First Peter thought it was the cry from his dreams. Worried that it might wake James or one of the boys, he picked up the struggling archaeopteryx and held it in his left arm. In the dark he stumbled on a loose slate and, catching himself with his right arm, reopened one of the melonball wounds. Wincing, still holding the archaeopteryx under the other arm, he went for the medicine cabinet, the bindings and the shears. Fighting the creature’s confused flutterings, he bound the broken wing.

Right arm, left arm, right thigh, left, right side, child's choice (Second Timothy always took a little happy nibble of First Peter's chest). Then Sunday rest and feast on archaeopteryx and shark. At confession James wept for the lack of faith that kept his nets empty and sent him falling into the selachian depths. First Peter gave him a light penance: to rewind and clean the clocks. James fulminated at this easy treatment, but First Peter could see how exhausted he was and refused to burden him further.

Two weeks went by and Second Timothy's hair grew that much longer, his head that much more hollow, everything nearly ready for the great day. First Peter found himself watching his brother’s every gesture, knowing how foolish it was to want to hold fast to something whose very value was in its lack of fixity. There was nothing of the eternal about Second Timothy. He was only here, only now. First Timothy's memory had grown faint in First Peter’s mind, but he remembered him as eager for the war, lusting for the sky and the chance to do violence against the birds and drive them away. Second Timothy was not eager for anything: all his joy was here already. He was like a boy standing in bright sunlight at noonday, with no shadow before or behind. This meant something to First Peter, although in truth he’d never known such noon sunlight, only the stormy blues and greys and greens, and far away to the west, the black and rising clouds of the maelstrom and the birds.

First Peter knew before anyone, except maybe Father, that the day had come. He was up before Matins again, and quiet as a ghost in the dark house under the drizzling rain, he went to the iron stove. Looking carefully around, he reached in and took out the fuddled archaeopteryx. With a single sharp gesture he cut the cast he'd made. The strong-healed wing buffeted First Peter’s face and caused him to twist, opening the wounds on his side, but he bore the pain patiently and didn’t make a sound as he shoved the archaeopteryx back in with its troubled fellows, just before the clocks began to chime.

In the blue half-rumor of morning, the whole family gathered before the slate house. Even James would not go out on the angry waters today. The iron stove had been dragged outside, and the archaeopteryxes screamed and fluttered in its belly. Second Timothy stood before the house with his family around him. His sharkskin suit shone sleekly even under the flat steel sky. Mother's eyes did not leave him, though in keeping with modesty there was not a hint of pride to be seen in her gaze. In his hands Second Timothy held the harpoon that everyone prayed would finally kill enough of the birds to end the war and bring the good days. A tether secured his right leg to a post of the house, that he might not drift away before his time.

One by one, the family came to kiss him and fill his head with their love.

First the girls came and pressed their stitched lips to his. First Peter watched Second Timothy's head swell and wondered that so much love could be held in the small girls' frames. He felt some sadness that he would never be able to ask them where it came from, but he put it away. One moment of weakness, James had said, and we are lost. Then the boys, youngest to oldest—Third John, Second Peter, Philemon—each kissed him and filled his head bigger and bigger with their love.

James gave his short rough kiss and made ready with the hook to sever the tethers. When Mother breathed her love into him, First Peter thought that Second Timothy's head might burst. Already it was far bigger than First Timothy’s had been, or any other child’s in memory. But when she pulled back, he was intact, his eyes distant dots, his smile wide as the ocean.

At last First Peter approached to give the sacred farewell. He drew in a breath and thought to fill his brother’s head with enough love to take him not only to the storm of birds but through it, around the world and right back to them. For an instant he thought that Second Timothy would open his mouth to say something, let all the love out and make them start all over again, but he didn't. First Peter worked his way around to Second Timothy’s ear and whispered, “It is a good day.”

Second Timothy’s balloon head bobbed, perhaps in assent, perhaps only in the salt-damp wind that streaked his cheeks.

First Peter dragged the stove forward, and as he removed each struggling, eager archaeopteryx, he tied one of its legs to a length of Timothy’s hair.

He began a hymn and everyone joined in, Mother and the girls humming in kazoo-like harmony. We give thee but thine own… High up on the hill they heard a deep bellowing blare, and all turned to see Father holding the fatted calf, blowing a horn from the calf's own sire and raising his hand in blessing. It was the thirtieth calf recorded since the war began, and each had grown old to give its horn without one beloved son returning.

All but the last archaeopteryx was tied to First Peter’s head, and a mighty wind rose from their westward-willing wings. First Peter tied the last one on and watched it stretch and unfurl. He nodded once to James and the hook, with two sharp tocks, cut the tethers. Second Timothy began to rise, and the archaeopteryxes strained toward the storm.

Quickly First Peter pulled the shears from their place of concealment in his sleeve and cut through Second Timothy's taut hair. The archaeopteryxes rose, startlingly unencumbered, into the sky and flew to the darkness in the west, squawking war, war, ever-war. Only one was tied to the still-smiling balloon boy. As Second Timothy rose upward it pulled him not west but east, to where the dawn was breaking, to where the clouds were opening like torn flesh.

First Peter heard the titan thunder of his father’s voice and his footfalls as he pounded down the hill. He heard the terrified bleating of the calf who thought perhaps his day had come at last. But First Peter was not watching them: his eyes were all on the brother he loved, drifting heretic and wild toward the broken eastern sky.

Then, for a moment, his sight was blocked by the anguished face of brother James, who raised his hook to rend his heart as he said, “Why, why, why?” and the sound from his mother’s straining lips was like the cry of that lonely bird from his dream. Something poured out of him onto the dark ground, but he felt no pain, only a great tiredness as though he had run a very long way, or been fighting a long time, though he alone of all Second Timothy’s elder brothers had never fought a thing. He could scarcely feel the mouths of his little brothers lapping up sacerdotal blood from his wounds old and new. He tried to think who now would be the second son, and who now would feed and teach them, and if they would now lose the war and be devoured by the circling birds and the gathering storm.

He did not think so. But thoughts would not stay with him, and his vision filled again with the sun like a fiery coin of red and gold or like the hosts of dawn arrayed in glory and the feathers of the single archaeopteryx like a rainbow in the morning, and most of all the huge smiling balloon face of his brother, floating high and far away.