The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate Page B

anything. I could hear our parents’ voices distantly from inside the house, but I couldn’t tell what they were saying. The sun was warm on my back. We both sat silent, together, enjoying everything. Daddy didn’t smell like beer. We had seen an electric eel. We’d all four had a good day. We sat there for a minute and tried to hold on to it. After a little while, Tick jumped up and said, “Come on. Reggie’s back.”
    We stuck our hands back into the bucket and disappeared back into our own world. We didn’t come inuntil Mom called us for dinner. Tick went to bed that night clutching his eel. And just before I fell asleep I said to my silent room, to wherever God was, quiet and fierce, “I am gonna go down there. I am.”
    Later, it hurt to remember that day. But I’d had it. We’d had it. It’s worth something to have a day like that, a day that an angel comes to call.

Six
    My father’s fortieth birthday started the same way that many of our Saturdays did: with Tick and me sitting in the upstairs hall near our parents’ door, playing together. One of our favorite games involved pretending to be eagles. It was a pretty simple game. We put our blankets on the floor and swirled them up into piles that looked kind of like nests and then we sat there, sometimes for a couple of hours, pretending to be majestic western birds. This mostly consisted of inventing and then telling each other about our various birdlike adventures and activities. Our interest in the stories we made up never waned. After Saturday-morning cartoons went into reruns, we’d even abandon the TV in order to play. I especially liked to play on the landingnear my parents’ room, so I could keep an eye on things—I was ever vigilant.
    There had been no beer since before our trip to the aquarium a month before. Daddy came home on time every night and had dinner with the family and then read
Sounder
to Tick and me and told us how much it reminded him of his childhood—the grinding poverty and the one-room shack and the white people who were both curiously absent and whose rules dictated almost everything that ever happened. I remember looking at him after that like he was from another country. I couldn’t imagine my big, stolid father a barefoot boy chasing after chickens. The night he finished reading it he said, “You see how those folks had nothing, right? That’s why I want you both to get a scholarship to a private school. Only way I got out of that was through learning. You can go even farther. Nothing will hold you back if you keep learning.” Then he hugged us both very hard. For that month, Tick and I fell asleep to our parents’ soft voices conversing or the silence of them reading together—they didn’t even watch much TV. Things were calm, but Tick still came into my bedroom every night and pushed Purrface out of the way and slept there himself, curled up like the cat he’d displaced.
    â€¢ • •
    T HE MORNING OF MY father’s birthday, Mom came out of the bedroom, tying her robe around her. We looked up from our game the minute she came out.
    â€œWhat is all this?” she asked.
    â€œWe’re eagles,” said Tick, grinning. “These are our nests.”
    I held up a pink rubber ball that was swaddled in my nest. “This is my egg. It’s gonna hatch any day now.” I cawed—a quick, sharp scraggly sound—and Mom laughed. “What was that, Josie?”
    â€œI’m the mother eagle protecting my egg. I gotta look out for it, right?”
    â€œRight.” She rubbed both of our heads. I loved when she was relaxed and affectionate like this. She smiled down at us. “Listen, it’s your daddy’s birthday so we have a lot to do. Can you two be my helpers today?” We both nodded. “Good,” she said. “Well, little eagles, you need to clean up this mess. Breakfast will be