One Marble by Anna Eplin

The creek water chilled Harl’s bare feet as he picked his way over to his rock, a large brown one that jutted up out of the water and had a flat top. Right here, where the bush-lined banks rose up high and the creek turned, no one could see him.

He pulled his feet up out of the water and shivered under his hand-me-down denim jacket. It was colder than usual for early April in West Virginia. At least, that’s what he’d heard his dad say to his mom yesterday. His dad said a lot of things that weren’t true, Harl had figured out during nine long years of confusion. But either way, he would rather wait for the school bus out here in the cold than be trapped in the house with them.

Harl stared at the water, his mind feeling as gray and blurry as the overcast sky reflected by the creek. Somewhere behind those clouds, the sun was coming up over the mountains, as it had to, just like the robins twittering in the grass beyond the creek bank had to hunt for worms, just like the water from the recent spring rains had to flow down the creek bed, just like a body had to breathe. There was no other choice.

Harl tucked his bare, cold feet under him on the rock and watched a salamander squirm past in the creek, followed by some minnows. After a while he spotted a crawdad digging around in the mud. He didn’t try to catch it, though. These days he just didn’t have the heart for that. He’d rather let the poor little guy be.

As he watched the crawdad, his eyes became aware of a small spherical object lodged under a stone in the mud nearby. He got up and made his way over. Careful not to disturb the crawdad, he reached his hand in the water and freed the object from its prison, then washed it off in the water. He stood up and stared at the blue-swirled marble in his hand.

His heart began to beat faster. He knew this marble. It was one from the set they used to play with. Somehow he’d forgotten all about that. What had happened to the other marbles?

He stowed the treasure in his pants pocket and began to search the creek. He waded up and down, turned over rocks, and dug into the mud with his fingers, but he didn’t find any more marbles.

The heavy feeling in his chest that had become so familiar began to settle back over him, making him realize that it had disappeared in the first place while he’d been searching. That was something new.

The rumble of the school bus engine shook him from his reflections. He waded out of the creek and headed up the hill. He stopped by the back door of the house to grab his backpack and put on his socks and shoes, which he’d stowed there. Then, feeling like he was still climbing up a hill even though this part of the ground was flat, he trudged around the house to meet the school bus.

#

“Look, it’s the nerd,” said Billy Angston, as Harl took his seat on the bus.

“Is he a nerd or a sissy?” said Greg Teller in mock thoughtfulness.

“Both, duh,” replied Billy. They laughed.

Harl looked out the window at the dirt road and put his hand in his pocket. His fingers clutched the blue marble.

#

“Children, silence! Thank you. Let’s rehearse the four times table.”

Harl felt like banging his head on the scratched-up wooden desk in front of him. He already had the multiplication tables memorized up to twelve and knew how to multiply larger numbers beyond that. But in this chilly, mildew-smelling classroom, he’d found that blending in as much as possible was best for avoiding both the teacher’s unpredictable ire and the other kids’ teasing.

Right when his mind felt so itchy that he thought he might explode, he suddenly remembered the marble. He put his hand in his pocket and rolled it around in his fingers as he thought about possible places where the other marbles could be at home. It was almost like having a mystery to solve. He began making a search plan in his head.

#

Thoughts of the marbles got him through the rest of the day. When he finally got home, after taking off his shoes by the door as he was supposed to, he ran up to his bedroom, threw his backpack on the bed, and grabbed his flashlight from its spot beside his pillow. Now he could start searching.

First, he got down on his hands and knees and looked under the bed with the flashlight.

He pulled out various items—a deflated football, an old box of jigsaw puzzles, a wadded-up sleeping bag, and the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots game they had gotten for Christmas the year before—until he could see all the way to the wall. He shined his flashlight’s beam on dust-covered socks, two abandoned plastic army men, candy wrappers, and even a disgustingly moldy piece of bread, which he retrieved using a towel. Maybe sometime soon he would do a thorough cleaning of the room.

Then he examined the similarly gross space under the dresser; then he dug all the way to the bottom of the closet. But he didn’t find the marbles.

He knew he wouldn’t find them on his bookshelf since he used it all the time, but he looked anyway, carefully moving out each book and making sure to keep all the Hardy Boys in order.

Finally, there was only one other place in the bedroom to look. Harl really didn’t want to look there. It took him several minutes of pacing around and fidgeting until he could finally work up the nerve to do it.

In a quick motion, before he could chicken out, he climbed up the ladder to the top bunk of the bed, where he hadn’t been since last fall. No, I can’t do this, he realized suddenly. After taking one glance around for the marbles—no luck—he hurriedly scrambled back down the ladder.

Then he ran downstairs and out of the house.

#

He spent the next hour searching the creek again, extending his search range and also looking under each bush and shrub along the creek bank. Still nothing.

Back in the house, he searched in the hall closet, under the living room sofa, behind the dining room cabinet, and everywhere else that seemed a possibility. His mother became aware of his unusual behavior and turned down the volume of her radio in the kitchen, where she was frying chicken, long enough to say, “What in sam heck are you doin’?”

“I found a marble in the creek,” said Harl, holding it up to show her, “and I was trying to find the rest of the set we used to have. Do you know where it is?”

“Do I look like a Five and Dime store clerk to you? Run along now and let me be.” Harl did, closing the kitchen door behind him as he went out.

#

He resumed his search by poking through the various sheds and junk piles around the property, steering clear of the muddiest spots of their yard. Still no sign of the marbles. He even ventured into the doorway of his father’s cluttered main tool shed and picked through a stack of rusted hand saws, hammers, and assorted screws to peer at the sawdust-strewn floor.

It was a long shot that the marbles would be in here, but still possible. He remembered Pa working with Bert in here a few times. He had never been allowed. He was always too little—and too unmanly.

An urgency mixed with a sense of reckless rebellion propelled Harl onward to look even deeper in the shed, even as his chest began to squeeze tighter and tighter with disappointment. By this point he had looked virtually everywhere else on the property. How could a whole set of marbles just suddenly be gone?

As he was walking out of the shed, Pa’s beat-up Ford pickup truck rounded the corner. Harl’s heart started pounding and he took off running. Maybe Pa hadn’t seen him near the shed.

“Stop right there, you little rodent!” Pa’s voice thundered across the yard. Harl stopped.

“What were you doin’ in my shed?” Pa yelled as he strode toward Harl. “You just got no respect, do ya?”

Harl tucked his arms close to his body and said, “I was just looking for our old marbles. I can’t find them anywhere.”

“Well, they ain’t in my tool shed, now, are they? You stupid little shit. Get over here.” Pa grabbed Harl, bent him over, and began to hit him hard on his bottom. The pain brought tears to his eyes, and with Pa’s tight grip around his middle, he had to fight to breathe. At one point, his vision suddenly went black, even though his eyes were open.

Finally Pa stopped and let go abruptly of Harl, who collapsed to the muddy ground, sucking in air. Pa stomped back toward the house and slammed the door on his way in.

Harl stayed down for a while, catching his breath. He didn’t want to cry, but a few unauthorized tears spilled out of his eyes and mingled with the brown spring mud.

#

Finally, Harl got up and ran down the hill behind the house, his bare toes squishing indentations into the soft earth as he ran. He startled a chipmunk and a cardinal in the bushes near the creek, and a few frogs plopped into the water as his feet splashed in, but he paid them no mind. He didn’t look for marbles, either. He scrambled through the creek until he reached his rock. Then he pulled up his knees and curled himself into a tight ball.

After a minute or so, Harl suddenly reached down and pulled the marble out of his pocket. Then he threw the marble as far as he could down the creek. He watched it splash and disappear. What use was only one marble?

“Where are you, goddammit!” he suddenly yelled. A startled sparrow burst up from one of the bushes on the creek bank.

Harl pulled on his hair and squeezed his eyes shut. Where are you? The words echoed in his mind.

Then, the dam that held all his tears broke, releasing a rush of sobs.

His brother had been his only ally, the one person he could count on to be kind to him and to defend him. Everyone else in his life seemed to hate him unconditionally. Now, since that horrific day last fall when the speeding car had hit Bert’s bike, Harl was alone.

He cried until he could barely breathe. At least down here no one could see and ridicule him for crying. Or worse, hint that he was to blame for what had happened, as his parents had taken to doing, because Harl had asked Bert if he could ride bikes with him that day instead of hanging out with his friends, and Bert had agreed.

It all seemed like a nightmare from which he just couldn’t manage to wake up. It couldn’t be that Bert was really dead. It just couldn’t. Surely he was about to come splashing up the creek and see Harl there, all balled up on the rock, and ask why he was crying.

Because you’re gone, Harl would say. Because now I have no one who doesn’t hurt me.

And Bert would say, “Silly, I’m right here.”

But he wasn’t there. Harl opened his eyes and looked at the spot where he’d imagined Bert appearing. No Bert.

Harl realized it was the same spot where he’d thrown the marble. Moving as if in a dream, he got up and waded over to the spot. He found the marble. He gripped it tightly and returned to the rock.

A drizzly rain began, but Harl didn’t care. He let the rain soak into him and numbly watched the raindrops plunking onto the water, stirring it up and making it look almost fuzzy.

As he watched, clutching the marble in his fist, he had the weird sense that the chronic fuzziness and fog of his mind was somehow transferring itself to the water, allowing his mind to clear for the first time in months.

Bert was gone. Harl was alone. And this situation was not going to change.

So he would have to, instead. He didn’t know how yet; there was certainly no way he could transform his personality into a copy of Bert’s sunny fearlessness. But he knew now that he couldn’t count on anyone else to be there for him. He would have to be one marble, alone, but hard and unbreakable.

He didn’t know if he could do that, but he was going to have to try, for himself and for Bert.

After several more minutes on his rock, Harl climbed out of the creek and back up the hill to the house, holding on hard to the marble in his fist.

 

Anna Eplin is a writer from West Virginia. On her blog Whatever the River Brings, she writes poetry, essays, and songs, while off-screen she writes novels, children’s books, and other stories. She’s also a mother of three children, with whom she enjoys romping in the hills, woods, and creeks of their West Virginia home. You can read her blog at annaeplin.com.

 

**Featured image credit: Dario Achirica, Unsplash