“Ooh! Put this in the bag!”
“What is it?”
The man took it from the boy and turned it over in his hands. The boy simply shrugged.
The man smiled. “This is a pine cone. It came from one of these trees.”
“So we can eat it? Like a fruit?”
“Not really. It’s more like a seed.”
“A seed? It’ll grow up to be another tree?” The boy turned it over in his hands, squinting to inspect it from every conceivable angle. “Should we leave it? I want there to be more trees. Lots more.” A worried look came over his face, painted red by sun and glossy with sweat from the day’s hike.
The man smiled. “Not quite like a seed. It carries seeds. We’ll look it up when we get home. It’s alright to take it.” The boy slid the cone into the canvas bag slung over his father’s shoulder and they continued on.
The boy frequently ran ahead of his father, scouting for other hidden treasures: the tattered grey feather of a gull, a soft polished stone, a small piece of wood he insisted was the fossilized bone of some undiscovered animal. The terrain became sandier and sloped downhill, and the man began to detect that distinct alchemy of smells that always accompany the crash of waves – seaweed and dead fish and salt and clean air.
“What kind of seed is this? Is it a nut?” He held it up for his father to inspect it. It was about the diameter of a half dollar coin, a distinct point on one end, covered with abundant ridges and grooves – an inflexible auburn prune.
“Not a nut. It’s a…I think this is a peach pit. All dried out.”
“Peach pit? Like, from inside?”
“Yeah, you know, like how you can eat all of a peach except for that middle part. That’s called the pit. Plums have them, too. They’re like really big seeds.”
The boy took the no-longer-foreign object back and inspected it closer. “So it grows into another peach? Or plum?” He sniffed it.
“No, no, no. It grows into a peach tree. Which makes lots of peaches.”
“Do peach trees grow here?”
“No, not really. They can, I think, but they’re more in the East, across the country. Someone must have had a snack and left this here.”
“Maybe they wanted to grow a peach tree.”
The man smiled and shrugged. “Maybe.” He held the bag open and the boy dropped it in.
As they walked further on, the trees thinned even more, eventually disappearing all together as they came out upon the beach. They sat down far back from the waterline and watched the waves lick the shore. The man took two sandwiches out of his satchel. “OK…we’ve got peanut butter, or we’ve got goat brains. Pick your poison.”
The boy mimed heaving and retching, then gave up in a laughing fit as his father set the peanut butter sandwich in front of him. He unwrapped his own and removed a small thermos of milk from the bag.
“We should have brought peaches,” the boy said, mouth full of sandwich.
The man nodded. “Yeah, we should’ve. Maybe next time.”
“Mommy loved peaches.”
The sentence floated in the air, buoyed by the sound of the crashing waves. He hadn’t mentioned her in more than a week.
“Yeah, she did. Especially peach pie.”
“Did I ever have peach pie?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we’ll buy one some time. Or even better, we’ll make one. It’s really good with ice cream.”
“Chocolate?”
The man made a face and shook his head. “No. Vanilla.”
“Mmmm.”
Five minutes later, the boy was down at the shore, wading in the surf, meticulously picking through the rocks and pebbles like a man who’d lost his wedding ring but was in no hurry to find it. His father sat back and watched him, not so much as a concerned parent and but more a sort of anthropologist, studying a newly discovered tribe, taking note of his small hands and pale complexion, of how he talked to himself and nodded his head from side to side. After several more minutes of sweeping the shore, the boy sauntered up towards his father, his pockets heavy and sagging with his findings.
“I…think…I’ve…got…some…good…stuff,” the boy huffed, out of breath from his uphill trek.
His father grinned. “I’ll be the judge of that. Let’s see your ‘stuff.’”
The boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of shells.
“Psh. These are all over! That’s not too impressive.”
“All over? I only found…” He took a moment to count. “Five. I just found five!”
“They don’t look like this, but shells are really all over. We’re sitting on them. This sand is made of shells. Shells and rocks, all broken up into little bits.”
The boy scooped up a handful of sand and let it run through his fingers. The boy nodded, and then shrugged, as if to say, “You can’t win ‘em all”.
“You’re off to an OK start, but I’ve gotta say, you haven’t blown me away. What else you got?”
The boy took out a small item, about half the size of his palm, urine-yellow, delicately parched and weightless.
“Not bad,” his father said. “Not bad at all. You know what this is?”
The boy shook his head.
“This is a sponge. Or at least part of one.”
“Like, for cleaning with?”
The man laughed. “Not too far off, actually. They’re animals that live in the ocean. They’re what people used to do their cleaning with. Now our sponges are mostly man-made, but this is a really excellent find.”
The boy beamed with pride. “The next one’s even better,” he said as he placed the sponge in their bag. He then presented a black elliptical object, slightly flattened, smooth and wet, and with much more heft than it first appeared to have.
“Wow,” his father said. “You found a mussel.”
An incredulous look sprung onto the boy’s face. “Huh?”
“Not like in our body. This one’s spelled different, no c. Anyways, it’s like a clam or an oyster. There’s an animal living in here. He’s still alive, too, because it’s not opening. Very cool.”
The boy’s face had traveled from skeptical to intrigued, but upon learning that last piece of information, it sharply detoured towards anxious and troubled, punctuated by a sharp intake of breath.
“Alive? I got to put him back. With his family.” He snatched the animal from his father’s hand. “His mama,” he gasped as he rushed back towards the shore, racing up and down, trying to remember the exact spot from which he had wrenched the mollusk away from its happy little existence.
The boy was again out of breath as he rejoined his father back on the beach, plopping down on the sand beside him. His father’s hand came to rest on his shoulder, feeling them rise with his breath, slowing until it was almost keeping time with the beating waves.
“Want some dessert?” the man asked after a while.
“I thought you said we weren’t bringing dessert this time.”
The man shrugged. “I just said that. I was going to eat it all myself, but I thought what you did for that mussel was really nice.” He took a box of animal crackers out of his bag. “You don’t need to eat any if you don’t want to.”
By the time they had finished the box, the breeze had picked up and the sun was hanging lower over the ocean, lending a deep blood-orange hue. The man took a sweatshirt out of his bag and put it on, and his son did the same.
“Ready to head back?”
The boy nodded.
They set out up the beach, the sun on their right. The man thought of other sunset walks upon other beaches, with fairer company even than his present companion. He remembered sweaty hands and awkward silences, soon followed by gropings and fumblings in the surf as they mistook hormones and youth for love and passion, as much delicate negotiations as sexual release. Under the shirt, but over the bra. More Kissinger than Cassanova.
They were nearing the parking lot, but gulls were gathering on the beach, and the boy raced over to chase them off. They scattered in a flurry of gray and white. After they cleared, the small boy stood where they had been, staring at the ground.
The man headed towards their car, calling the boys name. He turned and called again, but the boy didn’t answer, staying where he was and staring at the ground. He called his name once more, textured with equal measures of warning and concern. He ran to his son, dropping his bag in the sand along the way.
“What is it? Are you OK?” The boy’s eyes had filled with tears, though he was not sobbing.
“Where’s the…where’s the rest of it?” he choked out. “Can we help?”
There were blue-green pieces of shell strewn across the sand, many with a thick, wet, pink substance oozing out. The largest remaining piece was a small claw, still twitching.
The man exhaled slowly. “It’s gone,” he said. “The birds. They ate him, I guess.”
The two of them stood and stared as the last dance of life escaped the carnage on the sand. The boy finally looked up at his father. “Can we bury it?”
The man nodded. “Yeah.”
They both dug a hole, one much deeper than was needed for the crab’s remains. The man gathered the pieces together: the single claw, the few legs and pieces of shell. Even sand soaked with the pink substance was laid to rest in the bottom of their grave.
When it was done, they both looked down into their little plot. The man was struck with a much more somber feeling than he’d expected, a heavier weight falling on his shoulders.
“I should have been a pair of ragged claws,” he muttered, “Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
The boy looked up at his father quizzically.
“It’s from a poem,” his father explained. “We’ve got it in a book at home. One of Mom’s. You can read it when you’re older.”
“Not now?”
“I don’t think you’ll really like it now. It’s pretty hard to understand.” He smiled faintly. “I barely understand it.”
“Oh.”
“Your mom understood it, though.”
“Yeah.”
“She understood everything.” Quieter, more to himself than anyone.
The man grabbed a handful of sand and let it slide through his fingers over the remains.
“Wait!” the boy said. He ran back towards the parking lot to their discarded bag. After he found what he was looking for he came back to the grave. He dropped in the peach pit and proceeded to fill in the hole.
It was his father’s turn to look confused. “To grow a peach tree,” the boy explained. “So we can make pies.”
The man smiled and shrugged, and helped finish filling in the hole. When they were done, he roughly brushed sand off of the back of his son’s sweatshirt.
“You are covered,” he said, “with little pieces of seashell.”
The boy laughed, and then tugged at the seat of his pants. “I think,” he said between giggles, “that there’s…some little…pieces…of shell…in my butt.” He could barely speak and was gasping for air.
“Yeah,” his father said. “Me, too.” They walked back to their car, their laughter competing with the steady sounds of crashing waves.
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Evan Mather lives just outside of Chicago and is a full-time student with hopes to eventually earn his Masters in Library Science. He spends his limited free time with his wife and cats, subjecting them to his cinematic, musical, literary and culinary interests. Sometimes this is a good thing, and sometimes it is not.
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