Sarah promised she would be back by the time the frog made it across the river.
At first, Hannah had clung to Sarah’s skirts begging her not to leave with hushed cries, pointing at the heron standing hungry and stoic on the river bank. She’d seen these birds before and the way they swoop down in ruthless gusts of feathers and talons, snatching frogs mid-leap and swallowing them down whole with a toss of their heads. Surely, she then figured, Sarah meant she was disappearing forever, knowing fully well that the meaty frog hiding beneath the fragile awning of berry bush would be snatched as soon as it so much as stretched out one of its long legs.
Yet Sarah smiled in that way she always does as she took Hannah’s hands in her own, reminding her how clever, how smart she is before giving strict instructions to face the river, cover her ears with her hands, and hum along to the songs she heard the men sing on their way back from the mines. Sarah often didn’t use that tone of voice—the one that the Minister uses when he gets to talking about what will happen to the sinners for not believing in God. She knew it meant it was serious, something unbreakable that she would be punished for disobeying, so faced the river and pressed her palms to her ears tight enough to hear the blood whooshing around like she’d dunk her head into the river too.
It was hard at first, trying not to turn around. She wanted to know where Sarah had gone, and if she took the man with her. Her own amplified voice hummed too loudly in her ears to hear how far her sister’s footsteps went back into the woods, unable to even hear if the frog was croaking out any cries of surrender yet. They all watched the heron instead, admiring its silver feathers reflecting the golden afternoon that nearly blended it into the tufts of cattails. Its slender beak panned side-to-side in search for movement, perhaps not yet seeing the frog. Or maybe it has, but the heron is too clever in pretending.
If she screams, would it scare the heron away? Would it give the frog enough time to get across the river? It had scared the man, after all; her screaming. But in her defense, the man had scared her with his heavy boots snapping the grove of branches underfoot, intruding in her and Sarah’s secret place without so much as asking if he was allowed to join them. She wasn’t scared of the man—although she didn’t recognize his face, and Mother always said to be scared of new faces—but Sarah seemed to be from the way she gripped Hannah’s shoulders as if she was wringing her of water. Pulled flush to her sister’s chest, Hannah screamed at the suddenness of it all, and they watched as the man sprung back.
He lost his footing, she thinks. He fell back down the hill he went through all the effort of hiking up, but Sarah didn’t let her see how far he fell. She wouldn’t let her go run into town for help either, even though Hannah told her twice she could hear him moaning about something broken and something sinful. He must need the Minister! she insisted, but Sarah dragged her by her hand to the river bank instead of the church like the man needed, walking too quickly in too long of strides Hannah stumbled to keep up with.
“I’ll take care of him,” Sarah promised her. “And I’ll be back by the time the frog made it across the river.”
The frog shimmies backwards, planting its back-legs firm into the mud. Its plump body seems weighed down, anchored to the earth despite the sun drying its skin to paper with each second that passes. The heron, she figures, must know this, letting the frog decide when it wants to end its misery. Is that mercy, or cruel? The Minister always talks about mercy in church, saying God shows mercy on all the sinners by letting them live in his heaven when everyone dies. It must be awfully full in that heaven if he lets everyone in, she thinks. Twenty people had died in the last winter, which was a lot in her town. She didn’t like looking at them shivering until they went rigid in the stocks, thinking it looked like a terribly uncomfortable way to greet God in his heaven, all stooped up and crooked.
But that’s how the heron looks; legs bending into a crouch and its slender neck retracting into its body, beak pointed straight at the berry bush like an arrowhead. Hannah hums her song louder as the bird begins to ruffle its wings in preparation for a quick descent into the water. She doesn’t want to see it happen, but she’s too scared she’ll miss it too. She reads stories like this in the books she and Sarah kept in their secret place; stories of predator and prey that jump off the page in exciting twists. She likes the ones where the weaker prey wins over the big mean predator, but Sarah tells her every time that it isn’t how life really is. Predators always win, she says, unless you’re clever.
The frog lets out a low groan, digging its webbed feet deeper into the mud. It’s going to jump, oh no it’s going to jump! Surely it must know the heron is watching with open beak, inviting the frog to just hop inside and crawl down into its belly? How could it even risk the chance! Does it have something it desperately needs on the other side? An abundance of flies, or a pool of tadpoles?
Surely, Hannah thinks, nothing like that would be worth risking dying for. Unable to handle the suspense, she digs her fingers into her wisps of curls as she looks from heron to frog, frog to heron, knowing any second the frog will leap and there will be a flash of feathers before suddenly frog and heron are one and gone gone gone—
“Hannah!”
Hannah whirls around at the call of her name from her sister, dropping her hands at last from her ears. All at once, she forgets the anticipation of the silent war happening behind her at the sight of Sarah’s hair unraveled from her usual neat bun. “Did you take the man to church?”
“He’s talking with God right now,” Sarah tells her, hands folded like she had just gotten done praying with him. There’s a dash of berry juice on her cheek, and Hannah nearly pouts at the thought of her enjoying a snack with the man without her. “Did you keep your ears covered like I asked?”
“And I hummed too! I couldn’t hear anything, Sarah, I thought you were leaving for good.”
SPLASH.
Hannah isn’t fast enough to see it happen, but she turns in time to see the frog disappearing into the underbrush on the other side of the river, calling back to them in a victorious song. The heron has disappeared too, leaving behind silver feathers floating lazily
around the head of an alligator sinking back under the water. She hadn’t seen it before, too caught up in the heron’s gaze. The alligator winks at her before it is completely submerged.
“What did I say?” Sarah says, moving past Hannah to dip her hands into the river. She swirls them around, rubbing her palms against the river weeds. “The frog got across just fine.”
“Because it was fast?”
“Because it was patient.” She dries her hands off on her skirts as she stands up slow, looking off to the setting sun as if she saw herself reflected there. She still smiles the way she always does when she turns back around to take Hannah’s hand, looking like she just ate something spoiled but is too well-mannered to say something. “You’re patient too. And so smart, Hannah, too smart for the world to know.”
“But where did you go, Sarah? Will that man come back to our secret place again?”
Sarah shakes her head, intertwining their fingers too tightly—like she did when that man came stomping through and interrupted their reading time. She waits until they’ve nearly left the woods to finally reply in a whisper even the crickets probably can’t hear, “Let’s keep that man a secret, okay? Just like the stories we read in our secret place, we’ll keep this one to ourselves.”
Hannah nods obediently, storing it away in her mind behind all the other questions she knows she’s not supposed to ask more about, like Hell, and why she has to learn how to sew when she doesn’t even like it all that much, and why Sarah doesn’t smell like berries. She would dare and whisper that last thought—something surely simple to answer—but the reddened sun is dropping behind the hills now as if it had been shot from the sky, and the song of men returning from mines carries on the wind as they all march home, two-by-two, carrying stories in their heads that can’t be spoken at the dinner table.
They only pray at the table, for forgiveness.