Summary: Short light happy summer read. A vignette; a flicker; a moment in time.
Rated: K (1,185 words)
Glimmer
Little Carl Cartwright, or Calle, as his whole family called him – even Hoss, who tended to make it sound more like Cally – was smiling. His whole round face was lit up like the sun; the eyes were wrinkled into two wings of a dove, when his grin bared his partially toothed smile between his round cheeks.
The reason he was smiling so hard he nearly forgot to laugh was the shallow water of the bay. The sun dyed the blue surface in stars of bright golden shimmer, and the stars broke under Carl’s hands when he splashed the water with his palms. He was walking on all fours, occasionally swimming with his thick little legs, paddling the water with his feet and balancing his body with his short arms, like his Mama had shown.
“Don’t go far, Calle, you’re not to drown!” had Elin, his mother, warned him. Every warning caused a frown and a tempered grunt, indeed, a growl; but the protests were forgotten when the boy sat in the water on his bottom, splashed the water again and made his light brown curls all wet.
Every two minutes one of the older siblings approached him, too. “Don’t go too far, Calle, you can’t swim! Du kan inte simma nogt. Mamma done warned!” The overtly protecting tones amused the Pa, the overtly nurturing and patronizing way of the speech of the still quite young sisters and the paternal touch at the lower voice of the brother made him hide a smirk.
Carl, Calle, as he was called, didn’t smirk. Instead, he pushed his fists angrily in the water with straight arms, so that his little chest was arched back and his mouth opened out wide to scream in frustration. A bit red in his frustrated face, Carl and what he had to say in his deep dissatisfaction was not all Hoss was listening to. “I won’t, I won’t!” was definitely a part of it.
The older ones were swimming far, and away, before Carl’s temper got so high he forgot the joy of the cool water in the bay. Every now and then, either Thor, Sigrid or Rebecka climbed in a tree which stretched out one of its branches over the water, to make a perfect platform for a jump.
Poor Cally, it wasn’t so nice to be the littlest one, or the nearly littlest.
Elin was wearing a thin linen shirt that hung to her knees. She came from the bushes to the waterside, too, and the hems of the shirt were wet. There was a small noise of a little flab-flab, flab-flab audible in the gentle breeze when the cloth met her legs. She was carrying little Lotta in her arms, little Lotta who was wearing nothing but a pale yellow crocheted bonnet to cover her head. Elin reached the water and waded in, and stretched her arms out to let Lotta explore the water.
Lotta stretched her hands down, and screamed in delight with a wide-open smile, when she realized the twinkling glinting surface was wet and cold. Or as cold as it could get in such kind of a heat. Lotta waved her arms and made the water sprinkle and splash, and Elin lowered her so close to the water that she was able to paddle. She, too, found much joy in spoiling the serene reflection of sunlight into blasts of droplets and showers, and her thick-folded feet splish-splashed the water when her hands couldn’t control the situation. The shrill voice howled with a melody of satisfaction and merriness, and the rising intonations of her sentences could have been called nothing else but a yodel.
Elin laughed, and let her girl splash in the water for a while, before she grabbed the girl tighter in a knot in her arm. “Let’s wash you, sweetey…” She took the girl aside and lowered her down to fulfill her promise. The following scream was filled with everything but delight, and Hoss saw the face of little Lotta wrinkle in frustration.
“That’s my girl,” Elin said, and twisted the girl around, so that she was able to snuff her nose into the girls neck and belly. She purred her lips against Lotta’s bare skin, making her tickle. “That’s the way, that’s my girl.”
Elin grinned at Hoss and made Lotta’s hand wave to her Pa, before she lowered Lotta close to the surface of the water and started to let her learn her swimming motions, again. They approached Carl slowly, Elin wading and Lotta making a lot of noise and showers, and Hoss grinned back at them.
He saw Thor was giving an aid to the girls, letting them jump from his knee and his hands and flying them up in the air to make half-way somersault up in the air. The young man was getting tall; when he remembered not to stand a bit slumped, as if his head forgot he should hang a bit higher as the rest of his body had grown taller, he could have been even a bit taller than Hoss. He was growing mighty strong, too, stronger day by day, and the screams of the girls who landed on the water with their bottoms or their sides first – painful only tomorrow – told Hoss that his son’s powers were highly appreciated among his sisters.
Carl sat again in the foot-deep water, and dug the sand from the bottom of the stream to raise it high up, so that he was able to let it flow down between his fingers and bury his feet under it with intense care.
This, this was happiness.
Hoss was nearly able to forget his crutches and the splint on his leg, when the bruises of the face were not so bad and his broken ribs didn’t bother him with their joining pains. They tended to remind him from the shotgun fight that had happened during the bank robbery before the stage coach accident, after he had miraculously survived a war-path Bannock at the Indian land. The Comancheros and the Bannock, ignorant of each other, had made a real wreck of him trying to aim for the gold and bank notes he was carrying, and it was the dad burn last time he didn’t insist on Joe or Adam going to negotiate the deal and pick up the payrolls for the miners. Now that Ben had been rescued from the kidnap and Adam was no longer a wheel-chair patient, there were more pairs of hands to tend to this ranch than just Hoss’.
Elin giggled. It felt down in Hoss’ kidneys and stomach, too. He looked at the flicker of the crystal water and imagined himself to have a wet, cool, splashing dip in it.
~0~