Nobody wanted to touch it.
That much was agreed on.
There was a time that we might put our heads together to figure out what the hell this thing is and maybe where it came from, but clearly those days are gone.
I'm not saying I didn't have ideas about it, but I kept them it myself.
I learned to do that the hard way, to stay out of it.
Oh, I tried once or twice to put my oar in, venture an opinion or a suggestion, but it never helped anyone.
I think on my old grandma and how she mostly stayed out of things.
She had wisdom, all right.
She liked to say wisdom came from experiencing a lot of non-fatal errors.
She's been dead most of my life now, but it gives me comfort to bring her to mind, to see how right she was.
All this started when the nephew found the thing and had to come out and tell everyone.
Had I been the one to find it, I would have kept my mouth shut.
Like I say, wisdom.
But Nephew, he run in jabbering and yammering about this thing he never saw before, how it was not there one minute and there the next, how he would have never believed it had he not seen it with his own eyes.
Of course not a one of them believed him.
I didn't myself, but then I haven’t cared for Nephew since he grew out of being the baby all of us adored.
Happened fast, and I wasn’t the only one to see it.
I don’t know what turned him the way he is now.
Must have been something, since that don’t happen on its own.
Not usually.
Nephew is always riling somebody up until they're boiling, then greasing them until they calm back down.
I believe him to be a coward, but maybe that’s just because he's the smallest of all of them.
Nephew wouldn't back down from somebody smaller, but there ain’t nobody smaller.
Maybe it would have worked out different had we just taken him at his word.
I might have even believed him, though I wouldn't have said so.
But it didn't matter what I thought since none took him at his word.
Soon they all were after him to tell them everything.
One of the twins was the chief instigator, the younger one.
He let out that sort of horse laugh that's as good as calling somebody a damned liar.
"Yeah," he said, "so what's this thing look like, then?"
Those words started it, helped along by his tone of utmost scorn.
Even Nephew, small as he is, couldn't back down from such a naked insult, so he come right out and started to talk about it.
I remember exactly what he said, since that is my particular skill––not a song I hear on the radio that I can't sing back exactly right, even though I only listened once.
So, this is what Nephew says to us:
"It's like a kind of metal, only it's hot like a freshly baked cake, with steam coming off it. It’s orange, but not like the fruit– more like the way orange feels, if you get me. I knew right away not to touch it. It has a smell like when it rains and the lightning is far away, but there's somebody lit a fire within a few miles so the odor of smoke is mixed in with it. It makes a noise like crickets, only low and sweet like they was down a deep well. It's bright like the sky gets at the end of a hot day a half hour after the sun goes down. And it has legs like a table, only more than you can count."
Well, that got 'em going.
Immediately all was in a rush to go get a look at this thing that had all these different properties that disagreed with each other, but most still had chores to finish before night came on.
In the end, it was Sister and the three cousins who went first.
When they came back, they were furious with Nephew for his descriptions.
The oldest cousin shook her head and wouldn't say a word, so the other two followed suit and just stood there with their arms crossed in the most severe displeasure, like they didn't trust what their arms would do if they turned them loose.
Finally Sister flat out called Nephew a liar, and when he balked, she shushed him down with a stern finger like a school teacher.
She told him to keep his mouth shut while she informed us what was really there.
"I'll agree with Nephew that we ought not to touch it," she said, "but nothing else. It ain't a new thing at all. Why, we see this every day, in every house and shop, at the church and in the schools. They have them by the hundreds in the cities, and you never saw a picture show that didn't include at least a dozen varieties. I've known things exactly like this all my life, and so have you. In fact, when I got to where Nephew said it was I had trouble believing that this was what he was talking about, this thing I know as well as my own hairbrush. As for its smell and all that other claptrap, maybe that's how he sees it––I never thought that boy had a lick of sense, and using dreamy words to describe something that's a ordinary as a loaf of bread is just his style."
She shook her head and stomped up onto her porch, slamming the door after her.
As the day wore itself out, little groups of two or three of them went to see for themselves, always coming back disagreeable and angry.
Pretty soon everybody by me had gone to see it.
Most of them didn't say nothing about it, like it was a waste of time to even discuss it.
Them that did agree that they shouldn't touch it, but on nothing else, as I said.
All of them blamed Nephew, as though he'd fetched this thing with the idea of creating strife.
I was glad I never said nothing, kept my own counsel.
But as often happens, being a neutral party did not remove me from the conflict––instead, it placed me at the center of it, and I found that soon every last one of them was after me to see for myself and then rule on who was right and who was wrong.
It was clear there would be no peace until somebody had the last word on what it was and where it came from.
But watching them faces I'd looked at all my life, the way that they'd changed since looking on this wonder, I knew that seeing it for myself was the last thing I wanted to do.
Late in the night, after the last of them left my porch, I packed my belongings and a little food and set off for parts unknown.
The only thing I was sure of was that I didn't ever want to see it
Not seeing it was the best thing for me.
Still is.