Idle Grounds

If you’re lucky enough to have a tribe of cousins, as I do, you will love Krystelle Bamford’s Idle Grounds.

The occasion for the family gathering on this perfect summer day is a birthday party. …one of the grownups’ birthdays; it doesn’t matter.

Cousins eyed up cousins, standing a full cousin-length, giving a shy wave while the adults eased themselves out with a dish covered in tinfoil or a six-pack of Becks tinkling like a piggy bank.

Remember how that was? I do.

Though my cousins lived nearby, I didn’t see them often. Mainly, I remember Christmas Eve at my Aunt Ruth’s, aware of family tensions I couldn’t name, edgy with excitement. I was second oldest to my cousin Johnny, whom I revered. He was funny and irreverent, he had a “clubhouse” the basement in what was once the coal cellar, with a cot and snacks and comic books and a bunch of Hardy Boys mysteries, which let me read sometimes. We knew he was bound to get us all in some kind of trouble and couldn’t wait to see what it would be.

But, wait—Johnny was actually the second-oldest cousin. There was an older, secret cousin some of us knew about but never dared speak of—because his three sisters didn’t.

When he appeared, years later, to take his place in the family he turned out to be astonishingly like us. We loved him instantly. Plus, he added some very interesting pieces to the puzzle of our family.

What family doesn’t have a secret?

The family in Idle Grounds has plenty.

Twelve-year-old Travis is the oldest of the ten cousins, suddenly huge, his voice changing. He’s in a special school, with no desks, just bean bags, and a theater where you could sit all around the stage so no one ever needed to feel left out.

“Do you guys want to see something?” he asks, not long after the cousins arrive.

Of course, they follow him up the stairs, into the bathroom, where he presses his finger against the window screen and tells them to look.

Something zips by, something the size of a big cat, 15 percent bigger.

Zip, zip, zip from the tree line to the shed, but never back again.

Meanwhile, downstairs, the grown-ups are talking as they always do about what had happened the cousins’ grandmother, Beezy, and who was responsible for it.

And in the confusion of all those cousins in one small room, Abi, the littlest of them, disappears down the stairs into the view from the window and out of sight. She’s Travis’s sister, just three, the kind of child whose “pigtails stood straight up from her head, which made her look like a satellite floating in space, who kissed your elbow when you weren’t looking.”

The cousins are paralyzed by fear.

“What are you kids doing up there?” one of the uncles calls up.

Of course, Travis calls back, “Nothing.”

But soon, they go out looking for her.

The story of what happens as they roam their aunt’s property, calling “Abi! Abi!” is told collectively by an unnamed cousin. I’m guessing she (I’m pretty sure, she) is next in age, given that she’s so completely in thrall of Travis.

Her voice, well…

Approaching the chicken coop, where Abi might be, she reports, “It smells like a dog’s butthole,” Travis said to himself and we gasped and also fell in love.

Among the tribe, there’s self-assigned second in command, Amber, seven, the bearer of all bad news, the kind of girl who would pull a loose thread on your sweater and say, “Hey you have a loose thread”

And Owen, her younger brother who is sent into the chicken coop by Travis, emerging with two eggs he carries throughout the story. He has bags under his eyes and legs like pick-up sticks. He’s wearing a red T-shirt that said, “I won’ big at Magestic Sands.”

The other cousins are identified by terms like, mid-pack, little one.

Idle Grounds is without doubt my favorite book, so far this year. I’ll bet it’s going to end up being my favorite book of the year, period.

It’s funny and sad and smart and full of insight about what it’s like to be part of a sprawling family. I thought of it on Sunday, watching our own tribe of cousins (my great nieces and nephews) at the annual Easter Egg hunt. My favorite thing: the littlest of them, two, had trained for the hunt but got befuddled once it started and, one by one, the older cousins walked past and rolled an egg from their own baskets in her direction.

“Egg!” she’d say.

May they always be so kind to one another.

And may they continue to enjoy one another over the years, as my wonderful tribe of cousins has done. Cousin reunions are the best.

We’re still puzzling out those secrets!