Winter Birds, Page 2

  You must no longer travel hidden, you must enter this clearing to learn how this light feels on the skin.

  But the thought of standing naked beneath that nakedness has made your throat go dry.

  You step into the light, parting the leaves and branches with your hand. Your shadow shrinks beneath you. The sunlight is a new thing to your skin, a tingling that is fresh and filling—you smile, you run forward through the high grass, your too-quick heartbeat all that shows of your fear.

  The clearing is a circle and you stand in the middle, turning around and around.

  The sky is a wheel, you are under the hub, the hub is an eye looking down as you look up.

  When you hear the new sound behind you, at first you don’t turn to it.

  Then you hear the sound again and know what it is: the muffled rumble from the wide throat.

  When you turn you see it.

  Bright lion, loping large-thighed across the grass, almost playful.

  You bury your hands in his mane.

  The wide mouth yawns.

  The vast paw lifts, a playful tap.

  You gasp at the tearing, lean away still gripping the mane, you shudder and step away slowly, heart exploding in bursts of heat—the lion eager, pressing toward you, warm red tongue on your hands.

  You lead him to the side, steps coming hard for you as he leaps high, suspended in the air above the high grass that brushes your thigh; stained after with the luminous blood streaming down.

  You limp but never fall.

  Bright lion calms beside you, no longer leaping.

  You reach the trees and he watches you climb one of them, the pain like a fire in your side. He sits on his haunches and lashes his tail, puzzled that you don’t want to play any more. You fall into the crooked hollow of a branch too high even for his highest leap.

  The smell of your blood drifts out into the air.

  Bright lion watches from below.

  YOU DREAM you waken in River Man’s cave to the sound of water lapping in the tunnel. Shadows move on the earth walls. From a torch? No, from the fire burning in the stone fireplace.

  Your leg hurts the same as it would hurt if you were having a bleed there. When you touch it dried blood breaks off in flakes, leaving a light stain on your fingers. You remember the lion now, and falling asleep in the crook of a tree like a monkey.

  —River Man?

  Your voice so small the room swallows it.

  —River Man, are you here anywhere?

  As you waken fully you realize you lie in River Man’s bed, not your own. The room looks funny from this angle, everything out of place and yet not out of place. When you try to move your leg it burns, and pain like fire shoots up your side. But you ignore it, leaning over the side of the bed till you can see your own bed, hidden behind a wooden chest in the corner.

  He lies there, a big shadow, feet hanging off the edge. You hear his breathing now, barely, so deep it almost makes no sound. You say, River Man, but softer, not meaning to wake him, only wanting to use his name. But he rises and looks at you.

  —Danny? Danny, you’re awake?

  —How come it’s so cold in here?

  He crosses the room and says hi, hand on your forehead. He looks tired. He says, You are cold.

  —Cover me up with something. He gets a blanket, something heavy, maybe the fur of a big animal, a bear or a lion he killed. He spreads it over you and you sigh at its engulfing heaviness and warmth.

  He says, The bleeding finally stopped a little while ago.

  —My leg feels big.

  —It’s swollen some. The cuts are the worst. No tearing, only deep slashes.

  —It was a lion, River Man.

  —I know.

  —He was gold-colored, and his mane was so bright it looked like it was on fire. He came running out of the woods like he wanted to play.

  He turns his face toward the fire.—I know that too.

  —You saw him?

  —I saw him later, yes. He watches you for a long time, and at last touches your shoulder tenderly.—I didn’t think the bleeding would ever stop. Do you know how scared I was?

  You have no answer to that. He watches you and smiles. Touching your forehead, he says, You’re still cold.

  —I’ll be all right now.

  —You need better than that, he says, and rises up tall and dark, a warm shadow, lifting the fur and sliding beside you.

  NOW THE dream goes away. When you open your eyes the river flows past you just as before, and the branches overhead still weave the mazes that slow the falling light. The trestle hangs over the river waiting for a train. You wipe the seat of your pants when you stand, and throw a stick deep into the river, thinking it would be fun to spin like that stick spins, or like those leaves, twirling on top of the water till the river runs into the sea.

  The dream has left you with a feeling of heaviness.

  You walk down the riverbank, balancing at the edge of the weed fringe, looking down into the water at your own face staring up. “You’re ugly,” you tell your reflection, and you drop a stone into yourself. “You got a face like a hoe cake and crooked teeth and big ears.”

  You chant names whose sounds you like: Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy Eleanor River Potter’s Lake Mars Hill Matthew Mark Luke MenthoEucalyptus Song of Solomon Isaiah Jeremiah Hezekiah Daniel Nicholas Crell Bobjay Crell Robert Jay Crell Robert Jay Judas Robert Judas. Crell. Then you declare to your own bare arms, “You’re so white you might as well be a ghost.”

  Always you watch where you step, checking to make sure there’s no glass underfoot, nothing to turn your ankle on, no place to fall. You keep your back to the places where the underbrush is thin, where you might glimpse the house across the fields. Your family is dead, dead, you are an orphan …

  But the pines cannot hold back Papa’s voice. When you hear it you stand still. The wind increases, drowning the noise for a moment and bending the pines back and forth, now slow, now faster. The clouds hang low against the pine tops. Far across the field you see Queenie with her nose in the dirt. Beyond her the house shines. You think maybe your Mama stands at one of the windows, looking out the way she likes to. Maybe she has been waiting for you. Maybe she sees you now and is glad you’re coming home. Maybe that is even her shadow you see now, turning away from one of the black squares of glass.

  Or maybe it is Papa who watches.

  For a moment you want to go back to the river. But no. You will take River Man with you, you will dream he walks beside you across the fields, brown and tall and strong, his warm hand on your shoulder.

  The Catalog of Houses

  In those days, Danny, you slept in the same room with your brothers and Amy Kay, in the same bed with Allen, who would never let you lie close to him unless he was cold. The house by the river was always cold, wind pouring in through cracks under the doors, around the windows, down chimneys and out boarded-up fireplaces. The family that farmed these fields once lived in this house, but they sold the land long ago and the new owner doesn’t even remember their name.

  You moved to this house a little over a month ago, the seventh house you have lived in since you were born. After you move out of this house you will live in seven others with your family, before you are old enough to make your home wherever you choose.

  You and Amy Kay named this house right away—you called it the Circle House because the doors opened in a circle and you could walk from room to room forever. Amy Kay and you named all the houses you lived in, though finding the right name wasn’t always easy.

  The two of you began the game in the Snake House, a green cinder-block cottage with a red shingle roof. Mama liked that house better than any of the places you moved to later because in that house the living room and hall were paneled in polished cherry wood, and because the kitchen had cabinets built into the walls.

  The Snake House stood in a thicket of loblolly pine at the edge of a patch of woods where snakes abounded. The house was built on a
low foundation, and snakes could crawl into it through holes in the cinder block that Mama plugged as best she could with bits of stone and old rags. Later, when you are older, Mama will tell you stories about the snakes she found in the house. Once, she opened the hall closet to get down a set of sheets and in fact had her hand on the edge of one folded sheet when she saw a black snake coiled on top, darting fire at her with its tongue. The snake vanished as soon as she stepped back from the closet.

  After counting her breaths to ten, she searched the closet from top to bottom, lifting every sheet and towel slowly and carefully off the shelves. She found no snake even when the closet was empty, so she searched the rest of the house, spilling clothes out of chests of drawers, pulling couches and chairs away from the walls, even rolling up the worn piece of carpet in her bedroom, thinking the snake might have hidden beneath it. Still she found no snake anywhere.

  She went to the bathroom—when she got nervous about something she had to pee every five minutes, she said. She had sat down on the toilet with her pants around her ankles when she saw the snake beside her in the bathtub, tasting the edge of the drain with its tongue. Mama ran out of the bathroom pulling up her pants and snatched the garden hoe from its place next to the back door. She chopped off the snake’s black head while it frantically tried to fit itself down the drain.

  Another time she heard a dry crawling sound under the sink and spent the rest of the morning taking everything out of drawers and off shelves until at noon she found a chicken snake curled behind the drainpipes. She crushed its head with a tub of lard and burned its body on the trash pile along with the rest of the day’s refuse.

  Another time Mr. Luther, who owned the seed farm Papa worked on and the house you lived in, shot a six-foot rattlesnake in the dirt road near your mailbox. Mama, Amy Kay, and you watched from behind the ditch. Mama held you by the shoulder to keep you from running into the road. You watched the dying snake whip dust with its thick, musical tail. The sight of the long thing lashing frightened you so much Mama had to sit with you that night before you could fall asleep.

  Later that same summer, as Mama folded clothes she had gathered sun-drenched from the line, Amy Kay called out to her, “Mama, there’s a snake with Danny on the bed!” Mama ran to the door.

  You simply sat there, Danny, staring at what might have been a coil of dull brown rope. Mama whispered to you not to move. Later when she told the story she said she was terrified at the way you sat so perfectly motionless, staring with complete fascination at the snake. She brought a quilt from the other room. She stepped calmly behind the snake and threw the quilt over the dry, scaled body. Without pausing to take a breath she pulled you off the bed—you stiff and wide-eyed, not making a sound —and then she balled up the bedspread around the quilt and the furious snake and dragged the whole bundle outside. The snake coiled round and round itself in the fabric. She let it find its own way out and cut off its head with the hoe, cut its body a dozen other places, watching the pieces of snake turn over and over helplessly in the grass. A moccasin. Inside, she stripped you raw and checked every inch of you for bites. You held her arm and gazed at her without a word. Amy Kay watched from the doorway, knuckles in her mouth.

  That night Mama told Papa in a high, strained voice, “You better get Mr. Luther to stop up the holes in this house. I don’t care if it takes iron bars to do it, if that’s what it takes to keep the snakes away from my babies.” When Papa held her she trembled. He asked, more gently than was his habit, what had happened this time.

  Whether he ever spoke to Mr. Luther about the snakes is another matter. Papa had work to do and no time to worry about snakes. He was the foreman on Mr. Luther’s farm and the work kept him busy from morning till night. It was here on Mr. Luther’s seed farm that Papa lost most of one arm.

  You never heard the whole story, Danny, and neither did your brothers or your sister. Papa never talked about that day, and only rarely mentioned the green cinder-block house or Mr. Luther’s farm. Mama told you the story. She said she was hanging out clothes on the line when she saw Mr. Luther’s blue Cadillac full of people roaring away from the fields in a fog of gray dust. She figured something was wrong by the speed of the car and thought maybe Mr. Luther was having another heart attack. It made her sad to think so because Mr. Luther had always been nice to her. But she went on hanging out the clothes, expecting she would hear whatever news there was when Papa came home for lunch.

  A few minutes later Mrs. Luther drove up in the white Cadillac. Mrs. Luther got out of the car slowly, as if she weren’t quite sure where she was. Her face was ashen. There was an accident, she said, or something like that, not meeting Mama’s eyes. God only knew how it happened, Bobjay knew to turn off the harvester before he tried to clean it. Mama dropped her load of clothes to the ground and grabbed Mrs. Luther by the arm. Mrs. Luther reared back like a snake about to strike. “Mr. Luther has taken him to the hospital himself,” she said. “There wasn’t time for an ambulance. Bobjay was working alone in the backfields and got his arm caught in the corn harvester—it ground up half his arm.”

  Mama released the woman and turned slowly. Mrs. Luther watched her without any particular sympathy. “They brought him to my house. Right into my kitchen when any fool could have seen there wasn’t a thing I could do for him. There’s blood everywhere. The boys said he walked half a mile through the fields with only his shirt for a tourniquet. Mr. Luther said I should drive you to the hospital as soon as the boys get back from the fields.”

  “The boys?” Mama asked. Mrs. Luther took a long deep breath. “My husband sent three of them back there to get the … to clean the … out of the machine.”

  A MONTH or so later you moved to a red-shingled house that smelled of fish. Mama found this house for you to move into after Mr. Luther told her Papa couldn’t work on the farm anymore with only the one arm that he could use. Mama sold her wedding rings to pay the first month’s rent. Mr. Luther’s hands loaded your furniture on a truck while Papa sat in the car smoking cigarettes and staring ahead at the empty driveway. Mama watched him nervously and hollered at the men loading the truck to be careful with her furniture.

  The new house was hardly a house at all, having only one large room with a window in each wall and a sink in the corner. The outhouse stood in lush weeds a short walk out the back door, down a path fringed with chickweed and sheep’s burr. You children had never used an outdoor toilet before and at first you were afraid you would fall through one of the dark, stinking holes. But Mama told you this was the only kind of bathroom there was when she was little, and she stayed with you the first time, holding you steady with one hand while covering her eyes with the other.

  You named this place the Fish House, because before you lived in it the owner Mrs. Edna Crenshaw had run a fish store in the building, and the smell of the fish had soaked every board. Mrs. Crenshaw, a large, powder-fleshed woman, had been in the fish market business many years, buying fresh seafood off trucks that drove straight up the highway from the coast. Her customers were the local farmers and merchants, who got tired of their wives’ fried chicken and fatback and greasy pork chops. Over the years Mrs. Crenshaw had done well enough to lay aside money to build herself a brand-new brick fish store across the highway from the old one. You could see it from the window of your house, a small, square brick building with a multicolored sign in front, that Mrs. Crenshaw’s husband retouched lovingly every week from the same four cans of paint. Amy Kay called him Mr. Fish Face because of the way his eyelids drew back from his eyeballs, exposing the whites all around.

  You and Amy shared a bed in one corner of the house, with Allen’s crib next to you near the couches and chair that separated you from Mama and Papa’s bed in the other corner of the house. The first night you lived there Mama unpacked dishes while Papa glared at her from that bed. His empty sleeve dangled at his side. “This whole place smells like goddamn fish,” he said.

  Mama settled the dishes in the fresh-scrubbed cabinets
without answering or looking around. From the frown on Papa’s face you knew there would be a fight that night. It gave you a feeling in your stomach, a hurting like you wanted to cry inside. You watched Papa and waited. When he began to shout—about the bitch who couldn’t find no better place to live than this shack a fat-ass Holiness woman sold fish out of —you ran for the screen door to escape the sound. You tripped and fell. No one noticed then. You sat outside in the cold, listening to Papa’s shouts till long after dark. Mama unpacked boxes and wiped her eyes. Finally Papa drank enough to fall asleep in his chair. You came back into the house then. But even after Mama put Papa to bed and turned out the last light in the house you lay awake in your bed, listening.

  In the morning your ankle was swollen where you had fallen. Mama put a cold cloth full of ice against the hurt place, and stroked your forehead. “The doctors say your blood is special,” she said. “It doesn’t do what other people’s blood does. Isn’t it nice to have special blood? Even when it hurts a little?”

  Papa, frowning and sullen behind her, looked at your ankle as if it were untouchable. When the wound in his piece of arm healed Papa took a job at a gas company paying thirty-five dollars a week. He delivered bottles of gas for farm wives to cook with, and bulk loads of gas for farm husbands to cure tobacco with, and repaired stoves and furnaces and refrigerators besides. Even with one hand Papa could fix almost anything, if he had time to fiddle with it. He got a little happier when he was working again. But he wasn’t making nearly as much money as he had made working for Mr. Luther. Every night you ate potatoes cooked a different way. Papa hardly ever spoke at all, only stared at his plate. In his presence you children became quiet and fearful, because he was always frowning, and because the place where his whole arm used to be looked vacant and strange now. He would catch you looking at him and turn away. Where before he came home drunk once in two weeks, now he came home drinking two or three times a week. The look in his eyes was like flat gray stone.