The Wild Birds Read online

  As the story was told and retold, the deceased farming couple became symbolic of God’s wrath and righteousness. They had been either called to a higher purpose or brought down by vice, depending on who was spinning the yarn. There was a lesson to be learned, though no one could quite pinpoint it precisely. Their church hosted an elaborate double funeral at which the weeping and wailing was appropriately dramatic. Somber hymnals were sung and traditional black worn. Alice sat in a sort of shock in the front of the church, flat-back perfect posture on the hard pew as her parents had taught her, but never once shed a tear. She straightened tighter as she felt a ghost tap of her father’s cane on the pew. Five-year-old Lily sat next to her and cried in what Alice suspected to be fear at seeing her grandparents made up with layers of thick makeup, chemicals filling their veins, lying still as the day in their satin-lined boxes. As a large housefly landed on her mother’s nose, then buzzed and flew over and landed on her father’s forehead, Alice held Lily’s hand and told her it would be okay. She held her breath, trying to create tears. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not shake a single tear from her dry eyes, even as she met the suspicious, turgid gazes from the congregation.

  That evening at the funeral reception, held at the orchard farmhouse, it became a sort of unspoken bet among the guests to see who would be the first to get the young, tragic daughter to crack.

  “Your parents’ dedication to St. Timothy’s was so admirable,” an ample, purple-haired woman said before piling stuffed mushrooms into her mouth. She swallowed and shook her head. “Absolute pillars of society. You must just be so sad, honey. It’s okay to let it out, you know.”

  “I know,” Alice said cautiously, secretly trying to tie a knot with the string of a celery in her mouth.

  “You really shouldn’t keep it all inside,” another taller woman with significant chin hair chimed in. “T’isn’t healthy.”

  “Yup,” Alice said, glancing outside at the rain streaming down the windows in rivulets. Was that the kind of waterworks they wanted from her?

  “What on earth will you do with this whole orchard all by yourself?” A man joined the circle. Perhaps a scare tactic might work. Alice stood, slowly blinking.

  “Excuse me,” she said, pushing her way to the kitchen. Why were people such sadness succubae when it came to mourning? It’s like they were trying to get off on her pain and wouldn’t be satisfied till she’d filled their cups with her salted tears. In the kitchen, she dodged a couple more attempts to convince her into emoting and rooted around in the drawer until she found, way in the back, the little jam spoon she’d used to taste the roots of the wild ginger. With the spoon in her pocket and a copy of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, she slipped out the back door and into the rainy pasture. She had picked up the book at the local thrift store, God’s Closet, a place that mysteriously provided her with interesting reading from time to time. She often wondered what local Burning Woods citizen shared her passion for fringe literature. They certainly weren’t any of these folks gathered inside her parents’ house. She glanced back at the farmhouse and paused briefly to wonder about her daughter and her whereabouts but kept going, because Lily was surrounded by people. She would be just fine.

  At the back of the orchard, where the burn pile had supplanted the Doug firs and alders, the once-haven for wildflowers, she took out the spoon and found a nice scorched patch. The earth was full with moisture and carbon. She scraped the spoon along the black dirt and lifted it to her mouth, something she hadn’t done in a long time. She closed her eyes and smiled as the blackness spread over her tongue, because this, this dead, absent flavor, matched exactly the feeling she had inside. She put the spoon back in her pocket, sat down under the umbrella of an evergreen, and cracked her book. It was marked on a passage about falling into the void. Perfect, she thought. Let us fall and keep falling.

  Back at the house, young Lily wandered all over the floors looking for her mother. She wondered if this wasn’t what death meant—people just wandered off somewhere and were never heard from again. Perhaps her grandparents were now off wandering in the hills toward the ocean. It was how her father had gone out of her mom’s life, just wandered off on a barren Nevada highway, so maybe he was “dead” too. She went upstairs and then down into the basement, where she played quietly with a croquet set, setting the balls to click against one another, then back again, before noticing a small, half-covered secret little cupboard in the wall. She moved the boxes from in front of it and turned the small brass finding on the closure. It opened a minute door that led to a lightless room under the back porch. The opening was just big enough for her to get her body through. Certainly no adult could follow her. She climbed inside and closed the door behind her. Through small slits in the wooden slats, she could see full-grown legs milling about outside beyond the porch, smoking cigarettes and talking in quiet tones as they sipped chablis. She looked at the shape of each pair of legs but didn’t recognize any of them as her mother’s extra-long, muscular limbs. She decided she would stay there until she saw her mom, watching the stems of strangers wander in and out of view.

  The search party for Lily didn’t begin until Alice had returned from her reading break in the woods. Everyone had just assumed they were off somewhere together. When she came back, she started asking around about Lily, who had seen her or talked to her, was she playing with older kids or younger. The snowball of paranoia developed quickly as people heard the little girl was missing. People experiencing grief are primed to let in whatever wild horse of emotion comes to the gates, whether it be fear, lust, or the histrionics of blame. The members of the reception checked everywhere in a manic state, even the basement, but the secret little cupboard door was shut tight to the room under the porch. The local police were summoned. Lily might have heard the search party calling her name both inside the farmhouse and out if she had not fallen asleep under the porch a good hour and a half before and slumbered the sleep of the dead. So to speak.

  When Lily woke up, she felt a sharp pain on her chest just in front of her armpit. There was a little bit of swollen flesh throbbing and she felt sweaty after a swampy slumber. Her curly fine white hair was matted in little curls to her head. It was the small, painful flesh bite that prompted her to find her way out of the dark room and back upstairs. The first person she met at the top of the creaky stairs was a tall uniformed policeman sitting in the kitchen writing in a notepad. When he looked up and saw her telltale shock of curly, rumpled hair, he looked, appropriately, as though he’d seen a ghost.

  “Mister,” Lily said, padding her way over to his lap and putting her hot hands on his leg. “My armpit hurts.”

  There were wild rumors in the town that next week about Alice and Lily. The spider in the basement that had bitten Lily was speculated to be a brown recluse. She had been bitten on her chest just in front of her armpit and the area swelled up and out in a bull’s-eye pattern of red rings that later turned dark in little parts, concentric circles of deep irritation extending out over her heart. It was the talk of the town. She might die, they said. The venom had weakened her heart, they said. Some clucked that Alice was unfit to be a mother. Some said that she abandoned her young daughter at the reception to run off and have relations with one of the harvesters in the shed. Others still said that Lily had been possessed by the spirit of mourning and had been trying to find her way underground to be with her grandparents, as they had been the only upstanding citizens in her family. What was common among the stories was the disdain for Alice and her methods of child-rearing. Heathen, they murmured in line at the market. Elvira. Spiderwoman.

  For Alice, the next few weeks were spent packing things up in boxes and rearranging the house, trying to ignore the unfortunate events after the funeral. She ignored the judgment in the faces at the bank, the post office, the grocery store. “Nice to see you, too!” she would say, contorting her beautiful, wide mouth into a grimaced smile. “Lily’s just fine! H
ealed like a champ!” she would say. “Did you know we don’t actually have brown recluses in this part of the country?” she asked total strangers in an attempt to stem the flow from the rumor mill.

  Lily asked her mother one morning, mouth full of cereal:

  “Why’d you leave me, Mama?”

  “When, honey? I never left you.”

  “Yes, you did. After Grandma and Grandpa wandered off. You left me alone with the strangers and then the spider bit me.”

  Alice had no response to her young daughter’s accusation. She had, in fact, left her daughter behind in order to quell her own selfish rage. She had left her, and Lily had lodged herself in a small dark place like an unweaned animal. She poured her daughter some more cereal and kissed her on top of the head.

  “I’m sorry, honey.”

  At the bank she took out a little extra to buy Lily a new toy. She had been asking for a Lite-Brite for longer than Alice could remember. The guilt had weighed on Alice for days as Lily recuperated at home. Lily had started to grow tired of her old toys and asked her mom to give them away with the many other items piled in boxes. Something in her was changed by the incident. She sighed and gave away her blankie, her favorite stuffed bear, and all her plastic horses. Often she sat at the window watching the rain come down. It didn’t even occur to Alice that her daughter could actually be mourning the loss of her grandparents. Alice figured she could fix things by giving her something new. With the Lite-Brite she would give Lily the power to rearrange the stars in the night sky. A little astral meddling seemed like just the doctor’s orders.

  Alice was grateful that her parents had at least waited to exit the stage until after harvest was complete. They had left her enough in the coffers to figure out what to do by the time next spring rolled around, when she would need to start the process of trimming and spraying the trees on her own. Lily asked her mother one day whether Grandma and Grandpa would be coming back, or if they had wandered too far. Alice looked puzzled, then stared her plain in the face and said, “I sure hope not.” Lily didn’t ask any more questions about that and instead asked if she could have their old bedroom, to which Alice said, “Of course,” and leaned down to kiss her on her pouf of white waves. “You couldn’t pay me to sleep in there.”

  A letter came in the mail about three weeks after the funeral addressed to Alice with a postmark from Green Valley, Arizona, and a hand-drawn golden eagle soaring over a canyon on the back seal.

  March 12, 1983

  Dear Alice,

  Greetings from the Sonoran Desert spring! The desert is sleeping down here, which is one of the quietest and most incredible things. I wish more than anything I could transport you down here to see it. I heard about the passing of your parents and it’s long overdue that I send you a letter. My deepest condolences, dear friend. I know you didn’t always get along, and that their passing brings complicated emotions for you. If only I could be there to hug you right now, to just help you in any way I could. We could perform a spiral dance on the commune, drink red wine, and make fun of Kenneth’s newest driftwood sculpture. We could climb a hill until it was hard to breathe, or just lie back and listen to the pond frogs. Unfortunately, I am broke as a joke, so I am unable to come home. Just know I am there with you in spirit.

  Arizona is mixed—amazing land, but often intolerant and difficult people. I’m still out traversing the wild places like some furless wild dog looking for meaning. I’ve lived so many places over the last five years since I left Burning Woods, and each place holds its own magic. But in that half a decade I’ve never really belonged to a place, nor the place to me. My college semesters were short and brutish, bookended by time interning for conservation groups as a field tech. The footprint of my tent is always temporary. I think of you walking among your hazelnut groves that were your father’s and your father’s father’s. I think of you sleeping for twenty-two years in that same old leaning farmhouse. It’s a romantic feeling for me, to imagine those kinds of deep roots as I walk along yet another new arroyo or come up over another aspect of a mountainside. When my feet are throbbing with blisters and I still have four miles to walk over uneven ground before I even get to my old truck parked by the side of the highway, I think of you sleeping gently in your bed, the curtains rustling in the morning breeze. It is a beautiful, cool, calm dream. I do miss you, and Oregon, and all that that means.

  When I have a long way yet to walk I also sometimes talk to the trees. Any kind of tree—a mesquite, aspen, or ironwood. Chilopsis is a favorite conversation partner because if you’re lucky it will make a little hiss back. Do you ever talk to the trees? I’m kind of forgetting what normal people do and don’t do. I find when the wind is very low, just whispering, then stopping, is a good time to attempt a discussion. Sometimes you can just perceive an answer in the stillness. And then the wind rises again and takes that moment with it, on into the future and is gone. Say hello to the evergreens from me, and give one a squeeze when no one is looking. Although, really, who’s left there to shame you for tree-hugging now? Hug away, and with abandon. It’s your land now.

  My deepest regards to you and to that teeny little beauty, Lily. I wish I were there with you. Thank you so much for the drawing of her. She’s getting so big! I keep it with me always.

  Love,

  Sal

  Lily was back at kindergarten and Alice found herself alone for the first time since her parents’ passing in the truly empty farmhouse. Alice let her eyes linger on the word love, then folded the letter and put it back into its envelope, smoothing the seal with her fingers. Every time she received one of Sal’s letters she felt a mix of resentment washed over by an upwelling of affection. It was the tapping of a long buried stream that rolled within. Over the last couple weeks, the food train of helpful (read: nosy and judgmental) neighbors and church friends had slowed to a stop, and she shed her black mourning clothes for her much preferred jeans and T-shirt and started packing up things she no longer wished to have around in order to donate them to charity. Sitting there with a giant cardboard box filled with crucifixes at her feet, the stillness felt like the eye of the storm. In the calm, she waited for someone to tell her what she was doing wrong, or what she should do next. She tucked the letter from Sal into a tin box she kept behind a row of never-read encyclopedias way up on the highest shelf in her father’s drawing room.

  She surveyed the room and decided it would no longer be called a drawing room—too stuffy. From then on it would be called the library, a more egalitarian word for the space. She glanced back up at the tin on the shelf. Only she knew the tin was up there, and by far the tallest of everyone in her family, only she could reach up there without a stool. She realized as she stretched up on tiptoes that she no longer had to hide herself away in tiny boxes stuffed into dusty corners of the house. Carefully she brought the tin back down and left it open on the coffee table, the contents of her secret self unhinged and open for anyone to see. Inside sat a few letters from Sal, some cigarettes, an expired condom, a couple ancient joints, a collection of Gustav Klimt postcards with thin naked women in broken doll poses, and a miniature copy of the Anaïs Nin erotic book Little Birds. The clothbound book’s paper was thin as tissue paper and utterly rippable.

  Alice started a small fire in the fireplace and put Clifford Brown on the record player, sorting through the records and starting a pile for church music (headed to the donation box) and a pile for jazz (keep). Brown’s trumpet filled the room and Alice paused to consider how even when his music seemed happy and upbeat, there was an underpinning sadness to the chords and progressions that she appreciated. It was almost like a secret melody hidden underneath the blanket of sound. The music felt tended, tacked down by melancholy, as though it might float away into the ether if left to its own devices. After lighting the fire, she sat down in what had always been her dad’s chair and lit one of the joints, her legs splayed out in a most unladylike way. She waited for
someone to yell at her from the kitchen, or rap her on the leg with their cane, indicating she should get up out of their chair. But she was alone and it felt good. Due to an inefficient flue, the smoke from the fire filtered into the room a bit, mingling with the smoke from her joint. She took off her bra, threw it on the floor, and cracked the miniature copy of Little Birds. As the haze of her new life filled the room, she was transported to France in the thirties and New Orleans in the forties, where the brassy women in the book did all the things they were told not to and enjoyed every moment of it.

  She was far away; her hand slid down the front of her pants playing with what God had given her, the weed spinning patterns in her brain, when a loud knock on the front door brought her back to Burning Woods, away from the wild sexual abandon of a painter’s studio in Paris. She pulled her shirt down and got up to see who dared interrupt. There on the front porch stood a church friend of her parents’, Char, with a casserole dish and huge smile pasted on her face.

  “Hello there, honey!” Char bubbled, her smile tightening a bit as she noted Alice’s undone top button of her jeans and erect, braless nipples under her thin, rumpled T-shirt. “I thought you shouldn’t be alone on an overcast day like today.”

  Char pushed her way in past Alice, slipping easily under her long arm into the foyer. She headed straight for the kitchen but stopped and peered into the hazy, warm library with its box of crucifixes glinting and reflecting in the firelight as though itself lit.

  “You really ought to fix that flue, honey.” Char’s smile shrank as she waved away a thin plume of wandering smoke. She changed course and entered the library and put down the casserole on the coffee table, sniffed the air, and wrinkled her nose. “Redecorating?”