It Will End with Us (8 page)

My mind, I want to say, is like a cage full of dead birds.

The time when I was six and somebody spotted a bear in the river swamp, the first bear sighted there in thirty years. Businesses closed all over town so men could go hunt the bear. Papa took us down to where they had laid it out on a concrete slab back of the Amoco station. The fur, streaked with brown mud, was wet and cold when we touched it. They hosed it off at the station and the water ran pink into the street. They propped its mouth open with a stick, and we reached in and touched the teeth.

Mama was crazy about birds.

Chickadees are the least aggressive birds I know.

Along with their magazine the National Audubon Society sends me invitations to travel to places all over the world, even to the Amazon Jungle, with other members to look at birds.

There were more birds, more different kinds of birds, at Spring Hope than there are here.

Waterbirds—egrets, herons, gallinules, kingfishers, rails, ospreys, anhingas, grebes, and the like, ducks of all sorts.

And forest and field birds—owls, hawks, kites, quail, shrikes, cuckoos, killdeer, woodpeckers, whip-poor-wills, and so forth.

Warblers, finches, fly-catchers, thrushes, kinglets, nuthatches, tanagers, towhees, mockingbirds, thrashers, catbirds, vireos, always in the trees and bushes around the house.

Cedar waxwings and blackbirds arrived in great swirling flocks in the fall, crows and grackles thronged the treetops and strutted in the fields.

The many times pileated woodpeckers hammered at the house, digging for grubs of carpenter bees, ripping big pieces from the siding and excavating
fist-sized holes in the fascias and the tops of the columns, Verdell or one of my brothers going outside to shout and clap their hands or throw sticks to drive them off.

The bees themselves drilling neat little bullet-sized holes, buzzing furiously, while sending a steady stream of sawdust down past the windows.

The time Mama, looking out the window at a little drizzle of dust, said that one day there would be more hole than house.

I remember strangers showing up at Spring Hope, asking permission to look at birds, and walking out on the dikes with telescopes and cameras, even in December, in cold rain, or in September, in clouds of mosquitoes.

Papa going out to greet them and standing awhile talking, informative, gracious.
Seigniorial
is how he looked to me then, I think now.

Sitting in the kitchen talking to Maria about the birds at Spring Hope, not talking to her actually in a conversational way, just listing the different kinds of birds I remember there, and being aware that I am boring her silly but going on anyway, while Lester cleans under his fingernails with a tine of his breakfast fork, his eyes puckered.

The realization that I have become a tiresome old person.

The time Verdell built a whole stack of bird feeders out of wood from the chicken house and set them out in a row on the back steps, Mama coming down to look, and later he mounted them on creosote posts that he planted around the yard in such a way that standing at any window in the house we could look out and see birds, and every year or so putting up new ones to replace those that had rotted away.

I remember liking the way creosote smelled. Telephone poles, railroad tracks, and the bridge over Johnson Creek smelled of creosote on the hot days of summer.

If I close my eyes and think of summer, a variety of sounds, pictures, flavors even, floats into consciousness, but I don’t smell anything except creosote and dust.

I have an image of my mother as viewed from the back, standing at a window with raised binoculars.

And another of her making the rounds of the feeders, adding seed from a metal pail.

The time sleet was ticking at the windowpanes and Mama was outside in Papa’s big canvas jacket.

The time she chased Thornton around the house trying to put her ice-cold hands down his shirt.

Later, when age and illness had accentuated the sharp nose and long delicate neck, she came to look like a bird. Sitting in church with her shoulders hunched up, she looked like a stork.

A cold rainy morning and we were still at breakfast, the time Papa and Verdell came in carrying a bushel basket between them, the dogs pushing through the door behind them, and laid the ducks out on newspaper spread open on the kitchen floor. Papa quizzing the boys, poking each duck in turn with the toe of his boot, drilling them on the names, and hushing me when I tried to answer.

Canvasback. Pintail. Teal. Mallard. Lila shooed the dogs out.

I remember my mother and Lila plucking ducks at a table in the yard, plucking chickens, plucking quail. I remember Lila working smoothly, steadily, with strong big-knuckled hands, and the angry
way Mama jerked at the feathers and the tearing sound of the feathers coming off. They fished out livers and hearts with bloody hands and tossed the rest of the innards to the dogs.

I sat between them and when the down feathers went in my nose I snorted to get them out and Mama said to use a Kleenex.

I remember the dogs at Spring Hope, gun dogs mainly, English setters and springer spaniels for the most part.

I can recall the names of most and maybe even all of the dogs we owned over the years but the names of only three of my classmates.

Dana, Alex, Joseph, Henry, Big Boy, Bosco, Lucy, Beau, Venus, Rusty, Laddie, Cluny, Kirk, and so forth, were dogs.

The time Venus bit Jimmy Watts. No one liked Jimmy Watts, and we were all glad when Venus bit him, except Mama, who had to drive Jimmy home and apologize.

The fact that Mama’s little dog Margaret ate sugar lumps, was given scraps at the table, and became almost too fat to walk.

The fact that Margaret was afraid of Papa and sat between Mama’s feet when he was in the room.

I remember crying when Mr. Tully, who brought us firewood, ran over Lucy with his truck. Thornton said you could see her insides.

How Margaret just vanished, killed by a coon or an alligator probably, Papa said, nodding in the direction of the river.

I told people at school that an alligator ate my dog.
I remember the stray dogs that crept in from the highway, mangy, cowering, half-starved curs that Papa called coloreds’ dogs, that slunk under the kitchen porch, where we would find them curled up in the dirt and lure them out with food.

That disappeared after a day or two, Mama saying they had run off, when actually Papa or Verdell took them out to the woods and shot them, I found out later.

At the desk writing, and becoming aware that I am talking to myself, reciting the names of dogs.

At my bedroom window last night, preparing to pull the shade, I looked out at the rain and saw Thornton standing in a doorway on the other side of the passage—Thornton the way he was then, I mean, not Thornton the man of today—but it was another little boy, obviously.

I have an image of Thornton stretched out on his back on the rug in my room, hands clasped behind his head, eyes wide open, fixed on the ceiling, and of me in the bed next to Mama, while she read to us from
Peter Pan
.

The many times, later, that we played Peter Pan and Wendy.

Peter Pan and Wendy consisting mostly of walking around in the yard while Thornton made up adventures and told them to me.

We were brother and sister in the stories.

Edward wouldn’t play.

Afterwards, while Thornton was in school, I wrote the adventures down in a book Mama made by sewing sheets of stationery together with shoelaces. We made drawings for the book and drew
colored maps of all the places we had been in the stories.

I remember holding Thornton’s hand and flying over the roof of the chicken house.

I remember “That’s mine,” and Edward balling the tarp up in his arms. Without the tarp we were left sitting in bright sunlight with our plates and spoons.

The book was called
Peter Pan and Wendy at Spring Hope
.

It was a book about orphans.

Thornton scribbled all over some of the pages of the book after Mama said
facetious
was a word.

I went on writing adventures in the book even after he stopped playing.

Babies were birds before they were humans, and small children can still remember the bird-stage if they try hard, in
Peter Pan
.

The time Thornton took me up in an actual airplane and we flew down the coast. We flew low over the beach, and people in bathing suits looked up and waved.

We were not pretending to fly then. We were actually flying while pretending to be ordinary people.

Chagall was my favorite painter. He painted pictures of people flying through the air.

Even as a child I was crazy about Thornton.

The time my mother, rising abruptly from the table, said to my father, “We are
not
ordinary people.”

The many times I sat with Thornton on the black leather sofa in the library while Mama read poetry out loud.

The sofa cushions were split and oozed cotton stuffing. The time I tried to push it back in and Mama said I was just making it worse.

In my memories of Mama reading it is always raining outside.

Droplets trickled down the windowpanes, and she switched on the lamp behind her chair.

She read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Childe Harold,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “Dover Beach,” “The Lady of Shalott,” “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” “Annabel Lee,” and so forth, when we were still quite small.

My mother was fond of Poe.

Sometimes, reading, she was overcome by beauty and cried.

She couldn’t read Edna St. Vincent Millay or Keats without crying.

Sometimes I think she was driven crazy by beauty.

Mama, moved by a book or poem, would say that it was
devastating. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
was completely devastating, I remember.

Looking for Mama is in some ways like being lost in a dense forest, as I said earlier, and in some other ways it is like being lost in a thick fog or in a desert, as I also said.

Though I have never actually been lost in any of those places, I do have a precise image of being lost in a forest, one that I invented as a child while Mama was reading me the story of Hansel and Gretel.

I remember, from my mother then, stories drawn from the lives of artists. She told us about Robert Browning eloping to Italy with Elizabeth Barrett, that Shelley went sailing in a storm in a boat named Ariel and drowned, that Poe had a cat called Catarina, and so forth.

I don’t actually remember her recounting any of those stories, don’t possess, I mean, a little internal movie that shows her telling them to me. But in the case of certain facts, so to call them, like the ones mentioned above, it seems to me there was never a moment that I didn’t know them.

Unlike the story of Gérard de Nerval and the pet lobster he leashed with a blue ribbon and took for strolls in the garden of the Palais Royal, supposedly, which I do remember my mother recounting brightly at the supper table one night, having just read it somewhere, I imagine.

I remember my father saying that Gérard de Nerval sounded like an idiot.

Artists, according to Mama, were frequently eccentric, odd behavior being a natural consequence of genius.

She would have liked to be eccentric herself, I understood later, but didn’t dare because of Papa and the children and her position in the town and because in fact she hated being the subject of gossip.

More eccentric than she actually was, I mean, beyond the lavender dresses.

I inherited from her the idea that an artist has to be extravagant, even though she was never able to become truly extravagant herself.

Even though I am not myself an artist.

I almost wrote the
fatal
idea that an artist, etc., which is what it was for her in a sense.

I don’t remember Mama saying, “Modigliani was a debauched lunatic,” but I am convinced she did say that.

Lunatic
was one of the words she applied to extravagant artists she admired. She used the term, I want to say, fondly.