Border Songs (36 page)

A dozen barn swallows had gathered on the telephone and power lines looping from Sophie’s house to Northwood. Another dozen were approaching from far north of the ditch, then an incoming cloud—multiple clouds, actually—that broke up as they neared the three lines, the birds spinning like ice skaters or stunt pilots before lining up side by side and carrying on in high, grating voices that sounded like glass marbles rubbing against one another. He tacked toward their temporary roost at a forty-five degree angle, the din of Sophie’s party fading beneath the excited banter of the assembling acrobats. As the sagging lines filled up, they created the illusion that the weight of all these little birds was pulling the telephone poles toward each other and that the swallows were about to be launched from this flexed slingshot.

S
OPHIE ASKED
Alexandra Cole to give her two-finger whistle to get everyone’s attention. “I’d like to make a quick announcement and introduce a special guest,” she said, which created so much simultaneous chatter that Alexandra had to whistle again. “Brandon,” Sophie shouted. “Where are you?” A voice rose above the murmur. “Think he stepped outside.” “Well, good,” Sophie said over the laughter, “because I’m breaking a promise here. I told him I wouldn’t draw undue attention to his work, but I simply can’t resist. I wanted you all to get a chance to see some of it, and I hope that some of you find it as stunning as I do.” The chatter and laughter rose up and people crowded the walls with cocktails, most of them squinting at the art for the first time. “Listen!” she pleaded. “I took the liberty of inviting a far better judge of such matters, Dr. Matthew Egan, the respected dean of Fine Arts at Western Washington University. Dr. Egan?”

For most people the little man was just a voice. “Young Mr. Vanderkool’s art, I believe, reflects perhaps as well as any art I’ve seen, the
American psyche in the twenty-first century,” he said, to rising snickers. “I’m very serious,” he added while several conversations resumed. “His fixation with nests, for example, obviously expresses a grave concern with security.”

More giggles skittered across the room, but every painting and photo was getting examined now. “And the nests are crumbling,” someone blurted with mock gravity.

“His work with leaves,” the dean continued, “shows he’s obviously been influenced by the great Andy Goldsworthy, but Mr. Vanderkool’s quilts look more like flags, susceptible to the slightest breeze.” His voice rose confidently above the crowd noise. “And what to make of these paintings of startled smugglers and illegal immigrants?” He pointed at a portrait of the Princess of Nowhere. “Again, his focus appears to be the instant before collapse—or surrender. I haven’t had the pleasure of conversing with the artist, but it’s obvious to me, given the variety of people and birds he paints, that he celebrates all living things. Or consider his self-portrait,” he demanded. “Clearly, the leaves are feathers and …”

The laughter and raspberries rose, drowning him out with conversations about the casino and football and weather and an Oktoberfest celebration in Bellingham. Wayne Rousseau, however, was just warming up, holding court in his corner as people leaned in to hear him disagree with the dean and suggest that in fact Brandon’s art was all about turning order into disorder and chaos into a plausible pattern, the subtext being how
temporary
everything is. A shrinking bevy of ladies tried to follow his subsequent pronouncements about how dyslexic geniuses were often viewed as oddballs in their own time, about the latest movements in landscape art, about da Vinci’s obsession with flight, about how van Gogh’s very last painting was—

“Oh, my God!” Alexandra Cole shrieked, gawking out the window. “What is he doing with those
birds?”

H
E ESTIMATED
there were fourteen hundred shoulder to shoulder on the lines, with dozens more in the air entertaining the others and still
more congregating. He was standing perfectly still, slightly west of the raucous flock yet close enough to make out their long, midnight-blue wings and cinnamon breasts. Several incoming birds whirled near his head before swooping up to the black lines. It became a game, with swallow after swallow seeing how close it could come to his head, his hips, his bowed and extended arms, circling and dipping, finally swirling back to the lines. Their voices rose to a crescendo and were instantly lost in a mad, simultaneous flutter of wings, as if gunfire had launched them airborne in a swarm that extended, then collapsed as it veered southeast across the valley toward the treed hillsides below Mount Baker’s stone flanks.

He watched them fade over the golden fields into a hazy mob before disappearing into the blue-black sky itself. He felt so much a part of them that it half-startled him to look down and find himself still there, left behind, alone and buzzing like a tuning fork. He took a breath, shuffled his feet and heard the party behind him, sounding too close. He decided to go find Madeline before he lost the nerve or the words. But when he turned he saw that everyone had already spilled into Sophie’s yard and the street, all of them seemingly staring at him. He glanced around behind him, to see if there was anything else they could be looking at, but there wasn’t. Turning back, he spotted his sequined mother leaning against his father. He saw Sophie filming, then heard and saw McAfferty and Dionne clapping, with others joining in. But it took him a few beats to realize that the lone figure striding toward him was Madeline Rousseau, her arms extended from her sides the way they did when she was telling you something that amazed her, or the way they did when she was about to give someone a hug so big that it required an elaborate windup.

He apparently wouldn’t need to summon the perfect magical sequence of words after all. He wouldn’t have to say anything. If he just stood still and waited, she’d walk right into him.