Authors: Paul Harding
I pointed and jabbed. “Tsssst, tssst.”
Kate looked back at her hand. The bird did not seem to notice the seeds. It was smaller than any I’d seen before, save for hummingbirds. But it was not a hummingbird. It was not
a finch or a warbler or a wren. I’d never seen a bird like it, in the woods or meadows or in a book. Kate looked at the bird and smiled. The bird sang a liquid, silvery little phrase that was so clear and so limpid it seemed without source, trilling in the air for an instant and evaporating without a trace. (Afterward, whenever Kate and I talked about her first time feeding the birds, we ended our recollections by talking about the little yellow bird and the little silver phrase it sang that neither of us could have said quite for certain we had actually heard, but for the fact that the other seemed to have heard it as well.) The bird remained on the tip of Kate’s finger for another moment and whirred back into the reeds. I tried to sight it with my binoculars but could not find it again.
We crossed the boardwalk, walked up the log steps in the woods and into the milkweed field, which was full of swallows zinging around catching insects on the wing in the sunset.
Kate rubbed her arm and said, “Oh, man, I must have fed like a hundred birds. That pretty little yellow one was the best. I couldn’t even feel it on my fingers.”
W
HEN
I
WAS A
kid, we followed the Memorial Day parade from the Civil War memorial in the center of the village, down Main Street, to the cemetery. The veterans and cops and firefighters and dens and packs of Boy and Girl Scouts and the high school marching band formed a semicircle around a portable podium with a built-in microphone and speaker, which was never loud enough, set up once a year for this occasion in front of a file of uniform headstones belonging
to a group of Revolutionary War veterans, each with a small United States flag poked into the ground next to it. An officer in the army or navy reserves would give a speech, which, translated through the podium speaker, sounded like a garbled distillation of every Memorial Day speech ever given in every small town in the country, the words of which were not as important as the spirit in which they were delivered. When the day was sunny and blustery, the wind would pop and roar through the speaker along with the speech. When it was overcast or rainy, the speech would sound nearly subterranean, as if it were channeled through the officer at the podium from one of the soldiers in the ground behind him. Villagers sat on the hill overlooking the podium or meandered among the headstones, searching for the oldest dates, or stood behind the crowd with toddlers in strollers. Kids ran around playing tag or hide-and-go-seek and were shushed by whatever nearby adults when they squealed too loudly. After the speech, the first trumpeter in the marching band played taps. When he was finished, the second trumpeter played it again, from behind a maple tree at the back of the cemetery. Three veterans from the National Guard fired three rounds of blanks from their rifles and the Cub Scouts scrummed at their feet for the shells. The parade re-formed, the drum line started a march, and the procession headed back to town, where it ended with another short speech in front of the town hall.
I played drums in the high school band and dreaded the Memorial Day parade because I had to spend the day among everyone I knew dressed in a shiny blue polyester suit, with a white sash, white bucks, and a blue plume sticking up from
the crown of my white vinyl shako. After high school, I never thought about the parade until I moved back to Enon and had Kate.
Kate was born in November, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, but the next May, when she was six months old, I found myself taking her to the parade and following alongside the band with her in her carriage. I took her to the parade every year until she was old enough to join the Brownies, after which she marched in the parade, and I followed alongside her troop, taking pictures. She didn’t continue into Girl Scouts because by then she was preoccupied with tennis and running, but I was still able to lure her to the parade the two years before she died, although the last year, the spring before her death, she ran off with three of her friends and they all sat on a stone wall along the route, sucking on lollipops, knocking side to side off each other’s shoulders, laughing and yelling at their friends in the parade. I took their picture and they all mugged it up, making funny faces, and we kept the photo on the refrigerator until Kate died and Sue moved back to Minnesota and took it with her.
T
HE FIRST NIGHT
I spent alone in the house after Sue left I lay on the couch in the living room, in the dark, resting my broken hand on my chest. The hand was swollen and my black-and-purple fingers stuck out of the cast. The doctor had given me a prescription of thirty what she called instant-release painkillers and I’d been following the directions on the prescription bottle to take one pill every four to six hours. I took a pill and my brain felt slightly rubbery. But my hand
hurt so much that I began to resent the pain for distracting me from Kate. I found myself having a debate between thinking about Kate and concentrating on the pain. The argument became one of those tedious, seemingly never-ending dreams that irked and provoked me but from which I could not rouse myself, even though I was not, properly speaking, sleeping.
I had known lots of guys over the years who took pills and mixed them with other drugs and alcohol. I thought, A second pill won’t kill me; it’ll just sand the burrs off the pain and cool down these voices, these antagonists who haven’t the decency to leave me in peace. I need a break, some rest. I’m just so cooked, so cracked up and crooked. If I get some time out, if I can just step back a little, get my feet back under me, let this hand heal a little, stop killing me so much, I can figure out how to get hold of myself.
I sat up and took another pill from the bottle and swallowed it dry. I was thirsty. My mouth stuck together and the pill seemed to adhere to the back of my throat. Instead of getting up for some water, I lay back down and rested my hand on my chest and closed my eyes and whispered, “Just have some mercy, please just have some mercy.”
I surfaced into consciousness four hours later, sweating and parched. I rose and lurched to the bathroom and ran the cold water tap in the sink until the tepid water in the pipes cleared and the chilled water from underground poured out. I filled the red plastic cup Kate had used for rinsing her mouth when she brushed her teeth and gulped the water down and filled the cup again. I stood for a moment in the dark. What if Kate and Susan could just be upstairs, sleeping?
I thought. Couldn’t I just be down here going to the bathroom and getting a drink of water, or having a couple Toll House cookies and drinking milk from the jug in the light from the refrigerator, the door propped open against my hip, and pulling back the shade on the kitchen door a couple inches to look out at the moonlit yard, to think for a second about all the animals out there, hidden, going about their business, to think that that was eerie but also taking some comfort in it and going back upstairs and peeking in on Kate to make sure she wasn’t hanging half off the bed like she often ended up and climbing back into bed next to Susan, and maybe even worrying about money or work for an hour before I fall back asleep? What a comfort that would be, worrying about money while my daughter slept.
Going back to sleep upstairs in Sue’s and my bed, next to Kate’s empty room, appalled me, so I went back to the living room and picked up the bottle of pills and shook it. I tapped a dozen pills into the palm of my hand. I pinched up two painkillers and put them in my mouth and washed them down with the rest of the cold water in the red cup.
I
WOKE AT TWO
the next afternoon and struggled to make a pot of coffee with my good hand. My broken hand hurt dangling at my side, so I held it up near my cheek. Out of habit I looked for birds in the backyard. We’d bought a couple of feeders and Kate kept them filled. She tried to get the chickadees to eat from her hand, but they never would. The feeders were empty by the time Kate was buried. I couldn’t bring myself to refill them, so I fetched the bag of seeds we kept in
the bottom drawer of an old bureau in the garage. After cranking open one of the windows in the nook, I removed the screen and scooped up a bunch of seeds in an old plastic juice pitcher that had faint traces of a family of cartoon bears painted on it, and tossed them out into the yard.
The empty house held its silence like a solid volume. There was weight to it. The hosts on talk radio sounded brash and insipid and oblivious. The music on the classical station sounded like music for a dentist’s office. Rock music sounded lurid and insincere. I tried to read a newspaper but the bad news made me feel more hopeless and the good news seemed invented. I wanted to call Sue’s parents’ house and ask if she’d arrived okay and ask if it felt better to be there, but I knew that that would be the wrong thing to do. Sue had called at some point the night before. I remembered hearing the message on the answering machine, and from the tone of her voice that she’d arrived without any problems. I already felt bad, not having answered her call, not having already called back, as if I’d missed my one slim chance. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the message and I unplugged the phone. I checked my cell phone and saw that she’d left a message on it as well. I slid the backing off the phone and removed the memory card.
By three o’clock, it was unbearable to be in the house anymore, so I went outside and started to walk. I didn’t want to walk along the road, on the sidewalk. Someone might see me and stop and offer condolences or deliberate small talk. I imagined myself walking down the sidewalk and a woman pulling over and asking if I was doing okay and other people
driving by and seeing me and knowing I was that grieving father and separated husband, and the exposure and embarrassment and humiliation being too much to take. But, since the Fairfield estate had been subdivided into a development twenty years earlier, it was no longer possible to cut through the fields that had originally been called Wild Man’s Meadow, when Enon had first been colonized, at least during the day. As conspicuous as walking along the road felt, cutting through the meadow would have drawn more attention, if only for the strange and sorrowful fact that in the thirty years there had been houses set around it, I had never seen anyone, adults or kids, in the meadow, no one exploring or stalking through the high summer grass or marching through winter snows. Whenever I passed it, I recalled swiping my way through the tall, buggy grass and being half terrified that the wild man, after whom the area had originally been named and about whom I had been told by some older neighborhood kids, was scrambling toward me with unnatural speed and aim from somewhere along the line of trees bordering the meadow. My terror was greatest in broad daylight, because of a sense that the wild man was so terrible and so wild he did not even need the cover of darkness or creeping stealth to claim his victims in his realm. I told Kate about the wild man one day when we were walking by the meadow. She must have been seven or eight—old enough to be told the story and be thrilled instead of frightened. But she had not been thrilled or frightened in the least.
“That’s just people’s backyards,” she said, and just like that it was true; her understanding of the landscape unseated my
own—the mythical wild man of the meadow simply disappeared or, simply, had never existed for her and would never be grafted into her impression of the place.
Scooting past the meadow, I felt so panicked that someone was going to pull over and talk with me before I reached the woods that twice I nearly stopped and turned around and ran back to the house. When I reached the West Enon playground, I hurried off the sidewalk and past the empty basketball courts to where an old path entered the woods at a break in a stone wall. I sat on the wall for a moment and half-sobbed in relief at reaching cover. My broken hand ached terribly. The blood pulsing through it hurt. I took one of the six painkillers from the breast pocket of my flannel shirt and swallowed it.
The path in the woods dated back to the Revolutionary War, and I thought that only animals and kids must have used it for many years, deer and coyotes and the dogs of the village, which were allowed to roam with complete freedom, Enon never having had a leash law, and kids, at least when I’d been young, always having been given the run of the village by the time they were nine or ten years old. My friends and I had used the path when we were kids. I realized that I’d never shown it to Kate and that I had not walked it in over twenty years. As I recalled it, a quarter mile into the woods the path crossed in front of the ruins of an old cabin engulfed under thickets of bittersweet. The cabin was harmless but eerie. I had been inside only a couple of times, when I was a boy, on dares, during the day; otherwise, I always skipped into a half run to get past it. It lent the sense of some forsaken soul lying in a bed in the back room, someone who had been ill and
semiconscious for two hundred years, his limbs and body wrapped in the bittersweet, too, who sensed me passing by out on the path, and who wanted me to come into the house and snip the vines from him and take his hand and put a cloth soaked in cold water on his forehead. But his hands would have been hairy with roots and would have crumbled away like dirt when I cut the vines from them and took hold of them, and his old striped shirt would be rotted and full of spores that would have made me cough, and his old body would have been packed dirt that had half-rotted through the bedding, and the entire room would be full of a noxious suspension that had been fermenting for over a century, since the dying man had been quarantined and forgotten, exiled in an obscure dead water of time, the sort of which Enon is full, if you observe carefully enough.
There was no trace of the cabin where I remembered it being. I ranged up and down the area where it should have been, looking for a pile of logs or tangle of bittersweet that somehow might have digested the cabin, but there was nothing.