The Feathered Bone (30 page)
Read The Feathered Bone Online
Authors: Julie Cantrell
Hello Sparrow,
Bridgette and The Man got into a bad fight today. He was throwing things at her and yelling. I hid in my room and prayed he wouldn't hurt her. She was screaming and throwing things too. They were arguing over what to watch on TV. I don't know how anybody could get that mad about TV.
After that, Bridgette came into my room and was yelling at me. She was so mean.
It made me think about something Mom told me. We were helping at a homeless shelter. One of the guys there didn't want the blanket we gave him. He didn't like the cot. He was mad about the pizza. He kept knocking things over and fussing. Pop took him outside because the other people were scared of him. I was too.
When Pop came back, I asked why the guy was being so mean. We were only trying to help him. Pop said, “Maybe that's why he's mad. He knows he needs help, and he's too proud to take it.”
Then Mom put her arm around me and she said, “It's hard to understand, Sarah. But if you try to pet a dog who has a broken leg, he might bite you, just to make sure you don't hurt him worse.
It's 3:00 a.m., and I am jolted from sleep with another nightmare. The same one I've had countless times since Sarah went missing.
I'm running through the dark alleyways of New Orleans, chasing Sarah. She's ahead of me, just out of reach, and she's racing away, laughing. The alley walls are filled with colorful metal bird-cages, like the one that held the fortune-teller's sparrow.
In the dream, I run for long stretches, calling out to her. “Wait!” I yell. “I'm coming!” I'm almost close enough to grab her when a man jumps from an alcove and attacks me with his knife. He stabs me again and again from behind. I fall to the ground, bleeding, and then I see his face. The man is Carl.
Only this time, the dream has something new at the end. Carl stands over me, knife in hand. He says, “I never loved anybody.”
Just as I take my last breath, the cages swing open and thousands of sparrows fly free.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Mother's Day
“Happy Mother's Day!” Ellie wakes me with a card and a vase of fresh wildflowers.
“Oh my goodness, Ellie. These are beautiful!” I ignore my allergic itch and give the blooms a deep inhale. “They smell so good!”
“Got them in the pasture at the end of the road.” She smiles proudly. “Open the card.”
I sit up and blink a few times to give my eyes a chance to wake up. Then I tear open the powder-pink envelope to find a handmade card. “Ellie! You drew this?”
She nods, grinning broadly.
The velvety-soft construction paper brings back a swarm of memories. “Gosh, this makes me think of all those art projects we used to do together.” Hours spent painting, coloring, glittering, never worrying one bit about the mess. “I'm so lucky I get to be your mom. Best thing about my life. No doubt.” I give her a gentle kiss on the forehead, and she accepts.
On the front of the card she's drawn a beautiful sketch of a feather. It's dark blue and deep purple with tones of turquoise peeking through. “This is gorgeous,” I say, opening the folded paper to find another work of art inside. Here she's inked a mother and a girl.
“That's us,” she says.
“I can tell.” I offer a proud tilt of my head. The sketch really does resemble the two of us. Our arms are outstretched, depicted as wings, and we are soaring high above the rest of the world, which sits miniaturized below. We're both smiling peacefully. A halo of light catches the colors of our feathers, almost as if we glow. “This is the
most amazing drawing, Ellie. You have so much talent. Thank you. Best gift ever.”
She beams. At the bottom of the card, she's written:
The emancipation of you and me.
“Tell me about the picture.” I pat the bed, urging her to come cuddle beside me. She does.
“It's supposed to show us being free.”
“I like that idea. Free from what?”
“Just free,” she says. “Completely free. Free from our sadness. Our anger and our fears. Free from what we're supposed to do and what we don't want to do. Free.”
Trying not to cry, I hold Ellie against my heart, her drawing in my hands. Out my window, the morning gifts us with a golden arch of light. Looking at the sky, I whisper, “You've always been so smart for your age. Such a deep thinker. When you were little, you used to stare into the clouds. You said the sky was the wild blue yonder.”
She smiles. “I wanted to know what was up there. I wanted to fly.”
“What do you say we get in the car, and we start driving, and we don't stop until we get where we're going?”
Ellie laughs. “Okay. Where are we going?”
“I don't know. Somewhere we feel free.”
In less than two hours we've reached Gulfport, a navy town on the Mississippi coast, known more for its working seaport than its beaches. In these parts, the barrier islands keep the inner waters brown and unappealing. Katrina has done a number on the entire
stretch, but by taking Captain Skrmetta's boat from the yacht harbor out to Ship Island, we'll reach white sands and dolphin waters that aren't all that different from Florida's Emerald Coast, our preferred vacation destination.
With swimsuits and sunscreen, we load our small cooler onto the
Pan American
just in time for the nine o'clock departure. The boat is crowded with passengers equally eager for surf and sun. Temperatures are supposed to reach ninety today, and the warmth is good for us both. Ellie stays close to me as the boat pulls from its dock and heads out toward the open sea.
Neither of us says it, but I imagine we're both remembering the ferry ride from Algiers, when Sarah stood on the deck shouting at the wind, “We're free! We're free!” It's one of the last images I have of Sarah. Her arms stretched like wings, her head tilted toward the sun, her smile shining with delight. Wherever she is now, I hope she's somewhere feeling free.
The captain thanks us all for returning, explaining how tough it's been since Katrina. We're one of the first voyages out to the island since the company resumed business last month.
“You won't believe it now, but that Friday night before Katrina, it looked like the Normandy invasion with all those boats coming in. They were trying to stay ahead of the storm, get upriver. But the forecasts were saying it would hit Florida. We didn't start tying boats until twenty-four hours before landfall. That's not enough time. It was every man for himself.”
He continues to tell us about the extensive damage done to East Ship Island. With nearly two-thirds of it being lost to the storm, the channel known as Camille Cut was significantly widened. He assures us West Ship Island, our destination, fared much
better. Then, with a sailor's spunk and a survivor's grit, the third-generation ferry captain blows the ship's horn with a celebratory howl. A signal to all: the worst is over.
Ellie turns her back to the wind and asks, “Think we'll go to Destin this year?”
“I'm not sure yet, honey. Let's just enjoy today.”
Ship Island sure isn't the Emerald Coast, but it's the best I can do without Carl's help. He hasn't contributed a dime since he moved out, and I've been struggling to keep up with all our living expenses on my salary alone. Any little kink, like the new tires I had to buy last month, or Ellie's theater costumes the month before, can send me looking at my credit cards, a place my mother taught me never to turn. If it weren't for the rental income I get from her house, we'd be in trouble.
As the waves lick the ship, I'm betting that Carl and Ashleigh will be enjoying a week's vacation in Florida this summer. They may even invite Ellie to go with them. And of course she'll want to go. Why shouldn't she?
It takes about forty-five minutes to complete the eleven-mile journey to Ship Island. As the vessel docks, I point east and challenge Ellie with a bit of trivia. “Did you know there used to be another island out thereâbetween here and Horn?”
She shakes her head and carries the mini-cooler from the ship. The sand is already warm, but it's not yet too hot for bare feet, so I kick off my flip-flops and hold them as we walk along the beach. Ellie does the same.
“Supposedly the Native Americans who lived on the coastâsome of them your ancestors, by the wayâused to talk about an island that would appear and disappear.”
She gives me a strange look, as if she's way too old for fairy tales.
“Seriously,” I tell her, “it would be seen for years at a time, and then it'd be gone again. Only to come back many years later. Some sailor found a dog that had been stranded there, washed in during a hurricane. So they named it Dog Island. It was on maps in the early 1800s, disappeared before the Civil War, and then came back again around the end of the century.”
“Cool.” Ellie chooses a spot to sunbathe and arranges her towel across the sand. I do the same, claiming a space beside her. The beach is long, with plenty of room for families to spread out, so we find a patch of privacy. And peace.
“I think at one time there was a big casino on the island. Back during Prohibition, when people had to come way out here to drink. They called it the Isle of Caprice, and they would bring boatloads of gamblers in to party. They even bet on swim races. People would swim all the way from the coast to the island. Twelve miles across the Gulf. Supposedly it was a pretty fancy place, with all kinds of imported furniture and luxurious carpets. Can you imagine? The Roaring Twenties.” I say this with flare, prissing like a flapper.
“What happened to it?” Ellie pulls out her iPod, hinting this could be the final conversation we have for the day. I try to make it last.
“What do you think happened?”
“It disappeared?”
“It disappeared!”
Just before inserting her earbuds, Ellie looks out to the endless green sea and sighs. Then she says, “Nothing lasts forever.”
June 2006
Hello Sparrow,
I would be going to eighth grade if I wasn't stuck here. I always liked school. I miss it.
Bridgette brought me more books today. She'll keep buying them as long as I read to her. I don't think she knows how to read.
One of the books is called
The Little White Bird
. She says books shouldn't be written about places she “ain't never been to.” I told her that's what's so magic about books.
She told me to read this one by myself. Here's my favorite part: “The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.”
See? I believe.