Thing With Feathers (9781616634704) (2 page)

“Will ya grant me the child, Lord?” he shouted at the heavens.

The child, an heir, was all that mattered. Julius Bowman, formerly of Tennessee, enjoyed telling folks of his significance in royal history.

The bowman for the king had been Julius’s ancestor. But the family inherited far more than the pathetic scrap of historical pride. In the days of kingship, it was common to marry within the family to assure a pure heir and a concentration of wealth and title. Truth be known, although a bowman was important to the royals for both hunting and security, the title was only a half step up from peasant or even a robber. Still, the Bowman family had always been hell-bent on preserving it. Later, it was learned that incestuous practices sometimes bred insanity, sometimes bleeders. The Bowmans’ had no bleeders.

Julius Bowman had, himself, been born of incest to Bernard Bowman and to the title, which was barely on the skirt of actual nobility, in 1870 Europe. Leah Bowman had given birth to several daughters, even though Julius’ father had beat her unmercifully each time for the offense. After the first girl, Marie, was born, his father took to putting an immediate end to the life of subsequent infant girls. He could hardly afford to feed them all. When Marie was of child-bearing age, Julius’s father did in poor Leah, and made the girl his wife. Julius was the result of said union. By the time Julius was old enough to contribute to the future gene pool, his father was too old. It became Julius’s responsibility. His father had assured Julius that he would be doing God’s work.

“In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice,” he would often quote the Marquis De Sade, sometimes quoting the Bible in the same rant, perverting God’s Word in the process.

When Julius balked, his father beat him severely, nearly starved him, and verbally abused and threatened him, all of which finally gained Julius’s submission, if not his hatred. The union produced a female, and Julius and Marie were beaten for the transgression. That time, Julius was so angry that
he
broke the infant’s neck. But times were changing in Europe. You could no longer murder your wife or infants and get away with it. Julius’s deed became known to a priest, and he was forced to flee.

He fled to America in the year 1888 and settled in Tennessee, where he found that, while slavery was illegal, there were still ways; any bad white man could claim that a nigger had been stolen from him and swear the blackie into jail. Then, in place of keeping the nigger in jail (where the sheriff would otherwise have to provide meals), the man could buy up the black’s services until such time as he or she was sentenced for. By the time the sentence was served, the white man could bring up some other false charges and buy up the services again. Bowman had bought his wife, Jenny, from a farm bordering a neighborhood of niggers. With her being a Quadroon and all, or a quarter black, it seemed like nobody wanted her, not even the niggers. He’d been able to buy her cheap.

“‘And Joshua said to ‘em, “Pass o’er before the ark of the Lord your God in the midst of Jordan and take you every man of you a stone upon his shoulder accordin’ ta the number of the tribes of the children of Is-ra-el. Make it a sign for ya, that when your children ask their fathers, ‘What mean you by these stones?’ And ye shall answer, ‘The stones shall be for a memorial for the children of Is-ra-el forever.’” Julius was fevered in the moment, for he believed the Lord had seen fit to give him another son.

From the moment he had bought his first woman, a fifteen-year-old half-breed, he’d been obsessed with having a son. But when she’d finally produced a boy child, she promptly poisoned it. She had hated Julius Bowman to such a degree that when he’d left to celebrate his good fortune at a local pub, she’d killed his son to spite him. And then he did the worst thing imaginable to the half-breed. He sold her down the river to a New Orleans landowner, one reputed to be a master of the whip.

“Ah,” he said over the dead mother. “This stone I take shall be for a memorial unto this here peasant pioneer, who gave his life that I might possess his heritage. I shall name the boy Blair.”

In the ensuing silence, he rent open the torso of the woman and pulled the child free. Somewhere in the steely desert night, an animal shrieked. Then it was Julius who shrieked.

“What raillery is this? This is a girl child!”

He was so scorched that he nearly broke the child’s neck, but that time, something stopped him, something equally twisted as killing the child. It came to him that that child was intended to become his next wife. It was she who was to bear him a son, a pure legacy.

Julius Bowman arrived in Cloverdale on the Oregon Coast, not too far south of Tillamook Bay. It was a Saturday, late in the year 1911. He possessed a dead man’s silver, Bible, and some homemade soap he hadn’t bothered to use for himself or his ward. He still had the mule he’d started out on and, of course, the infant girl. Julius had tied the mule to Milton Blair’s hard-used touring car, and since the mule was unencumbered, it easily managed to trot alongside at a comfortable pace of about 15 miles per hour. The car had finally given out in western Idaho.

The townsfolk were uncommonly goodhearted and trusting. They were duly sensitive to the man’s misfortune of losing his young wife in childbirth, though some whispered that she had no business riding on the back of a mule so late in her pregnancy. Still, they were endeared by the circumstance of the good man—a Baptist minister, he told them—inclined to raise the baby girl on his own. It was decided immediately that Preacher Bowman should be hired to preach their sermons on Sundays. The town took up a collection to build a small home for the preacher, collecting a good deal from patrons of the local saloons when it became evident that the women collectors would not leave until every man had reached into his pocket.

On the day following Julius’s arrival, the men put aside their tilling and the womenfolk prepared food aplenty, and Cloverdale saw a good, old-fashioned house-raising for Preacher Bowman. It was treated like a celebrated town picnic.

Chapter 2

B
y 1928, the main street in Cloverdale had grown boardwalks so the ladies wouldn’t dirty their dust ruffles. Cloverdale had also been visited by a carnival not too far back, and they had their own stagecoach drop not too far north of the town, which dispatched visitors to the coast via modified car-truck. Sean passed by the Bowman barn, raised by a town effort a few weeks earlier, but with a roof not yet complete. He observed that it was already home to dozens of swallows. They whipped and flitted from open rafters to hay remnants in the fields and then back again. Industriously, they labored to form their nests and protect their young before the rains of April arrived. Rain was a far-off thought to Sean since the March afternoon boasted fine weather, warm sun and clouds like the candy Sean tried at the carnival a summer ago. It was a perfect day to hone his photography skills.

He spent every penny he earned selling salmon in the valley for five cents on a pound to buy the equipment. It had cost Sean near three dollars for the camera and three more for the developing and finishing outfit, but Sears, Roebuck and Co. professed the Conley box camera to be better than those sold by other dealers for as much as five dollars. The Conley was used by the best professional photographers. The lens had universal focus, and the shutter was purported to be instantaneous. He might be an ordinary dairy farmer for the time being, but he hoped one day to be an extraordinary photographer, something he’d told his parents many a time and to their great dismay. Sean’s father worried what living a man would make taking pictures.

Sean passed by Preacher Bowman’s cottage. It reminded Sean of one of those little cottages buried deep in the woods of
a Grimm Brothers’ tale, only there was nothing sweet or candy about the shutters and trim. In sixteen years, the preacher had not seen fit to add a single adornment or even an additional bedroom to the modest place the townsfolk had house-raised for him. Sean had only been four or so, so he didn’t recall much about the day the cabin was built. He remembered only that the men had been busily felling the trees while the ladies worked on a clay fireplace and a stick-and-daub chimney, and they had let Sean play in the clay until he was pretty much statue art. The first windows had been made from flour sacks, and there were even some benches and a table for eating that were made from split logs. The Bowman cottage had been erected with community spirit and much of the banter and laughter of a church social. Sean could bet his suspenders that those walls hadn’t heard a piece of laughter since that day.

He picked up his pace lickety-clip, and in no time at all, he could smell the river. He was anxious to catch a great blue heron or an otter at play. He thought that he might even try to double-expose an object to see what would be produced on the film. Sean daydreamed as he hiked among the low-growing blackberry bramble that was beginning to green. He nearly toppled when his foot became entangled, and as he worked his boot free, he became aware of the melodic voice of a girl somewhere near. That was probably Blair Bowman’s voice, Sean supposed. She was an awful pretty girl but painfully shy. Now that Sean thought of it, he’d never heard laughter from Blair or even seen her smile. His curiosity piqued, Sean adjusted his pant leg back into his boot and hurried toward the merry voice by the river.

He was getting close and hearing things clearer. It was not Blair’s voice alone but rather two voices. And it no longer sounded to Sean that Blair was laughing. Sean ducked from tree to tree until he caught a glimpse of movement in a small clearing on the river’s bank. He strained to hear what Blair was saying. It seemed to Sean that he had heard her sobbing, not laughing. He moved a bit closer, using the dense brush and alder to conceal himself. And his blood froze. It was Preacher Bowman who was with his daughter. Man of God or not, Preacher Bowman scared the wits out of Sean. He thought better of his spying, lest he should be caught, and was readying to steal away when Blair’s voice stalled him.

“Papa, please. Papa, don’t.”

“Quiet yourself, demon child.”

Sean turned back toward the clearing even though he could sense dread. All the townsfolk bore heavy hearts for Blair Bowman. All sixteen years of her age had been raised under the stern hand of the preacher. Folks said that Blair’s mother had died giving birth to her after traveling the Oregon Trail on the back of a mule for the entire ninth month of her pregnancy. Some folks thought the preacher wicked for entailing on his poor wife such misery and danger to life. Sean, too, thought the preacher must have been devoid of feeling for his wife as to expose the frail woman to such recklessness that insured her death. Though twenty-two years old and, by all standards, a man, Sean’s parents would probably still switch him good if he were to voice such an opinion about Preacher Bowman. His parents were largely responsible for persuading the congregation to ordain Mr. Bowman as their Baptist minister. Sean was close enough now to hear Blair’s words amid the sobbing.

“Papa…I have ripened. Miss Joseph warned all the girls about the blooding, Papa. I…could become pregnant.”

The preacher’s voice boomed from the clearing. “‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth.’”

Blair wailed at his response. “No! Papa, please. People would say of me—”

“That you are a demon child sent to test me, as you have been! A girl child, not a man child. But still, I am duty-bound to produce a son. The test? A test that I should succumb to lust and forget that this is God’s will. That you should look like my wife and sound like her, nay, be the very image of her, is more the trial!”

The girl cried uncontrollably. Sean felt sick. His senses all of a sudden seemed sharp and too real, focused on misery. He became aware of the mighty carpenter ants milling on the tree he rested against, could now hear little but the angry buzz of yellow jackets nearby and the racket made by many birds, which, just minutes earlier, had sounded like lovely music. And the heat of the March day was suddenly stifling. There was no longer anything beautiful about that, Sean realized. He heard the sound of a slap and the rustling of a petticoat.

His face burned with humiliation for Blair.
What can I do? Should I rush to the clearing by the river and expose the preacher as a molester of children? Would Bowman kill me for my spying? Would he harm Blair?
Sean heard Blair cry out in pain.
I could run and get help, but who would I tell of it? No one would come. No one would believe this
. He cast his eyes downward in shame. They came to rest upon the camera.

Chapter 3

March, 1928

Cloverdale, Oregon

T
he shadow woke Sean. A bird had swooped in through his bedroom’s open window. Sean jumped off the sagging mattress and grappled the pillowcase off his pillow. He finally persuaded the frightened Stellar’s Jay to fly back outside by shooing it toward the opening using the pillowcase. That done, Sean rubbed the sleep from his eyes and drew his pants and suspenders over his summer skivvies. He reached under the bed for his boots, and his hand brushed against the wooden box. Sean sighed. The photograph weighed heavy on his mind. He knew that it was proof of the preacher’s wickedness, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell anyone. It was not because he was afraid of Preacher Bowman. If only it were as simple as that. No, Sean was afraid of what would happen to Blair if the town was to find out what her own father was doing with her. Somehow, Preacher Bowman would make it all look her fault.