Winter Birds (15 page)

He only smiles and squeezes you tighter. You dig your knuckles hard against his bones and arch your back, sipping the air since you can't drink it. Papa gives you an ugly look that passes through you, but still your expression stays the same. You stare at the vein you have gathered in your hands. You count the slow swing of the empty sleeve back and forth in the air. “Put him down,” Mama says. “You hurt that youngun and I swear I'll make you sorry.”

“If he gets hurt it won't be my fault. You're the one had him crawling under that house.”

“Who had me crawling under there? You son of a bitch, put him down!”

Papa looks at you and laughs. “Look at his face. He ain't scared, he hates his Daddy.”

You turn your face to the sky.

“Bobjay Crell, you put my youngun on the ground right now, you dirty one-armed son of a bitch.”

Papa smiles a slow wide smile. “What did you call me?”

“Put him down.”

“No, what did you call me? You called me a one-armed son of a bitch. I want you to call me that again.”

Slowly his grip on you loosens and you slide to the earth. Your shoulder throbs and you gasp for air, you kneel in the pale grass and breathe, breathe.

Mama pushes back hair and says, “Danny, come over here now,” motioning toward the porch. But Papa steps toward her and she backs away.

His face is darker than the clouds. “Go ahead and run.”

“I can't run. You hurt my leg.”

After a moment he laughs. “Oh boy. You're sorry you said it now, ain't you?”

“I was mad, Bobjay, I didn't mean it.” She steps back. “Please leave me alone.” She backs up the steps, hands reaching for support she doesn't find. There is only air, and Papa laughs, and takes a step each time she does, and says, “You can't go anywhere else, honey.”

The hand rises.

A cry from the porch, Amy.

Mama makes a low sound from the belly.

“No, leave her alone,” Allen says.

But the sound comes to you from such a distance, there is a hush on this grass where you are still catching up with air. Duck jumps off the porch and runs away crying, his hands on his ears. Papa is shouting something.
Mama has already fallen, and is raising her arms to cover her face. Her voice surrounds you, entering like a knife, and you feel as if you bleed from the hearing. You look away from them, at the trees swaying serenely in the wind. But even then you can picture her face when he slaps her, and the sounds she makes rise round you in spirals.

He makes her crawl into the house since she crawled under it.

Says
Don't ever call me no one-armed sonofabitch baby
.

She says
Please, please, I didn't mean it.

While Amy says softly Mama, Mama, sags against the porch post saying Mama, and Mama disappears into the house on her hands and knees with her hair falling over her face.

The wind descends onto the house and fields, onto your face, onto Mama's vanishing skirt and legs and new bruises, descends onto the trees and the river, a noise, a rushing that almost makes you cold enough inside that you don't want to follow them into the house, that you don't want to see her after he finishes with her.

But when the door closes you stand. Their shouts are muffled by the house. You watch Allen and Amy and Grove. Allen goes to the door and opens it, and then Amy rushes inside with a strangled cry, only to run into Papa's legs.

Over you he hovers a moment, and a new cold rushes through you as he watches you. He has swept Amy to one side and Allen to the other. He gives you a long
strange look. “My arm hurts now,” he says, and walks to the truck. Fishing the bottle from his pocket, he drains it and throws it in the grass. He starts the truck and backs down the driveway, and clatters away down the road, between two dark banks of trees.

Smoke from Papa's cigarette swirls in the light in the place where he had stood.

When you have all come inside Amy closes and locks the door. Allen hurries toward the bedroom but stops. Mama is a motionless figure on the floor. You see a coil of white, part of her dress, then an arm, a lock of her hair, her upturned face, Allen standing beside her silent.

Seeing him, she stirs.

By then you stand next to him, and behind you is Amy, and Duck leads Grove by the hand, and you wait there, watching her rise.

A dark streak glistens under her nose. Red streaks a little place on her dress. She whispers, “You younguns go back to the living room,” her voice so weak it hardly reaches you. You eye each other and stay. Breath shivering into her, she leans up on thin arms, a swirl of the smoke twining round her and light filling her hair. She says, “I don't want you to see me like this”; she chokes, coughs into her hand. At last she stands and pushes past you into
the bathroom. She closes the door. Behind the rush of water down the sink you can hear her voice, a chant.

The others listen, watching each other. But you run into the living room, lie down on the couch and stuff your fist in your ears. The dark couch smells of tobacco, the upholstery scratches your face, but you press against it hard to hide from the light. You see only the colored shapes that dance against your lids when you close your eyes too tight.

Footsteps echo in the next room.

Amy says something too low to hear.

The sound of the wind rises as the water stops.

Pale shadows move on the TV screen, that no one thought to turn off when everyone went outside. It gives you an odd feeling that the people on the television shows have been moving the whole time, playing to an empty room. You go to the window, where you search the yard. Wind lifts the dry light leaves off the ground. No one walks in the fields but Queenie, a white blur nosing this way and that among the cornstalks.

“Can you hear me, stupid?” Amy asks. “Help me clean up this mess in the kitchen. You don't need to keep watch. He ain't coming back for a while.”

“I was looking out at the yard,” you say.

“You don't need to daydream, you need to help me.” She adds in a whisper, “I don't want Mama to see the kitchen like this. I got some of it cleaned up already, but there's still snap beans all over the floor.”

In the kitchen you pick up pieces of boiled bean and
potato with your fingers. Finding the mop in the pantry, you wet it and mop the floor, Amy directing you to this or that spot she says you've missed. She washes all the pots and bends them back into shape. She washes potatoes too, and starts to peel them as you rinse out the mop and put it away.

Your brothers stray into the kitchen one by one and watch the two of you. Amy sits Grove in a chair and makes him show his arm, which Duck swears is all right. He didn't hurt it again while Allen was looking after him. “It was already hurt before that,” Amy says, and tells him to hush talking so loud.

They sit at the table listening to the wind rush against this almost empty house, pouring over and under and around the joined boards and making them groan, as the light pales again, the clouds thickening.

Amy drops the brown peelings in the grocery bag that is full of trash. She washes the potatoes till they're white as the skin over her knuckles.

Mama is a rustle two rooms away, a soft hiss of cloth.

Soon the bedroom door opens.

Mama has brushed her hair and pulled it back tight through a red plastic barrette shaped like a butterfly. Her dress is a fresh one, white, patterned with blue flowers. She still wears the sweater Allen brought her, and stands silent over the trash bag picking out the pieces of grass caught in the yarn. She favors one leg. On her cheek a small bruise swells, and her cut lip puffs out a little. “You cleaned up real good in here,” she says softly.

Amy whispers, “I turned off the oven too. The chicken didn't burn or anything.”

Mama nods almost shyly, keeping the bruised side of her face in the shadow. “I knew I could count on my girl. Maybe with him gone we can eat us some dinner in peace.”

“I hope he stays gone forever,” Allen says.

“I hope he drives his truck off a bridge,” says Duck.

“We all hope so,” Amy says.

Mama only cleans her sweater, and then, nudging the trash bag with her toe, says, “That's enough mean talk. Danny, take the trash out and burn it. You boys go in the living room and straighten up in there. Amy and me got work to do.”

Amy slices potatoes as Mama opens cabinet doors, handing you the book of matches. The trash is light and doesn't hurt your shoulder. Mama says, “Be careful in the wind,” and you nod, while in the living room your brothers turn up the sound on the TV, and Amy, with that serious look on her face, asks Mama to teach her how to light the pilot on the stove.

OUTSIDE THE
wind carries you to the trash pile and you run like you're not supposed to, picturing yourself a stream of wind over the fields, soaring above the treetops and curling into the clouds, higher and higher till you fly where the air is clean and perfect. You run under the clothesline and past the johnny house, picking your feet high off the ground like a prancing pony, imagining you
make no noise running even on the dry grass. Your face streams with cold, your hands are quickly numbed, the wind cuts like knives through your sweater and shirt, so cold it tickles and you want to laugh. At the barrel where you burn the trash you fumble with the matches, sparks popping onto the backs of your hands. A small flame wavers on the edge of the bag, a blue flower. You hover over it and protect it from the wind with your hands.

In the top of the bag under the potato peels you pick out margarine wrappers and a wad of tissue that will burn fast. You lay them near the little fire. Now you become a witch and a master of fire, and this bag of trash is a city you mean to level. You stand beside it, arms folded, watching the city walls strip away under the fire, hearing the voices of the tiny people calling for mercy; but you shut your ears to their cries, you are big as a mountain compared to them, and you're angry as God when Moses struck the rock with his staff; you don't pity them for their crying. At the center of the burning you imagine your father's face, letting the flames catch hold of the edges and curl the flesh inward like this paper, till it burns him and blackens him to the eyes, which split open in the heat and spill tears over the trash, hissing like rain in the flame.

You look up at the clouds, an even sheet of gray.

You picture snowflakes falling into the fire.

The trash burns quickly. Smoke pours into the
clouds. You feel the heat on your face and lean toward it, staring down into the white heat where the bag and the cardboard have turned to ash. The city has vanished. Even the fire master can't make fire without fuel. At the end a gray shape wavers in place of the bag, that collapses when you poke it with a stick.

The wind whirls ash into your hair. The cold washes the last traces of the fire's warmth from your face. You have turned to stone in the cold. You are white like the pictures of statues you have seen at school, and smooth all over, and cool as if you are frozen. Nothing touches you or makes you feel. You don't know how long you have stood here perfectly still, and really, you might go on standing here all day, if you didn't hear the sound of a truck passing on the road. In front of the house it slows down. It sounds like Papa's truck. You run to the corner of the house.

The truck is green, not blue like Papa's. The truck is green. It passes the house.

You go back to the house without dreaming any more dreams.

THE KITCHEN
windows have fogged with the heat from pots on the stove, and Amy stands on a kitchen chair learning to make brown gravy in an iron skillet. Beside her, Mama watches, sipping coffee. The coffee spoon makes a brown stain on the white of the towel where it rests.

“Did you watch till the fire was out?” Mama asks.

Amy says, “It took him long enough for that trash to burn twice.”

“The fire just now went out,” you say. You open a new grocery bag beside the sink. The bruise on Mama's face is larger, darker-colored, shining in the light from the window.

Even with the television playing, the house seems quiet now, and the sound of the wind outside only makes the inside seem safer and warmer. Mama locks the back door after hurrying down the porch to hook the screen. The front door is locked and bolted. Your brothers sit in a line on the couch watching the parade on TV. Duck says he bets that stuff on the floats ain't even real. Allen says be quiet and watch it. Grove sits between the two of them, cradling his arm.

“Grove's arm is hurting him worse,” Amy says quietly to Mama, and Mama answers, “I expected it would.”

She goes to Grove and leans over him, touching the swollen place carefully. You watch her and touch your shoulder the same way, but you say nothing.

Mama's voice, when she speaks, fills the rooms in a way that Papa's never does, loud as he shouts. Her fullness is all of warmth and softness, with no blade edge. She asks if the arm hurts bad, and Grove nods that it does. She asks if it started hurting when Papa was yelling and Grove answers that it did. Papa's chair, turned toward the television, seems to mock you.

Amy says, “My arm is tired. Come stir this for a while.”

You take her place in the chair and stir with the arm that isn't hurting, though you are clumsier using it and must go slower. “Stir at the bottom so it doesn't stick,” Amy says, “and stir all around so it doesn't make lumps. You better not let it make lumps, either, because I had it going real good.” She sets the table, laying out flowered plates one by one. Mama has set the tea jar in the window. The smell mingles with the other smells. Soon Mama comes back to mix the tea and break ice into glasses. She has brought Grove into the kitchen, the swollen arm wrapped in an elastic bandage. Allen and Duck take their seats too, turning up the sound on the television so they can hear the parade announcers. Amy says, “I don't see what's so hot about a bunch of balloons.”