Winter Birds (9 page)

He shielded his eyes with his arm. “I heard somebody talking. Why are you all dressed up?”

Mama sat next to him. “A photographer wants to take my picture. He said he stopped because he wanted to take a picture of our house, but now he says he wants somebody to stand in front if it.”

“I think this house looks funny,” Allen said.

“He has a big black camera.”

“Can I see it?”

“No, you have to go to sleep like Mama said. You couldn't play with the camera anyway, because it's too expensive. I can't even carry it myself, it's so heavy.”

“Are we gonna move again, since he likes the house?”

Mama bent to kiss his forehead. “No, he wants to take a picture of it, he doesn't want to live in it.” She stood, smoothing the skirt. “Do you like Mama's dress?”

Allen nodded sleepily, saying, “It's pretty, Mama. You look like a fire truck.”

“That's not a nice thing to tell a lady she looks like.”

He giggled, as if he had been clever on purpose. Mama felt better on the way downstairs. Through the open front door she saw the photographer on the porch. As soon as she joined him he said, “That color will show up nice on film.”

He held a small black box in her face and clicked it with his thumb. She drew back as if bitten. “Don't worry,” he said, “I'm testing the light. I wanted some shots on the porch, but the light's not right, the trees are too close. We'll have to move down here.”

He bounded down the steps, almost slipping in the rolling sycamore balls. “Careful,” she said. “My younguns say those things are harder to walk on than ball bearings.”

“What clever children you must have.” He pointed the metal thing around and clicked it some more.

“They are pretty smart. I don't know where they got their brains from.” Mama pulled back her hair in a hand, feeling the cool breeze soothe her neck. DeCapra adjusted his camera in three or four different places and looked at her through it. Watching the black circle of glass, she could imagine it was simply the image of his pupil, magnified a thousand times. She could see straight through that hole into his brain if she only had a light strong enough. He pointed the camera at her and clicked it. He rolled a roller and clicked it again. “That wasn't bad,” he said. “You relax pretty good in front of a camera. Lots of people freeze up.”

Only then did she realize her picture had already been taken. Though she'd heard the clicks she didn't think it could be that easy. “Could you move over to the right, next to that big tree?” he asked. “Yes, there. Now, put your foot up on that root and look off in the distance. Try to make it look like you don't know you're having your picture
taken.”

She obeyed tentatively, looking over the fields and wishing she had a watch so she'd know what time it was. She glanced at DeCapra to see what he was doing. “No, look away from the camera,” he said. “Look out there somewhere.” He swept his arm in the general direction of out there. After a moment he added, “I really like your dress. Women with dark hair look good in bright colors.”

“My boy told me I look like a fire truck.”

The photographer knelt in the dirt. “How many children do you have?”

“Five.”

Slowly he rested his camera on his knee. “How old are you?”

She looked into the distance with a purpose now, because she didn't want to see his face. “I'm twenty-six. I've been married nine years.”

When he raised the camera again, he was silent for a long time, and in the end it was she who asked, “What school do you go to?”

“Mars Hill. The university of this great state of yours. I'm in graduate school.”

“My sons are going to that school. They've got a great big hospital there.”

“A hospital?”

She opened her mouth to tell him why that hospital was important. But she thought better of telling him too
much, remembering his other questions. “They're going to be doctors, every single one of them. That hospital must be a good place to learn how to be a doctor.”

“There's lot of money in medicine,” the photographer said.

“When they all get fancy and rich, they can each chip in to buy their Mama a nice house of her own and groceries every week, so when I'm old I can sit on my porch and watch the cars go by.” She laughed, almost as if she had been talking to herself. “It's all the rest I'm going to get. But it'll be enough.”

The photographer clicked his camera, saying nothing. Once he opened the back and dropped something in it, his fingers moving so fast she couldn't tell what he was doing. “It takes a lot of money to get a medical education, Mrs. Crell.”

“Where did you get my name?”

“From the mailbox.” He clicked the camera again. “I like that one, you looked mad.”

She heard the sound then, far-off, down the road. “It's about time I started my dinner, Mr. DeCapra.”

“I'll only be another minute or two, if you'll look out in those fields for me, or up in those clouds there.”

When she heard the sound again she knew she was right. The realization came with the quiet of all bad news. Here was Papa come to find this man with her, as she had known he would. “Yes, that's the right expression,” Mr. DeCapra said. “Pensive. A little worried.”

As the truck spun under the trees the windshield
flooded with black shadow. She couldn't see Papa's face. The photographer, absorbed in some dial of his machine, hardly noticed. The truck motor died. Mama turned slowly, arms folded, and walked away from the tree. She wanted simply to walk to Papa and take his face in her hands, to say it's nothing, this is nothing, I do not even particularly like this man—but she only watched Papa step out of the truck, arms folded across her breasts. She knew the look on his face from across the yard.

Papa flipped a cigarette butt into the dirt, and coughed. “We got company, Ellen?”

Mr. DeCapra looked up from his camera and bounded across the yard, offering his hand. “You must be Mr. Crell.” He let the camera dangle on the strap around his neck, shaking Papa's hand violently. “I'm a photographer, I come from Mars Hill—”

“You come all the way from Mars Hill to take my wife's picture?” He turned lazily to Mama. She smoothed her skirt again, wishing the red weren't so bright. “I know that's a pretty long ways to drive. We take our children to the hospital there.”

“It's a real good hospital,” the photographer said. “It's huge. I bet it covers half the campus.”

“They'll steal every penny you have, too, to pay for them big buildings.” Papa ground his heel back and forth in the dirt. “What do you take pictures for?”

“Some people in my department are putting together a book on the eastern part of the state, to try and capture your way of life. Some people think it's dying out. Your
way of life, I mean.” He searched Papa's face, uncomfortable, perhaps wishing he'd taken his last pictures a little faster now. At any rate, he finished lamely, “We have a grant from the government to pay for it.”

“Them fools in the government will pay for anything. You going to put my wife's picture in this book?”

“Your wife and the house. The house is fascinating. I'd love to have met the man who built it.”

“He was foreign.” Papa broke a match out of the book to clean his teeth. “My wife don't like climbing all the stairs. She says it makes her tired.”

“The stairs?”

Papa watched him for a long moment. “To the bedrooms. Me, I don't mind a few stairs. Specially not to get to a bed. How about you, Mr. Picture Taker?”

The photographer blushed. “The word is photographer, Mr. Crell. And my name is Frank DeCapra. No mister necessary.”

Papa laughed, shortly. “Yeah, I hear you. Mister.”

He turned to look at Mama. Years later as she told the story, the hurt from that look Papa gave her still burned in her. Not the look she expected. Not mean, not like he would slap her hands away if she tried to touch him. Just scared and hurt. He didn't look her in the eyes. He stared at each button of the dress, as if he were memorizing them.

“Mr. Crell,” the photographer began.

But this time Mama interrupted. “I believe you said you had all the pictures you wanted.”

“Mrs. Crell, your husband has insulted me.”

“He called you Mister. I've been calling you Mister all afternoon, and you never said a word to me.”

He blinked at her, as if her sudden unfriendliness were a great surprise. “You people must not see much of the world out here. One stranger in an afternoon makes you behave like you've been invaded by Yankees from all directions.”

“I suppose you like men to call you Frank, and women to call you Mister Frank,” Mama said. She shook her head quickly, for no reason but to free herself from Papa's gaze.

Mr. DeCapra stared at her too. “Yes,” he said, “I took all the pictures I want, and now I will be happy to leave.” Though he lifted the camera as if he would like to point it at them.

“Get out of here,” Papa said in a low voice.

The photographer jounced away, the camera flailing his ribs. But a few yards from the car he turned and spoke, gesturing emphatically, a teacher in front of his class. “You people are quite possibly crazy! All a man wants is a few lousy pictures and you act as if he's trying to steal your whole life right out from under you. So what if I don't want to be called mister? Lots of people don't like to be called mister.”

“Lots of people,” Papa said, stepping forward, “don't like to be yelled at in their own yards.”

Mama said as he took that step forward she saw the photographer's eyes move along the piece of arm at Papa's
side. He noticed it for the first time then—she saw the change in his face—and she remembered thinking how foolish it was for a man who made his living by seeing to notice so little. He drew back as much from the sight of the arm as from Papa. When he reached the little car Papa raised his good fist in the air. “If you put one picture of my wife in your goddamn book, I'll find you and break your neck!”

DeCapra raised his camera a last time and clicked their picture into the black box around his neck. Papa bent for a rock like an angry baby, and Mama had to take his hand to keep him from throwing it. She made him look at her. Behind, she heard the little car drive away.

Into Papa's eyes she said, “You're jealous over nothing. He took my picture three times on the porch. He's a boy.”

Papa frowned at her mouth, working on words he was afraid to say. She led him to the house slowly. At the door he began to whistle, a hollow sound, under his breath.

Inside, she slipped away from him to the stairs, saying, “I want to change my clothes.” She could feel him watching her even on the flight of stairs he couldn't see.

She didn't know exactly when it was after that, but he started drinking again before they moved out of the Light House. Not fighting again, only drinking a little beer. But when she smelled the sweetness on his breath she knew the time of peace had ended, and she became afraid again.

SOON AFTER
that you moved again, to the house you live in now, the white house in the fields by the river, where you wander by the river and dream of another life. Moving doesn't mean much to you anymore. Changing houses is like changing clothes: you shuffle the same furniture into different rooms, different patterns. This new house has a circle of doors. When Amy saw the house, that day when Mama brought all of you to it to help clean, the circle was the first thing she noticed. She stood in the doorway watching Mama scour a stain on the baseboard. “I just thought of something,” Amy whispered, and she lead you from the living room to the kitchen to the back porch to the bedroom to the bathroom to the other bedroom—back to the living room where Mama still bent over the same stain. Mama straightened to look at trees shifting beyond the window. “See,” Amy said. “The doors make a circle. Boy is that ever lucky.”

“We can play tag in here,” you said.

“You try playing tag and see what your Mama does,” Mama said, dipping her cloth into the pine-scented water. “I can hear every word you say, even when you whisper.”

Aloud, Amy said, “You could run around this house forever, and never get caught, Mama. Did you hear that part? The doors make a circle, and the rooms go round and round. Papa can't catch you in here.”

The shadows of the branches slid up and down the floor. Mama watched them. Her face made you sad. She
started to scrub again after a while. “Maybe he won't be chasing me in this house, Amy Kay. He's been so quiet for so long. He doesn't act like he wants to fight anymore.”

Amy nodded dutifully. You nodded too. But Mama kept her face turned to the wall.

You moved into the Circle House at the beginning of November. You will live in it only for the one winter. But you will remember this house better than any of the ones that come after it, and in your dreams you will pass many times through the circle of doors, watching the light fall through the windows, hearing your Mama walk from room to room as if rehearsing her path.

You walk beneath the unalterable surface of clouds. Cool wind sweeps down from them, singing in the pines and scattering the cornstalks in the field.

If you turn you will see River Man at the edge of the forest, and you are sure he watches as you retreat. You even know how he stands as he watches, weight all on one brown leg. If you turn you will see him.

But you do not turn.

On the screened porch Mama has set up the green table with the curved aluminum legs, and clay pots full of ice plants thicken there, bloated with winter light. The rusting porch screen sags against the pots. You push it back into place.

The pale leaves brush your arms soft as lips.

In the bedroom you share with your brothers and with Amy Kay, the light falls through the windows at a steep slant, bright enough that you're afraid the sun has broken through the clouds, ending any hope of snow. But at the window you see the clouds have not broken, only
lightened, and you ask for a wind so cold it would bring down the snow like a blast of white fire against the house and the fields.