In the Land of Birdfishes (12 page)

Momma’s moods were clouds slipping away across the sky, but mine were heavy stones and I still liked to think about heaven. I never went to church or read the Bible, so I didn’t think about whatever Mara or Sissy Grant had thought about when they put their minds on heaven. But I thought about what might happen to a dead person there that could stop them from wanting to stay in the world, that would peel their fingers from the living. When I was a kid, heaven looked like the river when it froze, and we could sail away on our skates forever but never be anywhere else, and I could see my brothers up ahead and they never got farther away. And now that I was older, it was the basement and my father still there in his chair. Or a long sleep in a black, quiet place. Whenever I sang, I let myself think about heaven.

That day, I looked at John watching me and started singing, and I didn’t think about heaven.

When I finished the last song, I looked over at June and saw she was watching someone coming up the driveway.

“I guess we’re late,” Jason said. He didn’t say it to us but to Aileen, who was beside him looking like we’d caught her in the middle of something she shouldn’t be doing. Jason lifted his legs over the fence and then unhooked the latch for her. He looked up at me then, frowning. “You said you were having a practice today. I thought we’d swing by.”

“Jason said you’re playing at … some kind of a music festival?” Aileen asked uncertainly.

“It’s a real honour,” John told her. “Maybe a thousand or
more people come up for it. It’s something special to get asked to play.”

“So,” Jason said, “did we miss the show or what? Are we going to have to buy a ticket to see you now?”

I lifted my shoulders. “We can do one more,” I said. “There’s a couple more chairs in the basement.”

“Don’t need chairs,” Jason said and grinned, but watching me closely like he still wasn’t sure what I was thinking. He sat down on the grass and after a second, Aileen sat down beside him.

“Angie,” June said. “What’s next?”

I sang about a story one of the Elders, Patty, had told me. It was about Raven stealing the sun back from Bear. I was proud of my voice lifting out of me. It was sweet and deep and when I got to the highest notes, it stopped being part of me and became part of the sky and the sticky, sweet shining sun. Down low, I made my voice like a whisper, like a grown-up, dark, rough thing being said, like someone who’d wanted you, someone who’d had you—someone who still remembered what it was to want you and then have you—would speak to you.

When I finished, Aileen was staring at something far away down the road. “Aileen,” said Jason, and I saw his hand touch her back and it was light and brief, but his hand was there for a moment and for a moment I felt that touch as if in the crook of my own back. I drew a breath into me and saw his eyes, that quick look he showed to Aileen’s face—that question in them about her and whether she was okay. And sometimes I had these moments watching him when just for a second I’d know the things he gave a shit about. And there were some other moments when I’d look at him and my breath would be
cold in my throat. And I’d see how his eyes and the bones of his face were as sharp as something you could cut yourself on.

But this time I let my eyes go from him and see John stretched out on his broken chair, comfortable the way a big man or a middle-aged man usually isn’t, and his clean, round face was something I thought I’d like to see again and again. And I saw in his eyes how he’d liked the song I sang him.

And then he came over to me and said softly, “That was a good song you sang. I liked that story about Raven.” He stood there humming what I’d sung, and I sat down in the grass then and made a sign so he’d know I wanted him to sit beside me.

I saw June watching us and then she stood up and waved to Lando. “Come on inside, Lando,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

Aileen slid her hand across her forehead. She and Jason were as close as two pages of a book but not touching at all. She looked like she had something to say but hadn’t said it yet.

“Did you like that story?” Jason asked her.

She looked startled. She turned her head back and forth, slowly, and then made like a shrug with her shoulders.

Jason said, real fast, “It was about Raven. You want to know where Raven came from?” She started to say something, but he said, “And the sun and the moon.” He looked at John. “I know how everything in the sky got there. Do you know a story like that?”

John said he didn’t, and Jason looked at Aileen again and said, “I know a lot of stories. Ma used to tell me one every night. If I asked her a question, she’d always answer with a story. You asked me a question last night. I can tell you the answer. I can tell you what happened to her.”

“To Mara?” I didn’t know what the look on her face meant when she looked at him then.

“It will take time, okay. It will take till the end of the summer. Then you’ll know what happened, when the summer is over, and you’ll know if you want to stay here.” His face looked worried. “You said you were going to stay here.”

She smiled but didn’t say anything back.

I thought, from the look on his face, that he would stop talking then, but he didn’t. After a moment, he said, “Okay, then there are eight weeks until the summer is done, and I will tell you seven more stories. Eight is the right number in our stories. You must try things four or eight times before you succeed. Because we have two arms and two legs and two bones in each one. So I will tell you eight stories, because that is the right number for something that you want to happen. After the eighth story, you won’t want to go.”

“You want me to stay?” she asked, and we all looked at Jason to see what he would tell her.

He said, “You won’t want to go.”

Then he said, “Now I’ll tell you the second story.” He reminded her, “There will be six more.”

Old Man did not forgive Old Woman for what she had done to him. He did not forgive her, but one day, he found her looking at herself in the river while she braided her hair and she didn’t know that he was watching her. She wound the hair around itself, and her hands moved so fast that Old Man could hardly see what she was doing, but the thing she made of her hair with her hands was perfect
.

Then he thought of how she had looked at him, before
there was a world and when they were young and new. He thought of the way she had loved him then, how she would smile so all the white points of her teeth showed whenever he touched her. And when she brought him food, she would let him eat first and she would watch him as he ate as if it fed her, too, his eating. And she would gather her hair into braids to make herself pretty for him. And when she spoke to him, her voice was so soft and sweet that he thought he could taste it in his mouth. And when she took off her clothes for him, he wept
.

He thought of these things and remembered how, once, he had loved her so much that he made her a ring of gold and a ring of silver, so that she could wear one on each hand and not forget that even as the ring was round and complete, so was his love for her. And he gave her each ring and she said, What lovely gifts you’ve made for me, but she did not touch them. And he begged her to put them on her hands, but she shook her head and said, If I put them on my hands to remember your love for me, what would happen if I forgot one day to look at my hands and then forgot the way you’ve loved me. What if I trailed my hands in the river to cool them one hot afternoon and then the rings were lost in the water and I forgot that you were the man who first unfastened my hair and called me beautiful. What if an animal with many teeth should set upon me one night while I slept and tear my feet from my legs and my arms from my body, and later I should wonder if I had ever been loved and not know
.

No, she said and shook her head. Let the sky keep them for me, so they will never be lost and I will never forget this time before time, this world between us that is before the world, when we have loved each other as a man and woman are able
to love. And then she took the rings in her hand and threw them into the sky, where they stayed forever, even long after the two lovers had become cruel to each other and the rising of the moon behind the sun became a thing that mocked them
.

And as Old Man watched Old Woman, he remembered all this, and he felt something happen inside him as he watched her play with the birds at her feet that were beloved to her of all things. They crept around her in the grass and followed her wherever she went. Her favourite was the largest and the blackest of all birds and she called him Raven. Old Man saw that the birds’ love for her was no less than his and that they would do anything for her
.

That night, as Old Woman slept, Old Man took the birds that huddled around her and gathered them into his arms. Every bird in the world was there, and as Old Woman turned over in her sleep, Old Man threw the birds into the sky. They made a terrible sound of squawking and Old Woman woke suddenly and turned to him
.

What have you done? she cried
.

Old Man was confused. I have put the birds into the sky with your two rings, that you may always look at them and know how much I love you, he said tenderly
.

She leapt to her feet and called to the birds, but they had forgotten her now. They were in love with their own wings and the pull of the sky upon them. They soared higher and higher, and though they sometimes came to the ground for a moment or two, or granted her a glimpse of their shining feathers when they paused for a moment on a branch or bathed themselves in the river, they were never hers again
.

She sobbed bitterly and cursed him. You have taken everything from me, she said. You have taken everything
.

As he watched her, he felt his face grow hard and cold. She turned her back on him and as she covered herself in blankets and let her tears soak the pillow, he said to her that he hated, You never loved me enough
.

When Jason was silent, I looked down and saw that John’s hand was in my own.

Mara

F
OR ALMOST THREE MONTHS
, Nellie put me to bed every night, saying that everybody there was trying and it was incumbent on me to try too. I never was brave enough to ask her what
incumbent
meant. “We’re all sorry for what’s happened to you,” she said, “but we’ve brought you into our home and that’s Christian charity and you must learn to show your gratitude as a guest in this house.”

During the day, I tried hard to understand what she wanted from me, but failed more hopelessly with each day that passed. She wanted me out of her way, but she would heave sighs that seemed to shake the walls each time she found me gathering moss, as she called it if I sat with my hand against the glass of the window or the wood of the floor so that I could feel the cold or warmth hidden deep inside and think of how once the floor was a tree and the window was a seashore somewhere far away.

Alexander would stand silent in the doorway while Nellie braided my hair and told me what prayers to say. He would not argue when she told me the wrongs I’d done that day or instructed me to try harder the next. But he would linger when she hurried out the door, her frustration wafting behind her,
and sometimes he’d touch my hair or my face and say, like I was his own daughter, that I wasn’t a bad girl. “You’ve got to learn to be careful,” he’d say before he left, if she had been especially angry that night.

But I couldn’t seem to learn where things were in the house, as I had in our own home. Too many times I found a chair where I hadn’t known there to be one, as I took a stack of plates from the table to the sink, or found Nellie’s favourite vase had been on top of the turntable where I played the
Unicorn
record Alexander had given me over and over. I learned to walk slowly and afraid, to hesitate to move my arms or stretch them out before me, but I couldn’t seem to learn to not try to catch myself when I fell and it was always that sudden, desperate reach of my hands that brought disaster. When I broke a glass bird that Nellie had loved, and stood there, bewildered, not even knowing where it had been or what it was that had caught me at the knees as I tried to make my way to the stairs, I heard Nellie cry that it was more than she could take and Alexander tried to quiet her, while Elizabeth whispered in my ear that it was not my fault. Later she told me she was almost certain Megan had left that stool in my path on purpose, and said she’d never known the bird to be on that low shelf where I’d knocked it as I tried to catch myself. “You must try not to make her angry,” she whispered. “And you’ll have to be more careful.” And then she taught me how many steps it was from my bedroom to the bathroom, and from the kitchen table to the stove, and from the bottom of the stairs to the door, so I wouldn’t have to bother her mother for help and make her cross. And she took me by the arm and showed me around the house where all the breakable things were, putting my hand up to touch the glasses we drank from, the smooth
glass of the frames over the piano, which she told me were full of photographs of the family but mostly Megan because she was born first, and especially, the heavy bowl at the top of the sideboard that Nellie’s mother had carried on the steamer all the way from Oban. And it must have been then that something changed in me, because each plate and glass before, the bird even, had astonished me, but I was not at all surprised when some weeks later the bowl was left on the kitchen table, which had been moved a few inches from the door, enough for me to feel it strike my hip and send me grasping for a handhold and finding only the bowl, closer to the edge of the table than it ever should have been. And nor was I surprised when it was after that that Alexander came to my room and held my hand while he told me I’d be going to a special school where they’d be able to better help me with my defect. Downstairs, Nellie was still weeping, and outside the open door, I heard Megan breathing.

The next day, Nellie and Alexander took me to a school where a man I was told to call Father, though he sounded nothing like Da, told me to say the Lord’s Prayer, and then gave me the Bible to hold in my hands and asked me to read what I could. “Can you see this?” he asked me softly, and there was suddenly a greater whiteness to the world, and I asked him, “Is that light?” He squeezed my hand and told me it was.

Nellie took my arm more gently than usual when she took me back to the car, and she told me that we would have to pack up my suitcase again and bring me back after the weekend. “We’ll have a nice weekend together,” she said. “And Fa—Mr. McGivney said that we can visit every Sunday if we like. You
know how busy our weekends are, but—” Her voice changed as she opened the car door and helped me into the seat. “In heaven’s name, a Catholic. But God will know I tried.”

I heard Alexander take a seat in front of me and the click of his seat belt. He didn’t say anything at all.