Last Things (5 page)

The day he proposed, my father took my mother to see King Tut’s tomb in Egypt. It was their first vacation together. For days beforehand, my father was so nervous he couldn’t eat. On the way to the airport, he fainted and ran off the road. My mother took the wheel and steered them to a stop. In the tall grass, my father lay with his head on the dashboard like a dead man. My mother took the ice from her drink and touched it to his wrists and neck. She pricked his fingers with a safety pin. When my father finally came to, he started the car and drove off without a word. Are you all right, my mother asked him. Just fine, my father said. They drove on in silence. Clouds of dust filled the air. Halfway to the airport, my father discovered his pinpricked hand. I thought I was dreaming, he said.

In the Valley of the Kings, they waited in line for hours and he took a picture of her posed in profile like an Egyptian queen. Once inside, my mother tried
to cut off a small piece of the mummy’s wrapping and set off an alarm. A guard came and escorted her into a back room. When they finally let her go, she was not allowed to keep the Band-Aid-sized piece of cloth she had snipped off with her sewing scissors. Later, beside the pyramids, my father got down on one knee and said, I want to marry you, Anna. You’re the only woman I’ve ever met who never bores me.

Afterwards, my mother insisted they go dancing to celebrate. They found a little café at the end of a winding street. There was wine there and a small band. An old man taught my mother a complicated Egyptian dance. You are very beautiful, he said. My father sat alone at the bar, watching them. His feet were covered with blisters from the long walk to the pyramids. The band began to play faster, then faster still. My mother came over and took his hand. Dance with me, she said, and my father did. Later, at the hotel, when she took off his shoes, she was surprised to find them filled with blood.

My mother had a scrapbook that she’d kept from the trip. On the first page was the picture of her as a queen, and a postcard she had saved from King Tut. The postcard showed a pile of gold jewelry and a mummified cat with a pink tongue. It was the sweetest thing you’ve ever seen, my mother always said about the cat. Once she told me about the curse that had befallen everyone who disturbed the king’s tomb. One of the explorers had had his canary devoured by a cobra the day after he unsealed the chamber.
Another had died of an insect bite to the face. The night that this happened, the man’s dog, who was thousands of miles away, let out a terrible howl and dropped dead. But the worst was the very last. There was a woman explorer on the trip and she alone seemed to have escaped harm. Twenty years passed without incident. Then one morning she went up to the attic and hung herself with a piece of laundry line. The note she left behind said: “I have succumbed to a curse that has forced me to depart from this life.” This was my favorite part of the story and my mother indulged me by telling it again and again. “And to think,” she said, “that this woman was a scientist just like your father!”

Sometimes I worried that the curse would fall on our family too. But my father said that this was just superstition. Superstition was when you believed in supernatural powers, I knew. It was crossing your fingers for luck or not stepping on a crack or going to church to pray for your soul.

I had never been to church because my father had vowed to raise me a heathen. A heathen was a godless thing, my mother explained. In some parts of America, it was against the law to be one. On Sundays, I watched from the woods as the Christians drove by. The women had on dresses and the men wore dark suits. Sometimes I threw rocks at their cars and waited to see what God would do. Nothing much, it turned out.

One of the cars that passed by every Sunday belonged to my teacher, Mrs. Carr. She always wore a
hat and gloves and looked straight ahead as she drove. I was careful to hide behind the trees so she wouldn’t see me. I had an idea that she didn’t like to be watched. Sometimes when she wrote on the board, her fingers trembled violently. As soon as she sat down, she’d clasp them together and hide them beneath her desk.

I was a little afraid of her. She was so old her skin was transparent, and one of her eyes was clouded over like milk. My mother told me that she lived all alone in a dome-shaped house at the edge of the lake. Her husband had built it for her and it was supposed to be powered by the sun, but sometimes it didn’t work. When it rained, Mrs. Carr brought blankets and a pillow and slept in the nurse’s office at school. In her purse she carried a small radio so she could listen to the weather reports. “Shh,” she’d say, holding it to her ear. “I think there’s a storm front coming in.”

Twice already that year, I had made her cry. Once when I stole her radio and once when I told her I didn’t believe in God. “What a terrible thing to say, Grace,” she said. “Don’t you realize you’re named after God’s greatest gift of all?” That night, when I asked my father if this was true, he called Mrs. Carr an ignorant fool. He threw down the paper and paced around the room. “Calm down, Jonathan,” my mother told him, but it was too late. Already he’d dragged the phone into the living room.

I knew my father was going to call Mrs. Carr and read to her from his favorite book. The book was
called
Know Your Constitution!
and my father carried it with him everywhere. This was the book he quoted from whenever he wrote to the newspaper.

My mother got up from the table and closed the door. “Poor woman,” she said.

In the next room, my father was yelling something. “Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the separation of church and state,” I heard him say.

The next day my father gave me a copy of the book to give to Mrs. Carr. Don’t be tedious, Jonathan, my mother said, but he slipped it in my backpack anyway.

When I gave her the book, Mrs. Carr frowned and put it away in a bottom drawer. I told her that I had been named after my mother’s aunt, who had red hair and choked on a biscuit when she was just twenty-one. “Is that so?” Mrs. Carr said.

After lunch, she gave me back my “Ways to Be Safe” paper with red marks all over it. We were supposed to write about the policeman who had visited our school last week, but I had written about
The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained
instead. I told about the man in California who was struck dead when a hunk of meat fell from the sky, and the woman in Texas who burst into flames on top of a Ferris wheel. Also the baby in Oregon who was born half chicken, half boy, and pecked his mother to death.

F. You have not followed the assignment
, Mrs. Carr wrote.

A girl came over and asked me what I got on my paper. Her name was Darcy Edwards, but I called her Girl 8 secretly. This was because of something Edgar had said. One day he rode by my school at recess and saw me standing alone by the fence. He stopped to talk to me and we watched the other kids playing for a while. All the boys were shooting marbles and all the girls were jumping rope. Then all the girls moved to the swings and all the boys played whiffle ball. Edgar spun the pedals on his bike. “Did you ever think that everyone around you might be an ingenious robot and you’re the only one that’s not?” he asked. In fact, I had never thought this, but now I saw it could be true. It explained why all the girls knew how to play the clapping game and all the boys brought baseball cards to school. The next day, I changed all my classmates’ names to numbers to better reflect their metal hearts.

“What did you get?” Girl 8 asked again. I covered the grade with my hands. “An A,” I told her. She snatched the paper away from me. “I knew you were lying,” she said. Later I stole her snowflake mittens and hid them inside my desk.

Just before Christmas, Mrs. Carr arranged a field trip to the raptor center where my mother worked. The day of the bird tour, I got up very early and drove with my mother on the highway out of town. She had brought along a box of slides and as she drove she held them up to the light and looked at them. When we got to the center, I sat in the lobby and waited for the rest of my class to arrive. On the bulletin board, there was a sign that said:

Once my father had given me an old map that showed the world supported by a series of tortoises one on top of the other. “That was the way people thought of the Earth back then,” he explained. “Before they had sailed all the way around the world and seen that it was round.” At the bottom of the pyramid was a tremendous turtle with a weathered purple shell. This one I thought had survived.

My mother went to the bulletin board and crossed out a line. There was only one dusky seaside sparrow in the world left now, she said, and it lived all alone in a cage in Disney World. She turned away so I couldn’t see her face. It was early still and the sky was gray. My mother closed her eyes. “Can we go see that bird?” I asked her. I knew about Disney World, about all the other things that were there. My mother turned to look at me. I made my face look sad. “We’ll see,” she said.

My mother’s job at the center was to take care of the baby birds. At night, people left them in the parking lot in shoe boxes and shopping bags.
BIRD
, they wrote in block letters on the front. Most of them were not raptors, but she took them anyway. There were four in the center now. Eeny, Meeny, Miney, and Moe. Two were ospreys and two were sparrows. Only the ospreys were birds of prey, my mother said. Their heads were covered with white fuzz like the heads of old men. They had black wings and sharp, leathery claws that were bright yellow. The sparrows were dull brown and cried all the time. My mother fed them with eye droppers and sang them to sleep.

In her office, there was a picture of her, knee deep in water, dressed as a giant crane. The summer before, she had gone to Texas and worked for a program that bred captive whooping cranes. All the workers dressed as birds so that the cranes would know how to feed their own babies when they were set free. My mother took the costume with her when she left and sometimes she put on the feathered head and talked through the beak to me.

The clock struck eight. “Where is everyone?” my mother said. I went outside and waited for the bus. At a quarter after, it arrived, and all the kids got off and milled around the parking lot. Mrs. Carr motioned for me to get in line. Girls 1–9 already were. My mother clapped her hands. “Let’s begin,” she said. She led us down the hall and into a small auditorium. “Quiet, children,” Mrs. Carr whispered, holding a finger to her lips. My mother stepped behind a podium at the front of the room. Above her, a screen showed a picture of an empty sky.

“Imagine, if you will, a world without birds,” she said. “It may be hard to picture, yet one day this may be. In the last thousand years, fifteen hundred species of birds have become extinct. Scientists estimate only eighty-five hundred species remain. Within your lifetime, at least a hundred more will disappear.” On the screen behind her, pictures of birds that were already gone flashed by. “The moa. The dodo. The great auk,” my mother said. Then there was a picture of thousands of birds flying in formation across the sky. These were the passenger pigeons, I knew. I hoped my
mother wouldn’t tell the story of what happened to them, because it always made her cry.

After the slide show, we went to the baby-bird room and my mother showed everyone the picture of when she was a crane. Then she put on a glove and brought out the hawk that sat on her hand. Mrs. Carr asked what the bird’s name was and my mother said that it was Hawk. Hawk had a black hood over his head like a tiny executioner. This was so he would think it was night and not make a fuss. With Hawk on her hand, my mother led us down the hall to see the picture charts of how birds evolved from dinosaurs. This was the part the boys liked best. In school, they talked on and on about dinosaurs, their tremendous teeth and pea-sized brains. One of them had a button that said “
I
killed the dinosaurs!” and he often wore this pinned to his coat.

My mother took off Hawk’s hood. The bird blinked and looked around at the bright lights. Then he made a soft sputtering sound and fluttered his wings.

“Can I tickle his feet?” Girl 4 asked.

“No, you may not,” my mother said. She put Hawk back in his cage and brought out the skeleton of a small bird. “Birds have hollow bones,” she explained, “which is why they are light enough to fly.” She showed us a bird’s head which had been cut in half. The bones were shot through with tiny holes like a spiderweb. My mother held it up to the light and looked through to the other side. “Isn’t that extraordinary?” Mrs. Carr said.

In the lobby, my mother paused in front of the extinction sign. “Five weeks ago, one of the last two dusky seaside sparrows in the world died,” she told the class. “Soon they will be completely extinct.” Her hands shook a little as she pointed to the bird’s name and the number beside it. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but no one was paying attention. Boy 6 was passing out gum and all the kids were holding out their hands to him.