The Man Who Loved Birds (35 page)

“I’m glad to hear it. Courage carves its own path and, I assure you, will receive its appropriate reward.”

Dakin Thompson’s son jumped from the backhoe and beckoned them over. The two men crossed the field to inspect the hole. “How do, Mr. Vetch. Hot enough for you?”

“It’s getting there,” Vetch said.

In the hole they could see a green-striped upholstery spotted with dirt but otherwise none the worse for its time in the earth. “You’re lucky we had such a dry summer,” the driver said. “If we’d had a lot of rain this baby would be toast. I might have it out of there by the end of the day, if you want to ride back out here and check.”

“I might be back,” Vetch said. “Depends on how mad I am at the end of the day and how much madder I want to get.” He handed Smith his sunglasses, then took him by the elbow and steered him toward the car. “The situation we are facing in this county calls for action. In the course of that action you might find it necessary to go to the dark side. You take that away and think about it and then you do what you think best when and where the opportunity presents. And if it doesn’t present, then you think about how a successful man makes his own opportunities and how you are the front line of the law and how the law will back you up.” Vetch handed the officer his sunglasses. “Go ahead, put them on. Now. About that missing marijuana. Whoever took it took the best buds, not the leaf, so he had some idea of what he was doing. And since you just told me you’ve never smoked marijuana—that is what you told me, correct?—you don’t know your pot, so obviously you have no
knowledge of this incident. You might mention it, however, among your
friends
and
contacts
”—here he paused a moment—“just so the message gets around. And you might think very carefully about what I’ve said to you and the possibilities it offers for advancing yourself in the eyes of the authorities to whom you are ultimately responsible.”

And then the county attorney climbed into his Mustang and was gone, leaving Smith to his small battered truck with only a windshield and a roof between him and the blazing late summer sun.

September. A lazy Sunday afternoon, the planet turning its other cheek to the sun. Leaves were still green but the forest had exhausted itself and with every shortening day a little more of its life drained back into the earth’s dark heart. Here and there amid the dusty green a staghorn sumac showed forth autumn’s bright scarlet. The showiest flowers of late summer—the black-eyed Susans and the bright purple ironweed—were mostly gone, though the fields were still lively with sky-blue asters and nodding goldenrod and tall wands of mullein now past their bloom. In his childhood Johnny Faye’s mother had cut and soaked their dried blossoms in lard so as to use them as torches to light her way about her winter chores. She still called them “Our Lady’s candles” and gathered their basal leaves for tea and poultices. Johnny Faye would gather some this evening, after he checked his crop for the last time. The next time he returned, he would bring clippers and sacks and harvest in a day what the earth and sun and their shaping hands had taken a season to grow. He could have harvested today—a fine day to bring in the crop, the bright cloudless September sky and all around him the knowledge of the long sleep shortly to come—but though Flavian’s company and help had been excellent he was after all a monk, and Johnny Faye thought it would be bad manners to harvest in the presence of a monk. Besides which, Johnny Faye was planning a
little surprise and he didn’t want the day cluttered with too many projects.

And so he arrived and stripped to his waist—such pleasure to feel the sun as a beneficent caress instead of high summer’s hammer. He climbed down the bluff and into the creek bed, where he clipped a few leaves that were shading the buds from their last, finishing bath of light. The thumb-length buds all but dripped resin—from the lip of the bluff, on the breathless still-leafed air Johnny Faye could smell their sweet cloy, and down in the creek the smell was overwhelming and that was good. All the power of this perfect place, this perfect summer, was contained in these perfect buds. Four or five months hence he would lift a burning brand from an open hearth and use it to light his pipe and in a single puff release every moment of this hot, dry summer, all those hours and days when he had not been at hand but the plants had understood that theirs was a good life and had made the most of it. Time would cease to be, and for some brief while he would understand time as the conjurer’s trick that it is.

He laid aside his clippers and retrieved his walking stick and squatted in front of the bank of clay. JC stirred himself from his shaded bed of leaves to come and watch this curious human act.

“Hey, JC. Watch this.”

He crouched and dug the tip of his walking stick into the glistening gray clay and closed his eyes and allowed his hand to carve what his body remembered:

J-O-H-N-N-Y F-A-Y-E

and when his body remembered nothing more he stood up and stood back and looked at what he had written, the marks he had made, the writing on the wall. He couldn’t exactly say that he
read
them—he knew what he was doing bore no relation to real reading, he had seen people read, sucking their teeth, the flutter of pages under their fingers like flying autumn leaves, one hand held to the throat, their eyes cast down and fixed in single-pointed concentration, lost
to time and space as surely as if they were dreaming or making love, and when they looked up the dream still in their eyes, magnified and obscured by spectacles. Forty years old and Johnny Faye could spot and name a warbler in heavy brush at fifty yards and still he envied them those spectacles, key to the lock on a door to a world he would never know—magic, mystery,
reading
. All the same, he surveyed the marks he had made and knew they were close enough, that anybody who came across them would read his name and know that he had been here. He had made his mark in time.

He laid his walking stick on the grassy ledge above the printed words and climbed up into the sycamore throne to study what he had wrought. He glanced up at the sun—it was past noon, Flavian might be along any minute. Johnny Faye leaned his head against the trunk and closed his eyes and gave himself over to imagining how Flavian would climb down the cliff. At first he would not see the writing—however smart he was, Flavian was not keen at seeing what was right beneath his nose. He probably wouldn’t even notice until he, Johnny Faye, scrambled down from his sycamore seat and took Flavian’s hand and pointed it out. Flavian would admire what he had written—crouched to the clay he would trace each letter with his forefinger and he would spell them out loud for Johnny Faye and all their babes to hear.

J-O-H-N-N-Y F-A-Y-E

And then they would make love properly, like two friends each of whom wanted to see what the other looked like with his clothes off and by the way is it OK if I put my hand here? And here? And if I use the scrub brush of my tongue to clean out the pit of your arm, that well of olfactory wonders? And what about this, yes, the rosebud of the lips around the stiff prick of love?

A sleepless night. Meena rose early. Sunday, the office closed. She did not feel well, though it was impossible to say whether it was
her pregnancy or her agony or both. To abort the child, impossible, but she would make possible the impossible. She had done so many times. To marry the county attorney and endure, what. Two years? Five years? She had done it before. It was what women did. How interesting, if she rose above herself and looked down from the perspective of the goddess, how utterly inescapably the way things will always be that even as a doctor, even in America she was a woman in a woman’s place. She had set out to change and shape her destiny, and here she was.

The blind drew Meena back.

As a child the stars had been the roof of her world as the earth beneath her bare feet had been its floor. The women in their patterned saris of azure and emerald and copper winding through the paddies to the day’s work, the vendors of yellow-green bananas and coconuts, the policemen in their starched whites, the men driving cattle through the shady lanes, the beggars in their despair, real and faked, the misshapen bodies of the deformed, each living as she could. Food vendors’ plates of recycled cardboard and banana leaf. The smell of cooking in the streets; the smell of tuberoses and defecation and diesel exhaust in the streets. The pressing crowds of dark-skinned people, her people, Durga Puja and the village priests have chosen her as the reincarnation of Durga, her people have dressed her in scarlet silk and crowd around the puja as a priest in white muslin sprinkles them with Ganges water using a stem of basil, placing handfuls of marigold and hibiscus petals into their outstretched hands, as incense burns and the drummers beat a wild rhythm against the backdrop of Durga indifferently piercing a blue-complected Azul with her trident. The Devi has chosen her for a special destiny.

Then the war. First the Army, then the collaborators, then the greedy neighbors sweep into their village to steal, rape, rob. Women are special targets. Those who are able flee to Calcutta. Her father stays because of the land, to save the land for her, his only child. Her mother stays because her father stays. They have
no experience of an army, how fast it can move, how far it can reach. Who could have thought that in the remote villages there would be such carnage? This is the work of the collaborators.

Her father delivers her across the border to her mother’s parents. She becomes a stranger from her home until many years pass and—married now—she is allowed to return. She takes a train to Calcutta, from there a bus and then a hired moto to the village of her parents. A young Muslim couple lives in the home she once called hers. Someone has replaced the roof—it had been thatched, now it is tile. They tell her they bought the house from a man who has left the village. They do not know who owned the house and the land before him, he had not spoken of her parents, no, so very sorry. Meena believes and does not believe. She returns to Bengal. Within the month she is gone from her husband’s house. She takes only her dowry jewels, sewed into the hem of her sari.

Arriving at Howrah Station, an endless interrogation into the mystery of suffering. The monsoons have prolonged themselves, the tracks are flooded, the train is late, the station a vast space teeming with life and death, the refuge of those who have no refuge, in a sea of faces they are living and dying. Her second time in Calcutta since her childhood visits with her father. She enters the great station, past extended hands and pleading eyes, the blind, the lame, the starving. She walks out into the streets, where the sky threatens, dense clouds, no rain, when rain might have opened her way, cleared her a path through all this life, all this suffering. On the plaza jackdaws move among the dying, ready to thieve—if the dying devote a moment’s attention to their pain the jackdaws swoop in and steal what little they have. Meena picks her way through the healthy and the dead, the dying and the sick whom in a few days she will see again, yes, that is why she is here, sitting with the dead but on her way to medical school, she has broken with all that has come before, she has rent the fabric of time. She will become a doctor, Dr. Chatterjee. She will devote her life to saving those she loves. She will break from all she has known
and flee to the antiseptic and enlightened West. She will apply her mind to the task and she will save them all, all those she loves. She will seize and shape her destiny.

Her first examining room at the Medical College—her first patient, a bicycle rickshaw driver. A simple enough problem—an open sore on the sole of his foot, the wound so deep the bone is visible through the ooze, but he must pedal his rickshaw if his wife and children are to eat, what is to be done? He walks barefoot across a tile floor encrusted with mold and the dried mucus and phlegm and pus of a thousand illnesses, ten thousand lives, ten thousand deaths. A simple matter of antibiotics and antiseptic and bandages and time but there are no antibiotics, no antiseptics, no bandages, there is only time. He sits on the examination table, present to all the infections of today and days before. He displays his wound and grins, a gap-toothed smile full of life. He has found his savior and she can do nothing. Everyone she once loved is dead.

Then the stars vanish from her life, she lives in cities until she finds herself an exile in this dark countryside amid these temperate jungles. For years she had protected herself—filled out forms, shouldered her way to the front of lines, studied, planned, pleaded, maneuvered. What strange confluence of events, what configuration of these northern stars had brought her to be carrying a lawless man’s child?

She drove to the monastery and parked at the graveled pullout for the statues. She understood that Johnny Faye might be at the statues at any time but she was resolute—though she knew that were she to encounter him all would be lost. After she parked she composed a note.
I am so sorry. With time I hope you may forgive. Meena
.

She walked to the statues and turned left to climb to the blind. How cleverly he had concealed it—not even a sharp-eyed hawk could discern it among the bushes and briars. She must not dawdle. Outside the blind she found a honey locust. She plucked one of its thorns. She parted the vine curtain of the blind and
stepped inside and in that moment she is swimming in a great river of life, the crocodile- and snake-infested waters of her childhood, she is swimming upstream, always upstream. As she swims the dead of her life drift past—her mother (had she known of her husband’s infidelity? The question occurs as Meena swims against the strengthening current), her father dressed in a Western suit and tie and radiant with the same anticipation that had governed her own life these past few weeks. Johnny Faye drifts by—he wears a dhoti and has arranged himself across a floating log and as he passes he turns to her with his chipped-tooth grin and holds out his hand. She
the doctor of the flesh, not the spirit
wants to stop swimming and drift downstream at his side, she who has never known desire now seized in its fist and dragged in its wake, but the river that is carrying him to the great sea is the river in which she may drown and she is carrying their child and so she continues to swim upstream. She fights the flood—she has never been so alive, swimming upstream. On each bank the trees drop their leaves and bare their branches. The water turns cold, she has swum that far north.