Richard Zimler - Hunting Midnight

The girl grinned now, but she was not judging me badly. I smiled my thanks to her and executed my imitation once again.

“Now come out,” Daniel said.

He reached down for me and we raced back to the crowd, where we found the birdseller’s wife sprawled on the ground, a hand over her brow, having fainted. But her husband was having none of it. He stood over her, shaking his head with exasperation, while two women dressed in widow’s black attended to her.

“What happened?” Daniel asked a soldier.

“The wooden bird sang,” he replied reverently.

The lad laughed from his belly while I prayed for a second and very personal miracle: to be swallowed by the earth and tugged all the way to Spain.

Daniel led me away. When I hesitated to get under the gig again, he pushed me down and told me to pretend to be a lark; the tall man with the mangled ear was holding one in his hand.

The lass was still watching, and her jade-colored eyes seemed to be looking deep into my doubts. “We’re being watched,” I whispered to Daniel, pointing at her.

He waved her over. She came to us without hesitation, her hands behind her back.

“What’s your name?” he said, glowering.

“Violeta.” She breathed deeply and pulled her waist-length auburn hair around to cover her front. Licking her lips, she added, “I might ask your name, young man, but your rudeness makes you unworthy of my question.”

“Violeta, go away!” he shouted, plainly of the belief that he could banish her with an order.

The lass gave him a challenging look. “I saw what you were doing.” She crossed her hands over her chest and stood her ground.

Sensing that only I could make peace between them, I stepped forward. “What we did was wrong. I shall do no more imitations.”

At that very moment, I found myself rising skyward, impelled by a force tightening around my neck.

“Got you!”

A rush of cold terror gripped me; I believed I was in the clutches of the necromancer. I fought and kicked for freedom, dangling a foot and a half above the ground.

“Let him go!” Daniel shouted.

The birdseller had both his meaty hands coiled around my neck. He was not squeezing hard enough to choke the life from me, but it was evident that he could twist my head off at any moment.

Disregarding Daniel, he shook me violently and said, “You’re the little bastard who wanted the dead woodpecker! You two are the ones who’ve done all this.”

“Let the lad go!” Violeta ordered.

I was struggling with all my might to pry the villain’s hands loose from me. Daniel kicked him in his shin, but that accomplished nothing. The lass then did something clever: She spit into the villain’s face. And she kept on spitting.

Dropping me to the ground, the birdseller kept a firm hold on my collar while he wiped his face with his sleeve.

Struggling for breath and coughing, I felt sick to my stomach.

“Help! Please help us!” Violeta wailed.

The stout merchant whose ankle was hit by the cage slashed his cane over the birdseller’s shoulders.

“I’ve had quite enough of you,” said the merchant. “Unhand the lad.”

But the birdseller was not about to release me without more of a struggle. Hence, the merchant brought his cane down against his back again with a cruel thwap that promised broken bones.

The birdseller fell forward and avoided a kiss to the cobbles by thrusting out both his hands. I was free. And the first thing I did was stumble forward, bend over, and vomit.

“Return to your wagon and leave the lad be,” the merchant advised the birdseller.

“But this little bastard was the one who imitated a thrush so we would think there’d been a miracle,” he pleaded in reply. “I saw him myself. Very likely he’s the one who stole all my beauties.”

“Is this true?” the merchant asked me.

As the birdseller got to his feet, Violeta rushed to testify on my behalf. “Sir, I have been with him for an hour or more, and he uttered not a single call.”

With those words, she earned my eternal allegiance.

“She is lying to protect me,” I confessed, wiping my mouth with my sleeve. “I am guilty as charged.” I took a mighty breath into my lungs and imitated a thrush.

“Extraordinary,” the merchant said. “Sing it again, lad.”

And so I did.

“More!” a woman exclaimed.

Over the next few minutes I created warbling and whirring renditions of goldfinches, jays, canaries, sparrow hawks, and gulls, culminating in an animated rendition of two kingfishers in friendly conversation.

“Astounding!” The merchant smiled.

At the risk of blowing my own trumpet, he did, in fact, seem to speak for everyone in the crowd. It occurs to me now that given more encouragement in this direction, I might have ended up as a performer at circuses or touring monster shows, the kind that feature bearded women and two-headed goats.

After I was finished, the birdseller said, “That is all very clever, son, but you have hoodwinked me out of my stock.”

“Hold out your hand,” the merchant commanded the birdseller.

But he feared a caning and would do no such thing.

“Please, I shall not hit you again, my good man. And I believe that these” — he reached into his waistcoat pocket to take out two large silver coins of one hundred reis apiece — “will compensate you for your loss. I ask only that you give me the wooden birds as a fair trade.”

He tossed the shining disks of silver to the birdseller, who, with his newfound wealth firmly clenched in his fist, walked off to complete the transaction. The merchant then inhaled a pinch of snuff and suggested, between sneezes, that I imitate a nightingale. A greater crowd gathered as I displayed my talents — more than two hundred souls, according to the counting done by Violeta, who was to become our greatest friend. Today, when I picture her as she was that day, standing right up front, alternately biting her lip out of concern that I might fail and giggling in wonderment, I cannot help but laugh along with her. Daniel was standing next to her, of course, his raised fist punctuating the cadences of my calls, watching me with such wild and generous enjoyment that I felt in some way that my imitations were truly only for him and Violeta. As for the wooden birds, all but one were given to the merchant; the jay that the birdseller’s wife claimed to have been transformed to wood in her hands she insisted on keeping, as proof of St. John’s intervention in our earthly affairs.

It is to her more than anyone else that we owe the continuing belief that a miracle took place that particular morning, June Twenty-Third, 1800. Indeed, the entire affair was later recorded in the chronicles of Joaquim Rodrigues, a city alderman, under the title “The Transfiguration of the Birds of Porto.” In this account, I am erroneously referred to as João Stewart Zarco, my two family names reversed. Daniel’s name is not given, but he is nicely described as a lithe older accomplice to young Zarco. It is also noted that a pious and pretty lass by the name of Violeta was the first to broach the subject of saintly dominion over the birds.

Belief in the miracle persists in Porto to this day, and I have learned to keep my lips sealed when it occasionally comes up in conversation. That the destinies of Daniel, Violeta, and me were forever linked in the space of a single morn seems to me the true and far greater miracle.

If something of symbolic and lasting value was accomplished that day, as I like occasionally to think, then my debt is to Daniel, of course. Even today, decades later, when I dream of him, he is often holding one of our painted birds in his hand, and I can tell from his gleeful eyes that he is plotting some new exploit that is sure to lead us toward both trouble and grace. Sometimes, too, I find the two of us sitting on the stoop of my home in Porto, side by side, and there is a warmth all around me, radiating from the street, the houses, the day itself….