Erin Fisher - That Tiny Life

There’s just no chance. The boy is so fresh he’s hopeless. Even the girl would be a better stand-in if Kendra took off. Melanie’s a liar and a fake, but reliable enough to set up the milking every dawn before school. Kendra climbs the stairs and shuts off the tap. The kid shakes out his hands, hitting the side of the sink, winces, and tucks his fingers under his armpits.

It’s because of this kid’s ineptitude that Kendra relaxes. She’s relaxed enough to find the kid’s discomfort funny. In fact, she’s carelessly lazy about the whole situation now that she sees what’s coming: bird, money, and a So Take That, Axel.

“What next?” Melanie asks.

Above the farms, the clouds are thick and slate coloured and sag, weighted, over the mountain ridge. “What’s next?” Kendra repeats. Up the yard Axel, carrying the white gyrfalcon on his glove, surveys the breeding pens. A pact: let the bird know they will give it what it wants. The first step in training. It’s not rage or hunger, as people assume, that inspires the birds to kill, it’s play. Kendra’s watched a falcon carry a feather a hundred metres up, release it, then smack it out of the air before it hit the ground. That’s the energy, the spirit of alert, high excitement, that she and Axel hone.

Axel bends at the knee to peer in a pen and, doing so, drops his arm. The white spreads her wing to regain balance and falters. Axel twists his forearm in response. The bird regains footing. “That” — Kendra slaps her hands together — “is next.” Let that grab her fist, that white chunk she helped hatch. And as she trudges through the snow she actually feels a burst of joy aimed at the future, at what she’s finally putting a leash on here, in this moment — life.

Across the paddock, beyond the slurry lagoon of cow dung and melted snow, over the fence, he squints at his daughter. His girl, absolutely. He recognizes the oversized red-and-black toggle coat, its plaid, felted wool that’s too big for her at the shoulders, the arms, and the waist — his coat. She drapes her pack on the fence between the properties and, as Kendra and a kid walk the trail to where Axel’s birds are, she sneaks up the stairs into the hatchling barn. He scratches his chin — beard — too much hair now to be called stubble. He woke her up drunk last night, he remembers that. Has a vague recollection of shaking her out of bed for help with his father, her grandfather. Too bad the memory isn’t gone entirely. Well, too bad he woke her.

But she should be in school. He crosses the snow and mud-slicked paddock. The cows blink at him. They seem disinterested and not at all distressed. She must have milked them again. His job. Shit, be honest, milking’s practically her job now. He skirts the lagoon holding his breath and picks up the pace. This year on the dairy, a whole childhood on the dairy, and he still can’t handle the smell of the dung pit. Of course that’s partly the hangover, which hasn’t even begun to hit properly — he’s still drunk. Unfocused and dizzy behind the eyes.

He ducks the barbed-wire fence. Axel’s place. Netting’s in good shape despite the age, or maybe it’s new. Some of the fibreglass roofs’ve been replaced on the bird boxes. Mewses are same-old, though. When he was nine — that’d be over thirty years ago, when Axel first moved here — he peeked through one of the feed slots in the breeding pens. The mewses had barely been built, and though the wood was dry, it smelled of paint enough for him check his fingers after touching the wall. The interior was dim. A triple-stripped oil drum, red and white with a hole cut in the side, had been settled into a corner. Hay, feathers, smell of bird shit like old cream and cashews. And the birds — two speckled gyrfalcons perched yellow-footed on dowels screwed into the walls. By the time he spotted them they already had their black eyes on him. That was it — he took off. Not sure what freaked him out so badly, the birds being there, or that they’d seen him, or the spooky thought that Axel might somehow know. Whichever, it kept him off Axel’s property as a teen, and his friends, well, if they had wanted to snoop their curiosity was beaten when he brought his father’s garage distillery into the conversation.

He climbs the stairs and hesitates at the door his daughter disappeared into. He should turn around and let her be. Last night might have been bad. How bad? He grabs the doorknob. He’s in the same clothes as yesterday, well, as all this week. Gumboots, jogging pants, one of his old man’s old sweaters, scarf. But how bad could last night have really been? Not like Melanie hasn’t already seen it all.

The room inside smells of pine, hay, and dust, and is washed in low red light — lit like a darkroom or brothel. What would Melanie be doing developing film? He thinks porn, then, no way. Heat lamps. Heat lamps are clamped to the counter that circles the room. Okay. That’s why the red. He closes the door behind him, tugging hard to compress the rubber flap against the insulation taped over the door jamb. The middle of the room is a makeshift wall of bookshelves. Seems like Axel’s picked up every loose piece of furniture he’s found on the roadside. Cords and extension cords from electric heaters loop half-buried in hay over the unfinished floor. He steps over the mess and runs his hand down the shelves of photo albums.

Around the room plastic sheeting is stretched taut over fibreglass insulation and stapled to bare studs. There must be over fifty lamps clamped to the counter that frames the room, and their filaments — painful to look at — reflect pink and red off the plastic. Cut-down cardboard boxes, each with a lip four to six inches, are stacked on the left. Beside them, haphazard pillars of aluminum tins.

He leans against the nearest bookcase and dusts through photo albums. The collections on the middle shelf date back ten years or more. He tugs out a thick green compilation and cracks it halfway. Infant birds. Falcons. No idea how old. White fluff barely covers their bodies. Each bird has a dot inked onto its forehead. Typewritten cue cards are sealed into the album under each photo. Date, name, and what looks like breed stock. He replaces the collection and selects another. Older. Adult birds this time. Photos have places — “Quebec,” “Tuktoyaktuk” — and dates. A third collection. This one old enough to have small plastic pockets, not the stiff, peel-back pages of the previous two. Axel as a young man — his hair pale brown or dirty blonde, difficult to tell with the camera filter — seated on a brick wall. He wears shorts, his bare legs are crossed at the ankles, and he salutes the photographer with a beer. Behind him, hills and mountains upholstered with short trees and brush that could be alpine. Blue sky above the peaks. Another photo: a young girl in a cap, no, a wimple and bandeau — a nun? — holds a hawk on a glove. She wears boots under her skirt and stands in a garden, or on the path between gardens. Flowers, no idea what type, tall-stemmed with weighty, petalled heads. The girl’s eyebrows and eyes and skin are dark — Spanish?

There’s recent photos, too, unlabelled and still in an envelope on the bottom shelf. He thumbs out the top print — Axel perched on a stool, bent over an incubator. Axel sits with his jumpsuit open and pulled half off, the arms tied around his waist. His chest is a mess of white hair but, admittedly, even at his age, he’s in enviable shape. His pant-leg is rolled up over his knee and shows off his stump. The incubator’s plastic lid is raised, and ten or so speckled eggs lie on the rods. Kendra must have taken these. Melanie isn’t in any of them. Milo puts the photos back. Enough, get on with it. He steps around the furniture.

Melanie stands at the far end of the room with her back to him. To the front of her sits an empty steel-rod contact incubator — the same incubator Axel sat beside in the photo. The rods are covered with a clear plastic lid, and dials — presumably temperature and humidity gauges — line the lower panel. With the plastic cover and metal rods it looks both like a record player and a gas-station hotdog roller, only larger. Enough room for three or four dozen eggs, normal eggs — he’s not sure about the size of falcon eggs. In the picture they seemed smaller. On the counter beside the incubator is a blue metal box with a pinhole — a candler.