Erin Fisher - That Tiny Life

In the ICU on hospital sheets, the chirps of machines and monitors, the pulse of the bird cradled again at his own heart, he never doubted. Even now it’s not doubt.

“Thirty birds in the hand,” he says aloud. At his own table, in his own house. The offspring of that first falcon filling the mewses outside. “A bird on the hand of every falconer in North America.”

The school kids gone, he escapes to the garage. Reflex. The still. His father’s pet, ordered from Europe, runs on sawdust bricks. Steel base polished at alternating angles to look checkered, the sleek rose-copper boiler and botanical basket, the thick windows the gin condenses behind — his father didn’t skimp. Austin used to steep juniper, peach, sarsaparilla, and a few more flora Milo’s forgotten, for twenty-four hours, and spend the next day in the garage monitoring optimum distillation temps. What Milo makes can’t be called gin officially, but it has the alcohol content. He unscrews the lid from a jar and sniffs it. Not good, except that it smells like alcohol. In fact, it could be called disgusting. He sets the jar on the cement floor.

The mess they made of the cow — a bloody puzzle on the tarp. The tractor in the driveway still has gas, and a backhoe attachment. The keys are in his pocket. If he couldn’t prevent the mess, maybe he can clean it up.

The bus huffed the kids off her property, but not out of her space. The cow is spread on the tarp in a pile next to the empty carcass and calf.

She climbs the porch and opens the door. They were in here. Mugs and crusted bowls cover the table and counter. Instant soup packages are set on a melted bag of frozen veggies on the stove. And although the entire farm smells of shit, the human crap smell of the house is worse. Mud. Footsteps. She pinches the hair above her ears and pulls. They went through the kitchen. She drops her hands and heads for the bathroom, then stops. Cody stands in the old man’s doorway, in his kilt, with his cutesy bangs and his thin neck, his knees slightly bent like he’s trying to vanish or is ready to bolt. He wipes his cheek, tries to hide his embarrassment of her, no, worse, for her. His whole future life at Axel’s flung her in the face.

He starts to apologize. “Sorry, I—”

Sorry? She slaps his mouth. Punches. He curls. She punches again. Pushes. Kicks, then straddles him and beats: fists, teeth, fingers.

The worst, most awful thing she’s done, she thinks, was like what this boy is doing. Like Milo. Like those kids on the bus. In grade seven, she opened the door to use the girls’ washroom and found this special needs kid rocking in her own throw-up, saying, “I feel sick.” And she did nothing. Nothing at all. She shut the door and pretended not to know, even when Candice helped the girl from the bathroom — her hand on the girl’s back — saying, “It’s okay. It’s okay.” She hits Cody till there’s sticky blood and probably tears. Why apologize? Why be sorry? Should she be sorry? There’s black snot down his chin. He’s stopped covering his face. What good is that? She slides down his legs. His kilt is up round his hips. She unzips his pants and pulls out his dick.

“Sorry for what?” she says. His eyes are swollen shut, or he’s keeping them shut. His cheeks are red — either he’s blushing because she’s touching him, or blushing from being caught in her house, or from the kick to the face. She puts her lips on his penis — should she bite? — but the kid gives a twitch and pulls his hands back up over his face. She spits it out on his kilt.

She leaves him on the floor. Outside, there’s enough moonlight to see that most of the cows have wandered off the highway and back to the pasture. She shuts the door and walks toward the barn. She should be sorry. Walking isn’t fast enough. She runs. She is sorry. Still not fast enough.

Only because of the bathroom, because of the bathroom sink — all he wanted was to wash the cow-pie off his hands — and then because someone moaned in the back room, needing help. And he waited because he wasn’t sure what the next step should be. Otherwise he would have left when Axel did, taking Kendra’s clothes from him.

Or maybe he went inside to avoid the kids outside, because the kids outside were so mean to her. Or maybe it was because of the cow. His left eyelid is stuck — there’s a red pulse through the eyelid from the hallway light. He zips his jeans, rolls on his front, and cringes upright. He washes his hands and face. He walks home across the snow.

He starts to climb over the paddock fence, but hurts, so he crawls under. His kilt trips his knees and he has to tug it out of the way twice. The motion sensor flickers in the training yard — Kendra, scrubbed pink, back in her jeans and sweater and jacket, with the bucket of feed. He lets himself in. She looks him over and swings the bucket his way. He takes it. The dead chickens are coated in a greenish slime that could be decomp, but doesn’t smell like the crime shows on TV back home claim rot smells.

“Vitamin powder,” Kendra says. “Remember?” She feeds a handful into a tray and slides it through a slot in the plywood nesting pen. “For the hatchlings — remember I told you about the hatchling room? You’ll see them in spring.” She furrows her forehead, scanning his sweater and scratches.

“For the hatchlings,” he prompts.

“For them, you start the same. Toss the feeders in the cement mixer and get these guys.” She taps the bucket. “Then everything goes through the meat grinder — Axel will show you — and next the blender. It’ll all come out grey and tufty, but that’s normal.”

“How many chicks have you gone through?” he asks. “Over the years.”

“Over the years.” She laughs once, then looks at him and takes back the bucket. “This bother you?”

“Does what bother me,” he says, before she can ask what happened to him, or if he’s going to be all right here by himself. “Feeding birds birds? Cannibalism?”

She puts a hand on her hip. “Cannibalism,” she says. “Good one.”

The light in the training yard is on, shining through the curtains, and Cody and Kendra are feeding the birds. Kendra feeds the birds. The boy hugs himself. Beyond them, in the distance, the light of the tractor digging a pit.

Kendra — she has pictures. Undeveloped film he needs for the records: the white, centre of the training yard on a post in the snow. And she’ll have snapped one of the bird on his glove, unhooded, as he walked her around getting her used to the fist. Only took him a lifetime to breed out the brain.

He lets the curtains fall. He’ll have to bring himself to ask before she goes.

Night’s calm. No point in rushing. She hops the falcons to her fist to feed them. Wipes the green fluff of the chicks from their beaks and hands them to Cody, who sets them on a perch-scale and calls the weight to her. Returns the birds to their mewses, crops full, lazy. They tuck a blue or yellow leg into their feathers.

The birds each carry their own beauty; if she could sneak a speckled male, or even Lola. No, she laughs to herself, Axel will be at the window. And she doesn’t want a bird that way. Not stolen. Nothing that will give her hesitation every time she lifts it.

She’s going to miss this place, she realizes. She’s going to miss this kid and his kilt. His fear of snorkelling. She’s going to miss Axel.

He climbs off the tractor at the far side of the pasture, slaps his hands on his thighs, and claps the blood back into his fingers in the dark. The drop in temperature that arrived with evening has solidified the ground. The half-frozen dirt has risen like yeast, is full of air and gritty with ice crystals; he stomps his feet at the edge of the pit he’s backhoed. The ground crunches crisply. Five or six feet deep. The first two feet good, fertile, grass field, and under that roots and rock. The tractor cools beside the pit, the exposed hydraulic metal of boom and dipper glint oily blue-black, although the rest of the tractor’s and world’s colours are lost in the night. The cow can wait until morning. So can Kendra’s truck. He should close the garage.