Noy Holland - What begins with bird

His first wife slept with her feet out, hung out over the edge of their bed. You could pull on her toe and wake her.

He coughs; he thinks to touch her.

He goes to the door and calls to his dogs, who come, as they do, slinking, dragging a path with their bellies. He says to sit; they sit. He throws a stick; they fetch it.

Walter shuts the door behind him. He finds his shovel where he left it leaned up into the hedge and walks with it through the falling snow and pokes around in the garden. The flakes are no bigger than fingernails, the dirt beneath a spongy loam, peaty, amended. He makes a clearing. Nothing is showing yet, no green tip pushing through.

There is nothing, of course, to do yet, nothing that needs to be done.

He paints his shovel red, his rake and hoe.

He checks the drive again for the paper and, from the drive, sees the light in the window come on in the upstairs room: his wife is up with her cup of coffee. In her slippers, no doubt, in her nightgown; she will lie on the fold-out all day and only wake enough to read. She knows he cannot climb up the stairs, or if he climbs up, cannot come down. He is not supposed to.

He eats a biscuit; he tries to read. He dials the weather service, listens to the recorded forecast: there is snow from Maine to Georgia, steady along the seaboard, on the beaches. Snow is falling on the Mississippi nearly to New Orleans.

New Orleans. N’wahle-ans is what his first wife said, and tar-po-le’an. Verandah . There was a time even he said verandah — years back, they were newlyweds, the months they spent in New Orleans.

It had been her idea, New Orleans. She found the place, the peevish bird — it slept on a perch on their headboard; her idea, the verandah, them sitting out for julep time in the last of the sun, in the rain if it rained. She insisted. Julep time, dark or light, rain or heat, no matter.

There were people, passersby, music coming up the street, no matter the time, the weather. They were walled-in, swallowed. Hiving, living among. The building scratched and settled, knocked; something ticked or sputtered, broke; something living nibbled. Sarah had not seemed to mind it. She had almost seemed to like it, his first wife — the slubbing in the crusted pipes, the soups tossed over the windowsills. A wheeze, a moan, a zipper zipped. Snakes in the reek and mire — this, this was just the inside, this was in the airshaft. Peel, marrow, gristle, bone; cast-off prophylactic, leaf and clacking oyster shell. Strays came, no wonder, feral cats — her word, feral —howling in the airshaft, the bird in a panic, flapping.

Quiet? — christ, forget it.

Better to live on a cul-de-sac. Better to live on a golf course. He liked the sound of the fans on the golf course, oscillant, obtruding — a whir — there to cool the bentgrass greens.

They settled in near the golf course, at the yacht club, he and Sarah, deep into the marriage. He had his work still, the approaching calm. The lassitude of the arrived, he thinks. A guard at the gate. The surrendering hills. And on a day like today, not a bootprint, not a windowshade tweaked open.

Not a yacht for years, for miles, in sight.

The lake is too small, too shallow, made. What there is of yachts is the word itself and an anchor plunged into the grass before the guard house; there are the miles of anchor chain dragged from yawing, sea-tossed ships — authentic — to grace the lighted fountain, the paved ways over the golf course. On every link is an even, talcumy burnish of rust.

Walter’s house is the last house, shored up against the hills. Beyond the hedge is the fairway and the slim tower he can see from their bed on the grassy rise. This is the newest improvement out here: a chiming clock, a sweeping light grand and exact and costly, the replica of a lighthouse.

Had Sarah lived to see it?

He cannot think quite. It would have waked her — the clock going off, the arm of light.

He tries the TV: talk show, talk show, weather.

He calls up the stairs to Helen. Does she think the paper will come today? Has she seen, by chance, his ruler?

He finds his ruler where he keeps it, measures the snow on the bird house, walks to the end of the driveway to see about the neighborhood kids. They quit moving when they see him; they ball up their hands in their pockets.

“Good idea,” he offers.

The bigger boy, when Walter speaks, sort of nods.

The boys are building a snowman, scraping snow from the cul-de-sac, picking out bits of gravel. There are patches of grass on the lawn showing through where they have scooped up the snow and hauled it off. The snowman is gray and lumpy, the blonde grass of Walter’s lawn poking through.

Walter bends down, holds up his ruler to the bottom tier. “Well,” he says at last, “it’s coming.”

“Yep.”

Walter knocks his heels together. He pats both boys on the head, the stiff crop of their flat-tops. “Carry on, men.”

Did they not have a chore of some sort, a father to help, a mother?

He finds his ladder, sets it against the side of his house where Helen cannot sec him, and wobbles up. He pulls a dead bird from the gutter, rotting leaves, several golf balls. The golf balls, he drops in his pockets. He lobs the bird into the trees.

Another rung, and he can see the fairway and the gray bank of the lake, far off. The old mother up the street comes out, her coat blowing open, and calls into the snow to her children.

He starts down then. The sky has gone chalky. The snow that must be falling seems to be floating up. He hears a door shut.

He found her letters. They spoke gently of him, mostly gently, of how he had turned away. He thought at first they were written for him. He sees her hand, neat, the yellow pad.

His chest feels wound, bandaged. If he looks too long at the ground through the rungs, the ladder bucks and sways.

What a blessing, Sarah wrote, a gift from the gods — to have found such love so late in life. He tries to feel that. Love’s not time’s fool . She had had the words chinked into her gravestone.

He sends a foot down, noses about for the rung. His foot is as stiff as wood in his boot; in his eye is a blurring, lifting flake, a flying, he thinks, insect. But it isn’t, he knows that it cannot be: the spot stays, moves, watery, a wingy translucence. It begins, as soon as he looks away, to sweep across his eye.

He keeps his eye shut; he is not frightened. His trees, his house, his car in the drive he has kept his world in order. His yard is flawless, as smooth as a lake the ladder rises serenely from.

Walter rests a time, moves again. His leg grabs when he moves — an old hurt-heel to puffy ankle, up, a toothy length of chain dragged up through the vein in his leg. He is bleeding into his boot — that’s what it feels like. His eye is a stone in its socket.

The good leg the one he is standing on gives. Walter crumples, tumbles, the ladder shrilling across the gutter, fast; it doesn’t fall quite. He has the sense to let loose of it, to tuck, pitch, roll, an old athlete.

Hey, hey.

Something dullish at first, and then nothing. Walter lies in the snow looking up.

That was nicely done, he thinks.

Not a scratch, not a tweak he isn’t used to.

A car slides to a stop in the cul-de-sac, knocks the head off the snowman.

Ah ha, he thinks — the News at last. A peep, a word, in the stretch of a day — is it really so much to ask?

He feels his heart thump in the vein of his neck. He wants to lie there, sleep, the snow twisting down. He waits for the sound of the paper. Waits for the light from the lighthouse to pass.

He had a route as a boy, a bag and a bike. Rode through swelter, flood, freakish snow people used to. Mere mortals.