Noy Holland - What begins with bird

The dog, loping out in front of her father, reaches Gracie first, drops the squirrel on its back beside her. Grace goes to her knees to see it. The squirrel’s mouth is still pulsing; its small legs are canted out, its paws drawn up like spiders. The white strip of its belly is mounded and soft, the broadly gaping seam of an animal stuffed with cotton. Grace nudges the tail and it flickers. She prods the ribs; the body curls and spits.

“What are you doing?” her father says.

“I’m thinking.”

“Can’t you think standing up with the rest of us?”

Grace turns up the cuffs of her father’s pants.

“I’m thinking.”

She pulls the wrinkle from the neck of his sock.

He steps away from her.

“Francesca,” Walter says.

He could weep almost, done in by her name. All her long life he had said it.

She taps the squirrel’s head and it hisses.

“Don’t do that.”

“It’s not dead yet,” she says.

“I can see.”

When she reaches to touch the squirrel again, Walter hauls her to her feet by her elbow. She stumbles into him.

“You don’t listen,” Walter says.

He bends to knock the folds from his cuffs. “You just do your own thing.”

“ I ’m listening, Doc,” Carl says from inside the house, a broadcast over the intercom. “I can see. You okay, Gracie girl?”

Grace sniffles. She hooks a thumb in each ear not to hear him.

“I took her out to Pop’s place one time, it’s in the country.”

Grace hums a song, makes it up, walks away off to the bank of trees.

“He’s got animals and all like that. Keeps a garden. I thought she’d like that. We do a little this and that for Pop, give him a boost, he’s old. I’m talking nothing — a weed here and there, maybe sweep something out. Maybe it takes half the morning. Gracie disappears. Docs her own thing, I heard that. And me and Pop, we’re neither of us, we can’t go and find her. I got a kid brother — I think he could go, but he is gone off, too. The two of them — disappeared. You get the picture. He’s a pretty boy, handpainted. Never been busted up.”

Helen slumps onto the picnic bench. She is tired; she has been tired for years.

And the day began so sleepily, sweetly, reading a book on the fold-out while the snow kept on in the gauzy light tilting, spinning down. She heard tinkering, nothing more — and now this, and there would be more of this, she knows. Chin up, carry on, count your lucky blessings. My.

She bends her leg up, examines the run in her nylons. The skin underneath is frayed. Fine , Helen thinks. It gives her something to show to Walter, how he walks off: Look what our dinner guest did .

“Here’s what I thought,” Carl says over the intercom.

He has rolled his chair into the bathroom.

“I was thinking you could spare us some dough, man. We got hospital bills, you know that.”

“We have bills of our own,” Walter says.

“Our own?” Carl says. “What does that mean? What the fuck does that mean?”

“Walter,” Helen says and pets his arm, “be quiet.”

A light comes on in the bathroom and Carl’s face appears in the window, mashed against the glass; his nose, bent — two holes; his lips Hexing, stiffening, then flowering out obscenely.

Walter pitches the golf balls at Carl, which rocket away off the glass.

“Don’t be stupid,” Helen says, and she jostles the door to their bedroom.

“You want in, Mommy?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“There’s plenty. I’m checking out the doctor’s medicine chest: two of them, three of that, once a day as needed. Good God, Doc. You’re a walking toxic event.”

He runs water.

“I’m own take a few. Just a tickle,” Carl says, “see what happens. I’m give out. I been rolling all over the house, man. You got ROOMS. Some I can’t even get to.”

He shakes some pills out. “A little help here and there. Why not? We got ER bills, we got ambulance. Gracie, tell them about the ambulance.”

He turns the faucet off. “Hey, Grace?”

Grace is down by the dog house kicking around through the leaves.

“She gets bit by a ant, she stubs her toe, and she calls the goddamn—”

“She didn’t used to,” Walter says.

“The hell she didn’t. She calls the goddamn ambulance. Grace! Where’d she go, Doc? Ain’t you watching her?”

They hear him coming. He bashes out onto the porch.

“I oughta knock your goddamn teeth down your throat. Grace! Grade girl.”

Carl rolls up close to the railing, lifts himself out by the arms of his chair to see across the yard.

“So help me, man.”

He cannot see her, cannot get to her — it is steps going off the porch. There is a hot wire strung to keep the dogs away below the wooden railing.

Walter pokes his nose up, sniffs at the air. He starts toward the patch of pine trees and, seeing nothing of smoke or flame, turns, breaks into a clumsy trot. It is inside the house, it must be.

But it’s not: it is the scorch of Carl’s pantleg he smells against the wire fence, and the stink of flesh searing.

Carl slams back into the picnic bench, swatting at his pants.

Helen sinks to her knees in her nursey way and hitches the cloth up his calf. She fingers the burn and, gently, gravely, his boot heel clamped between her knees, applies a compress of snow.

“Who, Mommy,” Carl brays, laughing. “That’s the first thing I felt in yeeears.”

There are two kennels built of chainlink at the boundary of the yard, a doghouse in each, an automatic feeder. The floor of each kennel is so deep in shit you have to walk on your tiptoes to keep it from welting over your shoes. That’s what Grace does — she walks on tiptoes, crawls into the doghouse.

They cannot see her in there. She doesn’t answer Carl when he calls.

Helen wrestles the wheelchair down the steps, bumps it over the walkway.

The windowlight flutters on — Walter is on his rounds. Lights on, speakers off. He toddles from room to room, seeking damage, surveying what is his.

Helen comes upon the ladder at the far end of the house, leaned up against the gutter. She kicks off her shoes and goes up — quickly, tottering on her arches, over the icy rungs. Grace is up there, she thinks, she must be, blundering over the shingles.

Helen feels brave and suddenly useful. She can do this for years to come — clamber onto rooftops, venture out in the dark and snow. A great weakening surge of something bristles her arms and legs.

Grace watches all this from the dog house how Helen bobbles up, hooks a toe. Then she is gone, crept out onto the pitch in the dark.

There is Carl, still, and the sheepdog to watch, the sheepdog circling Carl, snapping at the wheels of his chair. There is the milky beam from the lighthouse, the hum of the turning bulb.

The sheepdog rushes at Carl. He flies it back with his elbow.

Carl hunkers, his chin tucked, snarls, spinning his chair as the dog moves, keeping the dog out in front of him, taunting, he is like that, and Grace sees she is standing now, tiptoeing out to help him — the orbs of mud his chair plows up and hears, sometimes, her name.

She whistles. It will come to her — the sheepdog’s name.

And the light from over the golf course, that will come to her, too. You simply stand just so and wait for it: a beacon, a sweeping pulse, convincing, the light triggered by dark, by weather: needed, that’s the idea.

Nothing is missing, nothing damaged. No bedcover browned by flame.

Walter stands for a time in the doorway of the room that used to be, that would be again — it wasn’t his idea Francesca’s. Francescos —he would insist on that. There were Francescas all through his side of the family, every dead generation.