Noy Holland - What begins with bird

She thought the baby would weep soon. It would look up and speak her name.

Rose found she was counting heartbeats. She was thinking she could feel her heart beat as you do sometimes in your fingertips, behind your knees, in your teeth sometimes. She could feel that. But she could not keep up, counting — it was too fast, thready, the ragged, shallow, quickening pulse not of her own heart, she realized, but of the baby’s heart, the dent on the top of the baby’s head twitching against her arm. Her arm felt weak and tingly.

He came over the yard in his boxer shorts. He had hair all over his body.

Rose felt herself starting to pee, or bleed, she couldn’t tell which. She saw him start down over the hogback and she squatted with the baby in the dust as he came. She felt the shudder he caused in the ground as he came, in her knees, in the bones of her hands — she swore that she could feel that — a blunt, heavy, bear of a man running down to her through the cactus, the goatheads, his wide flat feet winging out.

We could do with him what we wanted. The old people left and left Goose here and what they left was ours.

They’d have taken him if they could. They took the glass from in the windows, they took the crib from the bend in the road. Our pa would have to drag a new crib out to keep the corncobs in. They took the cow in the wet field lowing. They took the blind pig beating the barn.

Down from the house where our ma stuck tight it went barn and barn and barn and crib and next the pond-bridge over the pond next the brocade couch in the pond where they had gone and dragged it. They left us the couch and the road paint sure from wherever cheap they had got it. They left the washer machine with its top torn loose down on its side beside the creek.

They took the knobs from the doors and the rods for towels and what bulbs that burned they could reach out to and loose them from their sockets. Anything much they could loose they took and everything they left behind we got to keep between us. I got the doll I saved from the johnnie that simpered when I hit it. I got the trees and the wind in the trees and the pond with the couch and the muskrat traps and the green gone garish on it. Pa got the horse and the hills.

The horse, we found between the barns where it had gone up and over. It had knocked its thick head on the road, Pa said. We were sitting in the truck.

We had checked the coop for chickens. We had seen that the crib was gone.

It went Pa then me then Ma in the truck with the baby asleep on her bosom.

They had hit it with a pipe, Pa said. Else it had gone up and over.

Ma got out like he told her to and went up the hill with the baby. I heard her high shoes on the road when she went and I heard when she stopped and rested.

The horse, I heard and would hear again the queer high birdish sound he made. It hung between the barns. He was laid out between the barns.

I got the barn and the hay in the barn and the dust coming slatted through the rafters. I got the pail for corn I beat to spook the rats from the crib when I fed when I came from the bus from school. It was my job to feed the animals, to fatten Maggie cow. I got the hay and the smell of the hay and the light snapping on on the barn.

The horse was Pa’s and the hills he rode and the bees he dug that clouded him when he dragged the hooked plow with the tractor. The rabbits he dug he gave to me, I kept in the bowl in the washer machine thrown out where the creek ran through.

I stretched the come-along out like Pa told me. Because the others never did have a come-along to crank the horse over the gravel with to take him off on whatever it was they had brought to move away on. So they left him laid out on the hump of our road between the high walls of our barns.

The horse was dead, Pa said, or good as dead but what was the thin long sound he made, what were the lifting moons of his eyes when Pa came close with his gun? So he was good yet good for something.

A horse is worth something, easy, Pa said, you could sell him off handsome on the hoof in a blink. They would buy him from Pa by the pound. We could haul him up on the bed of Pa’s truck, sell him off quick down the hill from us to pay for what they loosed from us the hooks and bulbs and sockets. And yet I thought to ride him. Yes. I thought to him: Hum up.

I looped the steel loop around his pastern first as quick in the dark as I could. I walked the slack out. I worked the handle some.

I saw the light go on in the house up the hill and then Ma in the window passing. So they left a light with the chairs all gone so Ma could sec to sit the floor and hitch up her shirt for the baby. The baby always goes to the one so I ask who is the other one for. She laughs. You are as bad as your pa. Get on.

There are chickens to feed and cow Maggie. Two cobs twice for Maggie. There are board fences sure to creosote and thistle to dig from the fields when it bolts before the purple crowns. I muck the stalls and soap the tack and vet Pa’s dogs they run the fields flushing birds all day. I am his girl Cricket. I climb the big oak on the hill Pa’s hill even after when it is hit and burns and the burn blacks my skin my clothes.

I work the handle some and the slack is out and I can feel the horse start to pull over the hump of gravel. He lets his long high sound. Pa says it is like a goose so Goose but 1 never heard a goose as that, so long as that it warbled, not a sound like that and never since from bird nor horse nor man. Not even when Pa hit him.

He hit him in his head. Then was a sound a girl-girl lets, queerly sung and pretty. But that was some time after. That was when we shod.

First Pa thinks to work with him when he is up and well enough and we walk him down in the sun in the heat on the road between the barns. First Pa thinks to gentle Goose to ride him days we do not plow, afternoons we do not need to hoe nor pick nor harrow. Pa went to him first going easy talking sweetly in his ear. Hope hope .

He never did hit Goose at the first the night when Ma went off up the road. She went up the hill with the baby quick her hair a knot on her brightened head he reached for when she rested. First it was me Ma reached for. Then after me she rested. I took the strength she had, Pa said, so after me she rested.

Pa gets the hills and the oaks on the hills the old people called the farm by. Ma gets the house she climbs to, her shoes tapping bright on the road. Our ma gets the boy not yet a boy for Pa to need to work the fields while he is weak and small. She gets the way he smells the way he gums her how he coos.

Goose lets his long high sound. I feel him shudder across the gravel the ratchet clicking slow. I sec him rest if I rest and flutter his nose but Ma will have something fixed for us and sits her chair to watch for us and sheets on the floor she has spread for us and the light is gone from the barn. They have loosed it from its socket hung from the spavined wall of the barn. Get up .

I taut the line some. I bring him easy.

I haul up the traps in the muck by and by from the bank where the old people left them. The dogs come to drink from the pond. They beat out a flattened path in the weeds in the burrs that catch and mat my hair flown loose when first I found one. First how we knew to look at all was once I heard Pa’s dog. She had her paw snapped up in the mouth of the trap in the gone-by weeds that mark the pond in the rattling pods come winter. Summer coming to its close. The fescue stiffly yellowed. And in the night Pa’s dog cries out from the drawn-back lip of the pond.

Be slow . Our Goose.

See the road slopes up. Take your time to calm you .