Noy Holland - What begins with bird

After her I found the others easy. You go by your nose through the weeds for the traps going low to the ground like a dog. Red fox I found and muskrat, coon and the paw of what I do not know in the muck cow Maggie made of the banks of the pond I would wade in the dry out into.

The old people could have found them caught in the dry time when they moved. Then I would not have had to. Would not have had to smell them then nor burr my hair to get to them nor haul them onto the bridge for Pa so Pa could see to flay or gut or what any else he did to them or sort the parts to bury.

We buried them back by the chicken coop in sight of the pond where they swam if they swam or only came and drank from. Soon the rooster flapped over the pond — his Goose had gone from the field. The rooster come to sit Goose’s back flapped in his grief to the couch when Goose passed come rain come sleet come snow. Crowing on.

His hens in the coop to hear him. I lay in my bed and heard him, the moon sweeping past, the stars.

Cricket you Cricket you .

See the white of his face swung up?

His bright eye webbed and curdled?

And then when we had blinded him and set him out in the field to browse I saw the skin seal and crumple saw in the cold it was blent and gathered.

They will do it to a baby too a rooster will give him half a chance he does it to his own. And his hens’ eyes are small.

I lay in my bed and pictured it.

Pictured Pa when I came upon him.

I came upon him in the wet months yet the flying leaves the sinking grass the geese dropped from their wedges yet and scudding across the pond.

I had come on the bus from school. I skipped. I swung my feet through the fallen leaves to smell the sweet wet smell of them to smell the wind the needling rain that in the night had felled them. The leaves flew up and clung to me to the ratty flounce of the skirt I wore the bitten ridge of my shinbones. I stopped at the pond to peel them from me.

I could hear the tractor then. You turn the fields to fallow them. I liked to listen for Pa to know where he might leave the harrowbed the plow.

I heard him. But I did not think Pa at first I did not think listen . I sang my song the coming home song against his note I had not heard and hope again to never. Still I looked about and saw him. He was wallowed up on the couch in the green with the yellow bead the pond was deep on the couchback scarcely showing.

He could not be Pa. He was something in the wet the old people left that had loosed itself from the muck as it went and yet it spit my name. With still our barns to pass between, the hill to the house to run. I ran. I ran the day the bees got Pa and ran the day I held his Goose in the washroom where we shod. But I did not run far. I heard him bellow. You try it try to run. Drop to your hands if the grass is high and dream he cannot find you there with your heart knotted small as the rabbits new-born he brings to you in the crown of his hat the days he plows to calm. But I have never saved one. I have never saved one yet of all the ones he brings to me I have lost them all.

I lay on the bank and watched him. The longer I kept away from Pa the harder it was to go to him.

And yet I went to him. I knocked the bees from his neck for him Pa gone in his hurt not hearing me not a place on him to hold him by I held him by his hair. Through the green I swam him. I could have walked the pond but it took my shoes from my feet the silken bottom. Me and Pa dragged a stripe in the green where I swam where it folded against Pa’s head. Pa Pa.

Once we grew a pig so fat even its eyelids fattened, ear and jowl and bursting cheek and by and by its eyeballs — squeezed — stood away loose from its head.

Then Pa. Bellowing out of the wallow. The cow to her teats to cool. The tractor run up on a stump and stopped and still at its ticking idle. I made my hands a stirrup — Pa’s legs were too swelled to bend. Swing up . And from the time of riding shotgun years I knew which stick to muscle, which to back to raise the plow when once we had it scraping up loud against the road.

Ma in her chair past autumn. Us come up come dew come snow. The baby let to his knees at the screen to scream the day the bees swarmed Pa and Ma came out to swat at us going Gracious lord above .

Think back to when time was in her — my soft head broken through. Before that. When time was she was Pa’s. Before my hair I grew in her that made her retch and swoon.

A girl. And her boy sick and small. I took the strength she had in her. I kept them up nights nights in her: their Cricket. Chirruping in the swill.

Boy , her boy, her funny runt. He could not be Pa’s. Who came before they thought his name and stayed they had not thought he might for such a long time after. Boy , she called him. Goose, you goose , and mister —Ma thinking not to choose a name to have to have to call him by should he be taken from her.

We never took him from her. Even when he crawled. Nor say I ever came to her to cut my name most fine in her not before nor after Ma swelling as he grew.

I was all Pa’s girl. The barns were mine and the hay in the barns and Pa and the trees and the cows. Cow Maggie leaned against me. The birds flew south by the stars. Barn and barn and barn and pond the road climbing out through the fields. Mine and Pa’s, my pa’s. The high quiet wobbledy stars. And Ma where she sat in the window was ours and sat in the shut-away buttery gold, the dogs at our heels the stars. Should you wish.

Ma’s shirt bled pinkly through.

The seed-blown fields the wickerings. The slickened births and murders, ours, the fierce wide blowing day.

I tended to him gently. Pa wallowing in the tub. He would swell to fit it. And swell till he could not budge from it and I would spoon a mash to him and keep the water cooled for him and nest his head in my pillow. His eye unloosed like a doll’s. Fetch a sledge. Break him duly from it.

Pa’s arms puffed out to float from him and seep in milky puddles, his skin so hot to touch it scalds. I did not touch it. I worked the coughing spigot, churned the cold to sap the heat slowly not to hurt him. And made as not to hear him his voice not his no voice at all — a green sea rief a great whale culled and keening in its traces.

I daubed a paste where he was stung a curdly dull against his skin I first swiped bright with butter. Pa. Who plowed the bees it comes to me to see if Ma would see to him to sec if she would tend to him but Ma would not have come.

Why seem at last to hear him? Ma would not have come.

And who was it came upon him?

And so I took it slow. I made Ma’s clucks and muddlings and swabbed and slowly doctored him. I had no Goose to think of no price to fetch no mouths to fill no deed to hide the doing of.

No day yet when we shod.

It’s me Pa Pa it’s Cricket .

Get .

I was not her. Not Ma and never Cricket quite but proof she had not come.

I took to sleeping in the barn else the sinking grass in the leaves unhinged in the wind. Pa’s rooster nightly crowing.

Pa when he was up again and shrunk into himself again rode Goose unshod through our honeyed woods our creeks our windfall autumn. Among the lowly creatures named and ours to daily tend. We are sloppy in our tending. Our swallows catch in the raftered dark our rabbits are turned from the fields. Fox we trap and whistle pig and the spotty domes of our turtles crush in the wet upon our road. And in our hay we gather. And too the narrow fellows sunning lazy in the stubble catch — snakes pressed between the flakes of hay as though we mean to keep them, and faith by them in the shut-away days the snowbound weeks we wait to breathe that the fields are strewn and rooted through with bees with bodies sleeping.