Noy Holland: What begins with bird

“But it makes your ma keep at it, same with that boy as you.”

Her boy. Him lolling yet at her bosom.

We woke for weeks to snowfall the curling drifts the wind banked up to pin our flapping door. The hedge disappeared the leeward fence cow Maggie walked out over to find her way to the barn. No school for weeks no place we went our tractor left with the broken plow on the road where Pa sprung off from it come up on him and over until all but the lip of the highside tire the wind picked clean seemed gone.

Then of a night a velvet wind and foreign swept our farm.

Pa legged me over the windowsill. He heaved me out in my mucklucks onto the slope of snow. The slabs of snow of thickened ice already in the pooling glare crept across the rooftops. I took my list to go by: cigarettes sardines D-con cheese.

Barn and barn and crib and pond and on the pond Pa’s rooster — spun — our grudging weathervane. I think he thought to crow at me who never crowed by morninglight and so I waved my cap at him and waved as I went at his baffled hens, sunk to my peep in the snow.

“How you?”

They had lights at the store and the woodstove burned and the wind flown hard in the blackened pipe sucked and moaned and tumbled. I gathered my goods and bagged them. The girl held out her hand for the money she knew my pa would never send me with and quick I turned for home from her the thaw sunk deep upon us.

Every stone and matted leaf and fence and sloping fallow steamed. The ice on the pond broke soft when I passed and soft the newts the spotty frogs the dull fish frozen in. The barn the mossy pond I smelled and in the wind the flowers bloomed where it had crossed to reach us. It came on.

Ma went back in her blotted gown to the back of the house she had happened from and found her hat her dungarees her chalky split galoshes. So quick I went to fetch Goose. He lay in the field on his blinded side in a patch pawed free of snow.

I let him stop for a time for the apples that dropped and palmed him the last of the treats I had kept the months for him in my pockets.

We took the path past the crib. I knew no other way to go so as not to pass her. She would go on. She had her bag at her knee her hat on. Her boy in a bunch in the wheelbarrow.

I led him along his hood pulled free him lathered in the sudden warm his brisket gaunt and heaving. Cricket you Cricket you .

It would not be long. I knew as much to look at Ma her flicks and starts and sudden flush her voice like something burst in her should she gap her mouth to use it.

I went on. I led him up between the barns where Pa had drawn the trailer up and stood the high gates open.

Ma turned back the once and once again to bring herself to go. We stood on the road and watched her. The road black in the wet in the sudden thaw in the steam that dipped and gathered grown so thick to squat upon our pond that it seemed not our rooster there but the air itself yet crowing.

Stay. Stay. So go .

I gave Goose his head to lunge at Pa to beat the air to strike at him should Pa swing past where Goose could see else think to speak or touch him. To see if she would tend to him. But Ma was going on.

She went up through the lopped and pollarded trees I kept as she went a count of. Pa’s dogs at her heels since the barn. Good dogs.

I leant against Pa’s legs with them. I licked his pants when I was small with them with him not looking. Quick.

You get .

Pa toddling off for his gun.

Goose scraped at the road the piddling stream with the shoe those months he had not thrown that I would pry for luck from him and clip the braid of his tail from him hung fat with the mud we had hauled him through, the slickened clay and loamy sweet, and thinking I would go there yet where Goose yet lay in the sun and moon I found a tree a buckthorn near and deep against it hung them.

I blinkered him to calm him.

I walked on in ahead of him and we could hear Pa coming back, I was backed against the trough with him wedged away under the bars from him and Pa had creaked the swing-gate shut and Goose went back to thrashing. I felt my head flung back. Pa stood up on the running board and the shaft of the gun pushed through.

So it was Pa shot him.

It is for my sake Pa shot him.

I was in the stall beside him and the trailer shook and ringing quit and the blood of my face where Goose opened it ran free in my mouth and warm.

Enough for me. No matter .

Ma looked back the once and went on.

All that she had left to us and what is yet to come to us the oaks on the hill the lightning hits the fox in the field in the weeds I keep gone red to gray come autumn — it is enough for me. No matter .

I will sing Pa her song the getting up song she sang to me in the morningtime when she leaned to me to nudgle me and the baby was in her hair.

I could smell him from her hair.

I slip through the muck the gone-by weeds the flatted grass the dogs bend down and think if I could run from him else think I never came on him wallowed up on the couch in the green suppose Cricket supposing .

We sat on the shore and watched him.

I did not know in myself what to do for Pa nor what there might be in tending him to call so even gently. To say: I tend him gently.

Pa would have me poke at him. He would have me pinch and twist at him.

Yet to say: I tend him gently . And ever in the dusk in the sinking light I knead his feet his withered legs to move the gout and feed him.

Am I not his girl Cricket?

Enough for me. No matter.

I sing Ma’s song to him.

Our blessings count.

Enough for me to keep our Goose and in myself the truth of him and the dogs grow fat and eat of him and by the silken sweet of glue we spread across our palms to peel the skin I feel him with me and feel of the seeds that split in me and of the living harvest, shell and hide and cloven tongue and of the fruit and fowl we strew the yolky eyes the deer we cull the great whales flensed for blubber.

Ever so. Ever so gently.

I lie in the field and picture it. Who have come to be one to picture it. How long it was Goose hung there. Such a time it was he hung there pawing softly at the stars.