Noy Holland - What begins with bird

I feed her — coffee, toast, get her out and away, searching for eggs in the snow. The dog by and by learns to carry the eggs, to hold them gently in the heat of her mouth with her narrow tongue. She bumps one along to Sister, bowls it with her nose.

The snow moves in a slab to the lip of the roof The barn is steaming. The grasses appear in the sun, risen up, a friend to the earth, in the wind blowing in from the sea.

I keep Sister out there. I make her find the eggs, bored or not, after I have gone to the trouble of hiding them, before we go back inside. I found a cap for her, a coat and gloves. I’d have found Cinderella’s glass slipper for her to keep her out of the house for a time.

George passes through the window with the baby. They are happy, drifty perhaps. A man and his boy. I hate to see it.

The blooms perk up. The day slackens.

Our old beech groans and tosses its head. We hear the bristle and click of ice on its boughs — a squirrel has lunged and, sluggish, missed, and the body is dropping through.

We move in. Afternoon. The dog dreaming. The baby asleep on my chest.

Sister takes a nap in the sunroom, ribbons in her hair, gorged on sweets, her cache beneath the bedsheets, the chocolate rabbit nested yet among the bright sweet beans.

I walk Sister into the pines when she wakes, the orderly rows, her fingers hung in my pockets.

No sun much, dusk coming on. No wind where we are to speak of. A thrush somewhere, silvery, sings. The boughs are still laden with snow.

And then a squirrel chirps, a clump of snow breaks free. The dog springs like a deer through the timber, squealing, demented, a grape-sized brain, Sister lurching after, the squirrel going limb to limb. Quick as that.

A great wet clump is falling. She keeps her face tipped up to watch it, watches it to the end.

The dog rears up and swoons as she does and hooks a paw over each shoulder, kisses Sister on her neck, on her ears. She picks Sister’s — George’s — cap off, lopes away snapping the cap in her teeth as though it is something to kill.

By then I’ve reached her. Sister splutters, spitting out the plug of snow. Her mouth is bleeding. Her face is the grotesque of a face, a soul in flames, some rung of hell, and she is sobbing, spit puddling under her tongue.

I sink to my knees beside her. The Keeper, the Tender: the cheap tableau. “Let me see it.”

On her forehead, the abraded skin is grainy with blood. “Poor girl.”

I bend to touch her. But she is up, what fun, lunging away, stupid thing, elated. She pounces at me, forgetful, or not — it’s that I am feeble still, tender still, careful. I have been told to be careful.

Sister pants: a dog: I never sec it quite: who she is, means to be, monkey horsie walrus bear. She rears up and kisses me.

I take a swing at her.

It is the hour, the light, it must be-the sly animal weight of it, amnesiac, the seizing, the night sky clamping down. Fevers rise, hunting time, predators on the move.

I try to get the dog to come to me, come sit by me. I think maybe this will calm Sister, if the dog comes and sits very quietly, she is trained to, you can’t know.

I know I have not had my pills yet. I have taken the last of the pills I had that have been, while I heal, a help to me, in the eveningtime in particular, dark coming on, the flattened trees — to dull the ache, the progress, the healing meant by the mess I pass, the sheeny clumpy liverish ruin that is left of being sufficient, of having been, for a time, sufficient, for a time, I swear it, calm.

A body needs something.

Sister wheezes, pets at me. I stop and wait for it: her odd little sudden chirping cry, her drawn-on cartoon mouth.

And then I hit her. She is the way she is and has always been and how she will always be.

And so I hit her. I had forgotten. You forget how it feels to hit somebody like you used to when you were young.

No moon, dim world, the sky velour. A bird above us, circling. We make our way from the trees.

The reverend streams past, slush flung up. Gone to vespers, gone to God. Perhaps he hears her. Thinks not. It is the hour, the light. The wind in the trees. And yet it comes to him; he must remember it crossing back, going home — to supper, sleep, to his wife, a dream — he must have seen it: the snow in patches, the stain on the snow: the trail she leaves walking back to the house, Sister bleeding into her hands.

“Now, now. There, there.”

We cross the street, the welts of slush. The light in the kitchen is burning. The windows are steamed from the heat of something George has set to cook on the stove. Still we can make him out with the baby. He is sitting in the kitchen with the baby, looking out across the road.

It comes upon me — the old, gone way we used to live, how we lived outside until dark came on, until Mother called, the dogs at our heels, the horses fed, the hay in the rustling barn.

We pass the bed of slackened blooms to pass unseen through the windowlight to watch George sitting inside. I sec Mother at the sink then also, Mother at her labors, at the washing, at the meals — young still, pretty still, laughing. I remember myself in the spindly dark, the lee of the hedge, the sweetened smell of the harrowed rows turned in the fall in the ripened fields. I spun myself out in the clovery dark; I felt myself thin and wobble. I lay on our land like a fog — upon every fence and creek and stone, every leaf and fallow.

I watch our George in the blaze.

“You know I saw you,” he said. “I never meant to. They had you opened. He was spun in his sack and looking at me, blinking, lodged in the saddle of bone.”

The dog whimpers. Sister kicks a pale stone at the barn. A dry hush in the limbs and a nicker.

A pine is down in the street. We see in the gray, in the grainy dark, the seepy luminous tear in the trunk that the head of the tree as it fell has torn — all trunk now, that tree, a hollowing snag, a yellow gash that, as the woods grow dark, tips and floats and burns.

I swing the porch door open.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“No.”

“Not hungry?”

“Uunh.”

Sister moves off, calling the dog out slowly.

It has come to me to introduce tonight’s reader.

My wife asked would I. She said it’s easy, easier for you, you do it easily. She makes it difficult — to stand here, to open her mouth, it’s a struggle, she says. I said, Yes, dear.

Yes hello, dear. Our director. There she is, everybody. Give a wave.

You mostly know me. What I mean to say. I know some of you from class, I see, the ones I’ve been thrown, I see you out there.

I’m not ungrateful. It can’t be easy. For my wife, I mean, not to seem, you know, it’s very delicate — she is partial, she’s not impartial, after all, no sense pretending. Still she has managed to throw me work. It clears my head some — to stand up here and talk to you in a grownup sort of way.

We have, as you know, the two children. The girl, a boy. They are thinking she is going to get better, our girl. Give her time, they say, some months to grow—

Yes, come in, come in. I’m glad you made it, every one of you. Blinking into the snow.

I was talking about our children. The girl, a boy.

I taught our boy to ride his bike. That was nice. He skids out, lays a patch, wants to show me. Shows everybody his scabs. Lookit look: a scab on every joint he can get to. Point of pride.

He says, “Our baby’s name is Noodle and I like to suck her hair.”

And so he does, I let him, no harm in that. He sets his lips around the hole in her headbone, slurps in a satiny frill. I think she likes it.