Noy Holland - The Spectacle of the Body

It was a redbird. I saw that it was a redbird. It was common.

I pushed the window open enough to lean out past the windowsill to be heard above the chuck of the ax. I saw he had not eaten. I saw the plate I had brought to him gathering wood chips still. Orbit’s shirt hung down from the waist of his jeans for a rag to keep to wipe his hands and the shadow had lifted off his back and gone off into the leaves of the tree and I leaned out.

“Hold out your hands for me,” I said. “Let me see your hands.”

I saw his shirt was stained and wadded. He kept his back to me. He went on with the ax.

I said, “Stop it. You’ve got to stop it.”

I said, “You ought to come inside.”

But I could not stop him. Even when the tree was down, even with the filly down, dragged away from the pin oak tree, I tried to tell my brother that our Bingo would not come.

But I could not stop him.

I could not stop any of it.

I knew she would not come.

Oh, to be a junkyard dog and run the woods with Daddy!

Gander knocks his beak on our door at night. I keep my vole in my pocket.

I say, “Lookit, Cissie.”

I take my hammer.

It is Daddy’s hammer.

It is my vole I found. It is in my pocket.

“Lookit, Cissie.”

I put my vole on the porch step.

She says, “Stop it, Orbit.”

But I do not stop it. I do not stop it. I go on hitting. I hit it on his head.

I was peeling potatoes.

In the sink, the mounding strips of skin gave off the smell of turned earth. Everything had stopped growing. The fireflies lay in the field.

I saw Orbit walking between them in his sock feet in the field.

He was walking to reach the place in the fence he had mended before he left for the fair — he had forgotten. I could see that he had forgotten. His hands were empty. I saw that his cap was frayed.

I peeled all we had of potatoes.

I didn’t suppose Orbit had eaten much in however many days it had been, and it had been a ways, I knew. It had taken my brother some walking, I knew, to get back home from the fair.

I boiled the potatoes and poured off the water and added what we had of milk. We had a good dollop of butter. I let it melt some. I used two colors of pepper. I salted the potatoes in a metal pot and mashed them together with the tines of a fork and spooned them into a casserole.

Orbit was burying tadpoles. I was sorry about the tadpoles.

I listened outside the door of the room when he went in to talk to Mother. He told her about the tadpoles, about Clem he had seen and the girl at the fair, about how he thought he’d seen Daddy.

He didn’t say a thing about Bingo.

He fixed the fence back. I mean that he pulled it apart again so that Bingo could get back through.

He got the ax out.

It was almost dark when he started. He kept at it, working into the next day and on into the next dark. I carried a big plateful of potatoes to him and set the plate down in the path in the yard beneath the crooked limb of the tree Mother used to read in.

She read limericks. She wore knee-highs.

I closed her mouth some. A tooth had abscessed. The side of her face had swelled.

The rope I used was rotty and thick and there was the hanging weight of it, I said the waiting hang of it. When I went out on the limb of the tree I could see our momma’s bedroom from, I saw that the knife blade bent and caught with never so little a nick in the rope I had lobbed across the limb of the tree I had climbed the tree to saw through.

So Momma said to me, “Orbit, so why don’t you cut it down?”

So I cut the damn thing down.

I found the ax our daddy used, which I had seen him do it.

After the tree was well and down, it was easy with even a flimsy knife to cut down past the hide of her into the long neck of her, the blade going quick along and smooth behind the soft muzzle even Bingo had fought to get at, that I had seen her jumping with the other dogs to get at. The muzzle was torn from them and hard-blooded and soft-haired still to want to kiss, but I did not stop to kiss it. It was near to yard dark and soon to watch the darkened woods, I would see the dogs.

So I went quick.

I had not thought to think it yet that she said my name: Orbit.

So, Orbit, so why don’t you go ahead and cut the damn thing down?

But I had not thought, Orbit.

I was thinking of the filly still and the knife blade pulling deep in her and the dark shapes of the dogs I saw bunched up in the field. The light from Momma’s window fell bright before the field. It was all the light I worked by. I worked to get the hide free the way once Daddy showed me. First you put her head back. I had put her head back. At first the knife went smooth. It was how he had showed me. At first the knife went smooth the way he had showed me down the front of her, smooth all down the neck of her. It was just a knife I had sneaked out from the kitchen with and then the light to work by, down by night from Momma’s room.

I heard her name me in her room.

It was just the one time. I only heard her one time.

At first the knife went smooth.

We passed the barn; the slough was dry; the lake was left by a river. The lake was dropping. Where the skiff had scraped on the bank of the lake, the paint was flecked and silver.

I did not know why we had come there. I remember the snakes were blind. The skins my brother had found in the woods the snakes by then had begun to shed, and a turtle — Vernon, I remember — and chicken necks, and the rhinestone shoe he had found of Mother’s that had not been chewed or planted; he brought tadpoles, I remember, a poke of frogs — a damp stash he had gigged in the trees — a flat stone, a kitchen knife, a lamplight, though the sun was high, though the moon would rise behind us.

Our house lay bright behind us. We paddled out with our hands. He threw a frog, a chicken neck. He threw an old bone from the garden.

We waited.

I didn’t know what we were waiting for.

We were quiet.

I did not know why we were quiet.

The lake slapped at our skiff underneath us. I started to sing. Of the cranes in the trees I sang of, and of the pelicans I sang of, no cry came.

I sang, Oh, what a bird is the pelican! His beak can hold more than his belly can!

But Orbit didn’t want me to sing. We were waiting for the moon, I thought, for the sun to fluke in the sea, I thought. I thought he would tip us over. He threw great wads of tadpoles out and the rhinestone shoe of our mother’s out and our Vernon gone scudding out in a slapping rain of frogs.

There was something he was trying to show me. He kept stepping up into the thwarts of the skiff to look for it to show me. But whatever it was was not out there, or he could not see it out there, and Orbit started to scream at me that I wasn’t really trying, I wasn’t really looking, but he never did say what to look for, see; I never really knew what it was he had brought me out in the skiff on the lake he had wanted so much to show me.

That was August. It must have been August.

Because I remember Orbit saying to me that the snakes were blind. I know that it is dog days, that dog days are August, that these are the days the skins lift away and the snakes themselves go blind.

Some days the crows are blue is the sun is yellow. The lean-to is blue all days. The weeds are going yellow. Tomorrow if the leaves are green, the next day the leaves are red if they are not yellow.

The girl’s hair was blue, then yellow. I did not want to touch her hair.

The redbird was a redbird before I touched the redbird. After, its neck was broken.

I chopped the pin oak down.

I should not have done it.

A tadpole’s legs are dark inside, as small inside the skin to cut as when a fly is yellow. I did not want to see the flies. First a fly is yellow. Then are yet the legs to grow, the thin wings and the eyes to grow, though first by night by Momma’s room I chopped the pin oak down. I know our momma saw me chop the pin oak down.