Noy Holland - Bird

“She’ll do that,” Tuk said, waking now. “It’s peculiar. When I found her in Waxahatchie asleep on the floor of the station, she was balled up and sucking her thumb. She sucks her thumb yet. She will in a minute. She might say something in Sioux.”

The three of them watched Doll Doll sleep, her face shown in full to the moon.

“She’s pretty,” Tuk said. “She’s just a kid, really. I got to care for her. I don’t quite know as I can. I cannot read nor write, this is true. I fought fires for a time but I quit that. I got burned over twice and stopped — in these mountains here once and on the prairie. I laid down where a homesteader proved up, in a ditch he had dug with a shovel when there were bison all over this country yet, before the railroad and Little Big Horn, when Custer cut his hair and they killed him. I can’t do that anymore. I’m past it. You got to be quick and young.”

Tuk held his hands open to the moonlight like a map he could not decipher. He dropped them to his lap and went on.

“I fought a grass fire in old Montana once. Hope not to see such a thing again. You don’t know what lives in the short grass until you set fire to it. It’s creepy with snakes and beetles, your birds that nest up on the ground. Killdeer, curlew, partridge. Fox denned up and badger, coyotes and pronghorn fawns. You can’t see it when you’re just moving through. Everybody wants to move through. Boy wants to fight fire so he starts one in a gully thinking he won’t get caught. Dumb. Fire moves. You can’t contain it. You got a whirlybird and a bucket and it’s like spitting into a storm. Pretty soon the blaze jumps out on the prairie.

“You don’t want to live to see prairie fire, friends, in a big wind, on the move. Shit, the wind. I grew up in wind. It gets in you.

“This little girl got in me, it took a heartbeat. I am not a free man. I gave it up to her, I cannot help that, in the Waxahatchie station. I didn’t have to go in there. I can’t remember why I did. I don’t question it. Things have a way of working — for the better, for the worse, you can’t say. I can say I never will shake her. There’s no helping what takes hold. She was burned. Her whole back’s burned up, that arm how you see. It seems peculiar but I tell you it isn’t. I carried her home. Of course I did. She was burned up. If she hadn’t of been burned up, I’d of left her right where she was.

“The wind changes. What was at your back is coming at you again. You can’t say. You can’t say where misfortune is going, my friends. You seem to suffer. Could be the best thing that ever did happen, whatever happened to you. You get scared. You can’t think but you still have to choose. You dig in. You are out there with the hoppers and the antelope, friends, and the antelope can run. You’re just pokey. You talk to Jesus. You talk to whoever you can. God above. Your dead mama. The wind sounds like a jet coming at you, neverlanding. Purgatory plain and true. Every hopper alive is burning. The horse patties are burning. The wind picks them up and sails them off and wherever all it drops them, fire starts up there too. Fire everywhere and the flames knocked flat like the land is a sea set to burning. Knocks it all down, the wind. You lean into it. You crawl. You talk to that old homesteader who hacked out his ditches with a shovel. Proved up.

“ What are you proving now, brother? What can you stand to believe in, brother, with flames licking inside your ears?

“I lay down in that ditch and got little. Prayed to God, prayed to Mama. You two shuffle me out of this and I will never come back again. I am good to my word. I am honest. I felt the weight of God’s hand on my back where I lay and it was a blazing hell.”

Tuk seemed to wear out and slump away and stoke himself up again. He reached across Bird and twiddled the last stones on Doll Doll’s candy necklace.

“I tried living someplace else,” he said. “Bluegrass country, horse country, it was pretty for a time. Was a boy there I made friends with. I worked with his pop breaking rough stock, colts fresh in off the meadows. Good people. I fairly liked it. The days were hazy. It’s wet country. The dew soaks your britches to the knees every night and come again come day.

“A day came there was a blaze set to burning in the barn — some thug from a rival farm. It’s a fact: there is nothing a human won’t do. I got my lead rope. You can’t handle but one head at a time. It is no choice you want to make but you choose. There was a colt they were buffing for the Derby in the blaze but I went for the mare I liked. I liked her for she was gentle. She had a clear kind eye. I tied my shirt across her eyes and led her out. She was a boy’s. That boy when he saw the barn go up came hellbent down the road. I brought his mare out to him. I wisht I’d quit there. I wisht I’d thought to tell him — a horse will run back to it. Of a fright. I turned away back to the barn to see could I get another one out. I maybe could of. I wisht I hadn’t. I never can see much ahead of myself to think into what will be.

“That boy was small and he could not hold her. The mare pulled back and broke free. Here she came. She cut hard around me. It’s the nature of things, it’s her nature. She runs back. Nothing tells her better than to run like hell to exactly what she knows. Run to home. Run to the rest of them burning.”

“That poor boy,” Bird said, and laid her hand on Tuk’s arm.

“That boy tried to run in after. I am fast enough I caught him and when I caught him, he kicked and scratched at me and beat me on my head. Just a kid. I held onto him. He was hateful, he never could help it. He just hated me, how he had to. He swore he always would.”

Tuk pushed his hat down against his forehead. He looked crumpled, thrown against the seat. He let a pup gnaw at his knuckles. Wolfie tore a hole in his shirtsleeve and two tiny teeth popped out. These Tuk snapped into a pocket of his shirt to give to Doll Doll when she waked.

“At times I think of that boy. He’d be a man now. I’d like to write him but I never did learn. That mare spoke to him. I’d say I saw that. He had to hate me, I’d say, there’s no shame in it. That mare was yours, boy. You took and kept her. You were a good boy. I never could.”

“Well it’s astory,” Suzie says. “Nothing wrong with it. It’s something to pass the time.”

Kill the time, Bird thinks. That’s what she’s saying.

“Mama,” her boy says, “Mama, I wish I could buy you a time machine, Mama. Then when you get really old, we can go back to when we were babies. Or we can go back just to now.”

“What’s the best thing of your day?” Bird asked him, asks him nightly, before she gets up and shuts the door.

He breathed into her face and whispered, “Being right here.”

“You wish,” Suzie says.

“Don’t be cranky.”

“How old would she be,” Suzie wonders, “the girl you and Mickey didn’t have?”

“I haven’t done the math,” Bird lies.

“You have too.”

Fourteen. Feather of a hawk. Her mother’s scarf wound into her hair.

“Have you?”

“Done what?”

“Done the math, Suzie Q.”

“On your dead baby, or mine?”

Suzie says, “Whenthe black widow female is ready to mate, she vibrates her web. The male advances. He winds her in silk. The positions they take are extravagant. Great contortions. Only rarely does he get away. Commonly she devours him, a widow by choice and practice. That’s me. I sink my teeth in slowly and suck them entirely dry.”

“I think you flatter yourself,” Bird says.

“He hasn’t come back.”

“Your poet.”

“Him.”