Broken Wing Read online

  I’m grateful especially to the few cuckoos who nest and breed around here, because cuckoos eat enormous amounts of insects. They especially like caterpillars of any kind, so in the years when a tent caterpillar infestation threatens my orchard, the cuckoos are especially welcome and useful. Often, in those years, I’ve thought, surely, this summer, I’ll get a look at one, since they spend so much time in the apple trees foraging for caterpillars; but I’ve never seen one, never in all these years—never, that is, until last summer.

  The constant, unseen presence of the black-billed cuckoo makes me think of all the other things that are all around us all the time that we never see. And of course, I admire the secretive, reclusive, retiring and shy manner with which the cuckoo goes about her life. Actually, when you think about it, the cuckoo is shy and retiring the way a rusty blackbird is. And somebody else I know, too.

  She was such a beautiful bird, and much bigger than I thought she’d be. I think it was a female. I knew it was an adult, because the eye ring was quite red. Their tails are long and wonderfully constructed. Their tails are made of a series of pairs of feathers, each pair a little longer than the previous pair, and laid on top of the previous pair. Five or six pairs—each gradually longer than the pair beneath.

  I picked up the dead cuckoo and put her on the compost heap out by the garden. Might as well get some good out of her.

  While I’m burdening you with stories of useless and stupid bird deaths, I want to tell you about the influx of white-winged crossbills we had this winter. There’s an allegory in this story, too.

  The last couple of winters here, we’ve had high numbers of white-winged crossbills. This is a boreal bird if there ever was one. It lives almost exclusively on spruce cone seeds, and thus must go wherever they are in abundance. They’ll eat tamarack and hemlock seeds, too—those being boreal trees, also. And, get this: if the spruce cone crop is especially large, they will even nest, lay eggs, hatch and raise young right in the middle of the winter. Food supply, my man—food supply is everything! Those of us who know about what people call the “inner city” know about that. Well, not everything. If food supply were everything, I wouldn’t be so lonely.

  This winter, even more than last, we’ve had large crops of spruce cones on both the red and white spruce trees around here. From a distance, the tops of the spruce trees look like they are dying; but it’s just the red-brown of huge cone clusters covering the branches, and because of that bumper crop of spruce cones and the seeds inside them, crossbills seem to be everywhere, which becomes a serious problem when you’re in a car going down the road.

  Crossbills are birds of the far north, of wilderness places, and because they are such wild birds, they are tame, unused to people and cars; and therefore, they don’t know to get out of the way when they are in the road looking for gravel and salt. For some reason, crossbills love salt.

  This winter, one day I was coming back up the road from the valley and the village, and I saw what seemed like two little knots of dirty ice, or maybe small rocks in the road. Then, as I was upon those dark spots, I realized they were white-winged crossbills foraging in the gravel for what little bits of salty ice might have fallen off of cars. It wasn’t until I was practically on top of them that they began to rise up and try to fly away. One of them made it; the other hit the grill of the car and came up over the hood, a disheveled ball of feathers, floating up over the windshield and the roof of the car. I pulled to the side of the road and stopped, got out, and went back to where the mortally wounded crossbill was now lying in the road. I picked him up. His heart was beating fast, his chest heaving up and down just as fast. It seemed to me as if he were actually panting. His eyes were open. I thought about wringing his neck to put him out of his misery. It would have been the kind thing to do, and I’ve done it many times to mortally wounded pheasants and quail, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it—even though I knew, or thought I knew, that I should. I smoothed off a little place for him on top of the snowbank along the side of the road, and laid him down. His eyes were still open, and he was still breathing, panting, very fast. I stayed with him. After a while, the breathing and panting slowed down a little, and then stopped.

  What is death, Howard? There he was one moment, a white-winged crossbill in the middle of the road picking up some salt, and all of a sudden, he’s flying through the air, not with his wings, but as a wrecked ball of feathers floating up and over a car, then landing with a little soft thud on the snowy road. A creature comes along, picks him up, and places him on a snowbank, which is where his life ends.

  What is death? How can he be that gorgeous little collection of feathers and flesh one moment, and an inert bit of matter the next? How can that be? What is it that made him alive? Surely, it is more than blood, a beating heart, muscle and instinct.

  It’s not the body. That body, inert now on the grimy snowbank, will sink into the earth there beside the road and rot, go back into and to earth, go back to where it came from. The body never dies, it just changes its form, from a beautiful collection of feathers and flesh to soil. That’s not death; that’s just transformation.

  So, then, what is it that dies? His spirit, that one particular white-winged crossbill’s spirit? Is that what dies? Or does it just leave that body there on the grimy snowbank, and fly away somewhere and enter some other white-winged crossbill’s body, one in an egg about to be born? Or does it fly away and enter me, become part of me?

  When death is, what dies? What is life? What is death that in a moment, there is no life where life was?

  All this brooding on the death of birds didn’t begin with today’s gloomy weather. It began yesterday, in all that beautiful weather, and because of what happened to me out in the woods.

  After I buried Broken Wing and had the ceremony, I went for a walk in the woods. This is an especially good time of the year to walk in the woods around here. The first few rounds of wildflowers are in bloom, but none of the understory has sprung up yet to crowd the forest floor, so the shape of the land is clearly visible, the way the ledge rock rises and falls and contours the earth; it’s all there to see. And the trees are only just beginning to leaf out, so the sky is still there in abundance above the still, almost naked branches. Only the slightest hint of delicate green, that first and pale green of the leaves as they begin to unfurl, makes the beginning of a smoky-green haze in the branches of the hardwood trees.

  And also, and especially, it is a good time to walk in the woods because the bugs aren’t out yet. No no-seeums, no blackflies, no mosquitoes, no deerflies. It’s bugless and wonderful out there for those few scant weeks, when the snow is mostly gone and the bugs haven’t hatched yet.

  Well, such a day it was yesterday, which is why I decided to take a walk in the woods after I buried Broken Wing. I thought it would be good for me, a balm for my soul, something, perhaps, to make the wounded whole.

  I worked my way through the ravine out behind the garden, past the waterfall, past the big yellow birch where the red-tailed hawk nests most years. I was a few hundred yards out beyond that when I came to an old, hollow-cored beech tree I know well, a den tree for many over the years.

  And there, at the base of that tree, in a hollow place in the trunk, the entrance to the inner empty core, where the roots go in, there—a raccoon, her chin resting softly on her crossed paws, her eyes wide open, looking straight ahead. Dead.

  And somewhere else, unseen to me but not far from there, last year’s fawn, having endured this whole and harsh winter, that last and final storm, having endured all that—she, just a couple of weeks ago, sought out a southern slope and lay her starved body down and died in the warming sun.

  In spring, the earth is pimpled with the dead: dead raccoon, dead yearling deer, ruined woodcock eggs, Broken Wing’s body rotting back into earth, another black-billed cuckoo somewhere beneath a window, the white-winged crossbill and all those other car-killed birds, rotting now beside the grimy, gravel-strewn road. All fertilize
r now. Done. Gone.

  In spring, when the earth is soft again and new;

  in spring, when Earth says to Sun: Come, seed. In spring, those corpses are her seething body’s rotting, phosphorescent jewels.

  All gone. All done. No matter. Make more now,

  make more of everything, with earth and rain and sun.

  No stopping spring. No matter how much death there is—no stopping spring. Not now. Not ever.

  What is death, Howard? What is life?

  How can the one rise so joyfully and new out of the decaying body of the other?

  Your friend,

  10. THE SUMMER OF MOURNING

  No matter how glum and brooding The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains was that spring, spring did what it always does: it burst in upon the stiff, winter world of ice and death, and turned everything flexible and green, and did it with an extravagance and burgeoning excess only spring knows how to muster.

  The The Man tried to join this springtime parade of life, but it was difficult. Everywhere he went, he thought he saw Broken Wing flitting into the dark trees. Every thought he had seemed always to be interrupted by a thought of Broken Wing.

  His vegetable garden, to which he devoted more love and attention than he had his apple trees, and almost as much love and attention as he lavished on the birds, seemed this summer to offer little help or distraction from his grief. In the past, his summer garden had always been such a pleasure for him. All those summertime vegetables, and the process of raising them: The Man had hoped the garden would be not only a pleasure, but a solace; but this year, it had turned out to be neither.

  Rather, this summer, every time he saw a bug on a stalk of broccoli or a tomato plant or on his fence of peas, he saw Broken Wing chasing after it. And then he didn’t see him.

  Every morning, with his cup of tea in hand, when the Man went to the garden to look around, Broken Wing wasn’t there; nor did he land on the hoe handle as The Man rested from his weeding and cultivating; nor on the railing of the porch as The Man ate his lunch. And when The Man walked up the hill above the house and along the logging road that runs beside the bog, Broken Wing wasn’t there, either.

  That June, in the garden, as he thought about Broken Wing and his midwinter night’s dream, as time passed, his grief for the bird did not lessen, but instead grew stronger.

  The more The Man actually lived through the events that had also been a part of his midwinter night’s dream, the harder it became to endure them without the presence of Broken Wing. It was as if Broken Wing were a ghost at all the events he should have been present for in his living self. It was as if Broken Wing were a ghost in this entire summer of no Broken Wing; as if he should be living out the life he had had in the dream.

  Then, late in June, two gifts of a sort—visitations, you might call them, from the avian world—began to help The Man adjust to the absence of his dead friend. And these gifts, these visitations, helped The Man feel encouraged, alive, even if only slightly, for the first time in a long time. He sat down one afternoon in his rocker on the porch, put his writing board across the arms of the rocking chair, and began a letter.

  Dear Howard,

  I’ve been meaning to write to you, but as you know, I’ve been in a funk since spring. But a couple of things have happened lately that have helped me rise up, even if just a little, out of my indigo mood.

  I’ve been meaning to write to you for weeks to tell you about my white-throated sparrow friend with whom I’ve been playing duets every morning.

  It all started early in June. There’s a large balsam fir about halfway down the lane to the road. A few weeks ago, early one morning as I was headed to the road, I heard that distinctive call of the male white-throated sparrow. So I called back—I mean, I whistled back. I mean, I tried to. His call is so clear and pure and high that I had great trouble getting into his range and key. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Let me get behind myself.

  Before I go on, I want to tell you about a little poem I read not long ago, a haiku by Richard Wright. Yes, that’s right, Richard Wright; the author of Native Son, Black Boy, The Outsider, Black Power and a collection of speeches almost no one’s heard of called White Man, Listen! Here it is:

  Leaving its nest

  The sparrow sinks a second, Then opens its wings.

  That’s exactly right!

  That’s what happens. Details. Details are so important!

  Back to where I was.

  That first day, the first day when I heard him calling his call from high up in that balsam fir and I called back to him, much to my surprise and delight, he came barreling out of the branches of the tree and across the lane and into the old lilac bush on the other side, where he landed and called again. I called again, too, and he flew back to the balsam and called again. So I called again, also, and he again, as well. This time, he headed for the lilac again but stopped short of it, wheeled around, and came straight at me. I was standing in the middle of the lane. He flew around me several times, trying to figure out what kind of odd-looking and monstrous white-throated sparrow I was, and then back he went to his singing perch in the balsam fir.

  Clearly, he was plenty irritated with me for my intrusion into what he considered his territory, and he’d come out to challenge me. Understanding this, I hollered, “Hey! I’ve been here 30 years! You just moved in last week!” Such logic meant little to him, and he came at me again, going back and forth from tree to lilac to tree as I began again walking down the lane to the road. I think he took my movement away from him as a sign of my retreat and his victory in this territorial battle, and I was not about to disabuse him of that notion. That was the extent of our encounter on that first day.

  The next day and the next, and any day it wasn’t raining, I’d go down on the lane and call to him—and he’d not only answer, but come out to challenge me. Slowly, I do believe, he got used to me, and I to him, and he quit acting so territorial. He grew tolerant and patient with me, and with my inability to pitch my song into his range. Sometimes, I could almost get into his octave, but never quite. The best I think I ever did was almost getting there, perhaps a third, sometimes a fifth, below him; yet even though I was singing harmony, he’d respond, and on those days, when I had to call in unison but a whole octave below, he’d still sing with me. I was grateful for what I saw as his graciousness and magnanimity, his patience, with my inabilities. Therefore, I was always careful, or as careful as I could be, to whistle his song with the proper intervals, even if I wasn’t in the proper key. It seemed to me he didn’t mind so much if I sang in F# while he sang in B, just so long as I got the intervals right. After all, change the intervals of a white-throat’s song just slightly, and suddenly, you’re a chickadee!

  We came, I believe, to enjoy our morning duets. And I noticed, over the days we played together, that he often changed pitch and key. He had more than one way to sing his song. I wouldn’t say we were exactly improvising together, but we also didn’t do the same tune every time, either. It was music, Howard, that the two of us made there each morning together, and it pleased me. And, as I said, my guess is he didn’t mind it too much, either.

  And also this. The two of us there together every morning were the absolute-and-original-never-more-basic call and response. You know, it’s odd. People think our music is urban, something generated in big cities; but everything about it began in the country, whether it was in Africa or here in our own South. Call and response is probably the most obvious example of it all, and obviously our musical ancestors learned this way of playing from listening to the birds.

  In a way, Howard, even though it seems I am about as far away from our music and our people as I could possibly get, what I’ve really done, I believe, is go back to the source, to the beginning of our music. Maybe that’s another thing that keeps me here.

  White Throat is gone now, and I wonder why. I wonder—no doubt because of the gloomy pallor hanging over me this spring—if he died, or w
as killed by the damn red squirrels that attack everything around here. Or maybe it was just that he and his mate, as soon as the chicks fledged, got out of here to be away from that lousy amateur musician in the neighborhood who was always trying to sit in, and then when he did get a chance to blow, played clams all the time. I’ll never know why he left. All I know is he’s not there anymore, and the silence isn’t as pleasing as his song.

  I miss him. Every morning as we sang, he’d display himself to me. His clear, brilliant white throat, and the bright yellow spot beside his eye, shown in the morning sunlight. He was a handsome little fellow. His kind has always meant spring to me. Winter is interminably long here. Yet when spring does come, and the robins and crows, the great migration of warblers, and all manner of other birds return, it doesn’t really seem like spring until I hear the white-throated sparrows sing. When I hear that little song, then I know for sure spring has really come. I always think what they are saying with their song is

  The sun! The sun! I bring the sun

  In the bright spot beside my eye.

  Come out! Come out of your house!

  The sun has come!

  Well, what that little white-throated sparrow didn’t know was that his willingness to sing duets with me was the beginning of my return to the land of the living.

  Howard, truly:

  There is a balm in Gilead

  To heal the wounded soul.

  There is a balm in Gilead

  To make the wounded whole.

  And that balm—need I tell you?—is music.

  I hope White Throat will return next year, and if not him, then perhaps his son or daughter, so that next June, I will have someone with whom to sing.