Broken Wing Read online

  That’s the first thing.

  The second thing is: for the past ten days or so, there has been a crow hanging around here in the dooryard, actually in the yard, and out around the garden, too. He’s got a club foot. His left foot is deformed. The claws, toes, and talons turn in, curl under, just as you’d expect, as you’d imagine. And he limps, as you’d also imagine he would. He has to walk on those knuckles. He seems to be able to fly alright, up to a tree, and perch okay; though he seems, obviously, to have more difficulty than a normal crow would, as he can’t grip a branch with both feet. He has to more or less balance, or lean on, the clubfoot on the branch next to his good foot. Whenever he lands anywhere—on a branch, in a tree, or on the ground—he has to get himself adjusted before he can do anything or proceed anywhere. Everything is more difficult for him—everything. He reminds me of Jimmy Washington, the legless guy on the rolling cart who used to hang around at the corner of Kinsman and 59th. Remember him? And, of course, he reminds me of Broken Wing. I welcome his presence. I’m glad he is here.

  I’ve been putting sunflower seeds and cracked corn out for him, especially. It’s almost as if the ghost of Broken Wing has returned in the form of this crippled, deformed, club-footed crow. I’m fond of him. I hope he stays around. I haven’t seen him for a day or two, though. I hope he’s not gone off somewhere or been killed. I call him Lord Byron. What better name for a crow with a clubfoot?

  With Lord Byron, as with Broken Wing, I’ve got a brother here with me, a deformed, tenacious, gritty, stubborn, obstinate, resolute black brother. May Lord Byron fight; may he resist; may he rebel; may he revolt until the last bitter—or not so bitter—moment of his life!

  I wonder for Lord Byron, as I wondered for Broken Wing, whether he ever gets discouraged, ever wants to give up, give in, just die, because it’s so much easier than to continue struggling. Think how much harder it is for Lord Byron, with that clubfoot, just to walk across the yard, just to get through each day.

  Or maybe, on the other hand, when the struggle is the hardest, maybe that’s when our instincts, or our will to live, or whatever you want to call it, drives us onward ever more strongly.

  Whatever it is, what is certain is that this life is a struggle. Need I tell you? And those who don’t know it, don’t know even half of what it is to be alive.

  Which reminds me of something else. I met a woman I know at the store the other day, and we were visiting, and somehow I got talking about the blues, and she said, “Well, what if you never get the blues?”

  Can you imagine? I was speechless.

  And she was serious, too. I must have had a look of incredulity on my face, because she looked at me and said, “No, really; what if you never do?”

  I just shook my head. I wanted to say something, of course. I wanted to say to her, “If you didn’t get the blues, honey, you’d be dead! You may be walkin’ round, doin’ your job, sweetheart, but you’d be dead.”

  But I didn’t say it. I just smiled and changed the subject, because I figured I was talking to a corpse.

  Sing ’em awhile, brother, make you feel a whole lot better.

  Which is what White Throat and Lord Byron reminded me of. It’s what I’ve been doing lately, and I’m feeling a little better, too.

  And speaking of indigo moods, I’ve had an indigo bunting coming to eat the seed heads off the tall grass that grows just beyond the lawn, right here near the porch, every afternoon for about a week. It’s rare in these parts to see these birds, so I feel especially fortunate. Always late in the afternoon. What a sight they are.

  Your friend,

  He finished the letter, put it in its envelope, sealed it, and then set aside the letter and the writing board. Yes, he was feeling better; a little better, at least.

  The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains rocked and looked out at the summer afternoon, out past his garden and beyond to the mountains to the east, where the ravens lived and croaked and chortled their way through their lives. And he thought about all the other lives, both human and non-human, that come and go, come and go, come and go, here in this tiny little place, this slab of mountainside where he lived; and he smiled to himself, and knew he was a lucky so-and-so to be here and feeling so sad and blue, because he knew it was a sign that he was alive and still in love, with this life, and his life, and this world, and all the creatures therein.

  11. POSTLUDE

  Then, like a bolt out of the blue, the blue of the sky, the blue of the indigo bunting, the blue of the blues, a little explosion went off inside The Man’s brain, and he banged himself on the forehead with his open palm, as he was wont to do. He hadn’t done that in a long time. A broad smile spread across his face, and he said out loud, “Okay. Okay.”

  The Man got up from his rocking chair on the porch, and went into the house and to his desk. He drew out from the desk drawer some more paper—a lot more paper. He grabbed a large handful of pencils and tossed them down on the desk, then sorted through them, chose a small handful he liked, and sharpened them; then took the paper and the pencils back outside to the porch, sat down in his rocker, put his writing board across the arms of the rocking chair again, and put the paper and the pencils on the writing board.

  He stared out at the garden and the mountains beyond, but this time, he was not looking at them. Although it seemed he was looking outward, he was looking deeply inward, into that place inside himself from which the words come, that place his friend William called the Tone World—the source of all words and music. For a long time, The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains stared deeply into the Tone World. He listened closely. Then, again, a smile washed across his face. His pencil met the paper:

  Take the road going north,

  Further and further north.

  Go up through the valley,

  Between the mountain ranges

  Up to where the West Running River

  And the River Road go west….

  12. A FINAL WORD

  At the time of my arrival in this place, I knew nothing about The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains, and discovered nothing about him until my wife and I had built our own house here, and had been living in it for a number of years.

  We came to where we are now forty years ago. When we first came to this place to build our own house among the ancient, pecker-fretted apple trees of this once and former side-hill orchard, I found the trees that The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains had cared for so diligently and carefully lying practically in ruin all around us, all of them choked with water shoots and crossing branches, dead trunks and limbs decaying in place and harboring insects and fungi of various kinds; making, of course, an ideal culture for more disease and decay. The whole orchard was, in short, entangled in the chaos of neglect.

  After clearing land and building our house, I pruned the apple trees as best I could; but not being the orchardist The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains was, I lost many of the ancient trees to my own lack of knowledge of how to care for them; and among the trees I lost, I believe, there were numerous rare varieties of apples bred and developed over generations in this place by The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains and those who came before him here. How many unique species of apples did my own ignorance let slip back into oblivion? Ignorance and neglect may be passive cruelties, but they are cruelties nonetheless.

  When a family, or a solitary individual such as The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains, first arrives in a place, builds a house, and tries to establish a life and puts down roots, there is little time for anything but the barest necessities of food, water, heat and shelter. It was therefore some time before I had even a little, more or less, free time to begin to get interested in the history of this place, and begin also to poke around among the rubble of old buildings lying about here to see what I could find.

  There was—there still is—a cellar hole just below where we built our house which looked to me, since it was small, like the cellar hole of a house. The other clue that made me t
hink this was the original house, and not some barn or outbuilding, was the ancient lilac bush still growing and blooming every May near the cellar. In these parts of the north, a lilac bush is a certain giveaway that this was once a dooryard, and that there will, therefore, be a cellar hole (or what was once a cellar hole) not far away. I surmised that this ancient and spreading lilac bush had been planted by a generation of settlers who’d come here long before the arrival of The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains. And, yes, there was indeed, not more than thirty feet from the lilac bush, a cellar hole, folding in upon itself, “closing like a dent in dough,” as Robert Frost once said, choked with red raspberry bushes and a few half-mature poplar trees.

  As I said, a few years after we had come here and settled into our lives here, one day, I began poking around down in the dingle-like declivity of that cellar hole. It was necessary for me to tear up raspberry bushes and chain-saw out of the way some of the poplar trees in order to get at what was beneath them. With a mattock and a pick, I began, more or less carefully, to paw at the decades of detritus turned back to soil that lay on top of whatever was beneath. I never imagined I’d become an amateur archeologist, but there I was, day after day, working my way down through years of history—toward what, I knew not.

  The walls of the cellar had been laid up with fieldstone, put in place without mortar, but chinked with smaller stones, instead: a certain mark of the extreme age of this place.

  First, I found some shards of charred timbers and some smoky broken glass, saying clearly that the demise of this dwelling came by fire.

  I found also some broken pottery of no particular uniqueness, a kitchen fork, the upper ring of a galvanized pail, a rusted ax head, some equally rusted nuts and bolts, and the business end of a pair of lopping shears, the handles of which had long since rotted away. In other words, except for what was left of the lopping shears, the usual things one would expect to find in a ruin such as this.

  Beneath those layers of the usual, however, as I dug deeper, I came upon, over in a corner of the cellar, in a kind of recess in the cellar wall, a most unusual discovery.

  By removing a few of the fieldstones from the recess in the cellar wall, I was able to reach into a small open area actually outside the confines of the cellar and extract from this opening a strong steel box: not exactly a strongbox, but a strong box nonetheless. I was so excited by this find that I gave up my archeological dig and hurried with the box up the hill to my woodshed/workshop, where I began carefully to chip away at the rust welding the hinges and the lid to the base of the box. With the addition of a little penetrating oil and patience, I was eventually able, slowly and gingerly, to lift the lid.

  In the box, I found a package slightly larger than a ream of paper, say about three inches by 13 inches by 11 inches. The package was coated with wax. I surmised that the steel box and the waxed package within were able to survive the house fire because the box and its contents were actually outside the house and therefore insulated, to some degree, at least, from the intensity of the fire’s heat.

  I peeled away the wax to find the package covered with canvas and tied with a sturdy twine. I undid the twine, which was, in spite of its age, remarkably supple and well-preserved, as was the canvas wrapping. No doubt, the wax seal had preserved these.

  Beneath the canvas and twine, I found yet another package, this one made of a whitish wrapping paper with a hard finish, the kind a butcher or fishmonger would use. This package was sealed, as well, with a strong fabric adhesive tape. I opened that package, also.

  Inside it was an envelope—yet another pack-age—and from it, I withdrew 183 neatly-typed manuscript pages, typed on a high-quality, high-rag-content bond. The first page said only:

  BROKEN WING

  No author’s name appeared on that page, nor on any page of the manuscript.

  As I read the story, I realized that it was the story of a life lived in this very place, the place where I live now.

  The accuracy of the story amazed me. The ravens do, in fact, live in lofty aeries in the mountains to the east, and there really is a boreal bog above our house. The white spruce tree in which Broken Wing died is still there, below the lane near where the garden used to be, and now is again; and although the balsam fir from which White Throat sang is gone, the lilac bush, across the lane from where the balsam was, is still there, also. The details of what The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains had experienced in his place were so much like my own experiences, it seemed they could have actually been mine.

  As I began to realize how this story I had found had taken place where I now live, I also began wondering about the person who wrote the story: this hazy, vague, mystery of a person known only as The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains.

  First, I wondered, why would the so-called Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains go to all the trouble to write this story down and type it up so neatly—all that, only to bury it in his own cellar? And if he were going to bury it, show it to no one, and literally hide it away, why would he go to such lengths to preserve it, to type it on a high-rag-content bond, which the author obviously knew would remain supple and not yellow for a long, long time, and to wrap it and wrap it again and again, and yet again, so thoroughly and carefully, and then put it in a steel box? If he wanted so badly to preserve this telling of his story, why didn’t he publish it? What better way is there to preserve a story than to make many copies of it and pass them around?

  The man himself was, and still is, a mystery to me. Shortly after I discovered this manuscript, I began asking old-timers around here if they had ever heard of this fellow, known only in this story as The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains. No one, not anyone, around here had any memory at all of such a man.

  So I asked about the Bap Brothers, as they seemed to be a local reference outside the story itself. I was hoping the Bap Brothers might provide some locus, perhaps, to anchor the story; not only in this place, but hopefully in a specific time, as well. Again, no one anywhere around here had ever heard of a pair of brothers named Bap living on this part of the mountain. I looked in the phone book—I mean, in the current phone book—and there they were, a listing of about a dozen families with the last name of Bap; yet, no one around here remembers, or claims to remember, anyone by that name. All this seemed to me, at the very least, odd—and perhaps even suspicious.

  And where did The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains come from? Was he from the north or the south? It’s clear he came from a city, but which city? And where in the country was his uncle’s farm?

  What was this man, The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains, like? Where did he get his education? He was widely read, especially in, of all things, poetry. He knew the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, D H. Lawrence, Ikkyu, Hê Ching-chang, Mêng Hao-jan, Byron, and obviously many others he didn’t mention in his story. In addition, and by his own admission, he was an orchardist and an ornithologist, as well. And, at one time, in another life, when he had lived in the city, a jazz musician, too. Who was this complex and interesting man, and why, in God’s name, would he place himself on a remote and lonely mountainside in the middle of nowhere?

  There was, it seemed to me, something of an answer to this last question, at least. At one point in the story, he says, in a letter to his friend Howard:

  What if I did come home? Who would know me? What good would it do? No. This exile is my home now, and it will always be.

  … I had to leave there, I had to leave home. I couldn’t stand it there anymore. When I came here all those years ago, I was just trying to be who I am, and not who somebody else says I am—and that’s what I’m still trying to be.

  Although there is no sure way to prove my surmise, I think this passage and a lot of other things about the story indicate that The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains was African-American.

  Neither I nor any other white person will ever know how difficult it is for an African American in this country to be who he or sh
e takes a notion to be. They are defined on all sides by others. Whites constantly tell them who they are and must be in order to get on in the white world. And their own people also make demands upon, and assumptions about, who they are, how they should act, and what they should be interested in. Imagine how impossibly difficult it must have been for a man such as The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains to be who he wanted to be: a lover of books and poetry, of the wilderness and the mountains, a gardener, orchardist, and amateur ornithologist.

  Put it another way. Now, of course, everyone knows that back in the days when this story took place—whenever that was—when The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains was alive, there were many, many well-educated black people in America, yet because of the bigotry of white America and the insistence on the part of whites to see black Americans as only one kind of person—and hardly a person, at that—the deep scholarship and learning of black Americans was denied and rejected; which, in fact, it then occurred to me, might be the main reason why The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains took to the wilderness in the first place. Was he simply, as he says, just trying to be who I am, and not who somebody else says I am?

  I know there is no means in his story to prove it, but if The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains were an African-American, that could explain the Bap Brothers’ hatred for The Man, and also The Man’s deep identification with Broken Wing—another black soul stranded in a white world.

  There is another haunting and disturbing thing I wonder about, and that is how the fire started—how the house burnt down. I wonder if the story that is beyond, outside, and behind this story is the story of how the Bap Brothers did, in fact, finally—after how many years—wreak their hatred and revenge upon this complicated man who wanted only to be left alone to raise apples, grow a garden, and feed the birds. I wonder if the Bap Brothers were able to do to The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains what Arnold was never able to do to Broken Wing.