Broken Wing Read online

  And I wonder if The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains could see this inevitability coming toward him, like a storm coming over the mountains, and I wonder if that is why he wrote this story, preserved it, and secreted it away in such a clandestine and secure manner.

  If this speculation is accurate, why, then, have all the people in this place erased from their collective memory any knowledge of these events? What kind of careful rewriting of history, what kind of willful forgetfulness is this? Why did they forget? What does that kind of willful forgetfulness say about the people who forgot?

  All of this, of course, is mere speculation that could go on forever, alas, to no avail; but it is an interesting and important speculation nonetheless, for the kinds of issues it raises about the nature of The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains and the people around him.

  There is yet another, even more confusing and distressing little fact about this story that I need to lay out here, as well.

  Although I am, as I said, no orchardist, I am, as The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains also was, a devoted gardener. It was not at all difficult to see where The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains had had his garden. I therefore determined, for the sake of historical continuity—and also because I knew The Man would have built up the soil in that location to a level of richness and fecundity the surrounding soil would not have—to put my garden where his had been.

  The first spring after I discovered and read Broken Wing, as I tilled the garden, I remembered what the story had said about the location of Broken Wing’s grave: I dug a little grave out at a far corner of the garden, so he could be close to all those garden insects he went after so diligently in my dream… I used the stones to make a little stone cairn to cover over the earth-scar, and also to keep off the grave robbers like the skunks. I drove the little sign on its stick into the ground just behind the stone cairn.

  I stopped the tiller and began to search the two “far corners” of the garden for evidence of the grave. I knew better than to look for the stick and the sign, which the winter snows would have broken down and the passing years rotted long ago. But a pile of stones doesn’t rot, and although they do sink back into the earth, that takes a long time. I’ve seen stone piles in the middle of the big woods around here that were once in the middle of a pasture or a field, hand-picked, stone by stone, by the early settlers; stone piles more than a hundred years old. They are covered with lichen and moss, but they are there and evident, nonetheless; and although I didn’t know exactly when the story of Broken Wing took place, I knew full well it wasn’t anywhere near a hundred years ago. Therefore, I was certain that somewhere in the high grass, I would find a little pile of stones—Broken Wing’s stone cairn.

  I did not. Search as I might—and search I did, thoroughly, and again and again—I could find no evidence of any stone pile near the far corners of the garden. I knew that over the years, the frost heaves of winter would have scattered the stones of the cairn; but given all of these allowances, I still could not find even the slightest evidence of what was once a pile of stones. Again, I became suspicious.

  Then, one June morning about six weeks after I’d put the garden in, something happened that not only surprised me, but also raised my suspicions even more.

  I came out of the house early that June morning with my first mug of tea, bundled up against the June morning chill in my rubber barn boots against the heavy dew of the night, and headed out to the garden to look around. As I approached, I saw something scurrying up and down the newly-emerging rows of potato plants. I froze in my tracks. I could hardly believe my eyes. It was a rusty blackbird—no, two of them—moving about, pecking at some kind of bug on the surface of the garden soil. I backed away slowly, hoping not to disturb them, but they were more than aware of my presence, and as I began to move backward, they flew off.

  The next morning, and many mornings that summer, instead of wandering out to the garden as the sun rose, I stayed in the house and watched the garden through my binoculars. On many mornings, I saw sometimes two, sometimes five rusty blackbirds, foraging around in the garden eating insects.

  And since then, on many summer mornings, year after year, after my garden sprouts its crop of summer vegetables and the insects descend upon this new land of edibles, out of the high bog above the house comes a family of rusty blackbirds, who pick through the rows of vegetables, eating potato bugs and cabbage worms, slugs, and whatever other insects that day has to offer. They always seem to come in the early morning, and then again sometime in the middle of the afternoon.

  Great confusion now joined my suspicions. There was no evidence of Broken Wing’s grave, as the story said there should be; and there was, in fact, right out there in my garden right now, a family of rusty blackbirds, foraging for insects exactly as The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains said they did in his dream.

  Confusion mounted on top of confusion.

  In order to confirm or deny what The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains had said about the nature and habits of rusty blackbirds, I did a little research of my own, all of which only confirmed that hunting garden insects is definitely aberrant behavior for rusty blackbirds. They almost never venture very far from standing water, which is why they nest and breed in boreal bogs.

  But here they were, right in front of me, almost every summer day: this odd little subspecies of rusty blackbirds which somehow, over generations, I suppose, has acquired a taste for potato beetles, cabbage worms, slugs, and other common garden pests. How did this happen? How did this subspecies evolve? Was it that their ancestor, one rusty fellow named Broken Wing, led the way for his progeny in acquiring this taste for garden insects?

  Which leads directly to the question: isn’t the presence of these rusty blackbirds every summer in my garden proof that Broken Wing really did not die, but that he lived? That he was not just a character inside a dream that The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains happened to have on a particular midwinter night, but a real bird who left a real inheritance among his offspring—this liking for garden insects?

  This strange and aberrant behavior in this little group of birds had to begin with some certain individual, did it not? It had to begin with a new form of behavior, and why could it not have been Broken Wing himself who began this little bit of odd evolution—because of the kindness of The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains? And since this happens here in this singular place and no place else, as far as I know, does that not prove that all these generations later, the rusty blackbirds in my garden are the direct descendants of a single bird whose name was Broken Wing, the very one in the dream in this story, the dream the author says is not true, but only a dream?

  Here, a stumbling block presented itself to me, if only briefly. What did the successive generations of the descendants of Broken Wing do to maintain their interest in eating garden insects during those many years when there was no garden in this place? How could the genetic memory of something Broken Wing had begun carry over, stay alive, over numerous generations, without being reinforced? The question stumped me for a little while. Then I realized that although most birds like to return to the exact same place every summer to breed, and therefore the descendants of Broken Wing would very likely still be up above the house in the boreal bog, breeding generation after generation, they could very well have foraged further and further afield to find the garden insects they had gotten used to, in order to supplement the diet of insects they found in the bogs of their nesting sites. Thus, in this way, genetic memory could be sustained. And then when my garden had appeared, they—like all animals, and humans, too, for that matter—being creatures of opportunity, they just naturally seized upon the easiest path to what they needed and wanted, and as a matter of opportunity and convenience, returned to the garden closest to home once that garden had “returned” to their neighborhood.

  With that minor conundrum solved, I returned to the deeper and more disturbing questions about this whole matter.

  Al
l the evidence seemed to be saying that a particular rusty blackbird named Broken Wing did exist—and did not die in a terrible winter storm, but lived on for a number of years and created a whole little subspecies of rusty blackbirds who added garden insects to their diet. They did all this, it seems, because of Broken Wing; and Broken Wing did it out of some kind of expression of interspecies trust between a rusty blackbird and a human being who called himself The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains.

  All of this leads to a question: if what The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains wrote as fiction, as a dream, was actually a true story, if there actually was a rusty blackbird who did not die in that terrible winter storm, but survived as he did in the so-called dream—then why would The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains say it wasn’t true, when in fact, it was?

  Was The Man trying to hide something, or protect something or someone? Why did he lie? What and where are the answers to these questions?

  Gradually, it seemed to me that going down the road of trying to find out why The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains had lied about the truth of the story was the wrong path to take. I began to wonder instead about the passage just after The Man wakes from his dream:

  Now, The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains realized that the time from when he had gone to bed last night, through the spring and summer—the summer life of Broken Wing and his family—through the following fall, through the next winter and spring, and into the next summer, to the moment when that rusty blackbird had landed on the porch railing that August afternoon eighteen months from the time he’d gone to sleep—all of it, all of it all had been a dream.

  How could it be a dream? It seemed so real! Had he not seen Broken Wing and his family hunting insects in the garden? Had he not seen Broken Wing perched on the top of his hoe handle? Had not Broken Wing come that summer afternoon and landed on the porch railing—stopped by for a little visit? Had not he seen spring, summer, and fall all come and go? And winter and the next spring, also? Had he not just seen that rusty blackbird on that August afternoon land on the porch railing and stare at him? How could all that be only a dream?

  Yet outside the window right now, it was obviously not August. It was the morning after a terrible late-winter storm. Yes, that terrible storm. Yes, look, just look outside, all of it had to be only a dream. Yet, The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains wondered to himself, how could he know that this, too, this moment right now, wasn’t also just a dream? When are we awake? When are we dreaming? How can we tell one from the other? His dream had seemed at least as real as his waking! How can we tell one from the other? Right now: am I awake, or am I dreaming?

  These questions seemed to me now to be the crux of the matter.

  More and more, I began to see The Man’s story as a kind of riddle, a koan, deliberately laid out in such a way as to not be unknotted by just anyone. What is dream, and what is not? How do we sort truth from fiction, dream from waking? Is it necessary that we do so?

  What if there is something—a land, say, a place beyond the conundrum, the mystery, to which we can go only when we accept the mystery and its confusions for what they are, and do not try to solve them? Perhaps, in that acceptance, we can gain a passport, so to speak, to that place beyond, that place The Man’s friend William calls the Tone World… which, I believe, is where all stories come from.

  And perhaps once we are able, through this acceptance, to go there, and once we have the skills to retrieve the story, once we are able to carry the story from the Tone World over to here, once we are able to do all that; perhaps then, the dualities of truth and fiction, of waking and dreaming, no longer matter, since now the story is here with us and part of us.

  This line of reasoning, if you want to call it reasoning, led me to wondering about myself. If it weren’t for the way I discovered this manuscript, if I hadn’t actually found it in that box in the cellar, I could imagine that I had written this story. Put it another way: what if the story The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains wrote—the one called Broken Wing—what if that was a dream of mine?

  If this whole story were my dream; if I dreamed there was a person like The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains, and he wrote a story about a bird with a broken wing, and in that story, The Man had a long dream in which the bird died—but in fact, he didn’t die, because it was only in his dream, which was inside my dream—then that would explain why there were rusty blackbirds still in my garden, and it would also explain why the neighbors around here had never heard of The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains or the Bap Brothers. The neighbors around here hadn’t heard of any of that because it was all in my dream.

  And if Broken Wing is my dream, then it is also true that the story I have just told you about how I discovered the manuscript in the wall of that deserted cellar is a dream, as well. In other words, I dreamed I found a manuscript in a cellar wall called Broken Wing, and within the dream of how Broken Wing died was another dream, of how he lived—a dream of a dream in which there is a dream.

  So, perhaps, here at the end, it may be, in fact, that I, after all, did write this story… although it surely doesn’t seem that way to me.

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to acknowledge and thank William Parker, for granting me permission to use his phrase and the idea of “the Tone World.” I also want to thank Lois Eby, Howard Nelson, Linda Ramsdell, Katherine Williams, Andrew Campbell, and two of his students in Louisville, Kentucky, for reading and critiquing early versions of this story. Their help, criticism and encouragement were invaluable to me.

  Poems by Hê Ching-chang and Mêng Haojan appear in The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology: Being Three Hundred Poems of the T’ang Dynasty, 618-906, translated by Witter Bynner from the texts of Kiang Kang-Hu (Alfred A. Knopf, 1929).

  “Home,” the unascribed poem on page 74, is from David Budbill’s Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse (Copper Canyon Press, 1999).

  Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy” appears in The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1913).

  Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Snow-Storm” appears in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957).

  D. H. Lawrence’s “Self-Pity” appears in The Complete Poems, Collected and Edited with Introduction and Notes by Vivian De Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts (Penguin Books, 1977).

  “I Found my Sparrow Sonrin” appears in Crow with No Mouth, Ikkyu, Fifteenth-Century Zen Master, Versions by Stephen Berg (Copper Canyon Press, 1989, 2000).

  The Haiku by Richard Wright is in Haiku: This Other World (Anchor Books, A Division of Penguin Random House, Inc., 1998).

  Certain phrases, sentences, and sections in this book, most often in altered forms, occur also in two of my other books, Judevine: The Complete Poems (Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1991, 1999) and Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse (Copper Canyon Press, 1999).

  I want also to acknowledge the pervasive influence on me—and on all other modern writers, for that matter, whether they know it or not—of the American writer Jean Toomer and his seminal work, Cane, in which Toomer introduces all of us to a mixing of literary genres and styles that opened the door to the freedom to blend poetry with prose in a novel, and to combine all manner of literary forms in any way we see fit in order to get to where we want to go. Acknowledgment of the influence and importance of Jean Toomer and Cane to all modern writers is woefully understated, especially among us white writers.