In the Land of Birdfishes Read online

  When we left the house, my mother stood at the door, leaning against the frame. I waved to her from the truck, but she did not wave back. I realized she wasn’t looking at us.

  Aileen and I sat in the front row, as we always did, and the women from the choir smiled down at us as they always did. Aileen fussed beside me, scratching her knee and fiddling with her hair, while I tried to sit without moving even my toes in my shoes, which were too tight.

  Da was reading about Jesus our saviour, and said that when people looked at him they saw a man of poverty and filth, when it was God himself who stood before them. Their eyes looked upon God but they did not see him. “He was despised and forsaken of men, A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; And like one from whom men hide their face He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Surely our griefs He Himself bore, And our sorrows He carried.”

  When he was finished, the choir sang in round, full voices that made me less sure of what I had seen on the beach. Beside me, the heels of Aileen’s Sunday shoes clattered against the bottom of the pew. Though she didn’t know what had happened to Mother’s shadow, I was comforted by her fearlessness, her oblivion. And I decided not to think any more about it.

  We rode the pickup truck home, Aileen in the middle and me against the window with the air rushing through and unravelling my braids. Da turned the radio on and smiled at us, his hands tapping out rhythms against the wheel.

  There was something in the back of the truck. I think of it now and can’t remember if it was paper or books or tanks of gasoline. But Da stayed behind us, unloading something. Whatever it was, I wonder sometimes what might have happened if the truck had been empty and Da had walked ahead, leading us into our house. But he stayed behind in some labour or another and Aileen and I ran up the hill, Da calling behind us that we’d better not slip in our Sunday dresses.

  Aileen opened the door first.

  I was second.

  She was not a tall woman. Somewhere scattered among the things I did not see in the room—the lamp on the table, the kettle on the stove, the books on the shelf, the blankets she’d folded the night before, taken fresh off the line by the door—a stool must have been cast aside.

  A decision takes time to reach; I have seen girls still as statues, watching their reflections, before deciding how they want to wear their hair. Even a dog will circle his bed before he sleeps. How long does it take? Is it considered over years or decided late at night or in the hours after breakfast, the length of a church service?

  From a beam that held up the roof, from the end of a very long rope, my mother died.

  I don’t know how long my father was in the house before she was in his arms. He held her. He pulled at the cord, but it held her harder. He reached to her face, moved her tongue in her mouth, pushed air in her lips and her nose.

  After a while, I realized my father was talking. He was saying things to my mother, but then he turned and he was saying things to me. I know because he said my name—”Mara.” Like that. He said my name.

  I couldn’t look at him. I was looking at her. I was thinking of birds.

  Suddenly he grabbed me so hard my knees buckled, and he slapped me. “Don’t look,” he said in the loud voice.

  He turned me away from her, but I ducked his arm and looked at her again. My mother, who was leaving us by the minute. Who was at the very end of leaving us.

  “Go to your room. Both of you, go to your room.”

  “Mara,” my sister said. My sister looked frightened and I had never seen her afraid. “To our room,” she said. “Let’s go to our room.”

  Da was digging in a drawer. He pulled out a knife and saw me standing there, still. “Cover your eyes, damn you,” was the thing he said. He climbed on a table and put one arm around her and began sawing at the rope with the other. He said, “Moira,” and that was my mother’s name. He pulled at the knife, while she was there at the end of the rope.

  I saw something then. A bird, just the very top of a bird’s head. In her mouth. It was just looking out of her mouth. I cried out then, and Aileen came to my side. “Look,” I said. “There’s a bird in her mouth. They’re inside her. The birds all went inside her.”

  “It’s her tongue,” said Aileen. “It’s not a bird, it’s her tongue.”

  “It is a bird.” I could see now the flicker of feathers behind her eyes that would not look at anything. Their dark shadow was all over her. “We have to let them out,” I said. I said, “Slice her open, Da.” I said, “Let them out.”

  My father dropped the knife and came toward me. He fell to his knees before me. “Mara,” he said. And then he said, “How can she let you see this. Your child eyes.”

  I began to speak to explain to him about the birds, but he covered my mouth, and then he picked me up in his arms and carried me beside my mother. He raised the knife and I thought I would end there, beside my mother. His eyes were not his own. And then he took the knife to my Sunday dress. He tore open the seam and sawed a long, wide ribbon from the end, and then he tied it around my eyes, so tightly I could feel my heart beat in my scalp. And then he pulled me to him. “You mustn’t look,” he said. “I’ll keep you safe. You’ll be all right, I’ll keep you all right.”

  I stumbled and fell. My hands went out into the air around me as I fell, and I felt the hem of my mother’s dress brush against me as I tumbled to the floor. I could see the light from the window but no shapes at all. Like this, I reached the other side of seeing. I left a world of colours and lights and figures and shapes, and woke into a dark world that was strange and unknown.

  “Aileen,” I whispered. I lay on the floor and didn’t move. I could hear a sound so familiar that it was a part of me and knew Aileen was crying. I could hear Da moving about, his heavy feet on the floor, and Aileen’s ragged breathing. I heard the knife tear her dress and then stillness, and then the sound of Da’s knife against the rope again.

  “Mara,” my sister called me, and I found her. She was only steps away and our arms opened around each other. I knew that for the first time in our lives, she was more frightened than I was. I felt calm in a way I didn’t recognize. This dark world we’d come into was safe in a way I’d never known or felt before. I knew that outside the bandage around my eyes, the world had come to pieces. I knew my mother was still hanging there or perhaps in my father’s arms now. I knew that Da had never touched us like that before. That until today, he never would have, and that with this day began a new kind of Da. But in the dark world, I felt my sister’s hand in mine and I was not afraid.

  Hours later, after Da had put us in bed, though it must have still been afternoon, Aileen and I lay beside each other (she found her way over to my bed), and we listened to Da moving in the other room. I don’t know what he was doing. Sometimes we would hear him speaking, but we couldn’t make out the words. I was restless and cold and my head hurt. Before putting us to bed, Da had wrapped still more strips of fabric around my eyes, so that now I couldn’t see even where the light was coming from. He’d patted my hair and whispered my name as he did it, but he tied the fabric tight, and now my head ached.

  “She’s dead,” Aileen said. “You know that means forever.”

  “She won’t come back,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Like when Da does the funerals for people. They go in the ground and it’s forever.”

  “I don’t know how she died like that.”

  “It was the rope.”

  “But how did it happen?”

  “It must have got tied around her and it choked her. Like the Boston Strangler, like Aunt Una told us about.”

  “But who tied it there?”

  “It could have been an accident,” I said. I knew it was important that I not tell my sister about the birds who’d taken our mother’s shadow and so I didn’t, but I knew that at the end of the rope were those birds. I knew that they killed my mother.

  “What was she trying to do with the rope, I wonder.”

 
; “I don’t know. Oh it hurts, this thing around my eyes.”

  “Let’s take them off.”

  “He might come back.”

  “We can put them back on if he does. He won’t know we’ve done it.”

  “No. He looked so angry.”

  “Do you think he’ll take it off us tomorrow? Why do we have to sleep with it on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is your ribbon tight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mine too.”

  “What can you see?”

  “Nothing. What can you see?”

  “Nothing.”

  The next day, I didn’t wake until Da shook me.

  “Get up,” he said. “We’re burying your mother.”

  I sat up and nearly fell, I was so close to the edge of the bed, but Da caught me.

  “Da, can I take it off now?”

  “No. Get up. Mara. Aileen. Get up now.”

  He led me by the hand from bed, and then Aileen took my other hand. We followed him like that, through the door, which he held open for me. Into the kitchen, I could feel the tiles on my bare feet. Out the door, which whined as he pulled it. I stumbled on the steps and felt Aileen against my shoulder. He pulled me on.

  “Da? Why do we have to wear this? Da, please take it off me?”

  He didn’t answer, but led us down the hill. I had to walk fast not to fall.

  “Wait here,” he said. He left us, and we sat down on the ground. We could hear the whisper and buzz of insects around us. The sun was warm on my shoulders though the air was still cool and I knew it must be early still. The grass was wet. In the distance, I could hear the water moving. Beside me, Aileen was crying.

  My father came back, and I could hear something behind him in the grass. Then he began to dig and I understood that my mother was there on the ground, somewhere near us. It was a long time we were there. And then he put her in the ground. We got to our feet and he said, “I can’t do the service. It’s not a funeral. She’s not with God. Your mother will stay here, you understand? Don’t say anything and don’t pray. It’s a sin to pray. But this is the end of her. You must know that. She’s in the ground. She’s not with us and she’s not with God. She’s down there with the bugs and the dirt. She’ll stay there.”

  Then he led us back to the house and to the kitchen table, where we sat in chairs and were fed breakfast, bread and apples.

  I felt my father’s hand on my shoulder.

  “I’m going to tell you what it’s going to be like,” he said. “It’s us three now. We’ll be alone now. You won’t go to school again. There was not a thing they taught you there I can’t teach you better myself, you hear. So we’ll do lessons at home and I’ll teach you what’s important. I’ll teach you to know God, and I’ll teach you your sums and things too. But there won’t be any reading. And no writing. It wouldn’t do you any good to read anyway, nothing but the Bible, and I can read you that.”

  He said, “Your mother committed a sin, do you understand that. The worst sin of all: despair. She left this world by her own hand, and it’s God himself who forbade that. You know of Jesus, who died on Good Friday, you know all what happened there. You know how on the cross, he, even our saviour, despaired. He called out to God his father, ‘Why hast thou forsaken me,’ he said. Do you know what this word means? Does it mean something to you, forsake? Well, it’s the same as your mother did here. She left you and will not care for you anymore. But it was a sin for Jesus to think this of his father, because his father was there all the time. He did not leave him and his care was infinite. And so, even Jesus who was divine despaired. But your mother’s sin was the greatest despair of all. She left God’s world. She held the great gift of God, this life, in her hand and threw it from her like a fistful of sand.”

  He said, “But it is not just her sin. She inherited this sin from her people and ours, yours. They took it with them from back in Scotland and they brought it here. It’s in the blood, but most of all it’s in the earth. Places, too, can be damned by God. It’s in the sea we fish from and the land we live on. Men here waste their lives not leaving. Because the land has a hold upon them. They get to loving the water and the soil. They get so they can’t let go of it. There’s miners that near commit the same sin as your mother going down in the pit every morning, knowing it will be their own grave they’ll ride that cart to one day. And if they left here they could find their way to better work—there’s places with good jobs that pay good money, but they’ll never go there, because this land won’t let go of them.”

  He said, “I won’t see that happen to you. I’ve put that thing around your eyes, and I won’t take it off. I’m going to save every penny I can, and we’re going to leave this place just as soon as we’ve saved enough to get good and far away. I’ll take the cover off your eyes then but not a day before. I’ll keep you innocent. I’ll keep you safe. This part of the world is a fist that takes you in it, and I won’t let it teach you to love it or fear to leave it. This land is full of beauty and anger, and it’s that your mother lived with and looked on, and I won’t have you look on it and know it and despair.”

  After that he let us go outside, but we sat there and did not know what to do. We didn’t know yet how to play without eyes to see. It felt strange even to talk to each other in the dark, so we sat close and held each other’s hands and were quiet for a long, long time. Finally Aileen said, “I don’t want to leave here, like he said.”

  “Where would we go?”

  “I don’t want to leave Mother if she’s staying here.”

  “I want to go to school.”

  “Me too. We were going to learn to make curly letters, all hooked together, like grown-ups.”

  “Well, Da will still teach us some things, won’t he. Like he said. Just not the writing bit.”

  “He’s inside now, isn’t he,” said Aileen. “Couldn’t we take it off, while he’s in there? We can put it back on if he comes out.”

  “But we mightn’t be able to do it in time.”

  “We’d watch for him. We can take it off just when he’s not around. He won’t know.”

  “We can’t. Please, Aileen, we can’t. We have to do what he says.”

  She was quiet for a while. I lay on my back on the grass. She asked, “What do you see?”

  I could feel the sun on my face, but I could hardly even make out the difference in light when I turned my face toward where I knew it to be and when I turned away. “Nothing,” I said. I reached out my hand for hers. “What do you see?”

  She said, “Nothing.”

  There were two worlds, and my sister and I walked through a door between them. On one side, my mother stood with us and it was full of things, it was plump, bulging, fat with rooms and the things in rooms, the chairs and papers and spoons and pillows and dolls and dishes and coats and desks and other things people put in rooms, and beyond the rooms, the sky and clouds and stars and trees and crows and fleas, and colours, yellow red blue black brown gold white grey. On that side, there were people—the neighbours far down the road and the people we saw at church and the children in school. It was so busy and we were always being taken from one thing to do, one place to go, to the next. The telephone would ring or there would be a knock on the door. We would go for a swim or have our hair cut on the lawn. On the other side, it was just Aileen and me. There were voices—mostly my father’s and sometimes we’d hear a voice from another room when Da would send us to our bedroom while a neighbour came by. But it was my sister I would feel beside me, always. We held hands almost all the time so we could know each other was near. And there were so many sounds in the new world. I could hear everything and know where I was in a room by the sound of a step on the floor on the other side of the house. The new world was loud but it was full of stillness. Time was distributed unevenly in the old world—handfuls of it would be thrown out and wasted all the time, a day by the shore would pass in a matter of minutes, and a day at school would sometim
es last till you were old. The new world released time on a spool that was steady, and the time it released was taut and long. We were safe in the new world. My sister was always beside me, her hand in mine, and I was only afraid of my father. We only left the house to play outside and we never, ever went to the beach again. There was no church and no school and no other houses. We never had to talk to other children or shake hands with grown-ups. The new world was beautiful.

  “Remember how it was before Mother died,” Aileen said sometimes. “It was so pretty when Mother was alive. And exciting.” Aileen missed school and cried often. I’d hold her hand when she did. Sometimes she’d get angry and push me aside. She was always the first to release my hand. Sometimes when we were outside, she’d go off on her own while I called her name. Sometimes she wouldn’t come back for hours, and I would wander the hill and not find her.

  I was always patient with her. She liked to list the things we used to see when Mother was alive. “Remember,” she’d sigh, “the fire in the stove at winter. Remember the trees in autumn, they’d let go of all their leaves and they’d fall to the ground, but they were all different colours.”

  I’d tell her she was remembering wrong, that she was making it up. “They were, they were all colours,” she’d say. “Orange and yellow and blue.”

  The more I told her she was mistaken, the more strange her memories became.

  “Remember the birds,” she’d say, “how pretty they were, their huge wings, the size of houses. They made that sound, wump wump wump. And they’d fight so hard with those other animals with wings, the ones with teeth.”

  The seasons turned and we felt them on our faces and we heard them. Summer was a long, warm dream that awoke to the clattering of leaves dead in the trees and their wheezing sink to the ground. Winter chilled us and we were cold even in our beds. In snowstorms, we went outside in our snow pants and coats and mittens and boots and lifted our faces up to the icy touch of each flake. I always thought I could hear the snow. At first it would seem everything became quiet, and then you would realize the world was not quiet but overwhelmed by another sound; the sky had opened its mouth and released its call to the winter below it. And the winter answered, and between them, they howled and murmured and roared into the quickening night. And then spring again, with its own sounds, that nasty insistent pressing of things out of the ground, the crack of roots emerging from split seeds, and there would be grass beneath our hands when we lay outside and let the sun burn our skin. This cycle went round and round, three, four times before it was done. And always my sister would ask me, when we were alone, “What do you see?” And I would say, “Nothing.” And I would say, “What do you see?” And she would say, “Nothing.”