Late Migrations Page 2

  The pond is dying, and now I am thinking of starlings reeling through the sky at dusk, the glory of the starlings in motion, wheeling and dipping and rising as one black beast made of pulsing cells, as one creature born to live in air. But the starlings don’t belong any more than the lilies belong; they are aliens here. This is not their sky. These are not their trees. They are robbing the dogwoods, leaving no berries for the mockingbirds. They have claimed every nest hole, leaving none for the titmice or the bluebirds or even the bossy chickadees.

  The alien does not know it’s an alien.

  When a starling hangs itself at dawn on the wire holding up my peanut feeder, and I wake to find it dangling there, black and stiff and cold, I can only pity it, hungry and confused and now lost to the world. But a downy woodpecker, unconcerned by the specter hanging above its head, is finally getting its fill of peanuts.

  In Which My Grandmother Tells the Story of Her Favorite Dog

  LOWER ALABAMA, 1940

  I was still teaching when Max Junior and Olivia were in school. Our school was a very short distance from home, and we walked. Of course, I always walked by myself; they were always running and playing. And my dog, her name was Honey, always followed me, and she would get up under my desk and stay there as long as I was at my desk. If I went to the board, she went with me and laid down by my feet as long as I was writing on the board. One weekend she went missing, and we looked everywhere for her. We didn’t find her until Monday morning. When we got to school, we smelled something, and it was this dog. She had crawled right up under the school building, right under where I sat. That’s where she was when she died.

  Howl

  The old dog wakes when the door shuts fast. Click goes the back door, and thump goes the car door, and now the old dog believes he is alone in the house. When the whine of the car backing out of the drive gives way to the crunch of tires on the road, and then to silence, the old dog believes he is alone in the world. Standing next to the door, he folds himself up, lowering his hindquarters gradually, bit by bit, slowly, until his aching haunches have touched the floor. Now he slides his front feet forward, slowly, slowly, and he is down.

  A moan begins in the back of his throat, lower pitched than a whine, higher than a groan, and grows. His head tips back. His eyes close. The moan escapes in a rush of vowels, louder and louder and louder, and now he is howling. It is the sound he made in his youth whenever an ambulance passed on the big road at the edge of the neighborhood, but he can’t hear so far anymore. Now he is howling in despair. He is howling for his long life’s lost companion, the dog who died last year and left him to sleep alone. He is howling for his crippled hips, so weak he can hardly squat to relieve himself. He is howling because it’s his job to protect this house, but he is too old now to protect the house. He is howling because the world is empty, and he is howling because he is still here.

  In Which My Grandmother Tells the Story of the Day I Was Born

  LOWER ALABAMA, 1961

  On Mother’s Day of 1961, Bill and Olivia came to our house, and Bill—this is the way he gave Olivia her gift—said, “This is to the sweetest little mother-to-be there is.” That’s the way he told us. And that was when she was going to have Margaret. And so we kept the road pretty hot between our house and yours after that. And when she was born, Bill called us and said he wanted me to go with him to Montgomery. They thought they would have to take Margaret up there. She was having the breathing trouble that that Kennedy child had later on, and he died. And so Max carried me down there, but when we got there, they had gotten it straightened out well enough that they thought it wouldn’t be necessary to take her. So we stayed a few days, until Olivia could get up and was able to bathe the baby and look after her.

  To the Bluebirds

  I know: there are too many dogs in the yard; and the giant house going up next door is too much hulking house lumbering too near the little nest box, never mind the beeping, growling trucks and the bellowing carpenters and the scrambling roofers with their machine-gun nails; and the miniature forest behind us still harbors agile-fingered raccoons and rat snakes as thick as my arm; and a Cooper’s hawk still patrols the massive pine tree on the other side of the house.

  But consider: the dogs are old and spend their time lying in the sun, their glad bird-chasing days long past. And the noisy builders, too close now in house-scouting season, will be gone by nesting time, replaced by neighbors who will drive straight into their garage, never lingering in what’s left of their yard. Look at the predator baffle, much larger than last year’s, and the now-bare ground where before the brush sheltered house wrens.

  Look: see the sturdy birdbath I’ve moved to your side of the yard, and the special feeder designed to hold live mealworms? The greatest token of my love for you is that every day now I reach into a mesh bag full of live mealworms and pluck them out, one by one, and drop them into the ceramic cup in the feeder. The worms stay in my refrigerator, where the cool darkness is meant to keep them in a state of dormancy, but oh my God they are not dormant. No, they curl their segmented bodies around my finger, and they lift their nubby heads and rebuke me with their nonexistent eyes, but I harden my heart to their plight and plink them into that little white cup, and I walk away as they twist and curl around each other in search of purchase. They are my gift to you on these cold days when nary a cricket stirs in the dry grass.

  The Way You Looked at Me

  LOWER ALABAMA, 1961

  Here are all my kin—my mother and my father, my grandmother and my grandfather, my great-grandmother in the placid wholeness of her white halo—arrayed around me. Born too early, tiny and frail, I am sleeping in every picture, and in every picture they are gathered around me, heads bent to watch me take each too-light breath, willing my lips not to turn blue again. I am too small and always cold, but my people are looking at me as if I were the sun. My parents and my grandparents and my great-grandmother, all of them, have gathered to watch over me. They are looking at me as if I were the sun, as if they had been cold every day of their lives until now.

  I am the sun, but they are not the planets.

  They are the universe.

  Not Always in the Sky

  Our neighborhood is home to a very large red-tailed hawk. The hawk’s telltale color is muted in females, in certain lights almost brown, and the dead tree this hawk often uses as a hunting perch is distant enough from the street to make the bird’s identity a matter for debate. My neighbors are convinced this bird is an eagle.

  “Go home and get your camera!” one stops her car to say as I walk the dog. “There’s an eagle in the dead tree!” I go home and get the camera, just to be safe, but the dog and I have just passed the dead tree, and perched in it was a large red-tailed hawk. When I go back with my camera, she is still there.

  There’s much talk here about the eagle who has taken up residence in our neighborhood, but no one seems to wonder what kind of eagle it might be. When I first heard the rumors, I thought perhaps my neighbors were seeing a young bald eagle. Everyone knows an adult bald eagle on sight, but juveniles always pose a challenge in birds. There was a remote possibility, too, of a visit by a golden eagle, a species generally found west of the Mississippi but reintroduced in Tennessee not long ago; several birds equipped with transmitters are known to spend winter on the Cumberland Plateau. But only by the most muscular effort of imagination could this bird be a golden eagle. We don’t live on the Cumberland Plateau.

  The bird is clearly a red-tailed hawk, but I don’t say anything to my neighbors. People want to believe that something extraordinary has happened to them, that they have been singled out for grace, and who am I to rob them of one sheen of enchantment still available in the first-ring suburbs?

  Working at my desk one day, I hear a great mob of blue jays sounding the alarm: a predator is in their midst. Minutes pass, and their rage shows no signs of dissipating, so I step outside. Perhaps the hawk that looks like an eagle has landed in my own yard.
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br />   But I see nothing in the sky, nothing in the trees, nothing on the utility pole at the corner of the yard, nothing on the power lines. And then I notice that the blue jays are looking down as they scream out their jeering cry of warning, and that all the smaller birds, even the ground foragers, have taken to the bushes and the honeysuckle tangles and are looking downward too. The little Cooper’s hawk who hunts in this yard will often stand on his prey for a bit, working to get a better grip on his struggling victim before taking to the sky, but there is no hawk on the ground either.

  Walking farther into the yard, I still don’t see anything, even scanning the ground with a zoom lens. And then it dawns on me that the birds must be looking at a snake. This lot backs up to a city easement, only a few yards wide, that leads from the wooded area behind our neighbor’s house out to the side street next to ours. We leave the easement untended, and the part of our yard that abuts it as well, because it serves as a kind of wildlife corridor. A very large rat snake, at least five feet long, hunts under our house and all over this yard, but I wouldn’t be able to see it in the easement unless I was practically upon it. I walk a little closer but only a little. Though I am not especially afraid of snakes, I know they are afraid of me, and I like to give them their room.

  Holding a useless camera, I suddenly realize that something extraordinary is happening right before me, a great serpent slowly on the move and all the songbirds aware of its presence and calling to each other and telling each other to beware. The miracle isn’t happening in the sky at all. It’s happening in the damp weeds of an ordinary backyard, among last year’s moldering leaves and the fragrant soil turned up by moles.

  Blood Kin

  LOWER ALABAMA, 1963

  In the picture I’m dressed entirely in white: white dress with puffed sleeves, white bonnet with white lace around the brim, white tights and white polished high-tops, the kind all babies wore. It must be an Easter picture, you think, because what parent would dress a toddler in white more than once a year? But it can’t be Easter. My grandmother, who’s holding me in her lap on the porch steps, and my great-grandmother beside her, each with a halo of white hair that matches my frothy bonnet, are wearing dark dresses. And no farm woman in Alabama would be caught dead wearing navy blue on the day of the Resurrection.

  The picture’s off-center; there’s room for my mother beside my great-grandmother, but Mama is perched on the next step up, smiling behind us, a little out of focus from the shift in depth of field. She’s hiding because my brother will be born in April, and she always hid from cameras when she was pregnant.

  Never mind that birth and death were entirely unremarkable in the world of that photo. Every chicken she ate with dumplings was one whose neck her grandmother had wrung. Every Christmas ham was once a piglet in her yard. All the babies in that county were born in their parents’ beds and too often died there as well. The cemetery is full of tiny graves whose headstones are carved with terrible phrases: “Many fond hopes lie buried here.” “Another jewel for the Maker’s crown.”

  My grandmother’s third child was born too soon, so early he had no name. She never told anyone else about him, but she told me, years later, when I could not stop weeping after my own miscarriages: “I had him in the chamber pot on the floor next to the bed,” she said. “Nights I cried for a long time after that. Days I went to work like always.”

  Nests

  Oblivion would be easier—not to know when the rat snake noses aside the tangle of grasses the cottontail has carefully patted into place, not to see it lift the impossibly soft fur she has plucked from her own belly, not to fathom that it is slowly, almost mechanically, swallowing the blind babies she has borne for just this moment.

  Better not to discover that a still brown cardinal is sitting on two speckled eggs in the hollow of the holly beside the fence, her orange beak the only hint of her presence in the brown nest in the crook of the brown branches. Better not to hear the crow flapping down to the fencerow or to see its black head driving her from the holly with a single plunging probe through the leaves, or to understand that it is eating her eggs, indifferent to the driving sweeps of her furious mate and her own piteous calls.

  Oh, to unsee the Carolina wren waiting so patiently in the tunnel of fronds she has wrapped around herself deep in the potted fern, invisible, but not invisible to the side-eyed jay. Oh, to unwatch her disbelief as she hops around and around the edge of the flowerpot, searching in vain for a hungry mouth to open for the caterpillar she has brought.

  Scolding will not save the little sac of mantis eggs the neighborhood boys are batting around like a ball, or the spider’s web swept from the eaves by a homeowner’s broom, or the cluster of frog eggs at the edge of the pond where the newt is hunting.

  This life thrives on death.

  But hold very, very still in the springtime sun, and a tufted titmouse will come to harvest your hair and spin it into a soft, warm place for her young. Keep an eye on the ivy climbing the side of the house, and one day you will see a pair of finches coaxing their babies from a tiny nest balanced among the leaves. Hear the bluebirds calling from the trees, and you might turn in time to see a fledgling peer from the hole in the dark nest box, gape at the bright wide world for the very first time, and then trust itself to the sky. Wait at the window on the proper day, and the cottontail nest hidden under the rosemary bush will open before you, spilling forth little rabbits who lift the leaves from last fall and push aside their mother’s fur and raise their ears and wrinkle their noses and bend for their first taste of the bitter dandelion. And it will be exactly what they wanted.

  In the Storm, Safe from the Storm

  LOWER ALABAMA, 1965

  At my grandparents’ house in the country, we live on the front porch, where the ceiling fan blows the bugs away and stirs the steaming air into something passing for a breeze. At home in town we are very modern and have no porch at all. There’s a concrete stoop but only the barest overhang to cover it, hardly anything to keep away the rain or the blistering sun. When a storm comes, my father sets his chair right in the doorway, straddling the jamb. I love the storms. If I’m asleep, he lifts me up and carries me through the dark house to sit with him in the doorway and listen to the wind and the thunder.

  The rain comes and I feel it with the tips of my toes, but they are the only parts of me that get wet, for I have drawn my knees up to my chest under my nightgown, and my father has unbuttoned his corduroy jacket and pulled it around me, and wrapped his arms around me too. I lean into him. I feel the heat from his body and the cool rain from the world, both at once.

  Secret

  Wild storms always come to Tennessee in the springtime. One year a wind shear hit a hackberry tree three doors down from us and snapped it off right at the middle. The crown of the tree came down hard in seventy-mile-an-hour winds, taking out a maple and several large cypresses and crashing through a length of cedar fencing, barely missing the next-door neighbors’ car.

  That night the local news was full of trees that had in fact smashed into cars, but the scene here was even more dramatic. The tragic hackberry, it turned out, was completely hollow. And in that hollow lived approximately forty-five thousand wild honeybees, who came pouring out of the broken trunk the way they do in that scene in Little House in the Big Woods where Pa chases a bear away from a bee tree so he can harvest their honey for himself.

  Here in suburbia, the homeowners were keeping a wary distance. Who knows how long those bees had been living in our midst, three steps from the street? And yet we’d pushed our strollers and walked our dogs past it every day without a single sting. Even so, the sight of forty-five thousand distraught honeybees pouring into the sky at once can be deeply unnerving. Someone called the Nashville Area Beekeepers Association, and the next morning an expert arrived. He was the one who estimated the size of the hive and captured the queen bee from the fallen part of the tree.

  The queen was not hard to find, actually: she was surrounded by a
n entire army of worker bees who really did not want to share her. But the beeman in his thin shirtsleeves was not alarmed. He just reached in, scooped her up, and installed her in a commercial beehive that he had set next to the fallen tree. Then he gathered several dripping honeycombs and smeared them in and around the hollow to give the bees something to eat while they were looking for their queen.

  It was a good plan, a nature-friendly plan to preserve a surprisingly healthy population of a crucial pollinator that’s long been in trouble. Every time I took our old dog for a walk, I noticed the bees still pouring out of the standing part of the hackberry trunk, but they were also buzzing around the honey and the hivebox next to it too. Everything seemed to be going according to the brave beeman’s plan.

  But the wild honeybees, hidden safely from human eyes for so long, had devised their own plan according to an ancient logic that did not involve that hivebox on the ground. Two days later they had gathered in one of the remaining cypress trees: clinging to each other and crawling on top of each other, they formed a giant, roiling, ice-cream-cone-shaped swarm. The whole cypress was humming.

  Then one of the scout bees must have returned with word of an acceptable site for a new hive—when I checked again at lunchtime, they were gone. The wind-ruined tree, the hackberry that had kept those honeybees a secret for at least a generation, was silent again.

  Confirmation

  LOWER ALABAMA, 1966

  My mother attended Mass at the little clapboard church for years before she formally joined it. Until then, she wasn’t a full member of the congregation and did not receive Communion—she didn’t want to upset her own father, the lifelong Methodist. Tucked away in a remote corner of southeast Alabama, my grandfather had never laid eyes on a Catholic before he met his future son-in-law.