Late Migrations Read online

  Jaybird, Home

  LOWER ALABAMA, 1968

  Two weeks before my seventh birthday, my family left the sandy red dirt of the wiregrass region of Lower Alabama and moved to Birmingham, a roiling city built in the shadow of Red Mountain in the southern Appalachians. The move should have been a shock—I was leaving a town untouched by open conflict for a city notorious for its racist convulsions of water cannons and police dogs and church bombings—but I was six. I knew nothing of that. I missed the pine trees.

  We returned to Lower Alabama often because my grandparents still lived there, in the house where my grandfather was born, and our long family history and frequent visits might explain why I imprinted on that landscape so wholly. Or perhaps it was the open windows, a time when what happened outside the house was felt indoors, or the innocence that sent children outside to play after breakfast, not to return till hunger drove them home again. I am a creature of piney woods and folded terrain, of birdsong and running creeks and a thousand shades of green, of forgiving soil that yields with each footfall. That hot land is a part of me, as fundamental to my shaping as a family member, and I would have remembered its precise features with an ache of homesickness even if I had never seen it again.

  It would take all the words in Remembrance of Things Past to catalog what I remember about the place where I was born, but there are three things that can bring it all back to me in startling detail: the sight of a red dirt road, the smell of pine needles, and the sound of a blue jay’s call. And of those three, by far the most powerful is the call of the jaybird.

  I love the blue jay’s warning call, the jeer-jeer, jeer-jeer it makes when a hawk is near. I love the softer wheedle wheedle wheedle and please please song for its mate. Blue jays have an immense range of vocalizations—whirring and clicking and churring and whistling and whining and something you’d swear was a whisper—but the sound they make that takes me right back to 1968 is a call that mimics a squeaky screen-door hinge. I hear that sound coming from the top of a pine tree, and instantly I am in the wiregrass region of Lower Alabama, where the soil is red sand, and pine needles make a scented bower fit for all my imagined homes.

  Barney Beagle Plays Baseball

  BIRMINGHAM, 1968

  It was already dark outside but not quite suppertime, late in the year we moved to Birmingham, and I don’t know why I was alone with my mother in the grocery store. If my brother and sister weren’t tagging along too, then my father must have been at home with them, but if Daddy was home, why did I come along with Mama to the Piggly Wiggly at the very worst time of day, when the store was swamped with husbands stopping on the way home from work to pick up the one missing item their wives needed for supper? I might never have been in the Piggly Wiggly at night before, but I knew that men did not understand the rules of the grocery store, did not understand which direction to push the cart to stay in the flow of traffic, did not recognize that standing perplexed in the middle of the aisle is bad grocery store citizenship, especially right at suppertime.

  My mother was surely in a hurry. Maybe I was slowing her down as she tried to zip around the bewildered men standing despondent among the canned goods, and maybe she sent me off to pass the time in the corner of the store where books and toys were displayed. Or maybe I wandered off on my own, in those days of retail on a human scale and no thought at all that kidnappers could be lurking in the Piggly Wiggly.

  The toys were a familiar, paltry offering—dusty cellophane packages of jacks and Silly Putty eggs and paddleballs and green army men—but the books were mostly new to me. The few children’s books at our house belonged to an old-fashioned era of read-aloud classics, fairy tales and nursery rhymes and Bible stories and my own favorite, Poems of Childhood. The Piggly Wiggly display featured what seemed to be a vast array of Little Golden Books and early readers. I reached for a green book with a picture in the foreground of a dog wearing a cap turned sideways between its floppy ears. We didn’t have a dog ourselves. I had not yet made friends in our new city, and I wanted a dog more than I wanted anything.

  I scanned the rest of the book jacket, pausing at the picture of boys in baseball uniforms. I had heard of baseball, but I’d never seen a game, in person or on TV, and did not recognize the outfits the boys were wearing. Why were these boys wearing pajamas outside on the grass? I only glanced at the words at the top of the book jacket. I was learning in first grade the sounds that letters make, but I could not yet read, and words in a book meant nothing to me.

  But then, as I stood in the bright light of the grocery store with darkness pooling outside, unable to reach me, the letters on the cover of that book suddenly untangled themselves into words: Barney. Beagle. Plays. Base. Ball. Barney Beagle Plays Baseball. Oh, I remember thinking. Oh, it’s about a dog who plays baseball, and opening the book to see what happened. And only then did I realize I was actually reading the words. I was reading! I went racing to find Mama, dodging despairing fathers peering at can labels, to show her how I could sound out all the words on every page and understand each one. And she was so happy about my happiness that she told me we could bring the book home, even though we had no money at all, and it had not even crossed my mind that she might buy it for me.

  Creek Walk

  BIRMINGHAM, 1969

  The rocks are gray slate, massive slabs cantilevered over the water as though the outstretched feathers of a great prehistoric bird had been caught in stone. My brother and I are barefoot, picking our way across the rock. We are always barefoot. The pads of our feet are thick, toughened by concrete and asphalt and gravel roads, and anyway shoes would be useless on this slick rock. Worse than useless.

  We have not discussed a plan, and so we are making our way to the creek bed with no real intention. We have nowhere to be and nothing to do for hours on end, for days and days on end. It is summer, and autumn is inconceivable to us. School will be reinvented every year, an astonishment every year. Where were the nuns all hiding while we were walking barefoot on the hot concrete?

  We are not thinking of school or of the nuns. We are thinking of nothing, or perhaps we are wondering if we will see another rattlesnake. Seeing any snake would be a cause for remark, but we have only once seen a rattlesnake. Mainly we will turn over rocks on the bank of the creek, looking for worms and roly-polies. We aren’t fishing—no one has ever taken us fishing; we are not the kind of children who would enjoy fishing—but we know we can summon fish by tossing worms into the water, and we like to feel the fish mouthing the freckles on our legs.

  Sometimes there are salamanders on the bank. Sometimes there are tadpoles in the foamy water at the edges of the backwash. Sometimes there are crawdads under the rocks that jut into the water. Always there are dragonflies—blue, and bottle green, and scarlet red—hovering over the flashing water. Always there are jays scolding from the dark pines. We see them and we don’t see them, we hear them and we never register their sound. The mud and the moving water smell vaguely of decay, but the smell does not disturb us or inspire the first curiosity. We have never even noted it. These are our sights and our sounds and our smells, as casual to us as the smell of our own breath in our cupped hands, as the sound of our own blood in our ears when we lie down on the biggest rock and hang our heads over the edge to dangle tickletails in the water, tricking the fish into rising.

  Farther down, closer to the highway, there are words scratched into the slate on the other bank. The letters are large and ghostly white: F U C K. My brother sounds it out, a perfect practice word for someone still learning phonics from the adventures of David and Ann, the Catholic school equivalent of Dick and Jane. “Fuck,” he pronounces, correctly. Then: “What does it mean?”

  “It’s a word people say when they’re mad,” I tell him.

  I don’t know what it means.

  We pick our way back toward the bank we will climb to start heading home. Clouds of minnows race from our feet. Clouds of grasshoppers rise from the timothy grass above the rocks. Clouds of
gnats hover above the water, part for our small bodies, and coalesce again behind us. We climb out and sit together on the slanted rock to wait for our feet to dry in the hot sun. At home it is almost time for supper, but we can’t tell time.

  Bunker

  All summer long the chipmunks dart in and out of the crawl space through the tunnels they’ve dug under every side of our house. Open either door and a chipmunk will flee, disappearing into a potted plant, up a tree trunk, or under the front stoop where they have fashioned their bunkers. Solitary creatures except during mating season, they ignore their own kind, each keeping to its personal private entryway into the dark. They are like neighbors who check the mailbox from the car and then drive straight into the garage, never a friendly word.

  In and out, the chipmunks rarely stray more than a few feet from the safety of a tunnel. There must be yards and yards of tunnels under our house by now, yards and yards and yards of tunnels, with dens tucked off to the side where the chipmunks deliver their babies in springtime, where they store their acorns in autumn, where they will sleep all winter long.

  But they have not yet gone to sleep—deep into October, the temperatures remain stubbornly stuck in summer—and my husband has become unnerved by their frantic bustle as they prepare for the cold. “Look at that,” he says, watching them dive for cover when he steps outside. “I think we need to take them out to the park.”

  “It’s too late,” I say. “They won’t have time to get ready for winter.”

  “It’s ninety degrees out here,” he says.

  He sets a catch-and-release trap outside one of the tunnels, baits it with peanut butter and birdseed, and heads to the gym. Within two minutes, there’s a chipmunk in the cage, digging at the wire with its powerful rodent teeth. “Come back,” I text my husband. “You caught one.”

  But he doesn’t come back. Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. Frantically trying to chew itself to safety, the chipmunk is rubbing its gray chipmunk lips raw.

  An hour later my husband regards the empty trap. “Where’s the chipmunk?” he says.

  “I let it go,” I say.

  “Oh,” he says. “OK.” He is the kind of man who understands that a sunny and suddenly unencumbered Sunday afternoon is a gift.

  I think of the nests the chipmunks have made under our house, the chewed bits of leaves cradling blind babies with translucent skin and only the lightest down for fur. I see them though I’ve never seen them. I want the hawks to stay in the trees. I want my neighbors to drive carefully in the road the chipmunks keep scooting across for reasons I can’t guess. I want the rat snake that lives in the brush pile to be too fat for the tunnels they have made. I want my house to shelter them.

  Operation Apache Snow

  BIRMINGHAM, 1969

  When the news comes on, my father sits in his chair, swirling just one jigger of Canadian Mist in a glass of ice water and piling up ashes in a silver-rimmed coaster meant to keep the sweating glass from leaving a ring on the end table. Walter Cronkite is on the screen, and I am learning that I say everything wrong. It’s ce-ment, not see-ment. And “Vietnam” is a word that rhymes with “atom bomb,” not with “Birmingham.” I sit on the floor, my head against my father’s knee, and breathe him in: Brylcreem and Aqua Velva and cigarettes and sweat. Smoke drifts around me as Walter Cronkite gives the week’s casualty count.

  I look up at my brother, who is drawing a picture at the table a few feet away, his tongue tucked into the corner of his mouth, his head tilted in concentration. He has not heard a word. He would never come home from that place, I think. When he leaves for Vietnam, he will not be coming back.

  Of course he will go: this war has lasted my whole life. Every week for my entire life the news report has included a count of the dead. The war will never end.

  Smoke settles on my head, on my shoulders, and I practice saying “Vietnam.” Viet-nahm. I will need to know what to say when I figure out how to get to this foreign land in my brother’s place.

  Territorial

  In late summer, the season of plenty gives way to the season of competition as ruby-throated hummingbirds bulk up for the coming migration, and goldfinches stuff themselves with flower seeds against a lean winter. All day long the hummingbird who has claimed my feeder tries to drive away the goldfinches, and the goldfinches try to drive away the bumblebees, and the bees try to drive away the skippers. No one tries to drive away the red wasp.

  Earlier this year the cardinals lost one set of nestlings to illness and another to predators, but now at summer’s end they are at the safflower feeder with two healthy fledglings. The young ones follow them around the yard, hollering, and the parents work from dawn to full night feeding them and explaining to the house finch family, over and over again, that the safflower feeder is now off-limits to everyone but juvenile cardinals. When I put mealworms out for the bluebirds, I must sit nearby while they eat, or the male cardinal—in the middle of his August molt and comically bald—will dive at them from the branches like a tiny strategic bomber. This half-acre lot belongs to him, even if the bluebirds and the house finches refuse to defer.

  There is still plenty to go around—plenty of flowers, plenty of seeds, plenty of bugs—but the creatures in my yard are not interested in sharing. For them, scarcity is no different from fear of scarcity. A real threat and an imagined threat provoke the same response. I stand at the window and watch them, cataloging all the human conflicts their ferocity calls to mind.

  Tell Me a Story of Deep Delight

  BIRMINGHAM, 1970

  We are in the double bed. I am asleep, and my sister is scooched over next to me, awake. “Tell me a story,” she says loudly. She is old enough to climb out of the crib but too young to know how to whisper. “Tell me a story!”

  “I’ll tell you a story in the morning,” I mumble.

  “Tell me one story.”

  “Once upon a time there was a little girl who wanted a story, but her sister was so tired the little girl said, ‘OK,’ and fell asleep.”

  I was born for sleep. My baby sister was born for waking. “Tell me a long story.”

  “It takes a while to think of a long story,” I say. “You be real quiet and let me think.”

  Some time later, our mother stops to check on us. The room is dark and silent, but a wedge of light from the hall falls upon her toddler’s open eyes. Mama tiptoes to the edge of the bed and squats to whisper in her baby’s ear. “Lori, it’s late,” she says. “It’s so late even big girls like Margaret are sound asleep.”

  “Her not asleep, Mama. Her just thinking of a story.”

  As a matter of unreliable narration, this story is hard to parse. I am quoting from memory a story my mother often told, a story that came from her own memory of a time long since past. Though I have no way of knowing how accurate my mother’s memory was, I’m confident that I am quoting her word for word. “Her just thinking of a story.”

  I know these words by heart because my mother told this story many times. I am less confident of my own lines, but I remember well the miniature drama that played out night after night in the old double bed that had come to us from my grandparents, and my sister remembers it too. I would pretend to be thinking of a story—or, in a version my sister swears is true though I have no recollection of it, I would tell her I had to say my prayers—and promptly go back to sleep. She would wait in the darkness, restless, impatient, until she finally fell asleep as well.

  I don’t know why our mother loved this story so, but my husband and I used to spy on our own young sons at night, listening to them giggling through the baby monitor, listening to them keeping each other awake in the dark. I was amazed at the way their minds worked when they had no sense of being observed—amazed at the way their lives were already unfolding without me. Perhaps my mother, too, loved that peek into the perfect innocence of my sister’s trust. And because it was a story she told with such love and absolute delight, I think I can see it, myself:

  My sister, flippin
g from one side to the other. Me, asleep but riding waves of consciousness with each rustle, each exasperated sigh. Our mother, whispering to her little girl, a child full of faith, poised for a magical tale, a story made of just the right words. Waiting for them to drift over her in the darkness and lull her into dreaming.

  Acorn Season

  We recognize the arrival of acorn season even as the acorns still cling to the white oak growing just outside the bedroom window. They’re green, but the squirrels are done with waiting. At dawn they sit in the branches of the magnificent oak and pluck the unripe nuts, taking a single bite before flinging the rejects to our roof: BAM! Then—bam bam bam bam bam bam bam bam—each one tumbles down the slope and—BAM!—slams into the gutter. One after another, a hailstorm of acorns, and all before the sun is up.

  One morning I wake to the sound of the alarm, and I know the acorns are ripe. The squirrels are eating them now, passing over the green acorns and getting fat on the brown ones. They are all about acorns—eating them, caching them in the crooks of trees, planting them in the flower beds, in the pots on the deck, in the piles of pushed-up dirt around the mole runs. Squirrels are the Johnny Appleseeds of the oak forest, their tails bobbing up and down in an undulating arc that follows the motion of their thumbless hands, their canny fingers patting the soil gently around each acorn.

  Lately the squirrels have been planting acorns in our house. Cooler nights have finally arrived, and the attic above our bedroom is the home they’ve chosen for winter, an alcove that can’t be reached by any human. Before the alarm goes off, I lie in our room below their room and hear them running. What is the rush? They are so close I can hear them stop to scratch their fleas, but they are tucked away where I can’t harm them.