A Catalog of Birds

  “So what’s going on? It’s not some guy, is it?”

  “I’m going to New York.”

  “You do that every summer.”

  “Full-time. I’ve given my notice at school.”

  “You’re leaving your job to work at the Catholic Worker House?” Nell asks, adding eggs, vanilla.

  “Changing one job for another.”

  “Do they pay you?”

  “Room and board and a small stipend.”

  “But you’re a nurse.”

  “Should be useful, then.”

  “Is this some kind of back-door approach to becoming a nun?”

  Sheila adds baking soda, flour, takes over stirring. “I don’t know yet.”

  “When will you tell Mom and Dad?” Nell asks.

  “This weekend. You could grease the pans.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “When school is done.”

  “You’re leaving now . . . ?”

  “I’ve needed to get out from under Marion’s disapproval for a long time. And I feel like I’ll lose my soul if I don’t do this work.”

  “That’s a little dramatic.”

  Sheila smiles, eats a spoonful of dough. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Sheila’s hair is pulled back; she has on a faded T-shirt and a skirt she made. She wears a five-dollar watch and sandals she’s had since high school. Nell thinks of Sheila’s apartment stripped bare; and looks at her sister’s face, no trace of make-up. All the things Marion criticizes:

  Would it kill you to wear lipstick?

  I’ll pay for a haircut, for God’s sake.

  A little bit of color won’t compromise your principles, Sheila.

  “I’m going to miss you.”

  “Come visit,” Sheila smiles.

  “I wouldn’t want to get in your way.”

  “We’ll put you to work.”

  “I feel like an idiot not knowing how important this is to you. Being caught up in my own little bubble.”

  “Marion likes to assign the starring roles.”

  “I should know better.”

  “No, Nell, Mom should know better.”

  “You’re different.”

  “You know how Dad always says not making a decision is making a decision?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This feels right.”

  Tuesday morning after working at the farm, Billy rides to the Ag Station with Jack and then walks down Castle Street into town. The sun is almost warm. Spring seems like less of a rumor and more of a possibility.

  Across from the Smith Opera House, the old model and hobby store stands empty, faded flyers with Megan’s picture pasted to the windows. The Strand movie theatre is shuttered, but the Roxie is still holding on. They’re changing the marquee as Billy walks by, bringing back The Wild Bunch. Maybe Nell would like to go.

  He climbs the stairs to the third floor, questioning why he’s doing this. Taking time off from work at the garage to mess around. Just because a good-looking woman told him to. Likely to be another sucker punch; the classic one-two of hope and failure.

  The art room stretches across the front of the building. Tall arched windows flood the room with light. There are eight large tables. Art books stacked on a beat-up desk. A bank of storage drawers and cabinets lines one wall.

  Jazz is playing, sounds like Coltrane, and students are already gathering materials. Anna Barnes greets him, introduces him to the class, and leads him to a table where a boy named Ben is working. They will share a workstation. Ben looks too young to be in high school, let alone college. Billy wonders what number he drew in the draft. It’s a curse, this way of measuring people. What’s the age difference? Two years? Yet there it is, the fucking generational divide. He watches as Ben takes in his scars, his wrecked hand, meets his eye, then looks away.

  Anna shows him where the supplies are, tells him he can bring his own things if he wants. She talks without pushing, a rarity. Some of the things he will remember:

  Everyone’s work is different.

  There’s no right or wrong here.

  Begin anywhere.

  He surveys the room. The projects range from miniature to enormous, and the variety of materials and approaches surprises him. It all surprises him. He’d been expecting glue and tissue paper. Instead there’s a lengthy wall mural of a riverbank, both painted and collaged. Constructions. Boxes. Boxes within boxes. One girl tears images from magazines which she cuts in pieces and reassembles in startling ways. A man with a bird’s head, a wheelbarrow with a woman’s bare arms for handles. The kid named Simon is working with sand and paint; his tablemate uses found images and text to create antiwar posters.

  “What do you want to say, or express?” Anna asks. “A mood, a feeling, a place, an experience.”

  She opens drawer after drawer as she talks to him. Paper of all kinds, colors, fabric, string in every texture and heft, thread, beads, feathers, seedpods, paints, pencils, crayons, newsprint.

  “Pick up whatever you feel drawn to and play with it.”

  She hands him a piece of poster board.

  “Assemble something. Don’t overanalyze it.”

  “They all seem to know what they’re doing,” he says.

  “They’re each working on a project that grew out of this process. Trust me. Get your hands busy. Turn your mind off.”

  He lets his hands sift through seedpods, thinks of Megan: Where is she?

  Snub nose, bony knees. She had a sly sense of humor and laughed so much when she slept over that Marion was always threatening to send her home when she and Nell were still horsing around at one and two in the morning.

  They worked and played together all their lives, cutting hay, picking apples, mucking out the barn, swimming, rowing, fishing, hiking, though the one thing Megan refused to do was sit around in the woods listening to birds.

  The summer she turned twelve they’d fallen asleep in the hayloft after haying all day. He woke to find her leaning over him. That first kiss tasted of sun and green grass. He pulled her against him, then rolled on top of her before he came fully awake and realized what he was doing. They’d crossed a line with the kiss; when he touched her they entered a new world.

  He withdrew from her then, and for the next two years ignored her, rebuffed her, kept his distance if they did have to be in the same place at the same time. Got himself a girlfriend to drive the point home, a loud, brash town girl, not his type at all.

  Megan bided her time, wise—or cunning—beyond her years. She let him know she was waiting for him, revealing much in her steadfast patience. And even though he told himself she was too young, that he shouldn’t, they shouldn’t, it grew more difficult to stay away from her. His thoughts turned to protecting her, giving her time to grow up. Maybe next year, or the next.

  Two years after that first kiss, during the apple harvest, Megan climbed into the tree where he was working. He lifted his head and suddenly she was before him, the late fall day so crisp it snapped against his skin.

  The sounds of birds and human chatter from neighboring trees fell away as she came close to him. She filled every one of his senses: the rank tang of her sweaty T-shirt, the sweet girl smell of her bare arms, the tomboy scent of her worn-out sneakers and dirty neck. Her breath, ripe with apples, her skin hot and dry, lips chapped, hair littered with bits of leaves.

  He noted that she did not smile in triumph. She was not playacting. She waited, not knowing how he would react.

  She was daring him, he realized. Choosing her moment. Daring him to make a move.

  He gathers paper and paints. A brush wide enough you could paint a house with it. He wishes he had dirt to apply to this board; he imagines cornfields, the ground softening in spring rains, a sense of motion, escape.

  He crushes charcoal, stirs it into thick
paint. Picks up the brush in his left hand. And begins.

  After the other students leave, Anna joins Billy at a table by the window to look at some of his field journals. She pages through them slowly.

  “These are so alive.”

  He turns away, suddenly agitated, on the verge of anger. He wants to slap those books shut and get the hell out of here.

  He looks up to find her watching him.

  “Can you pick up a pencil like this?” She shows him a four-fingered hold, then three. He has to decide if he will play this game or not.

  He crosses to the window, watches as Maeve Alsop leaves the bank across the street, stopping to tie a scarf over her hair. She looks thin and almost girlish in her red coat and heels. Until you see how grief hunches her shoulders, lines her face. She seems fragile and terribly alone.

  “Billy . . . ”

  He takes the pencil, can almost manage to hold it, but can’t use it.

  “But the other night you could hold the charcoal and use it some,” she says.

  “I could push it across the paper, or pull it, but there was no freedom, no . . . ”

  “Line,” she finishes for him. “Has there been improvement?”

  “Some. It’s slow.”

  “Could you spend a year exploring other media?”

  “A year?”

  “How long since your last surgery?”

  “Two months.”

  “That’s not long.”

  “First surgery was in December,” he says. “Feels like forever.”

  “It must have been pretty bad.”

  “Like I said, for me it’s about . . . ”

  “A hyper-identification with the natural world.”

  “I don’t feel the same anyplace else,” he says. “Except when I’m flying. And being cut off like this . . . ”

  “I can’t fix it. But I can give you space to explore. Here, if you want. If you’re interested in sculpture, I’ll get in touch with my friend Ron Crosby.”

  “How long will it take to gain some skill left-handed?”

  “That depends on how determined you are. And you have to let yourself draw like a five-year-old again.”

  “That’s a tall order.”

  “Without judgment.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s not failure,” she says. “It’s learning. It’s progress.”

  “I wish I didn’t need it so much. Or miss it so much.”

  “Come and draw with us. Or paint. Just get your hands moving. For a few hours a day. Be patient. See what happens.”

  Jack has been sitting at the kitchen table since 3 A.M., having given up on sleep. His wife and daughter sleep in the rooms above him; his son has still not come home. A glass of water sits on the table next to his tattered prayer book. Propped against the butter dish is a postcard from his brother Trevor. Finally. He’s found work on the docks in Savannah, Georgia. No phone number. No return address.

  Here in the dark, in the presence of the coal stove, the whisper of pines outside the window, Jack Flynn is struggling back to prayer. The distance he needs to travel seems insurmountable to him, from rejection of God or any idea of God, to a profound hunger for God. But hunger and desire are not faith. Anger is not the way, either, though he is so full of anger some days it scares him.

  What a crime, that another war should erupt in time to give his sons their own war, and take his sons from him, one teetering on the edge of living and he, their father for God’s sake, unable to protect his own children in any real way. The shame of his personal failures claws at him, the failures of his generation, his government, his church, and the price, again, in his own lifetime, of youth and valor, squandered in the mud and jungles. Dear God, erupts from his mouth on a daily basis, how can you ask this of us again?

  He and Marion, he has to admit, were complicit in their sons’ decisions to serve. He thinks of the endless conversations around the dinner table where they found themselves arguing against their own self-interest. Sure, there were deferments; yes, you could find a way to dodge your responsibility. But what about sacrifice, doing the right thing, even when it cost you something? If his sons did not do their part, someone else’s sons would have to go in their place.

  All you had to do was look down the street and see the boys who would end up going, who didn’t have the option of college, or some of the other less honorable deferments.

  Jack opens his prayer book, though he has no need to be reminded of the confiteor, the forgiveness of sins, and bows his head.

  Billy gets dropped off at the top of the driveway by the college girl he’s just dry humped in the back of her father’s car. She’s drunk and sloppy but not so drunk and sloppy she lets him get her pants off. He slips halfway down the driveway, falls to one knee, recovers, wishes he were drunker, maybe dead drunk, passed out, blacked-out drunk.

  Girls soothe him, their soft bodies, glossy hair, the touch of their hands, the dance they dance between innocence and debauchery, between yes and no. It doesn’t last. Alcohol is much more reliable.

  He slips his shoes off on the porch and lets himself in the back door. Trips against the doorjamb, curses softly, and starts to cross through the kitchen before he realizes that his father is sitting in the dark.

  “Dad . . . ?”

  Jack swallows his first flash of anger; takes in the smell of a woman, of cigarettes and spilled beer.

  “Come and sit with me for a minute.”

  Billy turns the light on over the stove and immediately wishes he hadn’t.

  “What are you doing up? Not waiting for me, I hope?”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Jack admits.

  “Runs in the family.”

  “Not long until dawn anyway. You know me.”

  Flanagan comes in from the living room. Yawns, stretches, curls up on Billy’s feet.

  Billy sees his father’s hand on his prayer book, a morning ritual, his thumb rubbing the worn leather, and is surprised when Jack reaches out and takes his hand.

  He registers the unfamiliarity of his father’s touch, his hands layered with calluses, the strength of them. They sit quietly until Billy remembers where his hands have been, cupping that girl’s pearly round bottom, and pulls away; his chair scraping across the linoleum.

  “You might lay off the sauce,” Jack says.

  “I know.”

  “It’s not helping.”

  “I’ve been trying,” Billy says. “Stopped drinking during the week—for the most part—and then I just hit it harder on the weekend. Some days it’s all I’m good for.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Feels true. Did you ever . . . ”

  “I did. Until your mother threatened to leave me.”

  “She did not.”

  “I was a scary son of a bitch when I was drinking. And it didn’t stop the nightmares. It made them worse.”

  Flanagan rolls over, begs to have her belly scratched.

  “I know you’re thinking about leaving us,” Jack says.

  Startled, Billy covers by getting up to get a cigarette.

  “It’s all right, you know. Your mother and I have been expecting it.”

  He sits again, antsy, his legs jittering under the table.

  One of the trashcans tips over with a crash.

  “Those damn raccoons!” Billy crosses to the back door; Flanagan follows him, pushing at the screen.

  “Leave it ’til morning.”

  “It’ll be all over the yard.”

  “Five minutes with a rake.”

  Jack joins Billy, puts his arm around him. Billy allows himself the comfort of his father’s touch and strength and belief, wishes he could bottle it, sup at this table until he feels whole again. All that communion promises. Bless me, Father . . .

  “T
alk to me . . . ”

  “I wish I could.”

  “Forgive yourself, son. Whatever happened. Let it go.”

  Rosie’s baby gets himself born two weeks early, following a labor so brief Rosie and Nick barely make it to the hospital. William Matthew Bliss has Rosie’s long black eyelashes, Nick’s cleft chin, and Billy’s blue eyes.

  Billy and Nell drive to the hospital in whatever car or truck they can get their hands on. They bring flowers, donuts, gum and mints and chocolate. Billy spends hours holding the baby, carefully cradling his nephew’s head in his hands.

  Nell watches her brother, so gentle with this baby in his arms. Can’t stop herself: thinks of Megan, thinks of Dorset Street, all that might have been and is not. That baby would be almost two. Boy or girl, she wonders almost every day. Shakes it off when she sees that Billy is quiet in this room as he has not been since getting home. At rest, almost at peace.

  Rosie teases him: “Since when do you like babies so much?”

  “Why’d you name him after me?” he asks.

  “Why do you think?”

  “He’ll be everybody’s favorite,” Nell says.

  “Just like Billy,” Rosie adds. “Mark my words.”

  When Jack gets home from the Ag Station Monday evening, Marion is at the kitchen table paying bills. He kisses her; she smiles and returns to the checkbook.

  “Let me finish this.”

  He draws a glass of water from the tap, picks up the paper, steels himself for the bad news and body count, as if you can conduct a war by counting casualties. Four hundred and fifty civilians killed in Saigon during Viet Cong raids throughout the city, the highest weekly death toll to date. And a glimmer of good news: The Senate is poised to repeal the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. About bloody time.

  He looks out the kitchen window at the side yard, his vegetable garden just beginning to green. They’ve been so busy and preoccupied, he barely remembers planting the garden.

  Pushing open the back door, he sits on the porch steps, rolls his shoulders to ease the stiffness from the day’s work. He’s a man who likes the comfort of his routines, and there’s been nothing routine about their lives since Billy got home.