22

Mobbing

Territorialism is pronounced in some species and in others absent altogether.

—G. Gordon’s Field Guide to the Birds of the Pacific Northwest

The Halloween Frankie was four and Patrick was five, Grammy Genevieve had made them Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox costumes for Halloween. Frankie watched her carefully cut the tissue paper patterns and affix them to the fabric with neat lines of straight pins—a fuzzy blue polyester suit and ears for Babe and red-and-white checked cotton for Paul Bunyan’s lumberjack shirt. Patrick wore his blue jeans and a stocking cap and bearded his face with a burnt cork. Frankie wore her patent leather church shoes to look like hooves. As they posed for a photo, Frankie thought she looked more like a blue dog than an ox and would have preferred to be a lumberjack too. But she didn’t want to hurt Grammy’s feelings, so she hadn’t said anything.

Judith drove them to the tavern for Downtown Trick or Treat, a Hood River tradition. Frankie was thrilled to be outside at night for the first time. When Patrick announced he wanted to hand out candy at the tavern instead of trick or treating, it didn’t occur to her not to go. She simply headed out the door with her laughing mother on her heels. Frankie insisted they stop at every single doorway on Oak Street, including the library, which was at the top of a steep set of stairs, and Sheppard’s Farm and Tractor, which was far enough between lights that most kids wouldn’t make the effort. Back at the tavern she divided her spoils equally, giving half to Patrick. It was only fair, she said, as she’d told people she was collecting for her brother too.

“That’s my girl! Oxlike persistence!” Her father had laughed, pushing a cup of cocoa across the bar. At the time Frankie hadn’t known what it meant, but she liked the sound of the word. Persistent. Later her professors called her that too, Dr. Grant included. Maybe she did have an oxlike propensity to just keep going. Persistent. The word ever after evoked for her the color of Babe the Blue Ox, the memory of fuzzy fleece, the sound of her black patent leather shoes tapping the sidewalk as she hurried between the lampposts of Oak Street with a chill October wind blowing the leaves off the trees.

She remembered that now, reading the letter from Oregon State University that Jerry brought with the mail. She stood on the dock and scanned the page, holding her breath and feeling a spark of hope.

Dear Ms. O’Neill,

We are pleased to offer you a position in the 1999 doctoral program at our Corvallis campus. Your persistence and dedication to your research is what we look for in our graduate students . . .

It was everything she’d hoped for—a chance to study with some of the region’s best avian biologists, a tuition waiver, and a teaching position to support herself. There was even something about graduate student housing. And at the bottom:

We look forward to welcoming you into our community in the winter quarter of 1999.

Sincerely,

Dr. John Twyhee

She tucked the letter in her pocket and walked back up to the house, where she plugged in the coffee pot and paced the kitchen. The OSU offer was perfect, but she knew they couldn’t hire her without the official completion of her master’s. She looked at her piles of notebooks on the kitchen table and her revision that she’d been ignoring for days now as she’d distracted herself with Charlie Crow and her notes from Marzluff’s study. There was only one way forward. She’d submit her manuscript, write her formal letter of completion to her committee, and request a date for her defense. It was all she could do, and the next move would be theirs. Dr. Grant might want to ignore her, but surely her other committee members would help move things along?

She fired up the computer and opened the latest draft of her thesis, “Family Ties: The Role of Pair Bonding in Habitat Rejuvenation for the Spotted Owl.” She checked her revision outline to gauge what she’d completed. Tending to Charlie Crow and rereading Marzluff’s research had felt like playing hooky, but the time away from her manuscript had sharpened her focus. As she settled into the work, she found the flow she needed. Methodically, she completed Dr. Wood-Smith’s edits, double-checked Dr. Andreas’s suggestions and Dr. Grant’s notes—which were mostly about excising her original research. She worked long hours for two days, stopping only to make a sandwich or heat up a can of soup. Time disappeared and she lost herself in the process. She went to bed the second night knowing it was the best she could do and hoping it was enough.

The next morning dawned cool and cloudy. After breakfast, she headed down the lake with fresh copies of her thesis, letters to her individual committee members and the department, and a response to Dr. Twyhee at OSU accepting the offer. At the post office, she handed everything across the counter to Donna. It felt ceremonial, but of course Donna couldn’t know that.

Frankie puttered back up the lake slowly, feeling at loose ends now that this monumental task was complete. The lake water was quiet and the mountain heavier with snow. She considered going fishing at the mouth of the Windy River and tried to remember where she’d seen the rods and tackle. By the time she landed the boat and located the fishing gear in the back of the pump house, it had begun to rain. She decided to wait until it lightened. She lay on the couch and stared out at the lake as it dimpled with raindrops. She tried to rest in the feeling of accomplishment or at least relief, but a familiar anxiety crept over her. Frankie never knew what do with time on her hands. She spent the afternoon cleaning the cottage. She put all her owl research and notebooks in boxes and tucked them in her grandparents’ old room. She swept the floor and did the dishes, which had piled up considerably. She washed her clothes in the ancient washing machine and hung them to dry when the rain quit. She split more wood, and when she couldn’t think of any other chores, she went inside and tried to read one of Patrick’s dog-eared novels. But she couldn’t settle.

Her eyes strayed to the corkboard covered in crow photos that she’d left propped up against the wall. She recalled her first day helping Marzluff last summer, the feeling of sun hot on her back as she’d crouched behind a laurel bush holding the boom of a microphone. A group of sorority girls walked by and, startled by the sight of Frankie crouched there, had shrieked and clutched each other. They laughed as they hurried away, and Frankie knew they were laughing at her, but she didn’t care. She was exactly where she wanted to be.

Marzluff’s research began with crows’ acuity with facial recognition. But beyond that he’d shown that the crows on the UW campus also taught other crows to recognize certain faces as dangerous. They were communicating something specific to each other. But how?

Frankie had studied the crow vocalizations for hours that summer. She’d listened to recordings of threat calls collected from various crows around the Pacific Northwest as well as the crows in Marzluff’s study. After some time, she became convinced she could discern a distinct pitch, tone, and duration to the call of Marzluff’s caveman-mobbing crows. She developed a simple theory: The UW crows didn’t just recognize the caveman mask wearers; they had developed a unique threat call for them too.

She worried Marzluff might not welcome her idea. After all, she wasn’t connected to his lab. Just a grad student on loan, an extra pair of hands. But she worked up the courage to tell him, and he congratulated her and told her to keep working on it. He invited her to come talk it over any time before revealing it to Dr. Grant.

She’d certainly bungled that, hadn’t she?

At the kitchen table, she flipped open the notebook with her notes on Charlie Crow. She’d documented his behavior out of habit, and her curiosity about crows had been renewed. She chuckled, remembering Aiden’s fascination with the crow recordings. That curious boy had tucked himself against the couch, pressing the headphones to his ears. What was he hearing? she wondered. What was he thinking? You could feel the bright spark of his mind within his silence. She pulled the headphones on and as the afternoon shadows lengthened over the lake, she immersed herself in the world of crows talking.

The next morning, the barometer pointed to “Fair,” which boded well for the berry-picking excursion she’d suggested to Anne. The berry pails were not in the root cellar, so Patrick must have left them in the store. Frankie climbed down the trail to the dock and stood at the door to the little building. She pulled her key ring out of her pocket.

“The keys to the kingdom!” her father had said, handing her this same key ring on her sixteenth birthday. She could still read his quirky left-handed printing on each key: “Root Cellar,” “Pump House,” “Cottage,” “The Peggotty,” “Store,” “Outboard.” There were unmarked duplicates and keys to various padlocks that had gone missing. But Frankie knew each key intimately and could have found the store key with her fingers without looking. She unlocked the door and pushed it open with her shoulder.

The old wooden door sighed into the low-ceilinged room, and Frankie flipped on the lights. A fine layer of dust covered the wooden counter, and the sunlight caught a tangle of spiderwebs in the far window. The refrigerator door yawned wide and empty. She knew the store hadn’t opened that summer. Patrick had been busy with his clerkship. And Jack—a knot rose in her throat, and she made herself finish the thought. Jack hadn’t been there either.

She found the berry pails in the storage cupboard where she thought they’d be. She pulled them down and shut the cupboard and looked around the small room. She could almost see her grandmother at the counter selling pints of fresh huckleberries, wild spring morels, or early fall chanterelles. Grammy Genevieve in her signature overalls and flowered chambray shirts charmed her customers—the Beauty Bay neighbors as well as day-trippers who came up to fish and swim on the north end of the lake. Later it was Patrick sitting on the stool there, usually with a paperback open on the counter. Like Genevieve he was friendly and a good listener.

She recalled the summer Patrick had taken over the store ten years ago. It was the summer after Genevieve died—right before Frankie’s junior year in high school. Judith had her real estate license by then and announced she’d be staying in town the entire season.

“Frankie can run the store, and Patrick can help you with the maintenance,” she’d said to Jack.

Jack objected, which was rare. The discontents of their marriage were more commonly about Judith insisting Jack do or stop doing something and Jack breezily ignoring her. But this was different—Judith opting out of established routine completely. He and Judith had such a fight about it that they didn’t speak for three days. Things eventually blew over. Jack, pretending there had been no slamming of doors and throwing of tools in the garage, sidled up to Judith one night as she washed the dishes and put his arms around her.

“Look out, Hood River,” he said. “Judith O’Neill is an absolute shark!”

She leaned back into his chest. A truce. She still did that then, Frankie remembered with a pang of sorrow.

Jack might have felt his wife’s abandonment keenly, but for Patrick and Frankie, those summers had been good ones. Patrick knew Frankie hated the store, with its requisite chitchat. Frankie knew she was just as good if not better at helping their father with caretaking duties. So they swapped jobs. Jack didn’t comment and nobody mentioned it to Judith. The summer residents grew accustomed to the sight of Jack O’Neill and his gangly daughter showing up with a toolbox and ladder to work on their houses. And on the weekends, when Jack was at the tavern, Frankie worked by herself. Patrick ran the store just as well as their grandmother had, if not better. He brought in more fishing gear and things he knew kids would like—ice cream bars, soda, and chips. Like Grammy, he sold fresh berries and wild mushrooms and could offer advice on which flies to use for fishing and what spots on the lake the fish might be biting.

Now Frankie set the berry pails on the counter and opened the fly-fishing cabinet to see what flies Patrick had left. Unsurprisingly, the sparse inventory was full of summer flies. She shut the cabinet and leaned against it, looking out the dirty window at the water.

She had loved those long summer days at the lake with her dad and brother. The sun rose early and set so late the sky would still be greeny-yellow at 9 p.m. In a flash of memory, she recalled sitting on the dock outside the store with Jack and Patrick at the end of a hot July day. She was tired after a long afternoon helping Jack hang gutters on the Condons’ house. Jack was telling some joke to a fisherman who’d stopped to buy ice and the guy was laughing. Everyone loved his jokes. Jack cracked open a cold Rainier. Talking to the guide, he set the beer down and carried on with his story.

Later, after he’d gone up to the cottage, Frankie noticed the can of beer sweating in the sunshine. She rolled it between her palms and raised it to her mouth. The first cool, bitter gulp foamed out her nose. She hated the taste but drank it anyway. After that, she would sneak a beer from time to time, and Jack hadn’t seemed to notice. Patrick was the one who brought it up. One Saturday morning as Frankie restocked the beer cooler, she made a joke about setting aside a sixer for herself. Patrick looked up from the inventory list.

“You should be careful with that, Frank,” he said.

Her body flushed with embarrassment.

“You’re just jealous,” she said.

Patrick shook his head and returned to the inventory list.

“Nah,” he said. “But we’re Irish, you know. I’m pretty sure Grandpa Ray was an alcoholic. And it runs in families. Just something I think about.”

Frankie scoffed, annoyed that her big brother had ideas that never occurred to her. It was years before she understood what he meant. Now that she understood so clearly, she wondered why it had taken so long to grasp the truth about it all.

Unwillingly her thoughts turned to last Thanksgiving, that terrible day her family had unraveled. It had begun as a nice afternoon. Judith had made an amazing meal with Patrick’s help, and her parents seemed to be getting along. Frankie wasn’t saying much but she always felt quiet around her mother. She listened to Judith talk about work and Jack describe the lineup for the annual post-Thanksgiving poker tournament at Hank’s. Judith was bragging about Patrick’s raise at work, and Patrick downplayed it with his typical modesty. Then Jack jokingly asked for a loan to set up a second tavern in the Hood River Heights.

“Make an easier commute for your old man,” he’d said.

He was joking, but something about the way he said it made Frankie look closely at him. Four years older than her mother, Jack O’Neill was only fifty-two. But while Judith had the energy of someone half her age, Jack sounded tired, and his eyes were puffy and red.

Judith stood up with the gravy tureen and marched into the kitchen.

“I’m kidding, my darling!” her husband called after her. “I want to retire and take you to Aruba!”

He hummed the Beach Boys song and waved his napkin in the air over his plate, waggling his eyebrows at Patrick and Frankie. Judith returned and thumped the tureen down.

“You know I don’t want to go to Aruba, Jack O’Neill,” she said, her voice low and tense.

Frankie looked at Patrick, who rolled his eyes. This was not a new argument. Judith had long been after Jack to sell the tavern and invest in something else. Jack put her off, laughing and noncommittal. But now he looked angry too, which was unlike him. He took a pull on his beer and set the bottle down hard.

“It’s difficult to track just what you want, my dear,” he said.

Frankie rose with the water pitcher. Anything to get out of the room.

“Mary Frances O’Neill, sit down,” Judith commanded.

Frankie sat. Patrick stared at the ceiling. Judith crossed her arms and glared at her husband.

“You know what I want,” Judith said. “I want you to sell that godforsaken building.”

Jack tried to laugh her off, but she persisted.

“I want us to build something new at the waterfront. It’s a chance for you to rise above where you came from.”

“Where I came from?” Jack sputtered. “What’s wrong with where I came from?”

Judith gestured around her.

“Look around you, Jack! You can do better than this. You should do better than this!”

Grandpa Ray had built the little house in the 1940s. He and Genevieve had given it to Jack and Judith after Frankie was born, and the joke had long been that it was their starter home. Judith had lost her sense of humor about that joke years ago, as the little house had not aged well.

Jack’s face flushed red.

“My father built this place with his own two hands!” he said, his voice rising. “He wasn’t ashamed of honest work, and neither am I!”

Judith planted her palms on the table and leaned forward, her voice low and furious.

“Your father was a lazy, unambitious dreamer who disappointed everyone around him.”

“My father—” Jack roared.

“Your father drank away the best years of his life!” Judith shouted.

Frankie looked at Patrick. His face betrayed nothing. How long had they been fighting like this?

“He did not—” Jack began.

“Oh, come on, Jack!” Judith interrupted. “Your father was an alcoholic and probably his father before him!”

And then she said the thing they never said.

“It’s part of your family history, and it’s part of you! You need to face it, Jack. You’re an alcoholic, just like your father!”

Jack looked like he’d been slapped, and Frankie could barely look at him.

“Don’t let it ruin everything for us. Pull yourself together,” Judith said. “And just sell the damn building!”

Jack sat back and gave a short laugh. He wiped his mouth with his napkin, folded it, and lay it on the table. His anger had left him as quickly as it had come.

“Well, Judith, that isn’t going to happen,” he said in his normal voice.

He looked at Judith with such love. Couldn’t she see that? That pained Frankie as much as how sad and old he sounded. He ran a hand through his hair.

“Oh, Judith, surely you know,” he said. “Are you going to make me say it out loud, then?”

Judith stiffened and her face creased with anger.

Jack clasped his hands and leaned toward his wife.

“I will not be selling the River City Saloon, my dear,” he said. “Because the River City Saloon is not mine to sell.”

He paused.

“Judith, Dad left the building to Hank.”

The silence that followed was deafening. The drip of the faucet echoed off the walls and the clock ticked furiously. Judith stood up with the turkey platter, stalked to the kitchen, and slammed it down on the counter. Shards of china and turkey skittered across the floor as Judith walked out the back door.

Frankie never knew where her mother went that night, but she was not home in the morning when Frankie got up. She called Patrick’s and Judith wasn’t there either. Though her parents had argued in the past, this was different. Neither one of them had ever spent the night elsewhere. Everything felt blown apart, shattered like the Thanksgiving platter.

Judith had not returned by the time Frankie left for Seattle that afternoon, two days early. Jack drove her to the bus stop, and they didn’t talk about any of it. He didn’t try to cajole her into staying any longer, like he usually did. Something had gone terribly wrong in the family, and Frankie felt lost.

“I’m so proud of you, Frances,” he’d said, holding her by the shoulders and looking her in the eye. “You’ve no idea.”

When he hugged her, he felt somehow fragile, her once larger-than-life father, and it made her feel worse. She climbed on the bus, and he raised a hand in farewell as she found her seat. She remembered the sorrow in his face as he turned away, put his hands in his pockets, and walked down the empty sidewalk. She remembered it all, the last time she’d ever seen him alive.

Her heart felt heavy now with the memory of that day, of all the things she hadn’t said and wished she had. The time she’d lost by staying in Seattle for Christmas and Presidents’ Day weekend and Saint Patrick’s Day. Afraid of Judith’s anger, her parents’ fighting, avoiding the heartache. Until that terrible day Patrick had called to tell her their father was dead.

She turned away from the window and looked around the dusty store, once bright and happy and now so small and sad. Frankie shut the door and walked up the dock with the empty berry pails and felt the rush of grief.

Oh, Dad, she thought. Why’d you have to leave? Why now and why like this?