JUNE 18, 1956
Birds,
I go to barn dances, because I love to dance. What God doesn’t exist in that boot sole on pine floor, in that spinning? I don’t go to church, despite my sister’s urgent pleas. My mother died when I was nine years old; why would I go to church and pray to that cold God? My God is in the tree roots, in the creek song, in the smell of wild mushrooms and the potent scent of herbs. My God is in the face of Otie—God face—Owl face—Moon face—One-Eyed—and in the way he looks at me, silent, neck turning. His sharp talons. His forever hunger. Name that God to me and I will name my God to you.
MY GOD IS IN THE MUSIC, TOO—FIDDLE, BASS, GUITAR, drum. My God is in the sweat and sway, the touch and the turning. And so I go to the dances.
I leave Otie in the cabin in his box against the wall. Two mice a day—that’s what he needs. I have live traps set up all along the foundation and along the stone walls. I pull the mice out by their tails, whisper thank you in their ears, hand them to Otie, who lunges, devouring.
I ask Adele how to say thank you in her language, and she tells me it’s oliwni. “Oliwni,” I whisper in the mouse’s petrified ear.
I ask Adele the word for owl and she tells me it’s gohkohkhas. “Gohkohkhas,” I say to Otie, “take care of yourself, my friend. I would take you dancing if I could, but they would call me a loon.” Otie blinks back, long and slow.
I slip out of my blue jeans and into an old dress of my sister’s. Peach-colored silk, pearl buttons, a stain on the hip and a rip up the side I’ve mended with crude stitches.
Will you ever learn to sew? My sister has asked me for years. My quick answer, always with a smile: no.
I put my hair in two braids and don my wool hat.
I put my boots on and take a sip of whiskey and say, “How do I look?” to Otie, who blinks from his crate, serene and mum.
I walk down the hill and catch a ride with Hazel and Stephen. My sister brings a chicken pot pie, a Jell-O mold, and a carafe of coffee. She eyes me and my dress sidelong: “You’re wearing that?”
I smile. Touch the soft tip of my sister’s nose. The cool line of it. She turns away, starts the car, drives.
I turn around to talk to Stephen. Six years old and moss-colored eyes like his dad’s. He is grinning at me. I am grinning at him. He asks where Otie is, and I tell him I left him at home with the stars for company. That he would be terrified by the dancing—think we’d all gone mad. I touch Stephen’s knee and ask if he will dance with me tonight. He shrugs. Smiles. Shakes his head.
I tell him that Adele told me, not long ago, a story about a woman who married an owl, and that I want to tell him the story sometime. That I think he will like it.
“The woman who married an owl?” He beams, showing off his crooked teeth, the new gaps there.
“Oh yes. And it might be me. It might just be a story about me!” I wink at him and turn back toward the open road. I roll my window down and take off my hat and put my head out and feel the wind in my face and in my eyes and I call out in Otie’s song—hoo, hoo, who-cooks-for-you!—to the dimming night air.
“Get your head back in here,” my sister says. I reach over and pinch her thigh. Turn back to wink at Stephen, laughing in the backseat.
LEX IS THE ONE WHO PLAYS THE FIDDLE. THE ONE WITH the fern-colored eyes, faint rims of black. When he plays, it is like his body becomes untied from this earth except for one electric wire that runs from his left toe to the top of his head. He spins around that wire, rocking this way and that, shaking, bending, flowing and flowering. Most of the time his eyes are closed, but sometimes he looks up at the dancers, and when he does he grins, and that grin is like a lightbulb exploding in that wooden room in which we dance, in which the men are so taut and the women so stiff, their faces contained, but in that flashing bulb, for an instant, we all look so beautiful, I think I might break open into something I was not before—a hawk, an ember, the petals of a beach rose, strewing. Then he closes his eyes again, and the music plays on, and I squeeze the arms of the man who is holding me and let my whole body surrender to his rhythm and his strength, and we spin.
Oh, the way the music draws lines of alizarin, lines of crimson around that square room! The way you can follow those lines with your eyes closed and climb into the heart of another person, the maker of the music, drifting out in spirals amid the pine walls of a pine-floored room.
I’m nothing like the ladies in this town in my crudely stitched silk dress, my men’s boots, my fedora. I’m nothing like the ladies with their Junior Ladies’ Community Club, the ones who bake pies for good causes and dress in nice, freshly sewn flowered dresses. Lena, I can hear my dead mother say every time I step out the door, her voice echoed in my sister’s. The tone of their voices make me pause: full of burnt molasses and smoke—a peculiar hunger.
But oh, how I love to dance! This dress I don so it can swing, soft silk that twirls up and over my boots and about my knees. I love to hold men and have them spin me around, their muscles tight around my arms and back, my braids whipping across both our faces. That spinning makes me laugh, and that laughing makes heads turn, but what do I care? I don’t. What would caring be but a tether keeping us from the unhinged future that is free, Otie?