MAY 17, 1956
Dearest Pines—
My sister’s husband’s eyes are the color of moss, the color of fern. I’ve never seen eyes that color, certainly nowhere in this town or on this mountain. Earth-colored, speckled with light. I’m living in what used to be my grandfather’s hunting camp, one room made of hemlock and spruce, still dank with the smell of whiskey and deer hides, a place where I keep my bird books and this notebook and the photographs I cut out of Outdoor Life and Field & Stream. The Battle of Taejon took my father, and Lex, my sister’s husband, came back from that war distant, drinking too much, averse to shoveling shit and milking cows. Who wants anything to do with a world like that? Sick with killing—nuclear.
My place? Wool blankets hung over the windows to keep out the drafts in winter, a battery-operated radio that plays Little Richard and Patsy Cline and Louis Armstrong. Buckets of creek water lined up near the door, and Otie, my one-eyed barred owl, found on Route 100, hit by a truck and barely breathing. I brought him home on a cool night in March, built him a nesting box from an old apple crate, and here he is, two months later, one-eyed, unable to fly, fervently alive.
“Fervently alive, Otie,” I call out. He purrs. “He” because he’s smaller than others I’ve seen; according to my bird book, males are significantly smaller than females.
And so it is just he and I, and these letters I chicken-scratch, while Satchmo sings “Mack the Knife” on the radio.
“Mouse!” I call out, laughing and handing Otie a live one, pulled from the trap, by the tail. He swallows it whole, blinks his thank-you. In the daytime: clings to my shoulder wherever I go. The barn, the fields, the woods. Anywhere but near houses or towns—their cool stares and many eyes. Their imposing expectations. Every one of which I’ve failed.
I avoid my sister’s house below, too. Its polished floors and clean lines and Lex’s fiddle on the back porch late at night—one-hundred-year-old melodies leaking up into the sky.
I’m like the three-legged coyote that lives nearby, the one that crosses the field in the evening, sticks to the darker edges.
Like this morning. Dawn, mist rising out of the valley, over the sunburnt trees, over the orchard and Silver Creek and the pines—you, my friends—who stand upright at the top of the hill.
“Good morning!” I call out, stretching. White pines: straight-backed ladies, winsome. You bend with the wind, sing in the strongest storms, smell like earth when the sun shines and like sugar when it rains. Hear that? Like sugar when it rains.
“What am I good for, my friend?” I ask Otie, who blinks and asks the trees. Me: twenty-seven years old. One wandering eye that won’t behave.
I laugh. Bring my cup of coffee—black, no sugar—to the granite slab outside my door, Otie by my side. The coffee burns my lips; I rub them together, feel the chaff there. Tip my head back to face the sun. A bear was here last night circling the trash can, sniffing the food-scrap pit. Her muskiness still in the air. Otie hops across the yard until he finds her scat, full of acorns and last fall’s apple drops, steaming near the outhouse door.
“Good work, Otie,” I call out, laughing.
Smoke rises from the farmhouse below. And faint but undeniable: the sound of a fiddle. He must be drunk at dawn.
“Go to sleep, Lex,” I whisper toward the trees. You shiver in response. Shake your heads. Say nothing.