AUGUST 6, 1956
Baby Bird—
It’s the hour before dawn I love best; rooster, crow, birdsong, the sky ink blue. I step outside and the grass is dew-wet, the world’s waking face foggy with mist. Lex is here sometimes beside me, his body golden amid the tangled sheets, his sleeping face shadowed with dreams. Hawks? Wars? Beloved, what rages in there?
Sinners we are. Black with night. Black coffee, sweetened beans. I bring the cup to his lips, the meat to his sleeping fingers. I say, “Home, love. ’Tis best you go home.” Oh what pools of guilt, those moss-green eyes! I take my finger and run it down his face, down the edge of his stubbled jaw. I say, shhh, and slip my finger between his lips. Beautiful face. Crow face. The punctured lives of men and women. Otie eyeing us from the corner.
Once Lex is gone, the morning becomes all mine—mist rising, the field alive with grasshoppers. This cabin is a hamlet, this cabin is a cave. Swing low, sweet chariot. I put bread crumbs out on the wooden table in the yard, and my friends the birds come—robins, chickadees, sparrows, jays. Chirrup, chirrup, cheep cheep. The black coffee cools and tastes even better. A sluice along the tongue. The blood wakens, fully alive to the world.
And then that sweet child. Stephen! Coming up the hill. Long-legged, towheaded, barefooted.
To the room that still smells like his father, though he doesn’t know that.
“Look!” he exclaims, a skull of some kind in his outstretched hands. I throw my arms to the air, throw my arms around him. “Oh, Stephen,” I say, “It’s a bona fide treasure! Muskrat? Otter?” He says he found it near the creek, its hue sun-washed, spotted with green mildew.
We wash it in cool water. We find a spot on my wooden shelf for it to sit.
“Come back and visit it anytime, Stevie-o. It’s your animal spirit,” I say. “You muskrat, you otter.” He turns and runs back down the path, singing at the top of his two-pint lungs.
I go to Adele, tell her I am deathly afraid. That love has come over me like a sickness. She gives me herbs—turtlehead and black ash, dark and bitter. “Make a tea,” she says, “and drink every morning.” It works: a week later my blood comes pouring. I kiss this woman’s dark and wrinkled hands that smell of Dawn soap and herbs and tobacco. I bring her a bottle of whiskey, a six-pack of Coke.
Adele tells me a story about M-ska-gwe-demoos, a swamp-dwelling woman, dressed in moss with moss for hair, who cries alone in the forest and is considered dangerous.
“Don’t be M-ska-gwe-demoos,” Adele says, laughing, shaking her head, cracking open one of the bottles. She says, “Love is risky stuff.”
“Have you ever been in love?” I ask.
The minute I say it I want to pull the words back in. But they have wings—a flock of red-winged blackbirds—making their way over the roof of the house, over the hoods of the tallest pines. Adele grows still beside me. Drinks her Coke slowly. Tells me that when the roundups happened she was sixteen.
She grips the counter’s edge, drinks her Coke empty, tells me that she was taken to a hospital and cannot have babies. “Ha,” she says, a near howl in her laugh. “Just like that.”
She goes to the stove, brings me another cup of dark, steaming tea that smells like trees and dirt and earth.
I bow my head to her knee. Say, “I am so very sorry.”
“Mmm,” she says. Her eyes are cold. Dark stones under river water. “Lena.” She touches my wool-coated arm, lays her warm and callused hand there for a long minute. “Don’t mess around.”