I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird

by Susan Cerulean

  In any case, I knew it was hard to care for him now. I thought back to a recent afternoon, when I was alerted to trouble by the sound of my father roaring from his bathroom: “NO!” he cried. “Panic! Panic!”

  One of my own paid caregivers blocked the light with her bulk. With plastic-gloved hands, talking loud, she was trying to pull Dad to his feet from the toilet.

  On Dad’s other side was nurse Danny, purposeful and determined to be swift, after a long morning of trying to address Dad’s impacted bowels, on and off and on and off the toilet. The twice-weekly suppository had been overlooked somehow, and five days of backed up waste had turned into immobile cement in his gut. Loud polka music issued from the CD player. There was too much going on in the room, a torrent of threatening sensation. I knew my father felt overpowered by the rush of caregiver instructions and his own physical discomfort.

  He could not make the connection between the administration of a suppository and the relief that would come soon after. His experience was of brutal attack. So from the seat of the toilet, Dad fought for his very life, an old lion in a cage. He wanted to be safe and to feel some sense of autonomy. Since he could not, he roared.

  I squatted before him, our faces level and our eyes locked, and tried to offer him a stream of translation and safety through my words.

  “Dad, it’s okay, you are safe, and I am right here to make sure of that, so please don’t yell anymore. Let’s get off the toilet, Danny is here to help us.” Sometimes I could help him get through the fear and violation, talk him through the procedure, insist on his okayness, override his panic and his instinct to fight.

  I could feel into the caregivers’ experience too: exhausted, tense, too many patients, and now this old man holding onto the metal chair rail when he simply needed to let go. What might I say or do in their positions?

  And I’d heard him yelling at them too.

  “Dad, I heard you call our caregiver a ratty bitch.”

  He laughed in astonishment. “I can’t believe it,” he said.

  “No,” I agreed. “You rarely call people names.”

  He thought a minute. “But she was forcing me to do something I didn’t want to do.”

  I wanted to keep these caregivers as allies and not project my judgment. The line wasn’t always clear. Especially when my father was fighting with people who had responsibility for his physical care but had too many patients to tend and could not move as slowly as he required.

  I needed to know who was hurting my father and to make it stop. Dad called her the “oink oink” person, because he said she called him a pig. Dad thought she was male, but I learned that she was a woman. I had met her before: she had very short hair and her voice was quite gruff, thus my father’s gender confusion. We had talked about her life, and she’d told me she worked double shifts in the facility, 3:00 to 11:00 p.m., then 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., four or more days a week. In the eight hours she had off, she looked after her three-year-old grandson at home.

  “I can’t imagine how you keep going!” I said. “Your schedule isn’t humanly possible!”

  “I get by on four hours of sleep,” she had told me. “But it’s better than the night shift at Walmart, where I used to work before this.” She was fifty-four years old, same as me. She earned $8.25 an hour, with no benefits and no paid time off for holidays or sick days. No wonder an old guy with his days and nights reversed sent her into a tailspin.

  I was lucky to catch a slack tide on my weekly survey trip to the spoil island, which made for an easy paddle across the river’s wide current. Only mid-May, but already so very hot. Sweat rolled down my neck and back, pasting my shirt to my skin. At either tip of the island, brown pelicans and terns loafed in good numbers, knee deep in the shallows.

  Last week, I’d hit the tern jackpot. The high mound of soil in the center of the island was dotted with nesting least terns and a few gull-billed. I’d assembled my spotting scope quickly, so that I could make a rough count and leave them alone, for they were panicked and let me know of their displeasure by circling and calling and dive-bombing my head. At least thirty birds protected nests. As soon as I’d tallied them and clicked off a few pictures on my phone to document eggs, I’d squirmed off the spoil hill and walked back to my boat. I’d been thinking about them ever since, how they scrapped with one another over nesting space, delivered small fish to their mates, kept a group watch for predators.

  Today I saved the center mound, the heart of the nesting tern territory, for last. When you survey nesting shorebirds, you watch for a spatial pattern. Least terns bound and rebound from the sand; that pattern is what cues you to locate the black heads of parents tending their eggs on the sand. The week before, I had counted thirty nesting pairs, along with several black skimmers and some gull-billed terns, and oystercatchers around the edge. All week long, I’d been replaying them in my mind.

  Never did I imagine the terns would be gone. But it was true. The interior of the island where spoil had been piled highest was swept clean of terns. For a moment I wondered if I had really seen them the week before. But I had a picture of eggs on nests to prove it, and bird poop on my hat besides. And there had been many, many pairs. Adjusting my binoculars, I studied the ground, pausing to look closely at bits of plastic and other detritus shining on the sand. Could I have mistaken that garbage for terns on the ground? No way. The least terns had been everywhere, dive-bombing, chattering, and warning me away. West to east, horizon to horizon, I scoured the hill with my scope.

  But there wasn’t a single tern on the mound. What had happened? Not for the first time I chastised myself: I lived too far away to guard them. But never in a million years did I think they’d all be gone.

  I raged across the river in my kayak, my heart beating wildly. Back in my truck, I dialed up Megan Lamb.

  “Such a huge bummer, Megan. There wasn’t a single least tern on the island just now,” I said. “You know I saw thirty birds on the ground incubating last week, but today there are none at all.”

  I could hear her intake of breath. She was disappointed too.

  “Why do you think?” I rushed along with my own train of thought. “Was Thursday’s rain enough to flood the nests, even up high on the spoil? Could it have been predators? Raccoon? What do you think?”

  “Oh, Sue, I’m afraid I can guess what happened,” Megan replied. “My worst fear. Last weekend, someone organized an event called Paddlejam, right there in Apalachicola. The idea was to try and break the world record of the number of kayaks rafted together. It was billed as a fundraiser for at-risk youth by the local Methodist churches.”

  She continued. “I received several frantic phone calls on Saturday saying that the kayakers were told to stage on our spoil island before they made their kayak raft. By the time I got there, the kayak raft had already happened and no one was on island. I hoped the crowd hadn’t been as bad as I imagined. Since the birds abandoned their nests, I’m afraid it was.”

  I dropped my forehead to the steering wheel of the truck, so hot it felt like a brand. It was a brand, the mark of the impotent, insufficient advocate.

  I knew that those paddlers harbored no desire to disrupt the nesting shorebirds on the spoil island. But there are too many of us humans, and we don’t (and don’t know how to) calculate the needs of other species as we go about our lives.

  I imagined the experience of those wild birds, nesting.

  We all watch. At least one of us is always alert for the different thing, for the potential threat. The scared part of me that wants to live sees the man when he’s only a dot crossing the water.

  And when the boat tracks a straight line through the shoving waves and the sucking tide toward our beach, then my heart begins to pound, and my worry wakes the bird next to me, and the one next to her. The black skimmers are the first to scramble to their feet on the sand and fly. We terns unhook the single foot we have tucked and lifted into our bodies, and we pull our heads from beneath our wings. The pelicans open
both eyes, not just one, and begin to shift their weight. And all of our hearts beat harder still.

  Because the boat is coming straight at us and its colors frighten us—flaming orange and bright green. And because there is a flashing stick the human uses to propel himself straight toward our place on the open sand where we rest and mate and tend our eggs. There is no other place for us besides this length of sand. And so our hearts hammer in our chests. The skimmers unfurl their wings and test the air so they will be prepared when the final panic, the lift-urge overcomes them.

  The man stands and unfolds his body from the boat. Nothing safe stands that tall on the sand, higher than the pelican’s beak yawning and stretching to the sun, higher and stiffer than a great blue heron, higher and more threatening than we can bear. A few of us tolerate the fear longer than others. Others jump into the air and swoop and turn, “Aa— a-raw, aa-a-raw,” we cry. And we will, all of us, leave our refuge, which no longer is one, because the man in the boat is pushing against our sand, the only place we can nest.

  Surely he will understand from our voices and the displacement of our bodies that we are scared and that he must leave. But he does not. He lifts his pant leg and pees on our place and then he drags his boat farther onto the sand. Our sand. He studies the signs that have been placed to protect us, but he misunderstands, or else he wants what he wants, more than he understands. Legions of us lift. Our flightless chicks scurry for cover, and we cannot protect them, nor our eggs, now baking in the sun.

  The man stretches his arms taller yet and surveys the beach. He pulls a tube of sunscreen from his pocket and sucks water from a bottle. Our voices are screaming and our blood is afraid and runs fast.

  The man does not find what he was looking for, or he is bored, and so he drags his boat and his paddle through our place and slides his boat back into the sea—this time.

  We are accustomed to the meander of the fins of dolphins in the water, and their leaping does not scare us, not even when they push mullet against the sand with their bodies. We accept the blood tax exacted by the eagle and the peregrine falcon. It is man and his dogs and the feral hogs he brought here that we may not survive.

  Every time a human intrudes in this way into our small colonies, a cost is exacted from our nervous systems. Who will bring the human into right relationship with all the other beings? Who will?

  How many, many times I have watched people walk right past protective barriers, right past the most beautiful interpretive signage we can create, straight into the tiny spaces we have managed to set aside for the wild birds to nest. Not everyone can be told what to do and then simply be left to their own devices. A commitment to kindness and respect has to come from some deeper cultural training; perhaps you have to be raised up in it. Somehow we must make this happen, because, as Kathleen Dean Moore has written, “This is the wonder-filled world that we are destroying, the lyric voices that we are silencing, the sanctity that we are defiling, at a rate and with a violence that cannot be measured.”

  Until people change their minds, deeply, deeply change, and understand and respect the equivalent needs of all species for life, all we can rely on is law enforcement. The enforcers—wildlife officers and volunteer stewards (and there are never enough of either)—are all we have to keep people out of the sacred nesting places. Without protection, ignorance and the desire to do whatever one pleases rule, and the bird or the old person suffers.

  “My heart sinks when the least terns arrive in April and begin breeding—or trying to,” a shorebird biologist told me recently. I understand his trepidation: the little birds’ pugnacity is no match for beach-driving trucks, dogs, fireworks, and every manner of human intrusion into their nesting beaches. Shorebirds and sea-birds are declining everywhere they exist, and some are already gone.

  Like so many wild birds, least tern populations were decimated by hunters who shot them and sold their feathers to adorn women’s hats. When the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed in 1918 and people began to change their attitudes toward conservation, least terns bounced back. But now, they are again so diminished by recreational, industrial, and residential development in their coastal breeding areas that they have been specially classified for protection in much of their North American range. No other wide-ranging North American tern has that unfortunate distinction.

  Not every beach-going human dishonors the birds, and not every overworked caregiver is cruel. I was particularly grateful for the attentive watchfulness and advocacy of our helper Esmine. She was one of the gentlest people I knew, with an intuitive heart and a great capacity for patience. She was in her late forties, a strong woman with a lovely face. One afternoon, she and I stood beside Dad, and together helped him roll on his side so that Alisha, a wound-care specialist, could address a painful bedsore that had developed on Dad’s left buttock.

  We had been talking, Esmine and I, about how to ensure that my father was checked for dryness and turned regularly in his bed during the night. We despaired of it ever happening. We knew the facility’s caregivers were paid minimum wage and overworked with no prospects of a raise. We knew many were rough and untrained, as well. Their voices were not soft.

  “I check on your dad when I’m here at night, to see that he’s kept dry,” Alisha said. “I keep these Landing girls on their toes,” she said. I heard the “charge nurse” in Alisha’s voice. I bet those workers jumped for her. Alisha was employed by a private company and was brought in as a consultant on hard-to-cure cases, like my dad’s bedsores. Her hair, dyed golden, swept up from one ear and jaw to join a complex bun on the other side of her head. She looked like a queen.

  In aspect, she was fierce, and in action, she was competent.

  Alisha said: “I do an extra check on all my patients when I’m here at night. I think, what if these were my father or mother?” But these weren’t Alisha’s parents, they were very old, well-to-do, white people. I was surprised; I didn’t know Alicia double-timed on night duty at the Landing. Dad yelped quietly as Alisha tended his wound.

  “How can you work all day traveling between nursing homes doing wound care and then work twelve-hour night shifts?” I asked Alisha.

  The two women exchanged a private glance: you do what you have to do. My friends and I compared notes about our sleep issues and our joint pains; too many of us had been treated for breast cancer, and most of us help with the care of our aging parents and grandchildren. But we took time off for vacations, and we had the resources we needed for health care. I so admired and loved Esmine and Alisha, who were as different from each other as any random pair of Caucasian women would be. I watched them carefully bandage Dad’s sore, and I sensed a common steel to their spines and a loving kindness in their hearts that I leaned into and longed for. I felt humbled, like a child, and I knew I was a member of privileged class with an unearned, softer path.

  CHAPTER 15

  Puppy Parade

  When we were children, our mother had taught us to hug and kiss and spoil a succession of family pets, in particular a pair of long-lived, poorly behaved German shepherds. Dad remembered those untrained animals for the trouble they caused in our neighborhood. So I was surprised when the Landing staff reported my father’s New Year’s resolution: to pat more dogs. They hoped he’d enjoy an annual event they called “Puppy Parade.”

  When I came to fetch him for the festivities, my father’s head drooped from his neck like a flower too heavy for its stalk. A strand of spittle formed a glistening cord to his chest. He slept like a stone in his chair. The kindest course of action would have been to let him rest, but I felt obliged to rouse him for the Puppy Parade.

  Within the circle of twenty-five residents and guests sat four or five new residents, women I’d never seen before in the facility. At least five we’d known had died during the last six months.

  “Dad, look!” I pointed out the parade contenders lining up in the foyer, a half dozen miniature dogs with nametags pinned to their costumes (Cinnamon and Milo and Ba
rnaby), leashed and low to the ground. “Love Train” blared over the yipping of the gathered pack. Tank, an extra-thick dachshund swathed in a camouflage cape, sniffed the nether regions of Sweetness, some kind of froufrou breed outfitted as a garnet-and-gold-clad cheerleader. This could be fun, a light moment in a dreary winter week.

  Dad turned to me. “Sue, I have to go to the bathroom. Now.” His voice was urgent. I felt my impatience rise. He was the guest of honor, after all. But since he received suppositories every three days to loosen his colon, I had to take his request seriously.

  I propelled my dad through the press of wheelchairs and walkers and costumed dogs and rolled him straight into his bathroom, facing the sturdy silver handgrip on the wall. He knew to grab the bar and pulled himself to his feet. I yanked the wheelchair out of the bathroom to give us working room. But Dad’s brain would not allow him to execute the pivot to the toilet; he could not release his grip.

  “Let go, Dad, let go,” I cajoled, pressing my hip against his to offer a physical cue. If he felt the porcelain commode at the back of his knees, I thought, he would feel safe enough to negotiate a forty-five-degree turn and sit. Instead, he did a deep knee bend in place, as if honoring the wall, still clutching the bar. Sweat prickled the back of my neck.

  “Dad, you need to turn,” I said.

  “I am, Sue, I am!” The connection between his will and his nerve endings was blocked or broken. I couldn’t reach the red button that would enable me to summon help without letting go of Dad. This maneuver was all on us.

  I pushed my hair away from my face, clamped the back of Dad’s shirt in case he fell, and scanned the room for any kind of solution. I spotted the hospice-provided chair potty behind the shower curtain. “Hey, Dad, here’s an idea,” I said to my frozen-in-place father. With my free right hand, I dragged the portable stool from the stall.

  “I can’t hold out much longer,” Dad growled. I juggled the potty over my head and beneath his trembling thighs.