Gradle Bird

by J. C. Sasser

  He pushed his glasses up his nose and bent the wire with his pliers, making curls in the bird’s tail. “That’s unusual.” He held the bird in front of his face, thumped its tail, and the bird swung on the hook around his finger.

  “Here,” Gradle said, handing him her gold-cross earring. “Use this.”

  Leonard took her earring and held it in his hand, surprised she would surrender what she had worn and loved for so long. He positioned the stud to serve as the bird’s golden eye. The chain looked like a trail of gold tears, the cross a gold teardrop.

  “You named me after that bird?” Gradle asked.

  “That bird flew through the window right after I had caught you into this world. It lit right on you.” He felt his throat burn and his voice begin to crack. “I didn’t care what the old wives thought. I took it as a sign of life. And I made a promise to you right then and there that I wouldn’t let anything ever hurt you.”

  Leonard clamped his jaw in an effort to hold back tears. He could feel Gradle’s stare burning his cheek. “Your mama was real tired after you came,” he said. “So I held you, danced around the room with you all night.” He stared down at the bird in his hands, and remembered the steps he waltzed with her. “When your mama woke up, I didn’t want to let her have you. But you were hungry. So I let you go and gave y’all some privacy.”

  Leonard closed his eyes and drew in a staggered breath. His hands began to tremble, and Gradle grabbed hold of them. “I went back to the kitchen and started piddling with that wire again. I made two more little birds for your mobile. When I was finishing up the second bird I heard one of the sweetest sounds I’ve ever heard. Your mama was singing to you.”

  Hush little baby don’t say a word, Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. Leonard heard the words in Veela’s voice.

  “It made me so proud to know she had taken to you. That she was loving you. It was something I wanted to see,” he said. “So I got up from the table and tiptoed down the hall with your little birds in my hand. And I looked in on you and your mama.”

  Leonard remembered walking down the hall that day, and how that board he’d put off fixing creaked under his foot, how the rain sounded on the roof, and how Veela singing to her newborn child gave him such hope. He peeked inside Veela’s bedroom door. A used needle sat on her bed, and Veela was trying to suffocate Gradle with a pillow.

  “She was trying to hurt you,” he said. “She wasn’t in her right mind. I grabbed hold of her and tore her off you. And she kept clawing at me, trying to get back at you.”

  Leonard stopped and tried to get the vision of Veela out of his mind so he could finish what he needed to say out loud. He closed his eyes hoping the darkness would erase it all. “I grabbed her by the neck,” he said, opening his eyes. He swallowed and felt rawness in his throat. “And I squeezed it too hard.”

  There was silence. He felt as if his body was drained of blood.

  “You killed her?” Gradle asked.

  Leonard nodded. “I told the law she died in childbirth.” He clenched his jaw and bit the inside of his cheek. “Not long after, I packed up some things and ran away with you.”

  He could feel Gradle’s eyes all over him, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at her. He stared out into the night, and suddenly Gradle’s body lunged into him. Her arms wrapped around his neck and she buried her head into his chest. He had never felt her hold him so tight.

  “Thank you for saving my life,” she said.

  Blood rushed back through his veins. He buried his face in her shorn hair and held her tight. His body tensed, and he clamped down his face in an effort to hold back tears.

  “It’s okay to cry,” she said.

  He clamped down harder, but he didn’t have the muscle to hold it together anymore. He looked up at the ceiling and felt light for once, and wondered if this was what it felt like to die and go to Heaven.

  CEIF USED HIS cane like a blind man as he hobbled to the pulpit in darkness. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light,” he shouted at the empty sanctuary. He struck a match and lit a candle.

  “What the fuck you think you are? Some kind of magician?” Sonny Joe appeared like a black beast at the altar. Ceif jumped and sucked the flame out of the candle.

  Ceif reignited the flame. “How long you been kneeling there?” he asked.

  “That Jesus character is fucking mute,” he said, throwing a tin of sardines at Ceif’s crotch. He popped a white cross from its bottle and turned the halfpint of liquor on its head. “I been sitting in the dark all night, getting still and quiet, trying to get him to talk to me.” He peered into a jar sitting on the altar containing every fighting fish he owned and picked out one of the dead. “You say he talks to you all the time. But guess what, Ceif? I ain’t heard a peep,” he said. He smoothed the blue fins of a fish against the altar’s wood, next to several others that were scattered like flower petals along the altar rail.

  “Maybe you’re the deaf one,” Ceif said. He peeled back the can of sardines and scarfed them down.

  Sonny Joe’s stomach convulsed. He leaned to the side and vomited all over the altar’s bench. After he was done, he spat out the remnants, and wiped his nose. He turned the bottle back on its head and let the liquor rush down his throat.

  “You haven’t had enough?” Ceif asked.

  “Just making more room,” Sonny Joe said. He threw the empty half-pint, and it skated across the floor. He peered inside the jar of colorful chaos and watched the fish fight. Perhaps they were reflections from the candle, but Ceif could have sworn he saw bright red flames burning in Sonny Joe’s eyes.

  “I got that crazy fucker thinking you’re gonna steal Gradle from him,” Sonny Joe laughed. “I got him believing you’re gonna challenge him to a duel. A real bona fide Western duel with leather straps and gun holsters.” He picked out another floater from the jar and splayed it on the altar. “Delvis is like a fighting fish. He goes ape-shit when something intrudes on his territory.”

  “Why’re you killing your fish?” Ceif asked.

  “To breed the pussy out of them,” Sonny Joe said. He fisted a Royal Red he had named Sin in his hand. “It’s called natural selection.”

  “There’s nothing natural about what you’re doing.”

  Sonny Joe doubled over and vomited again. The white cross he had popped earlier landed atop his spew in one whole piece.

  “Why doesn’t she like me?” he asked.

  “You need to go to bed,” Ceif said. He threaded his arms under Sonny Joe’s pits and dragged him down the aisle to Sonny Joe’s sleeping pew.

  Ceif lay Sonny Joe down on the pew, placed his head on his lap, and stroked his hair. He stayed up with Sonny Joe and tilted his cheek to keep him from choking each time he vomited. Ceif stayed awake long after the candle melted, after its wick burned down, and its flame dwindled to darkness.

  “Owe no man anything but to love one another,” Ceif whispered into the crown of Sonny Joe’s passed-out head. His breath was holy and hot and stunk of canned sardines and cigarettes. “Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself. It is high time to awake out of sleep, my friend. For now our salvation is nearer than we believed. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light.”

  Sonny Joe had gone too far with Delvis, and in the quiet, in the dark, Ceif made the decision it was up to him to put on the armor of light.

  “Watch ye therefore, for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning; lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you, I say unto all. Watch,” Ceif whispered to his sleeping friend.

  He hobbled to the pulpit, lit another candle, and wrote a letter to Delvis. He approached the letter like a sermon, poured over it, making sure the words were convincing and clear. He finished the letter at daybreak and folded it inside his Bible among the book of Romans.

  Ceif limped from the pulpit, paused at Sonny
Joe’s pew, and took one last look at his friend before leaving. Sonny Joe’s body was still, sedate from his all-night communion of Southern Comfort and white crosses. A blue bottle fly dipped in and out of his mouth, and in his hand he palmed the dead red fighter, whose tattered finnage was dried up and glued to its padded, pulsing grave.

  As he pointed his cane in front of him, Sonny Joe grabbed a fistful of Ceif’s shirt and pulled him back.

  “What was all that love one another and armor of light bullshit?” Sonny Joe asked, his voice a mouthful of gravel. He coughed up a wad of phlegm and spat it on the floor. “You trying to save me again, preacher boy?”

  “Save yourself.” Ceif moved forward, breaking away from Sonny Joe’s grip.

  “Where you going?” Sonny Joe yelled after Ceif.

  “To tell Delvis you’re nothing but a joke.”

  “Life’s one big joke,” Sonny Joe said. “But I’m glad you think I’m funny.” He removed his vomit-stained shirt and peeled the dead fish from the skin of his palm. He tossed it at Ceif. “He probably needs a funeral, preacher boy. They all do,” he said, nodding at the altar confettied with dead fish.

  “Bury them yourself,” Ceif said, cupped his Bible, and drug his lame leg through empty liquor bottles and cigarette butts. He hobbled down the center aisle and stepped out of the fetid-smelling church into a morning that was lively and new. A symphony of birds chirped in the tree heads whose leaves were made blinding green by a happy yellow sun. He had not heard the birds sing this way all summer and couldn’t recall if that summer he’d heard a single bird sing at all.

  He walked through the churchyard and hung a right on the road leading to Delvis’s place. He found himself so consumed by the day’s beauty that when he rounded the last bend, he had walked at least seven miles, but it seemed as if he had barely walked one. He felt like he was strolling in a garden, one abundant and lush and lit with a pure quality of light. White morning glories cloaked the trail banks and bloomed the size of dinner plates. He saw prints of deer, heard the coos of doves, and stumbled upon a snake that ribboned across the sand in a shock of green. There were orange monarchs and blue swallowtails and the yellow kind that looked like flying pats of butter. Ceif knew they all must have been born today because on any other day that summer the sun would have singed their wings, the rain would have drowned their tongues. Long ago, he had claimed to have found his Eden when he jumped into the South from a fast-moving train, but Ceif had never seen the South like this, so as he hobbled down the winding trail, he kept a lookout for Adam tending the fields and for a fertile, naked Eve.

  He turned down the drive, and when he saw Delvis’s shack in the distance, he was struck with an overwhelming sense of clarity and felt the armor of light. It was as if the breath of God was breathing down upon him.

  Delvis sat in the yellow morning on the Dairy Queen booth, listening to the birds sing. He had been sitting there all night with the whippoorwills who hollered off and on in the trees. He had watched a spider weave an entire web, trap some supper, and wrap it in thread for later, and he had watched the sky turn from light blue to black to light blue again. His guitar had rested against the booth all night, but he didn’t feel like playing. He didn’t feel like singing. All he felt like doing was thinking and being quiet. He had thought about Gradle and wondered if he’d ever get to see her again. He remembered the first time he laid eyes on her, how she looked like an angel all dressed in green. He couldn’t stop thinking about her then. And wouldn’t stop thinking about her now. He’d never stop thinking about her. He supposed when he got sick from missing her so bad, he could always look at the copy he’d made of her portrait and see her that way. Maybe if he imagined her with his best imagination, her portrait might move, her lips might smile, she might even talk back. But he wasn’t missing her real bad yet. He felt like she was still there, still sitting beside him somewhere. Maybe that’s how real true friends felt. They didn’t never go nowhere. They were always just there, even when they weren’t.

  He had thought a lot about Gradle, but he had thought even more about her grandpa and used up most of his brainpower on him. They always told him after they found him in the dumpster that people from all over the world wanted to adopt him. What he couldn’t put right in his mind was why Grandpa would want to throw him away, especially if he was so precious in the world’s giant big eye. Grandpa was his daddy. He’d never been so certain and clear about anything in his life. He’d had his suspicions when he first saw him in that photograph Gradle always toted around with her and stared at. He thought then that some of the dots in his mind that never had lines drawn to them started to connect. But he wasn’t for certain-certain until Grandpa appeared in his shack, his way of wrestling, and the point when he out of nowhere dropped the axe. The truth was in his eyes, in the diamond part of them. When Delvis stared into them he saw his reflection. He saw how much Grandpa loved Gradle, and for a minute, maybe even two, he saw that Grandpa loved him, too.

  Once the sun’s head rose higher, he got up from the Dairy Queen booth and walked the aisles of his garden. He cut the last blooming sunflower stalks, placed them in a bundle over Rain’s grave, and knelt down on his knees in the pillow-like dirt.

  “I’m sorry I ain’t been out here to visit you like I ought to. Don’t let it have no bearing on our friendship. I promise to do better from here on out. I appreciate you being a real true friend,” he said, rubbing the scar below his ribs where he kept Rain’s bullet. “I know you’re up in heaven. But I know you got good ears. I miss you, boy.”

  He wiped away a tear and rose from his knees. The crows were rattling and cawing in the trees like a bunch of wild Indians. It made him suspicious, like they were warning him of something. He started back to his porch, and his spine started tickling. He got the feeling he wasn’t alone. Somebody was at his back, watching. He spun around faster than lightning. There in the distance, he saw him, backdropped by blue sky, Ceif “The Electric Gunslinger” Walker, hobbling toward his shack.

  Delvis reached for his gun, but it wasn’t there. He ran inside, retrieved it from his bedside table, and shoved it in his holster. He stood in front of the mirror and practiced his fast-draw over and over. He was a little rusty. The last duel he had was way back years ago when George “The Animal” Steele challenged him over the TV at the Soap ‘n Suds laundry mat up town. Once he reached his fast-draw record of two seconds flat, he walked bow-legged out of the shack. He spun his six-speed Ruger like a windmill around his finger and shoved his pistol back home.

  When Ceif saw him, he stopped in the middle of the road. Light gathered all around the boy, like a shield, blinding and bright. He looked like an angel. He even had a halo. But Delvis knew Ceif wasn’t any of God’s kind of angels, and this light and the halo, giving Ceif the advantage was nothing but the Devil’s doing.

  Ceif hollered something, but Delvis couldn’t make out what he had said for all of the crows screaming in the trees. The boy reached out his cane and took the first step. Delvis braced himself. His hand hovered over his holster, and took his first step, too.

  “I’ll give you one chance to surrender!” Delvis yelled out, knowing the rules of dueling allowed the challenged a chance to surrender if they wanted to avoid blood.

  Ceif yelled something back, but again, Delvis couldn’t hear because of the birds. He wanted to fire a shot in the air to get them to hush, but the rules of dueling didn’t allow any dumb shooting or firing in the air either.

  The boy took another step forward and then another. He didn’t wait for Delvis to take his turn. Ceif was two paces ahead of him, and when he took another two paces without waiting on Delvis to take his, Delvis knew Ceif was not honoring the rules. He was a true outlaw and couldn’t be trusted. Delvis’s hand trembled by his gun as he tried to get even with Ceif, but the boy kept coming at him, paying no mind to any kind of rules.

  Delvis knew he could be a dead man in a matter of seconds if Ceif had his ability to draw, so he kept his ey
es focused on Ceif’s hands, watching for them to twitch. The boy paused and opened up his Bible. He reached inside and started to draw something from it.

  Delvis drew his pistol and pulled the trigger.

  The shot popped and tore through the air. The crows hushed and flew away in a flock of black, leaving the whole wide world silent. The boy stumbled backward as the color of his heart bled through his shirt. His cane snapped in two, and Ceif “The Electric Gunslinger” Walker collapsed to the ground.

  Delvis ran to the boy with caution. He could still have his gun in his hand, and so he needed to be careful. Ceif lay on his back, and his arms and legs made the shape of a cross. His eyes, like two black marbles, glassy and bright, looked up and beyond Delvis at something that made him smile. The boy mouthed a word that started with an E, but that was all Delvis could make out because the rest was drowned with gurgling, as if there was a bubbling red spring inside the boy’s throat.

  He knelt beside Ceif and patted his clothes, trying to find his holster and pistol. They weren’t where they were supposed to be. He scanned the surroundings, thinking Ceif’s gun had flown out of his hand, but all he found was Ceif’s broken cane and his Bible laying in the dirt with its pages whispering in the breeze.

  Delvis got confused. He would swear to God he had seen Ceif reach for his gun even though he wasn’t a swearing-to-God kind of man. As he patted Ceif down again, he noticed a square of paper resting in his outstretched hand. He took the paper, unfolded it, and read the words written on the page.

  Dear Mr. Miles,

  I am writing you this letter to apologize and beg your forgiveness of my friend Sonny Joe. Like all men, the Devil sometimes enters his heart. It is Sonny Joe, not me, who has written you the mean letters, and it is Sonny Joe, not me, who has called you at the Piggly Wiggly threatening to steal Gradle from you. There is no need to fear, for it is all a joke, a game in which Sonny Joe finds amusement at your sake. He does not want to steal Gradle. He’s hurt she doesn’t love him the way she loves you. He does not want a duel. His affliction are idle hands, which they say are the devil’s playground. Please forgive him, Mr. Miles, for he knows not what he does.