Sugar Birds

by Cheryl Grey Bostrom

  “He didn’t like me untangling him, that’s for sure.”

  “C’mon in.” She hugged the box to her chest. “We’ll take a peek at him.”

  “I’d rather leave him with you, if you don’t mind. I’m not dressed for a visit.” Cow manure spattered his coveralls and rubber barn boots. “I still have to feed calves.”

  “Thanks for bringing him by, Jake. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Sorry to interrupt.” He flashed me a wide smile.

  “Not at all. This is the granddaughter I told you about. Celia? Jake.”

  I knew it. My grandmother was telling every random person with an injured bird that my dad had dumped me here.

  “A pleasure.” He touched his hat, turned and waved without looking back.

  Gram hummed while I pulled on my long-cuffed leather gloves and checked over the supplies laid out on the laundry room counter: a leather raptor hood, styptic and talcum powders, superglue, gauze, scissors, a tiny paintbrush, paper plates, tongue depressors, and tinctures in little brown bottles with squishy eye-dropper tops.

  “You ever see a Coop, Celia?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Looks like that sharp-shinned boy we worked on, but with a bigger head, thicker legs. More of a barrel body.” She snipped the duct tape sealing the bird’s box. “Nape is lighter, too.” Her hands stabilized the box’s erupting lid flaps as the hawk struggled beneath them. “Remember what to do?”

  I nodded, irritated. I had helped her for years. She stepped away as I lifted the flaps and quickly secured the wild bird’s legs and wings—like I always did.

  But as I lifted him, my hold shifted, and he wrenched a wing free. I still held his legs, but he flapped hard and pitched forward. His foot dripped red.

  Gram flinched. Just the slightest twitch, but it felt like a slap, and the muscles in my neck constricted.

  She reached around me and immobilized him in one smooth motion. “We’ve got him, honey.”

  I scowled, slid my hands behind hers and reclaimed him.

  She pointed at his tail. “Rounder than the sharpie’s.”

  I raised the hawk to see. He rotated his head from side to side, his open beak threatening. If I were you, I’d want to bite someone, too. His talons jutted in front of him like sickles, and his stub oozed.

  Gram was studying me. “He’s a handful. Thinks if he can get away from us, his pain will stop.”

  Her words hit close to my core; I bristled. “How do you know?”

  She shrugged, then ran the leather hood under his beak and slid it over his head. With his eyes covered, the bird quieted. “Now let’s see what he did to himself.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Too much blood.”

  “He left his toenail behind when he fought that netting. If Jake hadn’t found him, he may have bled out or died of shock by morning.” She held the toe and bent close to study it. “Fortunately, the tear is low on his digit. The claw should grow back with no irregularities. We’ll patch him up to help him along.”

  She applied lidocaine to numb the injury, then dusted gauze with styptic powder and pressed it on the bird’s wound until the bleeding stopped. “Now we’ll dry it so the coating will stick.” She swabbed the site with clean gauze and blew on it. Even blinded by the hood, the bird wrestled against my grip, bit my glove. “He’s a fierce one. Hold him steady now.”

  Well, that rankled me. Like I wouldn’t?

  “Once the finish hardens, it’ll protect those nerve endings, and they won’t be so sensitive. Then he can use those spectacular feet of his to hunt again.” She whistled to the bird and dabbed his foot with the gauze. “He knows we’re helping him. Such a brave boy.”

  Gram mixed talcum powder with the glue and painted it over the toe. “After it dries, we’ll add another coat. That’ll be enough for tonight. A volunteer will take him to the raptor center tomorrow. I expect they’ll thicken the claw a bit more when he gets there.”

  She palpated the bird’s crop at the base of his neck. “Hm. Empty. He must have been zeroing in on a meal when that fence waylaid him. Time to set this boy up in his hotel room and give him some dinner.”

  Between applications of the custom-made nail, she lifted a travel crate onto the washing machine, hooked a water dish to the door, and set two raw chicken legs inside. I eased the bird, his toe sealed and dry, onto the crate’s floor. Gram removed his hood and shut the gate.

  “Thank you, dear.”

  “For what?” My tone dared her to answer.

  She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, and quickly stowed supplies in their respective drawers and cupboards. She glanced at her watch. “Oh, my. Ten thirty already. Time for this old bird to roost.” I averted my eyes as she touched my cheek and padded to the door.

  Alone with the resting hawk, I wiped the counter, then dropped my head to his eye level, assessing him through the door’s grille. “You. So exquisite.” I wanted to stroke his steel-gray feathers, arrayed like a cape against the tawny mottling on his breast and underside. He glared at me with cranberry eyes and sidled toward the food. “You want some room. I get that.” I stepped back against the wall and stood motionless until the bird gripped a chicken leg with his good foot and tore into the meat. Relieved, I watched his crop swell and turned out the light.

  CHAPTER 6 ~ AGGIE

  Hunger

  Wind. From the south, Aggie figured. Gusts spanked the river’s surface before they leaned the grass blades toward the woods, like little pointers inviting her into the trees. Smaller puffs petted her as she crawled away from her boat.

  The breeze made branches flick at her in welcome. “Wetfoot trees,” her dad called them: spruce and birch, western red cedar. Big-leaf maple, alder, cottonwood. They all liked the damp peat that flanked the river.

  Aggie knew these trees. Well, she knew their relatives, which put her on familiar terms with these cousins. She touched one after another in somber greeting as she wove her way deeper into their midst. At a spruce tree, she shook her head, refusing its prickly needles and rough jigsaw bark, then nodded at the Douglas and hemlock firs—old friends growing farther up the hill, where the soil was drier.

  I swear, Aggie. You study trees like a dog sniffs for game.

  Dad. Aggie figured that she studied trees like her dad studied her. Sometimes, without raising his eyes, he would say, “Maybe not that way,” as if he could hear her thinking about where to climb next. She’d sense him beneath her and draw from his strength. Her nostrils flared, smelling the memory. She must have dreamed the fire. Surely her dad was tracking her now, like he always did.

  A towering Doug fir caught her eye. This one hadn’t surrendered its lower limbs to the dim forest understory; this one, she could climb. The wind whipped her hair as she gripped the first handhold and effortlessly pulled her spindly frame skyward until she settled onto a chair-like trio of boughs she calculated to be over sixty feet up.

  From her new lookout, she watched a tractor drag an irrigation line across a far pasture. Only two days before, she and her father hauled pipe to a field of young trees. “Too dry.” He had thrown a handful of dusty soil into the air. “We’ve never watered this early.”

  “Too dry, too dry,” she hummed unevenly. Why hadn’t she listened? Left those matches alone? She wiped her wet eyes with her sleeve, scanned the hill and then startled with a jolt that nearly pitched her sideways off the limb.

  Farther up the slope, the same tiny woman who helped Burnaby with his projects and who visited Mama was setting a sprinkler in her garden. Mender! The old lady brushed her hands over her jeans and retrieved a sweater from a fencepost. She draped it over one tanned, skinny arm and strode toward the house, her long, gray braid bumping her back with every step.

  Aggie took in the familiar white farmhouse, the gambrel barn, the garden, the horse arena and, beyond it all, the road. Since this was Mender’s place, somewhere up that road was her uncle’s dairy. Where her brother was working when she lit the fire. Whe
n she killed their parents.

  Her lungs tightened, and her burned feet stung as the haunting scene replayed. Her stomach growled. But it was thirst that interrupted the overpowering flashbacks and drove her to the ground. She plowed through the tangled brush, then followed a game trail until she caught a whiff of water. The scent led her to a small artesian pool, where she sank to her ankles in soothing mud. In its center, clear water bubbled from a deep hole, then spilled into a larger, duckweed-covered pond a baseball toss away.

  Dad would drink here.

  A nurse log bridged the pool’s upper half. She crawled past baby trees growing on its mossy trunk, extended dished hands, and sucked the water down, wild with thirst that intensified with every swallow. She plunged to her elbows and lifted her hands again and again, the taste of snow from some faraway glacier rousing and reviving her until, satiated, she splashed her swollen eyes. Rinsed her ears. Snuffled water from a curved hand and blew—rinsing, rinsing, as if she could sluice away the sounds and smells of the fire. Extinguish those images.

  When she got to her knees, her hair dripping, a reflection on the water’s surface drew her attention. Elderberries. She and Mama picked them every summer after they turned purple. Boiled them into jam. These berries were still red, but she recognized the foliage. She clambered over to the bush and shoved a handful in her mouth, puckering at their sourness. Obviously, they weren’t ripe in early June, but they were elderberries, and they would do. A roar in her stomach insisted. Her hands shook from hunger as she picked.

  She ate her fill and returned to the lookout tree, ascending to her breezy perch just as a white car drove the lane to the house. The old lady Mender came outside and propped her elbows on the car’s open window, talking to someone in the driver’s seat. Then a dark-haired man climbed out. Mender wrapped her arms around him and held him for a long time, swaying as if rocking a baby. Her baby? He shook his head, pointed toward the road, and the two walked into the house.

  Within minutes, a girl in turquoise workout clothes jogged onto the lane. She reminded Aggie of one of those girls on the basketball team at Burnaby’s school. Tall. Lean. Two lanky, reddish dogs with floppy ears ran to her, then led her into the field. They all dropped into the swaying grass, out of sight.

  Aggie watched the location, but the trio had vanished. Fallen asleep? The man came outside and called a couple of times. What was he yelling? The girl’s name? The third time he whistled and shouted louder, his voice overriding the wind.

  Cilia? Those tiny little hairs? What kind of name was that?

  The man’s shoulders slumped, and he returned to the house. Was he the girl’s father? Even if the name embarrassed her, why didn’t she answer her own dad?

  Aggie stayed in the tree, reading the scene. She had nowhere else to go, anyway. A red-tail circled overhead and she imagined herself a rabbit nibbling grass beneath it. Then she envisioned the hawk diving and hauling her off with its puncturing talons. It would shred her with its beak. Would the pain feel something like this horrible sadness? She rested her forehead on her arms, the berries heavy in her belly.

  A long time later, she heard an engine; the dark-haired man’s car rolled slowly down the lane. Was the girl still in the grass? Aggie wasn’t sure and didn’t care. An aching lethargy overwhelmed her. Wedged between two branches, she closed her eyes.

  Before moonrise, Aggie bolted awake, muzzy. Coyotes yapped across the darkened landscape. Had they roused her? The answer came as sour bile rose in her throat. Her belly churned. She leaned with the spasm, and vomit exploded from her mouth. She scarcely had time to shake her head and spit before the contractions resumed in a fury of successive swells. The cramps wobbled her. She reached for a branch, missed, and grabbed a lower snag.

  A new fear, foreign and invasive, gripped her. In all her climbing, she had never felt off balance, but she did now. Never had she been afraid in a tree, but then she had never climbed in the dark before. What if she couldn’t get down? The tree’s bones were shadows; she couldn’t see much else. Reeling, she felt around with her toes until she found a branch, but when she stepped onto it, her foot skidded off into the air.

  Her body followed.

  Branches tore at her as she plunged past them—ten, fifteen feet. She flailed, caught herself, then slipped and fell again. When her arm hooked over a limb, she lurched to a stop and hung there, skinned and shocked.

  I fell. I fell! She gained a foothold on another branch and peered into the gloom beneath her, but couldn’t see the ground.

  A fresh wave of nausea wracked her body. She trembled and retched again and again, certain her eyes would burst and her belly turn inside out. Between heaves, she tested each branch with her blistered feet and lowered herself slowly, until she landed on the blanket of needles around the tree’s base.

  She staggered, then slumped in a ball, holding her stomach and shivering with cramps. When she shut her eyes, her mother and father called her from every direction. Frantic, she crawled in a delirious half-sleep, searching for them. Whenever her hands closed around one of their ankles, the ghosts evaporated, and her eyes popped open. Her heart thundered. Grief and nausea pinned her to the ground. She didn’t care if the dogs found her. For hours, she didn’t care.

  As night wore on, the wind calmed, and damp air from the river moved low through the trees. Chilled, Aggie lay motionless, stirring only when soft fur rubbed against her injured foot. The animal walked the length of her sore, abraded body, leaning into her and purring before it poked its noisy nose into her ear. She lifted her hand and a small cat arched under it. She ran her fingers along its back, and the creature kneaded her as Aggie clutched it to her chest. Her nausea was subsiding, and the vibrating purr soothed her until she relaxed and slept.

  When hunger woke her in predawn gray, the cat was gone. Disoriented, she listened to the forest birds’ first chirps and whistles until her alertness returned and she remembered where she was, and why. Savage cravings for something, anything to eat grew as she rose, spit, peed in the bushes and climbed her lookout tree. She gazed at the fenced garden, then sighed and tightened her empty stomach.

  A milk truck whined up the hill to the house. A man in overalls and a dark cap stepped from the truck’s cab and shuffled in a familiar gait to the house. Aggie brightened. The same milkman she knew from home. He set his wire basket of clanking bottles on the side door’s step.

  She wanted to run to him like she always did, calling out little jokes. “Hey, Mr. Binks. Don’t try to butter me up,” or “If you fall down our stairs, you’ll get creamed.” But she stayed put. What would he think when he drove down their lane and saw the rubble, when he heard that she burned her parents? He would hate her. Her breath caught in small hiccoughs.

  Oh, she wished she could go to Mender and ask her for some of that milk. Tell her about the fire, and how it was all an accident. But how could she? Mender was friends with Mama and Burnaby, not her. Along with Mr. Binks, Mender would hate her, too.

  Still, the bottles were right there for the taking. A sure thing. She would be stealing if she took one, and she didn’t want to do any more horrible things, but what difference did it make? She was already a murderer. She assessed her dirt-streaked pajamas. Dirty inside and out. Infected with badness.

  A bat wheeled past her, hunting its insect breakfast in the remnants of twilight. What if she swooped to the house like that? She could be a bat, her legs like wings, darting toward her own meal.

  She tracked the retreating milk truck until it receded down the road, then began her descent. Halfway down the tree, her eyes shifted to a small flock of goldfinches that ribboned toward the house. As the sun squeezed over the mountain, chickadees winged along the finches’ trajectory. A flash of orange found her peripheral vision—grosbeak. The bird sailed from a branch below her, straight to the feathered gathering near the patio, and her eyes widened. Mender owned a bird feeder. That meant sunflower seeds. Millet. Maybe even peanuts. She imagined herself a finch flying st
raight toward that food.

  She laddered the rest of the way down the tree and circled the empty arena, then crept through the tall grass and under the fence to the base of a cedar tree. Drooping branches and a thick trunk hid her. As she viewed the yard through a gap in the greenery, a familiar rub tickled her calves.

  She petted the cat’s back and they watched the feeder together. The animal’s chin quivered at the birds crowded around the teeming tray, which hung at the bottom of a seed hopper hooked on a pole a few feet from a window. Aggie took in the closed window blinds and, emboldened by her hunger, imagined chewing the seeds, pretending they were oatmeal.

  At the count of three, she scooted across the lawn, then crawled under a rhododendron bush. Cautiously, she flattened herself against the house and inched toward the feeder. Her stealth didn’t trick the birds; they scattered when she approached. She scanned the windows, hoping the cat’s appearance on the lawn behind her would convince any early risers that nothing was amiss, that the birds spooked because of a plain old calico.

  Under the feeder now, Aggie held out her shirt and tipped the hanging container sideways until seed poured into the pouched fabric. She gathered the cloth around the bulge and made her way along the side of the house, crouching beneath the windows until she arrived at the side door where the wire milk basket waited.

  A door closed inside the house as she reached, salivating, for a bottle. Her hand stopped midair. Were they coming for milk? She swallowed hard.

  And yanked a quart free. The glass clanked against the basket’s sides and scraped on the stair as she secured her grip. Did they hear her? Without waiting to find out, Aggie hugged the food to her chest and charged across the open field for the woods.

  CHAPTER 7 ~ CELIA

  Hooks

  After the repaired hawk settled in his crate, I crawled into bed, exhausted. Next thing I knew, a chemistry beaker broke in my dream and my eyes flicked open. Something clinked under my bedroom window. I thought I heard a scuffle of footsteps, but wasn’t sure, so I edged off the bed and lifted a slat on the blind.