Sugar Birds

by Cheryl Grey Bostrom

  “I understand your anger, Celia. But what do you want to do with it? Let it run wild? Wouldn’t it be better to deal with what’s beneath it?”

  She reached for my hand, but I pulled it away.

  CHAPTER 16 ~ AGGIE

  Poultice

  Her throbbing arm woke her. Aggie jerked with the remembered fright, and her shoulder bumped the hollow log’s ceiling, sending pain the length of her wound. Beneath her, blood staining the cottonwood fluff showed as black gum in the predawn dimness.

  This was bad. She fingered the slice and shut her eyes, wincing. She had to tend it, but how?

  As if answering, Mama surfaced behind Aggie’s closed lids.

  “Don’t tease that cat, Aggie. He’ll nick your hands.” Her mother had stood on a ladder in the orchard, picking August apples. Aggie’s tomcat slept under a nearby pear tree—or tried to. Aggie lay on her stomach in the warm grass beside him, flicking his whiskers, dodging his claws until, finally, the cat drew the line. A bloody red line, straight across her palm. Aggie squealed and splayed her fingers as he sped off.

  “Those dirty claws. So much bacteria.” Mama scouted the ground from her perch on the ladder. “There, Aggie.” She pointed at the fence. “Yarrow. Plantain. Let’s get a poultice on that scratch so it doesn’t get infected.”

  Aggie knew yarrow and didn’t like it. She once brought her mother a bouquet of the lacy flowers and they stank up her hands and the kitchen. And plantain? A nuisance. Stems topped with pointy, wreathed heads poked out of their lawn. She had pulled a million of them in the garden.

  She spotted one nearby. “Weeds?” She pursed her lips and wiped her bleeding hand on her shorts.

  “Leaves only, please.”

  Aggie picked a handful of feathery leaves off a yarrow plant and brought them to her. Mama stripped out the rib, shoved the greens in her mouth and chewed.

  “Oh, my. So bitter.” She blinked and puckered, but kept chewing. Green juice leaked from the corners of her lips. “Now you. Plantain.” Aggie shook her head vigorously and backed away. “C’mon, girl.” Mama’s words garbled through the pulp. “You love asparagus. Plantain tastes like that.”

  Aggie nipped a tiny edge from a plantain leaf and waited. When the flavor reached her, she raised her eyebrows, nodded at her mother, and then poked several small leaves into her mouth.

  Mama stepped off the ladder. “Chew them into a paste. Like this.” She spat the mash into her hand and held it out in front of her daughter. With her teeth, Aggie scraped the plantain from her tongue and plopped it on top of the yarrow.

  “Now let me see that cut.” Mama massaged the two plant pastes together and smeared them on the scratch. “Close your hand and hold it there.” A breathy, mnemonic puh had escaped Mama’s tight lips. “Plantain for pain and itching. Yuh. Yarrow for yikes—deeper wounds. Both fight infection.”

  That day Aggie thought her mom silly for giving all that attention to a measly little cat scratch, but now she was grateful. She climbed out of her cave, sat on her log, and scrutinized the sixinch wound in the day’s first light. It was deep. Ugly raw. And so sore. Could plants heal it? She sure hoped so. If this cut got infected, she might have to surrender.

  Surrender? No, no, no. Nobody would get their hands on her and put her in juvie. She would patch herself up.

  First, she’d give herself a good washing, something she hadn’t done since before the fire. And not just her arm. Every inch of her was gritty, especially her feet—and her privates were stinky. She headed for the spring, but when a twig scraped the cut, pain buckled her. Guarding the wound, she sidled the rest of the way to the water.

  She lowered her arm into the pool, but the frigid water stung so fiercely that she gasped and yanked her arm skyward. She forced herself to think of the Polar Bear Swim at Birch Bay on New Year’s Day. Twenty-five degrees that day, and her standing there in her bathing suit. She and Dad had run into the sea, pumping their arms and laughing. Had dunked to their chins.

  But my arm wasn’t slashed then. She gawked at the oozing flesh and turned her head away. The cut’s depth worried her. Mama would say it needed stitches. A full-body bath would have to wait.

  She plunged her arm into the water a second time and nearly fainted, but held it there until the icy water dulled the pain. Her fingers traced the wound underwater. Skin flapped over it in places, and even in the numbing cold, it hurt too much to rinse deeper.

  Good enough. With nothing clean to dry herself, she drooped her arm at an awkward ninety-degree angle, away from her body, like a sparrow airing its wings after rain. The gash hurt worse at that tilt, though.

  “Keep it above your heart.” Mama again. She had elevated Aggie’s hand on a pillow the night after she caught it in the car door.

  Above my heart. Aggie tipped her forearm up and laid her palm on her scalp, so the injury was above her shoulder. Yes, above her heart felt better. And sunshine would dry it off. She lay back in the sloping field where the woods met the grass and extended her arm uphill, over her head. Warmth soothed the wound and she closed her eyes. Ah. If she kept her body stationary, the pain eased.

  Instead, a new sensation took its place: tickles. Mama said that cuts itched when they were healing. Tickles. Itches. Same thing. She lay still as a stick with her arm outstretched, with the wound facing upwards as she relaxed into the low buzz of summer insects. Not a mosquito whine. Mosquitos stayed in the shade. This sounded like bees. Honeybees, with little pollen bags on their legs. She pictured the bees in their seed garden, climbing into bright nasturtium blooms, gathering flower dust.

  Or these were plain old flies, humming away like the ones at her uncle’s farm. A calming, summer sound. Almost a serenade. Her mind wandered until the tickling in the wound intensified and called her back.

  Reluctant to reawaken the pain, she stalled, like Gulliver from her old storybook, tied to the ground with Lilliputian ropes and not yet ready to pull free. She would let the sunshine shrink her cut and heal it. Did she really need a poultice?

  With her eyes closed, she was home again, hose in hand, watering the young trees. She splashed each one to wet the needles and leaves and surface soil, and then moved on, hurrying, until Mama called to her. “You cutting corners, Agate? No deep soak?”

  Cutting corners. Yep, if Aggie bandaged the wound without a poultice, she’d be skipping steps again. Then how would she heal—and escape the cougar if it returned?

  When it returned. Now the animal knew where she lived. Good thing those lions mostly hunted at night and didn’t like to dig. If she hadn’t been inside her cave … well, she wouldn’t dwell on that. When she got better, she would find a rock to block her den’s door when she went to bed.

  She raised both arms into the air and a compact cloud of flies lifted with them. Shoo. Pesky things. She swatted at them, and the tickling quit, thankfully. She didn’t need that annoyance on top of everything else. The gash marked her skin like a huge red leech. She felt sick if she inspected it too closely.

  After collecting a fistful of plantain leaves, she hunted the riverbank until she found the tiny white flowers and floppy fronds of yarrow. “Good to see you, smelly things.” She sat cross-legged amidst the patch of blooms, steeled herself against the throb in her arm, and gathered fuzzy leaves. With hamster efficiency, she stuffed both plantain and yarrow into her cheeks and began to chew.

  When the plants released their juices, she retched and nearly coughed out the whole gloppy mouthful. She needed food, not this. Her stomach was crying again. But instead of spitting out the mess, Aggie stopped chewing until her gagging subsided and the saliva pouring into her mouth diluted the yarrow’s bitterness. She emptied the mash into her hand and, looking sidelong at the cut, dabbed the green goo from her wrist to her elbow.

  Now what? She couldn’t sit there all day. She needed a bandage. And a mouth rinse. Unless she kept moving, she would have neither. She considered the river, thought of muskrats and beavers pooping in the water, and spat. Sh
e lifted her shirt, pressed her poulticed arm against her bare stomach, and retrieved the bottle she had stashed near the pool.

  Back at her den, she swished her mouth and blew half of the spring water from her bottle into the shrubs. She drank the rest, ate a few leftover cattails, and crawled inside the cave, trying to ignore the bloody bedding. A bandage could wait. Stiff and cold, with her arm immobilized against her belly, she clenched her teeth to stabilize her trembling jaw.

  Mama said plantain helped with pain, too. Mama knew. Later in the afternoon she would feel better. Besides, the wind was rising again. Ominous, steel-colored heaps of clouds piled up outside, darkening by the minute. She would lie here until the storm passed and let the plants work. Only until then. If she stayed here too long, she would run out of cattails. If she didn’t eat, she would grow too weak to climb.

  She might even die.

  The churning clouds exploded, shaking the ground beneath her. Thunder. Would death be like that thunder? Would it shake the ground like that? She held her breath and waited. The door to her cave brightened with a flash, which pulsed in her teeth and her ragged arm. Another boom followed, louder than the first.

  And rain. Rain, on a billion leaves and needles. Rain that washed all of her hunkered birds and porcupines, raccoons and possums, streamed down the face of her cave, and soaked into the thirsty ground.

  She stretched her good arm through the cave’s opening, palm up.

  CHAPTER 17 ~ CELIA

  Ants

  After I escaped Gram’s lecture in her rose garden, I found Burnaby in the barn. “Bone-hunter, you ready? Let’s find that owl you fed to the ants.”

  We both needed the break. People were going crazy looking for Aggie. I hoped I might see signs of her while we collected, but to protect Burnaby’s sensitive self, I didn’t tell him I had seen footprints in the garden. For two seconds. And had no proof. No need for a painful red herring.

  Burnaby stood at the workbench with a bucket of dead starlings at his feet, while he folded toilet paper and laid it in a shoebox. Gram’s garden basket sat beside the box, with tongs, two pairs of tweezers, a trowel, and a pancake spatula laid like medic’s tools on the hand towel inside.

  “Can I carry something?”

  He handed me the box and strode out the door toward the river, scanning the trees again for Aggie as both basket and starling bucket dangled from his elbows. Pi trotted beside him, and I trailed the two, still steaming about Mender’s accusation that I had wrecked her peas and carrots. Still baffled by those footprints.

  I was so busy frowning into the ground that I almost plowed right into Burnaby at the first anthill, rising three feet tall in a sunny spot between two spruces. He bent deep over the pile of twigs and fir needles, his face inches from the squirming insects as he introduced them.

  “Thatching ants.”

  Paths led into the mound from all directions, thick with black and red bugs carrying grass and beetles, dead flies, tinder, and conifer needles. A few ants crawled across his boot and up the leg of his jeans, but he ignored them.

  “Don’t those bite?”

  “They do.”

  I stepped backwards, but he let them climb right over his denim as he scraped bare and stomped flat a three-square-foot dirt patch bordering an ant trail. He pulled a bird from the bucket and laid it on its back in the center of the cleared space, talking as he worked.

  “The first time, I arranged the bird directly on the mound. Later I found the skull and spine, but the ants had dispersed most of the skeleton.” With the spatula he scraped away a piece of the matted anthill. “I dug inside for missing bones, but the insects swarmed.” He pointed at the tiny creatures, rolling like sea waves into the damaged section.

  “Like that.”

  He waved the spatula toward the scrape. “Thereafter, I left the birds farther from the hill.”

  “Don’t you have a jar of spare parts?” I suppressed a smile. Unlikely. Given his penchant for accuracy, he would hate to jury-rig a skeleton.

  “Yes, I do. Substitutions—in a box, not a jar. I prefer originals, however.”

  Hoo boy.

  At a second, taller anthill, Burnaby brushed debris off a nearby stone, flat and large as a Thanksgiving turkey platter, then cleared the surrounding ground. “My first bone plate. From the shallows upriver. Still need a few more.”

  He again laid a bird on its back, this time in the center of the stone. We knelt and watched. Two ants crawled to the starling and traced its feathers with their antennae. As others diverted off their trail in the direction of the supine bird, the original explorers scurried back to the nest. Within minutes, platoons of ants marched toward the carcass. With the temperature in the high seventies, insects soon covered the bird in a collective writhe.

  Burn rose abruptly. “Five more.”

  “You rationing?”

  “One for each hill. Animals eat these birds too, so we’ll distribute. Cut our losses.”

  At the last mound, we found the owl. A few ants lingered around its skeleton, picking their teeth, I figured, after chewing all the bones clean. The lower half of the beak lay a foot away from the rest of the body, moved by a zealous ant squadron. Feathers and the smallest wing bones, those delicate hands of the bird, lay strewn in a trail across bare dirt.

  Burnaby opened the shoebox, so I picked up what looked like a femur. I was just trying to be helpful, but he appeared to have an internal conniption over my effort, given the size of his eyes and how his mouth sputtered. My hackles rose. Settled.

  “Easy, Burn.” I set the bone in the box, then wiggled my cigar stub digits at him. “I get it. No touching.” I actually did get it. Bones were his deal, and he was good at them. He’d been kind enough to bring me along. He didn’t need a bull crashing his china.

  When I folded my hands, he relaxed, and with tweezers and fingertips he recovered the bones with the delicacy of a surgeon. Then he laid both box and tools into the garden basket, sat cross-legged in the shade, and morphed into a maître d’.

  “Would you like a snack?” He spread a bandana on the ground and produced a package of M&Ms, which he tore open with bone-gathering precision and poured onto the handkerchief.

  “Why, sure.” I reached for the pile, but he raised his hand to stop me. From a baggie in his pocket, he withdrew a damp cloth and cleaned his fingers, then passed the rag to me.

  “Alcohol. Bacteria deterrent.” He waited until I wiped down my bone-touching paws before he sorted the candies by color, then arranged them on the cloth according to the chromatic spectrum, leaving gaps for the missing colors. Quite a few gaps, given that he was working with green, yellow, orange, and those random brown and tan outliers. When the piles lay in neat order, he extended his hand. “You first.”

  I took a yellow one. Burnaby swallowed and blinked. I suspected that choosing one out of sequence had a visceral effect on the guy. He stayed with the green. Ate them all.

  “I’m not good at this yet.” He took a candy from the next pile.

  “There’s a skill set to M&M’s?” Couldn’t help myself.

  “At conversation. Mama says I give speeches when I should be conversing. Misplaced monologues are selfish, she says. Talking should be reciprocal. Unselfish. Like tossing an apple back and forth so each hearer can catch it. She says I should listen without having a speech ready. Consider. Respond. Listen again.”

  My mockery smacked me this time. He was so sincere. “At least you realize it, Burnaby. Most guys don’t get that. Girls either.” Did I? I understood the law of quadratic reciprocity, but he was talking about people. About relationships. He seemed concerned about me.

  “See?” he said. “You did it right there. Heard me and responded.” He lifted his hands like a referee calling a touchdown. I wouldn’t have guessed he liked football.

  “And you did the same right back,” I said.

  “I did?”

  “Yessir. We are having a proper conversation.”

  A brightne
ss washed over his face. He scooped up the remaining candies. I knew he was making a sacrifice, stirring them all together.

  “Here,” he said, and poured the mixture into my palm. Beneath all his weirdness, the guy was almost cool. Maybe sturdier than I thought.

  “About Aggie … I saw something.”

  Burnaby plucked a dandelion leaf and began tearing it.

  “Might be nothing,” I continued. “But I swear I saw footprints in Gram’s garden.”

  His eyelids fluttered. “Did Mender see them?”

  “No, and it was too late to tell her. She wouldn’t have believed me. Thinks I lie to her.”

  “Mender knows tracks. She didn’t notice?”

  “Apparently not. Chopped right into them.”

  Burnaby panned the foliage overhead. “Those would be the first prints anyone has seen. You certain they were human?”

  “No, I’m not certain. I only saw them for a second.”

  He nodded slowly. Folded the bandanna.

  I felt fidgety. “You see your parents yet?”

  “Yes.”

  I waited. “Well? How are they?”

  His eyes dulled, and he shoved the kerchief into his pocket. “Critical. Especially Mama. Necrotic expansion. Immunosuppression.”

  “And that means?”

  His shoulders hunched. The explainer was still holding the apple.

  Thunderheads were piling up like mashed spuds when I got back to the house. No sign of Gram. I changed my clothes, assessed the sky, and figured I could get in a quick five miles before it rained. I jogged fast down the lane and turned downhill at the road, into the wind.

  About a mile and a half out, thunder rumbled in the distance. I thought of Aggie. Where would she go in a storm? Was she out in the open like I was, a target for the nearest lightning bolt? I hadn’t seen a flash, so I quickened my pace and kept running, determined to make it to the stop sign before I turned—my two-mile mark, according to Gram’s odometer.