by Molly Gloss
While she stood watching they brought up something heavy and dark, something like a waterlogged stump. The oystermen had seen her watching from the bay shore, and when they had the thing aboard they hoisted it up and displayed it for her, lifting and spreading the arms wide, lifting up the heavy head until the mouth fell open to white teeth, a red tongue. The bear’s thick, sodden pelt streamed with salt water. The dog pointed his nose at the sky and suddenly raised a new wail—it seemed to her a sound of terrible bereavement. One of the men on the boat shouted something, but she could not make it out against the chop of waves on the muddy shore.
• • •
Several times in the years since his death she had been visited by Tom, or rather Tom’s ghost. Once, just at dusk, she had seen him sitting below an oak tree alive with acorn woodpeckers, and when she called to him he turned and grinned and made the purring sound a woodpecker makes in greeting its fellows. She came upon him suddenly in the narrow aisles of the Stanford library stacks, where he smiled slightly as if embarrassed and then turned into another aisle without speaking. On the peninsula, where heavy rain could turn the meadows and fields into an archipelago of islands, the houses and barns afloat in their yards, she had seen Tom crossing through the flooded tombstones of the Ocean Park cemetery, not walking on water but wading in his heavy hiking boots, raising a white surf that slapped against the stones. When she spoke to him he glanced back with a soft expression but did not reply.
None of this, of course, was real. A moment afterward, the person sitting under the oak was Claude Gerald who lived uphill from her parents’ house in St. Helena. In the library stacks, it was Benjamin Morse, a student in her botany class whose dark hair brushing the collar of his shirt was so much like Tom’s. The one she had seen crossing the flooded churchyard was a young man who sold oysters on the pier at Nahcotta—she did not know his name—on his way to the feed store in Ocean Park.
After Tom drowned in the Spitsbergen estuary, but during the months when she had still believed him to be alive, she had been visited by vivid dreams of him, dreams that slipped away in the morning, beyond retrieve. It seemed to her that glimpses of Tom’s ghost must be fragments of those dreams, dreams she had thought irrecoverable, and a separate, nameless loss. She wrote down each sighting at the back of the Journal in Species Accounts, on the page set aside for uncommon birds, the page titled Incidental, Accidental, Rare.
• • •
The birds had mostly gone to ground or been driven inland by the storm, so in the afternoon when the rain briefly slackened she took the sand trail to Oysterville to replenish groceries and post her letters. She walked quickly, holding down her hat. The sky in the west was still black, but now rippling every little while with silent green lightning. Dry blue flakes of ash or dust—she was at a loss what to call it—lifted and fell on the wind, and gathered at the outer edges of puddles in a stiff rime.
Oysterville’s prosperity had failed decades earlier with the failure of the San Francisco oyster market, the village by now reduced to a few dozen weather-battered houses and barns scattered between the upland woods and the mud flats. The post office occupied space in Mulvey’s Store, and the storekeeper, whose name was not Mulvey, and who served also as postmaster, remembered her from previous years.
“It’s you, is it, come back to look for your strange birds.” He meant this in a neighborly way. She was by most standards an odd woman, one who dressed in trousers and tramped about in wild territory that was home to bears; a woman known to carry a pistol, and whose behavior and study could not properly be called “bird-watching.” But he had known her sort in North Carolina as a boy—“yarbs” who sold leaves and snake venom as curatives door to door, and lived out wild in the woods; and he was himself eccentric enough to think well of her.
It crossed her mind to tell him the correct term for a strange bird was incidental, or rare; but she smiled slightly and said, “Yes, it’s me,” and handed him several letters to post.
While he rummaged for any mail that might have come for her, he said, “Well, that was a storm we had, wasn’t it, I never seen a sky like that, never have, nor such lightning.”
She agreed that it was a terrible storm.
“A tempest, my mama would have called it, but no, I never seen it like that, which I wonder if it wasn’t those fellows over to Fort Canby, shooting off some sort of ordnance, which they claim not. Or else the Japs, but if so they have got poor aim, they hit nothing but trees.” He brought out two letters, one addressed in her mother’s hand and the other in her father’s. “Now what else can I do you for, miss?”
She gave him a short list—flashlight batteries, chocolate, a piece of smoked ham—and she bought a copy of the weekly Chinook Observer, its bold headline announcing “Yanks Shoot Down Yamamoto.” She stowed everything in her knapsack and swung the sack to her shoulder, but did not immediately take the trail to camp. On the lee side of Mulvey’s porch she found a bench and sat to read her letters. Her parents each gave much the same mundane report comprised of errands and weather and neighborhood gossip. “They have shot down Yamamoto,” her father wrote, which was his only reference to the war.
While she was skimming the front page of the newspaper a young girl ten or eleven years old came through the yard, and when she saw her there she veered across and stepped up onto the porch. “Is your name Miss Kenney? Are you the woman looks for birds?” The girl was in rubber boots and a brown sweater. Her fair hair was unevenly cut, held back with bobby pins under a hat decorated with fishhooks and bird feathers.
“I am Barbara Kenney,” she said. And then—this is what Tom would have done—she told the girl, “I am an ornithologist, which is a scientist who studies birds. Are you interested in science?”
She considered her answer. “I wonder about things, if that’s science.”
“It is.”
The girl ran her tongue across her chapped lips. “I wonder about some birds I saw. I could show you them.”
“Do you know the species name? Or can you describe them to me?”
“They’re oystercatchers.”
On the peninsula, she had only ever seen oystercatchers on the rocks below the North Head lighthouse a good twenty miles to the south, prying mollusks out of coastal rocks with their long, tough, bright orange bills. She said, “Where did you see them? Are you certain they are oystercatchers?”
“They’re over on the mud flats”—the girl pointed vaguely—“which is not where I ever have seen them. And most of them dead on the ground.”
She could not think what the girl’s story might mean, or how to measure the truthfulness of it. But she thought of the albatrosses and petrels dead on the Leadbetter beach. She put away her newspaper and stood. “Well, all right, show me.”
The girl led her south on the tarred plank road toward Nahcotta. There were jack pines on both sides of the road, and the wind made a sound in them like the rattle of pebbles in a jar. A splintered windmill on the roof of a house made a faint whine, spinning its few intact vanes. In the west, the black sky was shot through every little while with flutters of silent, virid lightning.
After half a mile, they turned east and walked on the criss-crossing dikes of a cranberry farm and then the girl stepped down onto one of the bogs and headed straight across it. The field was soggy but not flooded, and the vines had not yet begun to bloom. The girl stepped with care, not to break the twiggy branches.
At the far edge of the bog they passed through a small woodlot and came onto a secluded part of the bay shore. There were dozens of black oystercatchers dead and dying on the wet mud. The birds not yet dead beat their long wings weakly against the ground and made faint yelping sounds, ghostlike and plaintive. Their golden eyes seemed to study the sky through milky film.
She knelt and examined several of the dead birds. She lifted wings and spread feathers and felt along the bodies for shotgun pellets, but the birds were unbloodied and intact.
The girl, watching her, sai
d, “What made them fall? How come they died, do you know?”
“We have had such a fierce storm,” she said after a moment. “I imagine it had something to do with that. There were a great many dead birds on the beach this morning—seabirds we don’t see on the land. It may be the unusual weather drove them ashore. And brought down the oystercatchers.”
The girl pulled at the hem of her sweater with grimy hands and glanced toward the dark sky in the west. “I went over to Klipsan this morning and there were a lot of whales that drove up onto the beach. We get them sometimes, one or two, but there’s so many I couldn’t count them all. Maybe a hundred, they’re laying all up and down the sand for most of a mile, just laying there waiting to die I guess. Is that on account of the weather too?”
“I don’t know. It may be.” She said nothing about the dog, the bear.
“You’d think a big storm would make them swim down deep, not come out on the beach,” the girl said, which was perhaps not a question.
Barbara wrapped two dead birds and then a living one in sheets of newspaper and put them in the knapsack. The live bird rustled the paper and cried weakly.
“Will you cut them open to see what killed them?” the girl asked her.
“Yes. Sometimes an autopsy can work out the cause of death.”
She walked among the birds still on the ground, quickly twisting the necks of those still moving. The girl watched this in silence. Then she said, “I live at the Whalebone Inn. Will you come and tell me if you work out what killed them?”
She knew the Whalebone Inn, a boardinghouse in Nahcotta. “Yes, I’ll come and find you if I learn anything.”
They walked back together across the cranberry fields. When they came out on the road, the clouds were huge above the tops of the trees, violently bruise-colored, rippling with that strange lightning. They looked at the sky in silence. A dry blue rain had begun to fall again; it collected in fine drifts on the brim of the girl’s hat.
“I am camped at Leadbetter Point. Will you come and tell me if you find any more dead birds in numbers like that, or where they aren’t usually seen?”
The girl nodded, and after a hesitation she said, “Do you know the real name for an oystercatcher?”
“Do you mean the species name? The black ones here on the peninsula are Haematopus bachmani. Bachman was a friend to Audubon, and there are several birds named for him.”
“Have all the names been given out by now?”
“Do you mean, have all the birds on the earth been discovered and given a name? No, no, every year some new ones are found. If we were in South America we might discover one—there are more species of birds there than anywhere. I don’t imagine all the species on the earth will ever be known and named. People are always finding new mushrooms and insects and fish.”
The girl cast her a sidelong look. “Are any birds named for a woman?”
“Yes, a few.” She considered how much more to say—how much Tom would have said. “But most of those are named for queens or goddesses, or for the daughters or wives of scientists, not for women who are themselves scientists.” She did not say that in the winter just past she had taken work as an poorly paid assistant to a prominent male professor, trapping birds and preparing their skeletons for his outdated study of the mechanics of bird flight; or that the winter before, she had resorted to teaching children at a grade school in Calistoga. She did not say: Universities are willing to educate women, but not employ them.
“Are any birds named for you?”
“No.” She did not smile. “Not yet.”
• • •
Overnight, as blood will clot in a wound, the clouds thickened and hardened, and in the morning what remained was a black flaw stretching out of sight to the north and south, a long, shifting vein of darkness, glossy and depthless.
The storm had battered the coast for hundreds of miles, from Vancouver Island to Bandon, and inland as far as Spokane and Boise. Fishermen cutting through her camp on their way to the beach told her the widespread belief: that a new and terrible weapon detonated over at Hanford or at one of the secret sites in Canada had brought on the unnatural storm and left that huge black pall in the sky.
A woman she met on the beach was of another mind. God, she said, had opened a portal into heaven and shortly would raise up all the believers.
In the following days, extraordinarily high tides gnawed at the beaches and mudflats; roads and paths disappeared; fifty-year-old houses built on bluffs above the sand fell into the sea. Rafts of dead fish floated in on the next tide and the next, and their decaying bodies littered all the salt marshes and the sand beaches. There were so many fin whales and gray whales decaying on the beach at Klipsan that when the wind blew northerly she could smell the stench from her camp almost ten miles away.
Her notebook became a record of casualties and losses. Thousands of plovers, the subjects of her summer study, had been scattered, driven away or killed in the storm. She posted signs to warn people away from the nesting grounds—this was a crucial time for the few hundred pairs who remained—but the beach had been reduced to a narrow strand, and the Coast Guard horse patrol came up and down it twice a day, heedless of the birds’ shallow nests. And in the days after the storm, beachcombers from the tourist cabins, as well as peninsula natives from Oysterville and Nahcotta, walked over the dunes and through the plover nesting sites or drove onto the beach and parked above the high tide line. From the open sand, the black rift seemed to hang just overhead, almost within reach, and on clear nights it was a starless streak through the firmament. People sat on blankets on the sand, or on the fenders and the running boards of cars, and stared up at it.
She watched it too, from driftlogs above the nesting grounds. One day she watched a single heron, then nine pelicans, then a pair of horned grebes rise through the sky and vanish into the blackness. Methodically, she wrote down the time of day, and the numbers of the birds, their names. She tried to think what else to say, and finally wrote, Gone.
• • •
She had come to the peninsula for the first time in 1927, on a month-long summer holiday with her parents. She was fourteen years old. They rented a board-and-batten cabin on the beach side at Ocean Park, and she spent her days roaming the sand hills, the woods and shorelines. She went to the beach at low tide and came back with her pockets full of shells and agates, her bare legs wet and sandy to the knees. She hiked the oyster-shell road a mile and a half to the bay shore, collected feathers and shells along the edge of the slack water and rummaged in the spruce woods for empty nests and birds’ eggs. The pungent carcass of a ninety-foot whale had washed onto the beach near Ocean Park and she drew its detailed likeness in her letter to Tom, beneath a long list of the ducks and pelicans she had seen on the bay, and shorebirds observed on the surf beach. Several times that month she hiked out to Leadbetter Point. There were tens of thousands of snowy plovers nesting there and raising their young, the broad bare sand dimpled with uncountable numbers of their shallow scraped nests. A boy was flying a kite, she wrote to Tom, and wherever it crossed overhead the little birds would rise up in a panic. Do you think a paper kite looks to a plover very much like a hawk?
She and her mother dug razor clams at low tide, shucked them, and fried them in cornmeal. At night her father built great driftwood bonfires and the three of them sat on the sand watching showers of bright sparks rise into the darkness. She was used to the Napa Valley, where the normal weather in summer was stiflingly hot, and a dry wind rattled the oak leaves. In August, weather on the peninsula was often cool, and she was astonished by the clarity and depth of the sky when the fog cleared out in the afternoons. Walking the bay shore two miles from the ocean, she could hear the breakers as a low continuous throb when she stood still and listened for it.
One week it rained every day. Salt hardened in the shakers and green mold bloomed on the window sills, but she found this kind of weather—days and days with a great drumming of rain on the roof, a loweri
ng slate gray sky, a tremendous wet wind tearing through the trees—oddly exciting. She put on a rain coat and walked across the sand hills to the ocean where she stood under her streaming hat watching the surf breaking high and brown, clear to the horizon, tossing great logs like balsam chips. In the morning, before the wind picked up, before her parents stirred in the other room, before the barest gray light began to signal the day, she lay in bed and listened to the gabble of thousands of geese feeding on the tidewater marshes. It’s wonderful here, she wrote to Tom.
• • •
The woman who came to the door at the Whalebone Inn was not someone she recognized, though the woman seemed taken aback and said, “Oh! It’s you!” as if they were acquainted from long past.
“I’m looking for a girl who lives here, she has a brown sweater and her hair is light in color. I failed to get her name.”
“That would be Alice. What do you want her for?”
“I’d like to speak with her, if I may.”
The woman, who was Alice’s aunt, considered her niece an odd and baffling child—a girl who preferred capturing frogs to playing with dolls; a girl who liked to keep snakes as pets. It was a mild worry of hers, that Alice might grow up to be an eccentric and homely hermit-spinster such as the one now standing on the porch. After a considerable pause to weigh Alice’s best interests, she stepped out and shouted, “Alice! Com’ere now, I mean it!”
In a moment the girl came in sight, walking up from the tidal flats. She was barefooted and muddy, in pants raggedly cut off at the knees. Her sweater pockets bulged with shells or agates.