Birds of a Lesser Paradise

by Megan Mayhew Bergman

  Sorry, he said.

  It was just after six when we settled in to camp. We found a small clearing, the site of an old logging camp. Its remains, mostly rusted tin roofs, lay in overgrown heaps in the woods beyond the tree line. The maple and swamp gum around us were choked with smilax. The cicadas were humming and the evening sky was still blue as we threw up three tents. I could hear the frogs tuning up; we were just north of Lake Drummond, near the old lumber canal. Dad opened his tent for Betsy, but she remained with Smith, who tossed sticks into the woods for her to chase.

  I was tired and a blister was forming on the back of my right heel. While Dad started a fire to keep bugs away, I set up the camp stove and heated water for tea. I unwrapped the sweet potatoes I’d baked earlier and mixed them with roasted garlic and black beans and heated them in a skillet over the stove.

  After eating, Dad thumped his chest and squirmed.

  Feel okay? I asked.

  Heartburn, he said. Just need some water.

  Smith sat quietly and stared at the fire. For a few minutes the flames held us like a magnet, a false sun. It was as if we were early hominids or starved settlers, fugitives pausing to rest.

  Come help me, I said, touching Smith’s arm and handing him the discarded tinfoil from supper. I led him a few yards away from camp. Are you mad? I whispered as we tied up our food in bear bags. I didn’t mean to snap at you earlier.

  Nah, he said. I get it. You’re protecting him.

  Throw this line over the tree limb, I said, handing him a rope with a sack of rocks on one end.

  Dad, who was now nothing but a silhouette in front of the fire, choked a stick with his hands and practiced his putting stance. He sent clumps of pine straw flying with imaginary golf balls.

  I read somewhere, Smith said, that they’ve found the ivory-billed in Arkansas. Maybe we could head down there sometime.

  But I’d stopped listening. I was rushing toward Dad, who had crumpled and lay heaving on the ground. He clutched his chest and shoulder and tried to sit up. Betsy lay down beside him.

  Breathe, I said, coaxing him to lie back down on the ground. Breathe, Dad.

  Even as I tried to calm my father, I could feel panic overtake me. I couldn’t let Dad die out here. I had to be rational, make the right decisions.

  Elevate his head, I shouted to Smith, who stood behind me, as if waiting for instruction.

  Smith dropped to the ground and put Dad’s head in his lap. Do you have aspirin? I asked.

  Dad shook his head. Smith, too.

  Don’t worry, I said, though I felt as if someone had hit my skull with a blunt shovel.

  We have to get him out, I said to Smith. I think he’s had a heart attack. Or a stroke. I don’t know.

  You run, I said. Grab a flashlight and my phone and run until you have service. Tell them we are roughly one half mile from the place where the groomed trail becomes a footpath near the old logging camp.

  Smith stood up. He looked drunk, tired, shocked.

  Go, dammit!

  I hated myself then, for letting a stranger into our life, for having to trust this stranger to save my father. Smith sprinted into the woods. Betsy hesitated, then followed him.

  I sat Indian-style on the sandy soil next to the fire and cupped Dad’s head, bringing it gently into my lap. I massaged his temples and jawline.

  You’re going to be okay, I said. You have to believe that.

  I’m sorry, he said. His voice was small and strained.

  Don’t talk, I said, trying to sound calm. Just rest. Rest and breathe.

  When you camp in the swamp at night, you know there are bears. There are hundreds, and they smell you, and they’re curious.

  Everything sounds large at night—raccoons, squirrels, a startled deer.

  But nothing was as fierce and wild as me. I was furiously alive.

  Dad told me once that he knew how to do many things—rig a trap for a prize mink, field dress and butcher a buck, navigate by the Southern Cross, but when I was born he didn’t know how to feed or burp me. Your diapers were in a knot, he said, or sliding down your legs. I forgot to brush your hair. I couldn’t keep your face clean. Your mother was dead. Those were hard times.

  He was sorry, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t picture that grieving, incompetent father. I remembered the stacks of bird books, flash cards, and faded Audubon prints. Stories of him looking for Carolina parakeets as a boy, begging his father to stop logging, hoping he’d still find a viable pair in the swamp.

  Remember, he’d tell me. Birds need dead trees for nesting and foraging.

  What I never told Smith was that Dad had left years earlier for Arkansas at the news of a possible discovery of the ivory-billed. He’d driven his pickup to the protected tract and quietly trespassed for two weeks, tape recorder in hand. For most of his life, he’d been desperate to believe in the bird’s existence.

  Your mother believed, too, he’d said.

  I tried to find my mother in my dreams. In college, when I got high, I’d sit on the roof of my dorm with my eyes closed and search for pieces of her inside myself. I figured that the parts of me I didn’t understand—those I couldn’t trace to the bearded man knee-deep in juniper water back home—were her. My perfectionism, my temper, my love of heat—and, as my father reminded me, the way I sang to myself—off-key, pitchless, hopeful.

  I don’t like thinking about those four hours in the pitch-black swamp night. The fear in my gut, Dad’s arrhythmic breathing, the sounds of snapping limbs and rustling leaves. Suggestions.

  An emergency squad rode into the swamp on two ATVs. I heard the sounds of their machines and voices and as soon as I saw their lights, I cried. They loaded Dad onto a stretcher but didn’t have room for me, so I left our gear in the middle of the woods and jogged after the ATVs with my flashlight. The sound of the ATVs quickly disappeared and I found myself running, tripping over tree roots, tears mingling with the sweat on my face, sand in my teeth, the rocks hard underneath my boots.

  As the swamp opened up to the logging road, and the logging road opened up to the highway, I looked for Smith and Betsy, but I was alone.

  I brought Dad home from the hospital two days after the heart attack; he was to rest before the quadruple bypass his doctors had scheduled. I hadn’t heard from Smith after sending him into the woods, but when we arrived home, Betsy was tethered to the front porch, a bowl of water at her feet. She quivered and cried until I unleashed her. She put her paws on Dad’s knees, desperate for acknowledgment.

  I’d been home that morning preparing for Dad’s arrival. Smith had apparently dropped Betsy off while I was gone. Perhaps he’d been watching the house or seen my car. I hoped he wasn’t avoiding me.

  That Smith fellow tried to run off with my woman, Dad said, scratching Betsy’s head.

  Easy, Dad, I said. Let me get you inside. I guided him to his bedroom and helped him onto the bed.

  Will you keep the business up, Dad asked, until I can get back to work?

  Of course, I said.

  Betsy claimed a spot next to him, circling until she found the place where she could rest her chin on his knee. I dragged the television into his room, but he didn’t want it on.

  Can you make me a fruit salad? he asked. And a fried egg sandwich?

  I nodded. That afternoon, I nailed a platform underneath Dad’s bedroom window where I could spread birdseed.

  Eventually, Dad said, I should get out of your way, go somewhere with railed showers.

  You’re staying here, I said. You’re going to be as good as new. New was never all that good, he said.

  You’ll be fine, I said.

  Despite our verbal optimism, we felt our lives turning. We felt the beginning of something sad.

  Dad shook the newspaper—a habitual motion—as I placed a dinner tray over his lap. He pointed at the obituaries: It’s my generation’s time, he said. Natural progression.

  Don’t rush, I said.

  The next morning, we quietly ate
breakfast on the front porch. Dad looked out over the property.

  There’s crabgrass on my course, Dad said, surveying his green.

  Dad reread biographies on Jefferson and Roosevelt and tried his hand at the New York Times crossword puzzle. His complexion was sallow and he moved stiffly.

  I want to be outside, he said after two days. He looked out the window like a sad dog.

  Give it time, I said. But part of me felt that depriving him of the outdoors—the sulfur smell of the swamp air, his putting green, the trails he walked daily behind our house—was akin to starvation.

  The next morning, I made him breakfast and opened his windows. Then I walked down our gravel driveway to organize the latest team of bird-watchers and drive them into the swamp. I emulated the speeches I’d heard from Dad: Try to become part of the forest. Be patient and humble. Find the dead trees. He had a way of exciting our customers; I felt condescending.

  The night before, I’d dreamed that Smith had climbed into my bed while I was sleeping. It could happen; we never locked the doors, no one in our town did. At first, the idea of him in the house at night was petrifying, but the imagined trespass only underscored his air of mystery.

  I wanted to lay eyes on him, thank him for what he’d done for Dad.

  But maybe Smith had no intention of coming back. He had the inherent toughness a thing must possess to survive on its own. Perhaps I was romanticizing him because he was my only option, the one piece of luck I’d brushed up against in this lonely place. You don’t know him, I reminded myself. You don’t know the ways he’d change your life.

  After dropping the bird-watchers off at the swamp, I went to fill Dad’s truck with gas. The station attendant was holding court behind the counter.

  You could take each one of these small Carolina towns, the man said, these towns without stoplights and no tax base and no real post office to speak of, turn ’em upside down, and shake ’em. All sorts of characters would fall out. Nazi war criminals in Burgaw. Hoffa in Wilson. Earhart in Duck. At least when I was a boy.

  I put a ten-dollar bill on the counter and let the screen door slam shut behind me. Outside, I took a deep breath. I could hear the man laughing, decades of tar in his dark lungs. What better place to hide?

  Across the street: a tobacco warehouse, lumber supply company, and garden center. Bulldozers moving earth for a shopping mall. In a few months, men would come here for hunting licenses. I wouldn’t leave the house without an orange cap. I’d tie orange ribbons to Betsy’s collar, keep the cat inside. The smell of woodsmoke would fill the town. Pickup trucks would roll by, still-warm deer piled in truck beds like trophies.

  The only ivory-billed woodpeckers I’d ever seen were stuffed and mounted on dry branches. I wondered, if he could go back to that day in the swamp, would Dad have put a bullet in the bird’s heart to prove he’d seen it? To watch it longer, watch the life fall out of it?

  For thirty years, he’d wanted to know for sure that what he saw was the real thing.

  Days after seeing Smith for the last time, I knew I was waiting for someone I didn’t understand. Maybe I’d spend the rest of my life waiting, another refugee made into myth by the swamp. Maybe it was for the best; some people and places are better left unchanged.

  The night before his surgery, Dad went to bed early. I cleaned the kitchen and stared at his closed door. I missed him. Already. I walked down the hall and knocked.

  Can I come in? I asked.

  He was propped on his pillows, Betsy sleeping against his feet. She looked up as I entered. His television was not on; there was no book in his hands. He’d placed a picture of my mother on his nightstand. I opened a window.

  For the morning, I said. So you can hear them sing.

  He didn’t speak, but reached for my hand.

  The air was too warm, but we were used to it. The crickets were loud and I let their noise chip away at my worries. I rubbed my father’s rough hand with my thumb.

  I did see one, he said. Once. I’m positive. It was the real thing. A bill the color of chalk.

  Somewhere in the distance, a train ran over the old swamp tracks, tracks Dad had followed in and out of the swamp as a boy, tracks he’d known before he fell in love, before he spent two years grading our backyard into a golfing green.

  He’d seen the last wild things, the early hunting cabins, the last virgin timber, and maybe even the last living ivory-billed. He’d seen the last great bucks, the last great hunters, the skin-laden trappers emerging from the woods at dawn smelling of sulfur and musk.

  His family had made it through the Depression selling mink; I’d once watched Dad carefully tug the mangled body of one from a chicken-wire fence, desperate to save the skin. He still ate the chickweed and creasy greens that had been self-seeding in the backyard since his father’s time. Dad’s old-school frugality was harsh, endearing, maybe a lost art.

  Will you put socks on the bed, he said, in case I get cold?

  The rhythm of the crickets outside muffled traffic, and every now and then the clear note of a jay cut through the air like a circular saw. Maybe it wasn’t the same as it had been when I was a child, but the swamp remained a wild place, wild enough to hide whatever wanted to be hidden.

  You had a good childhood here, he said.

  It was the beginning of a good-bye that I didn’t want to hear. Even if he made it through the surgery, he’d be a different man. Older. More careful.

  I could smell the swamp rose, harlot pink and fragrant in the hot night. Dry magnolia leaves scratched against the vinyl siding of the house. Dad relaxed into his pillow. Betsy fell asleep, no longer on guard.

  For minutes, maybe an hour, I held his hand, and I think he slept.

  I wished for things to stay the same. I wished for stillness everywhere, but I opened up the rest of the bedroom windows and let the world in.

  Saving Face

  Lila had two things to do that day: have dinner with her fiancé, Clay, and evaluate the working farm at Sandhill Prison. She put on her work boots, the steel-toed ones with worn and hay-packed heels, stuffed a change of clothes into a bag, and threw a box of shoulder-length gloves into the back of her pickup.

  After her work at the prison was done, she’d join Clay in a diner car some urbanite had turned into a second-rate wine bar. She’d put the wedding on hold a year ago; now he wanted to discuss the future, reach a final decision. Because she didn’t know what she wanted, she was dreading the meal the way she dreaded obligatory Sundays at church with her mother, or the therapy sessions she’d started recently. But she packed a black dress and the only tube of lipstick she owned.

  Lila drove the flat, pine-shadowed highway toward the correctional center. She kept her windows down and public radio on.

  Most buildings in this part of town were churches or sad municipal structures, some vacant, some half used, mildewed, ugly, and too expensive to fix.

  It’s the kind of year you keep your old shoes, she thought, passing a man in a lawn chair on the side of the road who’d been begging as long as she could remember. His sign said: Vietnam Vet. 1 Wife, 2 Kids, 3 Skinny Cats. Need Food and Bud Light. Betcha can’t hit me with a quarter! he shouted at the passing cars, a cigarette between his teeth.

  Lines were long at the dollar hot dog stand downtown, while tables at Brodie’s Italian Bistro sat empty. Her mother was cutting coupons again. Her father had offered her a spare bedroom in her childhood home in case she wanted to drop her lease, but her veterinary practice was breaking even, and she valued her independence.

  Lila had an apartment downtown over a bakery. Every night her three cats climbed into bed with her, kneading her arms, legs, and chest. They were not demanding companions. They settled into the nooks of her knees and at her feet. The white noise of their purring sent her to sleep feeling less alone.

  It was summer, but Christmas decorations still hung from the lampposts surrounding Hoke County City Hall—no one wanted to pay to have them taken down. The green tinsel ha
d faded in the sun and birds had nested in the hollowed-out candy canes.

  Tacky, her mother said, but sooner or later you stop noticing. That’s life in Raeford, Lila said.

  Lila drove her pickup past the barbed-wire fence line and the brick prison and down a dirt road toward the prison farmhouse. In recent years someone had tacked vinyl siding to the house. The facade was dented and yellowed by the dry dirt that rose from the road. Sorry-looking air-conditioning units sagged in the windows.

  Sandhill Prison had been many things. The Tuberculosis Sanitarium for Negroes. The Mary Hobgood Training Center. Now it was a low-security prison with a working farm. The administration was thinking of closing the farm and selling the land and had called Lila in to evaluate the health of the livestock. Lila checked her notepad: seventy jersey cows, five pigs, and one horse.

  We don’t need any bleeding hearts, the warden had said. Just a real good evaluation of health. In other words, how many of these things can we sell?

  Lila slammed her truck door shut and walked to the farmhouse. She knew the farm well; she’d been called out for cattle vaccinations and difficult births over the years. She looked backward, nervous. Prisoners who worked the farm roamed the land freely. She could see a handful in their orange jumpsuits raking through the compost pile in the distance.

  Hey, Doc, the warden said, sticking out his hand. He wore pressed khakis and a short-sleeved button-up.

  She hated the way people looked at her face, like they were sorry.

  The wolf hybrid had taken most of her upper lip. He’d roused from his anesthetic haze earlier than expected as Lila was pulling quills from his muzzle. It had not hurt at first; the shock had delayed the pain. It was two in the morning and she was the only one in the surgical suite. She remembered blood on the mounted telephone as she dialed for help.

  After a year of plastic surgeries, two seams remained where grafts had been placed underneath her nose. A cosmetic surgeon had tattooed a rose-colored line where the edge of her upper lip once appeared.

  You were so beautiful, her mother had said in the hospital, giving Lila milk through a straw that leaned against the corner of her broken mouth.