Winter Birds

by Jim Grimsley

  Mama said, “He can’t help it.”

  “I know, you say it all the time, it’s his blood, it’s his goddamn blood.”

  “Don’t talk like that in front of him. You don’t know how it makes him feel.”

  “All I know is everything in this room has to be paid for by somebody, and I got a feeling it’s going to be me.”

  “He’s a little boy, he can’t help the money.”

  After a while Papa said, “Well, at least we ain’t going to take any more chances. We been lucky since Danny, we got two good sons. We won’t have any more.”

  Mama’s voice took on a nervous sound. “You think we’re going to stop because you say so?”

  “One of your fancy doctor friends can tell us what to do. There’s pills you can take to keep from having babies.”

  “That’s fine if there’s not one already started,” Mama said slowly. “But what if it’s already too late?”

  Right in front of their eyes the man’s bare back retreated, so close he might have slid his hand right through the solid look of hate Papa gave Mama when he understood what she was telling him. They only saw each other and the wound in your mouth. You knew then you might have followed the man forever, might finally have caught him except, now and then, for the look in your Mama’s eyes.

  Mama told you, years later, about the night Papa came back to the hospital after he learned he was going to be a father again. Your bleeding had slowed. The doctors hoped a clot would form soon. Papa drove all the way to Mars Hill muttering about the baby and drinking beer. In the hospital he let Mama know everything he had thought about her since he saw her last, and picked a fight with her in front of the nurses. When he began to shout in earnest one nurse ran for doctors and orderlies. But before anyone came he lunged at Mama with a paring knife he had carried in his pocket all the way from home. Mama locked herself in the bathroom before he could reach her. Papa beat at the door with his piece of arm shouting not that he wanted to kill her but that he wanted her to come out and pay some mind to him, look at him, see him for a while.

  The doctors told Mama they could put him in jail if she wanted them to, if she would press charges. She told them no. If he were in jail, who would feed her family?

  You slept through all this, a deep sleep that made Mama more afraid than before. She stood at the side of the bed all night, counting your breaths.

  In the morning you woke to see them both at the window, Mama facing Papa, Papa standing with arm and piece of arm clumsily folded. Past his head you could see clouds, far above the world. The dream of the other had disappeared. Your chin was dry. You could feel the large and rubbery blood clot on your tongue.

  “You should have waited to tell me till after all this was over, I couldn’t take any more surprises. I’m about out of my mind.”

  “I already waited two months to tell you because I was afraid what you might do.”

  Then you called, “Mama,” softly, your voice strangely thickened by the clot.

  They turned and saw you, and both of them smiled. Mama pushed Papa’s arm out of the way and came to you.

  “See,” she said, “I told you it would be all right.”

  In a moment Papa came too, and laid his heavy hand on top of your stomach.

  A week later when the clot disappeared you could eat soft foods again, and the doctors let you go home. Mama packed your clothes into a shopping bag saying Papa was bringing Aunt Delia’s car to drive you home. Not to the old house but to a new one. She acted as if the news should surprise you, and you, for your part, were never quite sure why it didn’t. She told you the story in the car while you waited for Papa to sign the papers about the hospital bill. Papa broke Mr. Rejenkins jaw in a fight, Mama said, and spent the night in jail. The next day Mr. Rejenkins evicted the family from the house. The new house was nicer, Mama said, in a neat, clean yard, closer to town than the last house. That wasn’t the end of the news, either. In a little while, Mama said, you were going to have a new baby sister or brother, and wouldn’t that be fun?

  IN THE next house, the sixth one, you lived for two years. You named that house the Light House because from a distance it looked like an old white lighthouse rising out of a sea of trees. The center of the house stood three stories tall, narrow and sheer like a tower. Mama hated this house from the beginning, despite what she told you that day in the car. There were so many stairs to climb she ran like a mountain goat from morning to night. She swore it was the stairs that brought on the early birth of your youngest brother Grove, who lay three weeks in a hospital incubator before the doctors thought him strong enough to come home. Papa fretted every day about the money wasted as peevishly as if Grove had checked himself into an expensive hotel. Mama lay in bed staring at the ceiling and keeping quiet. She laid Grove’s birth certificate on the dresser next to her where she could see it all the time.

  When Grove came home he lay in the crib with his eyes closed all day long, a small, dark-haired toy. Soon enough he proved to be a bleeder like you. One day a razor blade accidentally tumbled off the dresser into his playpen, and he dragged his soft arm across it. The pale flesh oozed blood hour after hour, more than you would have thought such a small body could contain. Mama and Papa drove him to the hospital in Mars Hill. Once there he bled for weeks.

  He almost died, Mama said. A few months later he almost died again, of a bruise on the side from a simple fall in his crib. He passed blood into his diapers and his side swelled stiff as a melon. A few months later he almost died again when for no reason, after no fall, his knee swelled to twice its normal size, bending his leg back double.

  At each accident Mama and Papa drove him to Mars Hill, where the doctors hovered over him with their needles and their bags of plasma.

  At home, Mama walked from room to room, listless, watching Grove sleep, touching him carefully and turning away from the rest of you, studying the road beyond the window glass.

  Papa came home drunk nearly every day. He sat in his chair by the same window where Mama watched the road. By then he had managed to buy a used television for the family, and he watched the blue images drift across the screen till he felt like sleeping. For a long time after Grove was born, Papa rested when he drank. He would answer any question Mama asked him in a flat voice, looking at her but showing no sign of feeling. If not addressed, he kept perfectly silent.

  One night he brought a bottle into the house and dared Mama to get drunk with him.

  Mama turned from the bottle to Grove and back to the bottle. It was summer and hot. Her face was beaded with sweat from climbing stairs. She was afraid he would fight with her if she said no. The bottle had a crow on the label, a grinning black crow sitting on the kitchen table, the naked light bulb suspended over it on a thick black cord. Mama watched the bottle for a long time, and you watched her. At last she poured the liquor into a jelly glass.

  They fought again that night, the first real argument since the night in the Blood House, a fight like a storm passing through the house. To you it seemed uglier than any before it, because Papa hadn’t yelled this way in such a long time, and because Mama was drunk too, and seemed like him.

  In the morning both were sorry in a way you had never seen them sorry before. For the first time they became afraid of the bitterness that had taken root so deep between them. Mama held you children in her arms all at the same time, and apologized to you as seriously as if you were all adults. She swore she would never drink like that again. Of all the children only you and Amy Kay understood why she was upset. You watched each other carefully as she spoke.

  Papa never said he was sorry for anything. But after that day he stopped drinking and a long calm time began. At night Papa parked his truck in the wide cool shade under the sycamores, and stepped from the truck smiling. Mama met him at the door and talked to him tenderly as she pulled off his shoes. She washed his feet to cool them and led him by the hand to the supper table. Together they tended Grove and watched him grow plump and strong agai
nst his blood, till his strength became like a sign between them. For a long time he had no bleeding at all. Neither did you.

  You started school. In the morning you waited beside the mailbox for the orange school bus to take you to Potter’s Lake, where you sat in the old school building watching breezes stir cobwebs in the corners. Teachers told you about numbers and alphabets. You memorized.

  Duck cut his teeth and wore out his first pair of shoes. When he could walk Allen took him everywhere, teaching him about things like mud puddles and dandelions and stepping on bees without getting stung. Grove, now a year old, learned to make elaborate gurgling noises. Papa said he was singing. Papa liked to hold Grove in his lap in the evenings. Mama watched them with a smile and some tension eased in her face, making her look younger than before. She said Grove would probably start talking early and never stop, like the rest of you. She said that whatever bad people might think about her and Papa, they’d had five smart younguns, and she meant to see you all in college one day, all doctors and lawyers in fine big houses.

  A picture of Amy Kay from that time survives in your piles of letters and papers, her face small, shell-pink and scrubbed, smiling a smile so fragile it seemed ready to dissolve in an instant, like frost in a blast of warm air. In her eyes is a look of waiting. Even after a year in this house, when you might have looked forward to another summer of this peace, you watched Papa carefully for signs of a change.

  By then it had been more than a year since you saw Papa drunk. Amy Kay forgave him and sat on his lap in the evenings, telling him about her friends at school. Duck remembered nothing of the other houses and couldn’t help it if he thought it fine to have a Papa to push him in the rope swing outside, suspended from the sycamore branch. Grove laughed in Papa’s face and stuck small fingers in Papa’s eyes, not caring about what had happened before he was born. Only you and Allen, in the middle, still held yourselves stiff when Papa touched you, never laughing around him, never feeling easy. Something would happen to change him back. Even Amy said that, though as far as she was concerned it didn’t do a bit of good to worry about it while Papa was so much fun.

  You never knew what happened to end the quiet time until many years later, when Mama told you a story about something that happened while the family lived in the Light House. Mama could tell a story richly and deeply when she wanted to, losing herself in the telling, so that all you saw in her face was the reflection of that morning years ago when a photographer stopped in front of the Light House, asking to take Mama’s picture half an hour before Papa was due home for lunch.

  The photographer drove a convertible sports car with square white patches on the canvas hood. Mama thought the patches looked funny when the man parked the car at the side of the road. When he got out of his car there were more patches on the elbows of the photographer’s jacket—black oval patches that Mama said were there for decoration, not for covering up holes. How odd, Mama thought, that a man would put patches on his clothes because he liked the way they looked. When the photographer lifted his camera out of the car, Mama drew back from the window, thinking it was a gun. The photographer watched the house from across the road, testing the weight of the camera in his hand. He flipped a match from his finger. When she saw how he stared at the house she backed further from the window, and held the curtains closed with her hand.

  The photographer walked across the road as casually as if it were his own kitchen floor, caressing the camera with both hands. At first he took pictures of the house and the trees, now and then bending one knee to the ground, or turning the camera sideways, or doing both at once. She didn’t think he would come to the house, until he straightened in a particularly self-conscious way, eyeing the porch. When he stepped forward a small sense of panic overcame her. She was alone, except for Allen, Duck and Grove, who were taking naps upstairs. You and Amy were in school. Heart beating, she ran to the door, listening for his footsteps on the porch—light and sharp, not like Papa’s heavy, measured tread. She didn’t know why it seemed so important that he was coming to the door, except she remembered the foreign sound of his car, stopping beside her mailbox, and she remembered the dark camera and the patches for decoration on his elbows.

  She opened the door only after he knocked the second time. He made an impatient humming sound that she could hear through the door. When she opened it he stopped the noise immediately, as if he hadn’t really expected anyone to be home. An instant later—long enough to make it seem artificial—he smiled. “Good afternoon. I’ve been taking some pictures of your home and thought I’d see if anyone was here. You have a very interesting home.”

  “We rent it from the people up the road,” Mama said.

  He smiled, eyeing her thoroughly, up and down. The look made her self-conscious. She wondered if he thought she was pretty. He waved his arm elaborately in the air and she could see the patches again, a fabric like velvet. “The house looks the same whether you own it or the government owns it. I rent my house too.” He pushed past her into the living room. “May I come in? Sorry, I don’t have much time. My name is Frank DeCapra. I take pictures of houses like yours.”

  She closed the door slowly, smoothing her skirt. She watched the photographer without seeming to, while he explained that he was at work on a project for the university sociological resources center. He didn’t say which university. He was taking pictures of rural people—and rural houses too, he added at the end. She nodded politely to everything he said, and when he paused she nodded to show she understood. All the while he hardly seemed to notice her; he kept busy browsing the room, the furniture, the plastic curtains at the windows. Mama found herself wondering what his house looked like inside, and whether or not it was better than this one.

  He tapped his finger on the camera. Mama moved to the window. “That little car belong to you? Don’t you get scared driving around in something that little?”

  “I get good gas mileage,” he said, lifting a glass ashtray off the couch arm, holding it to the light and setting it down again. “It’s not what you drive that matters, it’s the way you drive.”

  “A good strong wind would blow you right off the road.”

  “A car is much too heavy for the wind to blow around. But this car is hard to find parts for, because it came from another country.”

  Mama nodded pleasantly. In the kitchen she could see the clock. “My husband will be home soon. He doesn’t like me to have strangers in the house, so I’ll have to ask you to get all your pictures taken as quick as you can.”

  DeCapra circled the room, inspecting the walls. “How old is this house?”

  “Forty or fifty years old. An immigrant man built it, the lady told me, and they bought it off him before he died, for next to nothing. He said he didn’t want the government to get it, and he didn’t have any people in this country. I can’t remember what country he came from.” Mama walked to the kitchen. “I don’t have a good memory for things like that.”

  He raised the camera to his eye.

  She found herself staring into a circle of black glass and turned away from it. “Don’t be pointing that thing at me.”

  He laughed. “It won’t steal your soul, you know.”

  “I look like a mess this morning,” Mama said.

  “Not at all,” he said. “In fact I’d like to take a picture of you in front of your house. That’s actually why I came to the door.”

  “Oh I don’t think I can let you do that.”

  “You don’t think a camera can hurt you. Here, I’ll let you hold it.”

  She shook her head. “I’m afraid I might drop it.”

  “Then look at it. See? It can’t hurt a thing. It’s a box to collect light.”

  “Oh, I’m not afraid of it.” She turned to the window and frowned where he couldn’t see her. Papa would be home soon. She didn’t want him to see this man here—especially she didn’t want Papa to see a man like this one, young, with both his arms intact, dressed in clothes like these and drivin
g a car like that, with that arrogant look in his eyes. But she kept her tone bright and was conscious, as she spoke, of trying to sound a little stupid. “I don’t see why you want to take my picture. I’m not pretty. The only pictures I ever see are of pretty people, like movie stars.”

  “I think you’re pretty enough or else I wouldn’t ask to take your picture. But pictures don’t really have to be of pretty people.”

  “They don’t? But you want to take my picture because I’m pretty?” She laughed in earnest this time. “Which one is true?”

  The photographer blushed. She liked him better then, the blush gave his face a softness. But he was too stubborn to laugh at himself. “They’re both true,” he said. “In fact, these days people look at pictures of ugly people as much as they do at pretty ones.” He fumbled with a tiny dial on the camera. “Do you have a dress in a brighter color? For the picture. It’s going to be full color.”

  “You don’t listen to anybody, do you?” Mama smiled into the sink. “I never told you I’d let you take my picture.”

  “Hey now, that’s not fair. The light’s right under those trees, and I won’t find another house like this one for miles and miles.”

  “It’s me the picture would be of, so I’m entitled to say no if I want to.”

  “But what would it hurt to let me take your picture?”

  “My hair’s a mess, I haven’t even washed it.”

  “Your hair looks fine. It looks the way a country girl’s hair should look.”

  She smiled at his calling her a country girl as if those two words summed up everything about her. “How is a country girl’s hair supposed to look?”

  “Light and fluffy,” he said, “and a little too wild just to hang down over your shoulders, the way city women’s hair hangs down over their shoulders. You should be able to see the sunlight coming through it.”

  “Sounds more like chicken feathers than hair,” Mama said.

  “Come on now, you’re being stubborn.”