A Catalog of Birds

by Laura Harrington

  They leave the cove, a relief to be in clear water again. Harlow had felt all along that this might be where he would find Billy. His instinct for the strength of the current, his knowledge of where a body might get caught and held, has made him single out this cove and connector of one lake to another.

  He guides the boat around another small promontory, past rocks and branches, winter’s debris still evident. Here the trees come down tight to the shore. He cuts the motor and they sit in blessed silence. Brendan unpacks sandwiches, passes Harlow the thermos of coffee.

  Harlow takes a sip, then starts the engine and turns back the way they came. Shouts to Brendan that he wants to take one more look.

  Throttles down to enter the cove, past one beaver dam, and there, by the second dam, dark hair, looking so much like the shredded bark of the structure, the body facedown.

  Neither Brendan nor Harlow is prepared for the shock of their discovery. Harlow steps into the water, slips on a submerged log, then finds his footing. It’s deeper than he expected. He has to force himself to touch the body.

  He tugs on a shoulder, the skin icy cold. One arm is caught beneath a branch. Harlow dives beneath the body to free it, the water brown and murky from the mud he’s stirring up with his feet.

  When he surfaces and turns the body over, Billy’s eyes are open, the blue dulled, the light drained away. Harlow closes his own eyes when he puts his hand on Billy’s face to close the lids.

  It seems to take more strength than either man has to hoist Billy into the boat. They wrap him in a blanket, both noting, but not speaking about, the scars and burns running from his face to his fingers, so much more extensive than they had known.

  Harlow thinks about the invisible circle Billy and Nell drew around them all their lives. Wonders how Nell will manage without that sanctuary. How it will mark her and change her. Like losing a twin.

  They ride north to the Flynns’ on the flat blue surface of the lake. Brendan scatters their sandwiches on the water for the birds and the fish.

  Harlow guides the runabout alongside the dock, ties up. Flanagan, barking furiously, scrabbles to get into the boat. The dog’s howls bring Nell down the hill as Harlow and Brendan lift the body from the boat. Flanagan noses the blanket aside; begins licking Billy’s face, frantic. Her distress tears through the rest of them.

  Brendan gathers Billy in his arms as one would lift a child and carries him up the hill.

  In the kitchen, Marion sweeps everything off the long table. When Brendan lays Billy down, she pulls him into her arms, keening.

  The sound drives them all from the room.

  Nell sees her father and Brendan talking to Harlow before he leaves. The effortful composure, speaking in low voices, the veneer of calm, all cut to pieces by her mother’s grief.

  When Nell ventures inside, she finds Marion and Sheila with basins and clean cloths, working quietly, mirroring each other. She wants to run away, but forces herself to stay.

  “Let me help,” she says after several minutes, picking up a cloth, wringing it out.

  So this is how we take care of the dead, she thinks. His cold limbs, heavy and wooden. Washing away the final vestiges of the lake, of his life on earth. To prepare him for the grave and beyond. If there is a beyond.

  She looks to her mother hoping, perhaps, for some reassurance. Marion is unreachable, her head bowed. She pauses in her work, both palms flat on the burned flesh of her son’s body.

  Nell washes Billy’s hands, wants to fold them. The slender, tapered fingers, uncommonly white after their time in the water, will not yield. She realizes they will never yield, never touch or be touched again.

  Flanagan circles the table, settles, finally, near Billy’s head.

  Marion refuses to release Billy to the police. Dale Pope quietly argues the law, the necessity of the coroner’s report. If the coroner wants to examine him, he can come here to do it.

  She refuses an autopsy, refuses the Army’s repeated offer to send an honor guard, refuses any and all government intervention: Leave us alone. You have no further claim on my son. Refuses the visit from the funeral parlor director, sample books in tow.

  Nell knows that strings must have been pulled and guesses it was Father O’Rourke or Dale Pope himself who signed off on the legal documents.

  The following morning, Jack, Brendan, and Harlow walk up the hill to the Alsops’ farm, shovels and pickaxes over their shoulders. There’s a level stretch of ground on a rise above the orchard, not far from Asa’s bee yard, with wide views to the lake.

  Asa joins them. The men dig in shifts: two on, two off. The topsoil is nearly two feet deep. Beneath that, the going gets tougher: a combination of clay loam, rocks, and sand.

  Nell, furious to be left out, follows them up the hill, carrying a shovel of her own. The day is overcast and humid. When she crests the hill, Harlow and Brendan are waist-deep in the grave, their shirts discarded on the grass. Asa and Jack lean on their shovels, blowing hard. They are filthy, sweat drips through the dirt on their faces and necks, their undershirts stick to their backs.

  Brendan clambers out and hands Harlow a pickaxe, a one-man job in that tight space. All of their activity has silenced the birds, though she can hear a low hum from the nearby hives between each swing of the axe.

  She is struck, suddenly, by the fact that she is neither needed nor wanted. So full of her own conflicting desires, she hadn’t thought to bring a jug of water, or a thermos of coffee or a pint of whiskey.

  Nell walks down the hill to the farmhouse, finds mason jars in the kitchen, fills them at the tap, folds them into a kitchen towel so she can carry all four of them, and walks back up the hill, leaving her shovel behind.

  The men take the jars, drink deep. They are exhausted. She stands looking into the grave. Harlow and Brendan don’t bother to climb out even though she can see they’ve cut steps into the sod to make climbing in and out easier.

  “How much longer?” she asks.

  “Another two feet,” Asa replies.

  “How will you measure?”

  “Harlow’s our yardstick.”

  She walks up through the aspens to the white pines beyond. The low pine branches she cuts are fragrant, sticky with sap. She lashes them together and drags them back to the hollow where the men are almost finished.

  Nell asks for help lining the grave. She does not, after all, want to climb into the open pit. Brendan stands in the bottom and places the boughs, overlapping them as instructed.

  “Ample make this bed,” Jack begins, and stops.

  “Make this bed with awe . . . ” he tries again but can’t continue.

  Brendan climbs out of the grave to stand beside his father.

  “Be its mattress straight,

  “Be its pillow round,” Brendan says.

  “Let no sunrise’s yellow noise

  “Interrupt this ground.”

  They gather their tools and their shirts; Nell collects the water jars. Harlow puts his arm around her, pulls her close. Together they walk down the hill through the orchard, the lake spread out below them a sullen gray.

  When Jack and Marion leave their bedroom, he in his navy suit, she in a dark dress and shoes that pinch her feet, Jack has his hand on the small of her back. He waits while she puts on her hat and adjusts the veil.

  Nell thinks, my God, they are smaller, and suddenly older. She sees her father draw himself up and square his shoulders, a soldier still. Marion leans into him briefly before Jack reaches out to take Nell’s hand.

  The Mass for the Dead at Saint Joseph’s is a public ordeal, the crush of people before and after the service overwhelming. Then the family, with Father O’Rourke, Asa Alsop, and Harlow Murphy, drive to the Alsops’ farm for a private burial.

  Nell looks at the pale silver-green aspens, the white undersides of their leaves tipping up in the wind.
How is it possible she will never hear her brother’s voice again, or his laugh?

  She had thought to sing but is unable to make a sound after the coffin is lowered into the ground. She sees her mother’s knees buckle, sees Brendan and Jack move close to support her. Sheila runs her rosary beads through her fingers, praying silently. Rosie, holding the baby, leans against Nick. Connor and Collin hide behind her.

  As the family heads toward home, Nell stays behind. The grave is covered with fresh pine boughs. She waits until she sees them cross the road and then, alone, sings for her brother.

  At home, the church ladies have laid out the collation on folding tables borrowed from the vestry. Marion walks slowly up the stairs, her right hand gripping the banister. She goes up to change her clothes, but does not come down again.

  Father O’Rourke carries a bottle of Jamesons out to the porch and sits down with Jack. Neither one seems to be getting much use from the bottle until Brendan joins them, tops off their glasses and his own. The whiskey is smooth and treacherous. Brendan pours again. They might make a dent in the bottle after all.

  Esme Tinker stops by, and Anna Barnes shows up briefly. Asa Alsop, carrying his own loss, sits silently on the couch. Harlow joins the men on the porch.

  Maeve and Evan Alsop come to the back door, knock quietly. Sheila welcomes them, pours Maeve a cup of tea, piles cookies on a plate for Evan. They sit on the couch next to Asa. Nell gets up to say hello. Maeve takes her hand.

  “I’m so sorry, honey,” she says, then, taking Asa’s hand, “We’re so sorry,” her sudden emphasis a surprise to them all.

  Rosie’s boys are bored and restless. She finally lets them change into play clothes to go down to the lake, but makes them promise to stay out of the water. This is a promise they are unable to keep.

  Jack follows his children up the stairs, so drained it’s an effort to climb each step. He can hear Sheila and Rosie putting the sleeping porch to rights. The springs on each cot clang and vibrate as they’re dragged into place, as they lift the mattresses from the floor and replace them on the bed frames.

  Sheila unearths stacks of mismatched linens from the hall closet. Later they will launder the old sheets, and find several so worn they don’t survive the washing machine intact.

  Tonight, four Flynn children will sleep on the sleeping porch, or not sleep, as Jack Flynn cradles his wife in his arms in the room down the hall.

  Collin begins to cry and climbs into bed with Rosie. Connor teases him until Rosie hushes them both. The baby is tucked into a cradle between Rosie and Nick. He will be known forever after as Matt because none of them can bear to call him Billy.

  Nell chooses Billy’s cot so she can see the sky, pushing the dog off the pillow. Sheila begins to pray. Is it the words or the repetition that is comforting, or the belief that someone is listening?

  “Hail Mary, full of grace,” floats on Sheila’s voice.

  “Shhh . . . Shhh . . . ” Rosie says to Collin.

  “Pray for us sinners . . .

  “Now and at the hour of our death.”

  “Amen,” they say together.

  “Amen.”

  The house subsides into silence except for the rain falling steadily on the roof. The smell of the lake is strong on the sleeping porch, the air they breathe saturated with moisture. In the morning, their blankets will steam in the sun.

  For now the house and its people settle beneath the heavy air, heavy enough to hold them to the earth, the rain washing their thoughts clear, allowing their minds to empty, the chorus of grief temporarily stilled.

  Brendan is the first to leave after the funeral. His C.O. gives him one more day and then one more before hauling him back to Texas. Rosie and Nick return home to finish packing, their move to Rochester imminent.

  Nell takes advantage of her parents’ distraction and disappears with Harlow. Spends the night for the first time, though she is unable to sleep. She watches him as the moon rises, lighting his face. He wakes, curls around her, tells her the story of how the world was made, built upon a turtle’s back. In the morning she cooks breakfast, learns to make coffee the way he likes it. They linger, late for work. Time suddenly means something. They grab all they can get.

  Nell drifts through her days at the grocery, delays her fieldwork with Esme. Not quite ready to walk or work in the woods. Comes awake and alive each afternoon as she walks up Castle Street to the garage, a steak from the butcher bleeding into a paper bag, a few potatoes to bake in the fire.

  She is afraid to need Harlow too much, to turn to him too often, to reveal the cracks and fissures that appear daily inside of her. But who else can understand what Billy’s absence means, how it rewrites the past and puts her imagined future into question?

  She keeps dreaming Billy alive, sees him sitting on the edge of his bed, packing a duffel, drawing, smoking, driving. Night after night she finds him in the water, they kick for the surface, laughter rising as their bodies rise; relief, release as they break the surface.

  She wakes to the sun pouring carelessly down on the lake, now menacing and strange. They might as well be landlocked the way she turns her back on the water.

  Maeve and Evan Alsop move back home to the farm. Maeve keeps her job and her car, lets the apartment go. Evan takes over Billy’s chores and then joins his father in the orchards. Dash rarely leaves his side.

  Nell gets time off from work to help Rosie and Nick with their move to Rochester. Leaves them with beds made, the boys’ rooms unpacked, and the kitchen organized. She is grateful to have something else to think about, to do. Promises to return.

  Jack and Nell drive Sheila to the bus station for her move to New York. In the car, the three of them are subdued; at the gate they’re tongue-tied. Jack tries to tell a joke but can’t finish.

  He hugs Sheila fiercely, “If you change your mind . . . ”

  Nell cannot let Sheila go.

  “Come see me,” Sheila says, smiling. “Come work with me.”

  “Don’t leave.”

  “We’re meant to go,” Sheila whispers in her ear. “And you, Nell, you’ll fly furthest of all. You’ll see. Billy always said: ‘Nell’s the one. Watch her.’”

  Nell stands beside her father as Sheila boards the bus. They remain for several minutes as the station empties. Jack is waiting for the strength to return to his watery limbs so he can walk back to the car.

  “Nell,” he says, when he can speak. “I’m proud of Sheila. She’s a brave girl. It took her years to stand up to Marion, to work up the courage to live her own life. That’s what I want for all my children.”

  They watch Sheila’s bus pull onto East Main.

  “We’re knocked off our feet right now. But don’t you mix up that sadness with the ordinary sadness of saying goodbye.”

  The weather is hot and dry and still, day after day. The leaves grow dusty, the grass brittle, nights pass like a fever.

  Rain threatens. Does not come. The air is heavy. It weighs on Nell, humid, muggy, hard to breathe. Her chest hurts, her eyes, her head. Summer lightning teases; she feels it crack and boom inside her body.

  She escapes to walk Turner’s Ridge with Harlow, build forbidden fires; make love in the grass as dusk turns to dark.

  She is embarrassed by how much she wants him until she sees how much it pleases him. Her awkwardness melts away. He is comfortable in his body, like no one she has ever known. He finds her beautiful, tells her so despite her protests. She revels in his irreverence; his ability to make her laugh and, for long minutes, forget.

  They make plans almost daily to swim or take the boat out, but Nell cannot bring herself to get into the water.

  Nell continues to look for a letter, a note, something Billy left behind. It’s when she stops looking that she finds it, a folded piece of paper stuck into the inside pocket of his hunting jacket. The one piece of clothing he kn
ew she would wear and wear again. This is where he always kept a small sketchbook.

  And deeper in the pocket, his dog tags. She reads his name: William Edward Flynn, and slips the chain over her head, dropping the tags inside her shirt, the metal cold against her skin.

  Now that she has his note in her hand, she hesitates, not sure she wants to read it. She unfolds the piece of paper. It’s an old drawing, a study for the great blue heron. And on the back, scratched in faint pencil:

  Nell.

  Forgive me.

  The title floats up inside her: Some Call It Flying.

  The smell of Billy’s jacket brings Flanagan to her side. Together they walk down to the dock. Nell lies on the rough wood planks, the dog stretched out next to her.

  The reckless scent of roses comes to her on the wind. She has the sense that Billy is somewhere in that freewheeling sky. She waits for the sky to open up and take her, or the lake to rise up and swallow her.

  She tries to imagine stripping off her clothes and putting her body, her face inside this water ever again.

  What else will the lake take in her life?

  Billy.

  His name echoes inside her.

  She closes her eyes and catalogues what she hears: water over stones, the creaking wallow of the rowboat. A cardinal, now two. Finch, eastern phoebe, common yellowthroat. The poplar leaves are the most distinct to her ear, but she can sort out the great pines and the swaying hemlocks, too.

  All that Billy taught her to see and hear washes over her. She waits to feel the release of his death; wonders if she will ever be able to let him go.

  Flanagan lifts her head as an egret rises from the marsh. Nell turns to see its white breast faintly glowing in the raking afternoon light. The slow beat of its wings is barely audible, the sound of air moving over feathers so faint, hearing it feels like knowing one of God’s secrets.