by Russell Hill
Esther protested that Robin couldn't walk as far as Ezra's, but Robert insisted.
"I gots to go to town, find the sheriff, tell him about the white man what got bit by congos. He come by here, I don't want no chance he look in the house and find them."
Esther said that Robin shouldn't walk, but Robert said, "No, we gots no choice. Jake carry her if she can't walk."
So Robin and I made our way though the woods in the failing light. We went slowly and by the time we had come in sight of Ezra's shack, I was carrying her, holding her over my shoulder, feeling her body press against mine, and when we came into the clearing Ezra was waiting, warned by one of Esther's children that had been sent ahead. The dogs gathered around him, but they remained silent. He helped me carry Robin into the house
Robin lay on the corn shuck mattress and was quiet and then she said, "I feel empty, Jake. You know how you told me a snake sheds its skin?"
"Yes," I said.
"I feel that way. I've shed a skin, only there's nothing left, just emptiness."
"It will pass," I said.
"You say that, but you don't know it."
She looked past me and her eyes were green, like a creature that lived in the bayou, and they were flat and when I tried to look at her she looked off, first to the left, then the right, as if making eye contact with me would somehow force her to confront something, but she didn't know what it was that she needed to confront, and neither did I. There was nothing I could do, that much I knew.
Robin slept. Ezra's wife said nothing this time, hovered around Robin and when she woke there was a broth for her and then we slept, all of us, Ezra and his wife, Naomi, and the children in that one room and in the morning one of Esther's children showed up. We were to stay where we were until Robert sent for us, stay out of sight,
"I don't know why Robert so fire up to save your white skins," Ezra said. "But Robert got his reasons so we keeps you." His wife said nothing.
That evening another of Esther's children came and said that Robert would come to us in the morning.
When it got dark Ezra and I sat out in front of the house while the children played.
"Your wife doesn't want us here," I said.
"She a smart woman," he said. "She know if the sheriff come and find you here, it go hard on us. She don't want no truck with you."
"We won't stay," I said.
"My wife be afraid for me and for our childern but she know what kind of dogs be out there and she ain't going to throw you and your woman to them. They not like my dogs. Them other dogs eats their own kin."
Eventually Ezra and the children went inside but I stayed, leaning against the wall of the house, watching the darkness of the woods opposite, imagining that somewhere, deep among the trees, was another ivory billed woodpecker waiting inside the hollow cavity left by a rotted limb, its cartoon head alert for the sound of the wings of a bird like itself.
Robin was not my wife, but we had lived together for three-quarters of a year, and those who knew us assumed that we were husband and wife. Although I suspected that it didn't matter to any of them whether or not we had gone through a ceremony. Her name was that of a bird, but it was a small songbird, round-bodied, red-breasted, a short sharp bill that tipped from one side to the other when it looked at you, quizzically, cocking its head, making sharp darts at the ground to pick up insects. Robin was not like that. She was more like the ivory bill that she had imitated, slender, angular, a rare thing so imbued with magic that people exclaimed Lord God when they saw it. But it hadn't been seen for years until we had seen it sliding through the trees toward Robin as she clung to the trunk of a cypress high above the oily water of the swamp. I could recreate the wings of Robin's shoulder blades in my head as I looked at the black line of the woods, could feel my fingers trace the delicate bones of her ribs, her nose, her forehead, but Robin lay inside the house, asleep, emptied out. I thought of the cicada husks clinging to trees, transparent shells left when the insect unfolded its wings and took flight. I thought of Robin, high in the cypress, the black feathered cloak covering her, clinging to the trunk like a huge mythical bird and the long slow sweep of the other bird that came toward her, lifted, and then crumpled, tumbling over and over and I thought of Robin, too, falling, and I went into the house and felt my way to the bed and touched her hair, made sure that she was breathing, and I lay next to her, careful not to touch her, careful not to wake her. She turned restlessly and I held my breath and then her breathing was even again and I lay in the dark, trying to shut out the image of the Lord God Bird skin, wrapped around the dead infant. The special chile, Robert said.
In the morning Robert was there. He told me the sheriff and a deputy had come with him to the bayou and they had taken the dead man from the shack.
"He all swole up, blue and green like spoilt meat and the sheriff say he know who he be but only 'cause somebody say he gone to the bayou and don't come home. The sheriff say it a dam shame the snakes done bit him but you a dam fool if you goes into the bayou all likkered up.
"He thank me for tellin' him and he ask again if I see any white man and woman but I say no, this the only white mans what come through. So he's gone."
"What happens to us?" I said.
"We takes a chance. You goes north. But not at the same time."
"What's that mean?"
"Your woman go first. I gots a white man in Marion who comes to the bayou, I takes him huntin' for possum. He got a taste for that. I knows him for a long time and if I ask him to put this white woman on a bus goin' north, he do it. He think he puttin' one over on the sheriff, somethin' I got cookin'. The special chile gonna go from here today. Ezra's woman take her to Marion. You goes tomorrra. But you don't go to the white man."
"Where do I go?"
"Ezra take you to the edge of the parish. Where the Sharkey road cross the dummy line. Then you finds a freight train goin' north. Hitch a ride."
"I don't like the idea of Robin going by herself."
"Ain't no choice," Robert said. ""You gots money for the bus?"
"I have money from the loggers. I could go on the bus, too."
"No. Bus go slow, word get out the two of you on it, you don't get to Pine Bluff. They be takin' you off and bringin' you back. You hitch a ride on a freight, maybe you get to where they can't touch you."
When I told Robin what was going to happen, she protested. She didn't want to go north alone. She was afraid that I wouldn't be able to follow and she wouldn't see me again.
"You don't know how I feel, Jake," she said. "If I lose sight of you, I think I'll stop breathing."
"No. You won't stop breathing. And you'll go to Arlington Heights and go to the garage at my folks' house and I'll show up and everything will be OK."
"Everything won't be OK. It won't ever be OK again," she said. "Everything will be different."
Naomi gave her an old dress to wear and they rubbed soot from the stove on her skin to darken it and I gave her a fistful of money. I watched as the two of them went down the dirt track and as they grew smaller I wanted to run after Robin, stop her, but Robert sensed what I was thinking, and his gnarled hand took hold of my arm and then they were gone.
"Tomorra morning Ezra take you to the dummy line," Robert said. He handed me a small pink stone. "You keep this in your pocket. It be a charm what keep you from wanderin' off."
25.
Ezra left me at the edge of the parish and I set across the field as he told me to, until I came to the railroad tracks. Follow the tracks, he had said. The fields were fallow now, corn harvested, cotton ragged with a few tufts clinging here and there, little wads of white stuck in the rocks between the ties. It was nearly an hour after I left Ezra that I saw the sand hill cranes. The size of children, with bodies the color of slate, slender necks and heads, a bright red cap just above the sharp black beak, they were motionless, erect, aware of my presence on the tracks. There must have been fifty of them, alert, watching from across a field. Above me a half
dozen more banked, like airplanes, their wings spread, legs down, the long necks like arrows and they came in among the grazing birds, slowing, touching down gently, folding their wings so that they magically disappeared into the smoothness of their bodies. They were shaped like soft grey figs, their delicate necks and heads still, and I stopped and waited but they remained as they were, like one of Audubon's paintings, blue brush strokes in a brown field.
And then I went on, walking awkwardly along the ties, until I came to the edge of a town and the sidings where, as Ezra had told me, freight cars were shunted. This was the line that ran north and south, he said, and I could find an empty car and ride farther north, but I should be careful that no one saw me. It seemed too easy.
Darkness came and I waited. A train rattled through, but never slow enough so I could climb aboard and I couldn't tell which cars were empty and which ones were full so I stayed in an empty boxcar facing the tracks. Other trains came through, two headed south, one north, and then, as the sky began to turn gray, a long train came through, and slowed, finally coming to a stop. A brakeman with a lantern appeared and he waved it and the train reversed itself and a dozen freight cars came onto the empty rails in front of the car where I hid. He waved his lantern again and the train reversed and I could see empty cars passing me, but they were going south.. Then there was a clanking as the train again came to a stop and the brakeman was gone. The cars began to move north, imperceptibly, and I dropped out of the car and ran across to the empty cars opposite and climbed into one. It had scraps of cardboard in it, and a few sticks of wood, and I crouched in a corner as the train picked up speed. I was headed north. That was all I knew.
I thought of the cranes in the field I had passed. It was Fall, so they were headed south. Perhaps Robin, too, had seen the cranes.
It took four days to reach Arlington Heights. Once I reached southern Illinois I took a bus, riding all night, getting off in Elgin, hitching a ride and arriving at the side of my parents' house in mid-afternoon. I went immediately to the garage, but when I looked inside, it was no longer my room. There were the lawn mower and garden tools, cartons and the kitchen icebox with its door turned to the wall. There was a space where, apparently, my father now parked his car, an oily patch blotching the concrete floor and the garage smelled of oil and gasoline. My bed was still there but boxes were stacked on it. There was no sign of Robin.
I went to the back door and found my mother in the kitchen. Her surprise was complete. She stood for a moment, then embraced me, exclaiming, "Jake! You're here!" and stood back and looked at me, saying again and again, "You've changed!"
She made me sit at the kitchen table and when I asked if Robin had been there she said no, they hadn't seen her. and where was my car and had I found the bird I was looking for and was I hungry?
When I asked again if there had been any sign of Robin, she said perhaps Robin had gone to her parents' house, no, there hadn't been any sight of her. My father would be home from school soon, and we would all have dinner and I would tell them where I had been, what I had been doing. I went to Robin's house but no one was home and when I asked a neighbor she said she hadn't seen Robin for nearly a year. I don't think she recognized me. I felt empty, imagined Robin on a bus that was broken down on the side of a road, imagined the fat sheriff stepping on board the bus where she sat, alone in. the back. The figure of a woman came toward me, walking under the leafless maples that lined the street but I knew it wasn't Robin and somehow I knew that things had gone terribly wrong.
My father, too, was surprised to see me. But supper was strained. I couldn't tell them what had happened, and I knew that I looked strange, my clothes ragged, my hair long and unkempt. And I could feel my father's gaze, as if he were examining me the way I had seen him examine a set of draughtsman's drawings., and I knew that he was weighing what he was looking at, turning me over and over in his head.
But there was no evidence that Robin had returned to Arlington Heights. Her parents hadn't seen her, and I waited three days, sleeping in the room with my brother, who now seemed a stranger and who said little to me. My father asked if I had returned for good, but I told him something had happened that had changed things, that I had to go back to Louisiana, that something had happened to Robin. He pressed me for details but I was vague, that my car had broken down, I had to go back to get it repaired, I had expected Robin to meet me but her plans must have changed.
It was cold in the mornings, frost on the vacant lot next door and I spent the days waiting. Once I telephoned the sheriff in Arkansas, feeding quarters into a pay phone, telling him I was a reporter for a newspaper in Little Rock, that there had been rumors of a sighting of an ivory bill by a couple from the north, an ornithologist and his wife. Did the sheriff know where they were?
On the fourth day I told my father that I was leaving. If Robin showed up, they were to make sure she stayed, that I would telephone him in a few days.
He asked if I had enough money for the trip. Yes, I told him, I still had money left from my job with the loggers. He had stopped asking me questions, only said that whatever it was that had happened, if he could help, he would try, but I think he knew that my separation from him and my mother and my brother was now complete. And I was desperate to find Robin.
I went to a sporting goods store in Arlington Heights and I bought a pistol, a small .38 that would easily fit in my coat pocket. It was a cheap gun but I was not about to go back to Louisiana unarmed.
My father drove me to Elgin to the bus station. I had new boots and a jacket and I had cut my hair.
"I don't know what you need, Jake," he said as we waited for the bus. "A boy left here and a man came back. I don't think I ever really knew you before. I have no idea who you are now." He put his hand on my shoulder. My father wasn't a toucher, and I could not remember him ever putting his arms around me, at least not since I was a tiny boy, and his hand resting on my shoulder felt strange.
And then the bus came and he shook hands with me and I went south again.
26.
The first bus took me to southern Illinois, crossing the Mississippi into St. Louis at night. The river glowed black as we crossed it, and the water lapped at the levee near the bus station. I had a long wait for the next bus that would take me into Arkansas and I watched while six black women in long white dresses and white turbans knelt along the stone and brick levee, chanting something to the water that flowed silently. I changed buses and went south again, following the same route Robin and I had driven, sliding down through Missouri into Arkansas, night becoming day and night again as we came to Pine Bluffs. The people in the bus changed color, more blacks now, their voices softer and I could hear the familiar ring of Robert's voice in some of them.
We went by the turn-off to Crossett late in the morning and when we reached the Louisiana line a few minutes later, I grew apprehensive but when I stepped off the bus in Marion, no one paid any attention to me, and I set off toward the tracks and the fields beyond, retracing the steps I had taken only ten days before. Inside my trouser pocket I fingered the pink stone that Robert had given me.
At first Ezra didn't recognize me. His dogs set up a clamor and he stood in the doorway, watching me approach. When I called out, "Ezra, it's me, Jake," he yelled at the dogs to shut up and stepped down onto the dirt.
"What you doin' here?" he asked.
"I came back to find Robin. She never got north."
He called into the house and Naomi appeared in the doorway.
"Mister Jake say his woman never get to the north."
"I give her to that white man in Marion what Robert said would put her on the bus."
"But did you see her get on the bus?" I asked.
"I give her to the white man. He say he take care of things."
"Could you find that white man again?"
"You gots to talk to Robert 'bout that. I didn't take her to no house. We find him in a barn south of town."
I found Robert in the church on
the other side of the woods, fixing a broken chair. Unlike Ezra, he didn't seem surprised to see me.
"Where's Robin?" I asked.
"She come back the day after you gone."
"What happened?"
"She say she can't go north, she gots to stay here and she want to know where you be. I tell her you go north to meet her, and she gots to get on the bus but she say no, she got somethin' to do here."
"What was that?"
"She don't say at first. Esther puts her to bed and we watches her and then she cuts her hair off, just leaves this little bitty top what looks like the Lord God Bird, only her hair is all black and she grease it up with fat so's it stick right up and she tell me she wants that coat of feathers."
"You gave it to her?"
"Wasn't no choice. She wrap herself in it."
He gathered up his tools and put them into the sack.
"She's at your house now?"
"No. She not there."
"Where is she?
"I don't know."
"What do you mean, you don't know?"
"Just that. Next day she gone. My pirogue gone, too."
"Gone where?"
"Like I say, I don't know. I get up and the pirogue be gone and she be gone."
"Why didn't you keep watch on her?"
"What you want me to do? Hog tie her to the bed?"
"You looked for her?"
" 'Course I did. Borried a boat and went lookin' but ain't no sign of her. Mebbe she went on to the other side to the Big Woods. I look there, too. Two days I find my pirogue but she not with it."
"Jesus, you just let her go off like that?"
"Sweet Jesus gots nothing to do with it, Jake."
Esther wasn't much help, either. She said Robin wasn't herself, looked like she was faraway all the time, and then she was gone.
"We sorry, mister Jake, but she just slip out of here when we not lookin'."
I went to the house where we had stayed but there was no sign she had been there. I borrowed Robert's pirogue and went into the bayou and searched for the next two days, sleeping in the pirogue at night, working my way back to the Arkansas side. I came out into the fields and crossed to where our house had been but all that was left was a charred pile of timbers. My car was gone. I went back to the woods and followed my old blaze marks, sometimes stopping to make the ivory bill call or knock two blocks of wood together, imitating the knock of the ivory bill. There was no answer.