Nightingale's Nest

by Nikki Loftin

  “I was supposed to give that money, that five hundred dollars, to the landlord. And I didn’t. And now it’s gone, to Mrs. Cutlin. And my dad’s hurt, and my mom’s—” I broke off, tears welling up in my throat. “Anyway,” I went on when I could. “I have to make it up to them, so we can stay in our house. I have to do this job, Gayle. Dad already told them I would.

  “I have to cut down your tree.”

  She let out a breath, sighing. There was—almost—music in the sound. Then, soft as a far-off breeze, two words: “I know.”

  Her arms tightened around my legs, and I felt hot tears splashing on my ankle from where she crouched. “I know, Little John.”

  I didn’t ask her to forgive me. I knew better than that. But as I sat there holding her tight, running my hand on the top of her head, I wished I could think of something to do—some way to show her how I felt. How bad I felt for taking her to Mr. King. For giving Jeb a reason to destroy her nest. For cutting down her tree. For not being there when she fell, over and over.

  But nothing came to mind.

  • • •

  That night, I sat next to Dad as he watched the news—or tried to. The TV kept cutting in and out, like it was about to die.

  “I wish we didn’t have to cut that sycamore down,” I said during one of the static-filled pauses in the game. “That’s the one Gayle sits in.”

  “Got no choice, boy,” Dad said. “We need that money.”

  “I promised her,” I said, softer. “I promised I wouldn’t let you cut it down.”

  Dad let out a laugh. “Well, then that’s fine. I ain’t cutting it. You are.”

  “Isn’t there something else we can do?” I asked, trying one last time. But I knew it was hopeless. Dad smacked me on the side of my head with his left arm.

  “No more of that. You got us into this mess, you’re going to get us out.”

  “This is all my fault,” I said. It was strange. I’d thought the words so many times, I didn’t think they would sound different, coming from his mouth. But they did. They sounded hollow. False.

  “You got that right,” he said, not looking away from the flickering screen.

  “All of it?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer, just grunted. Close enough to a yes.

  I stood up, angry now. “Really, Dad?” I said, trying not to show everything I was feeling on my face, like he did.

  But he wouldn’t even look at me. He was more interested in the television than his son.

  My voice came out as hard as his had ever sounded, and just as deep. “Really? Funny thing is, I don’t remember drinking away the rent money last week. I don’t remember spending all the money Mr. King paid us on beer and bourbon.” I stepped back as he made a fist.

  “You shut up now, boy,” he said. “You’re the one that lost the rent money—”

  I cut him off. “No, Dad. That wasn’t rent money I ‘lost.’ That was hush money. Money Mr. King gave me so he could get Gayle alone. So he could get her alone, make her sing. Money you shouldn’t have taken. Did you know she can’t sing now? She told me he stole her voice. You should have thrown that money back in the old man’s face. But you—you scraped it off the ground, like a dog.”

  Dad’s face had turned purple. For a second, I thought he might have had a heart attack; he couldn’t speak. But then his breath hissed out between his teeth. “That’s a boy talking. It’s time you learned a hard truth, son. Being a man ain’t about doing what you like. It ain’t about being particular where your rent money comes from. You see a chance, you take it, to support your family.”

  I said a word I’d never said in front of him, I was so sick of listening to his excuses. “I’m not going to do it,” I said. “I’m not going to cut down that tree. It’s all she’s got left.”

  He took another breath, and started to rise off the sofa. His face twisted with the pain of moving too suddenly, though, and he fell back on the cushions. Mom called from the bedroom—“Boys? What’s going on out there? John, are you all right?”

  He scowled at me and bit out one final comment. “Maybe I did spend money we needed. Maybe you did, too. Now all we got is this chance to keep our home. You going to give that up, for what? A tree? A girl? Is she more important than your own mother?”

  Mom walked into the room then, frowning at us both. Ribbons trailed from her fingers, and her eyes were glassy. “Have you boys seen Raelynn?” she asked. “I need to braid her hair.”

  “No,” I said, answering both of them at once. Then, to Mom, “I’ll go out and look for her.” She kissed me, cool lips on my hot cheek, and said thank you.

  I had to get out of there, had to get away. But I didn’t have anywhere to go. I sat on the porch, listening to the cicadas hum, the far-off birds twitter themselves to sleep in nests that still clung to their tree homes. Every sound traveled in the still air.

  I listened to Mom and Dad talk about me.

  “You’re awful hard on him, John,” Mom said.

  “Have to be,” Dad grunted.

  I wanted to laugh. Of course he would say that, think that. God forbid he ever be soft on me. I might turn into a girl. Or the kind of boy who made friends with little bird-girls.

  “Why?” Mom asked the question I was thinking. I strained to hear Dad’s answer when it came.

  His voice was rough, and low. “It’s all I got for him, Mary. Teaching him how to work hard? How to do the hard things? It’s all I got to give.” He laughed, a bitter, short sound. “I sure as hell ain’t passing down a fortune to him when I die. Look at this place. I haven’t even been able to provide a house for you.” His voice broke, but he cleared his throat.

  “That don’t matter,” Mom said. “We get along.”

  “Get along. That’s all we do. No, Mary. I mean to teach him how to be a man. And hope he’ll be a better one than me.” There was a sound of cushions moving. “Now I got to get to sleep,” Dad said. “Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

  The next morning, Gayle wasn’t there when Mom drove me and Dad in the truck to the Cutlins’. Or if she was, I didn’t see her. I hoped she wasn’t home. I could hear the TV playing loud inside the house.

  Maybe she wouldn’t hear the saw at all.

  Verlie Cutlin was standing by the door of the truck, arguing with Dad through the open window about paying a kid to do a man’s work. “I’ll guarantee his work,” I heard Dad say. “He’s as much a man as I am.” I saw Jeb watching out the living room window. He made a face at me, then twitched the curtain shut.

  Mom drove the truck right into the Cutlins’ backyard. I could feel the tires squelching in the boggy ground. I hoped it wouldn’t get stuck—I’d hate to try and shift the truck without Dad’s help. But it made it through, all the way to the side of the wide lawn. Mom parked it a good ways from the sycamore. I got the chain saw out of the truck bed while Dad maneuvered out of the cab. He moved slowly, like he was a hundred years old.

  “Now, you remember what we talked about at breakfast?” Dad asked me as I checked the pull on the saw. It was greasy and black. I made sure the chain guard slid back and forth without a hitch, and walked over to the base of the tree.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m to cut here.” I nicked the place on the trunk with the blade, an easy height for me to saw. It would leave a sizable stump, but we could cut a second time and burn it out the next day. “At this angle, right?”

  Dad nodded when he saw how I was pointing the saw. “Notch it there,” he said, leaning close to the tree. He was panting from the pain of moving his arm.

  “I got it, Dad,” I said. “You go sit down.”

  I don’t know why I’d hoped it would go fast, the cutting. I guess I kept hoping something would happen to stop it all. That it would start raining, maybe, or Dad would yell out, “No, stop! I’ve changed my mind. We can get the money some other way
.”

  But none of that happened.

  When the saw met with the tree, I jerked back. The wood felt so much thicker, stronger, than the trees I’d cut before. More real, somehow.

  The chain saw screamed when I cut the first notch. When I cut the second time, I thought I heard something else, someone else, screaming, inside the house.

  It’s just the TV, I told myself.

  “Good. Now make sure you step back when you cut through,” Dad shouted out behind me.

  I nodded, wiping my face on my sleeve, hoping Dad and Mom would think it was sweat I was clearing away.

  I was scared on that last cut. If I did it poorly, the tree might fall the wrong way. Might fall toward the truck, or the fence, and then there wouldn’t be any money for all the work.

  No reason for me to have cut down Gayle’s tree.

  I swallowed, and set the chain into the wood again. The wood screamed underneath the saw. Before I could finish the cut, the trunk started to go, and I stepped back—careful, slow, making sure the chain saw was out of the way, like Dad had told me. The tree leaned over in the sky, then raced toward the ground with a whoosh of leaves and green, fuzzy seedpods falling like oversized raindrops around my head.

  I stepped back one more time as the tree met the ground.

  “Perfect,” Dad said from behind me. His voice sounded tired. “Let’s cut it into two-foot lengths, or smaller. The Cutlins want them stacked along the south side of the house to season for firewood.” He coughed. “Maybe we can do that tomorrow.”

  “No,” I said. I wasn’t going to leave the tree laying across the yard like that, for Gayle to look out and see all night long. “You go on home. I got this.”

  I thought Dad was going to argue with me, but Mom took him by his good arm and led him back to the truck door. “I’ll be back in an hour,” Mom said softly. “You be careful.”

  “I will,” I promised. I watched Mom move across the lawn, over to Mrs. Cutlin, who handed her a stack of crumpled bills. I had a feeling, if I saw them close up, most of them would be marked from small branches, stained with chlorophyll from sycamore leaves. There might even be a candy wrapper in the stack.

  I turned away, mopped at my face again, and got back to work.

  No birds sang that afternoon. It was fitting.

  I slept the next day away. Mom came in to check on me at ten in the morning. She felt my head and told me not to get up. She thought I was sick, maybe because of the sunburn. I did feel sick, and my face was hot.

  I was sick, sure. Sick at heart. My stomach felt like I’d eaten bricks, my chest like one had landed on it and was crushing the breath out of me.

  My face burned. I got up to go to the bathroom, and stared at it in the mirror. It looked just like I felt inside. Raw, blistered, red as the devil.

  I wondered: Was it possible to be so ashamed of yourself, your face would stay red for the rest of your life?

  Ernest came over while I was in there. I heard Mom tell him I was too sick to come to the door, heard his footsteps as he went back to his house.

  His birthday was over. I hadn’t even called him on the phone. Maybe . . . maybe I could do it now. I swallowed, wondering if he would forgive me for all those months. Might as well try, I thought, reaching for the phone, dialing the first phone number I’d ever memorized, even before my own.

  One ring, two. Then, “Hello?” He sounded older, his voice deeper.

  “Hey, Ern, I heard you come over,” I managed before I ran out of words.

  Ernest hesitated. “Yeah, um. Hey, I’m sorry about your dad and all,” he said after a few seconds.

  “Thanks.”

  “How is he?”

  “Fine, I guess.” It was weird. We sounded like grown-ups talking at a coffee shop. Acquaintances. “I saw Isabelle at the store,” I said. “She said you called to invite me to your birthday. Sorry I couldn’t come.”

  “Yeah,” Ernest said, his voice quieter. “She told me you didn’t know. About me inviting you.”

  “I didn’t.” The silence between us hummed, but the conversation was still going on. Now Ernest knew—there was so much more wrong in my house than just Raelynn’s death. There was my mother’s craziness, my dad’s accident. And me, the only one there who could hold down the crumbling fort.

  “Hang in there,” Ernest said after a few seconds. “You need anything? Another one of my mom’s Jell-O casseroles?”

  I laughed, and so did he. She’d brought one over almost every day. It was like a reflex with her—someone got sick or hurt, she bought Jell-O and started mixing chopped fruit and vegetables into it. It was pretty gross.

  “No, thanks. But tell her the celery–and–mandarin oranges one was good. Try and discourage the one with the ham in it, though, okay? Yuck.” We laughed again.

  “Your mom said you were sick. Why don’t I bring you over my Nintendo? You could play the games I got for my birthday.” So he knew. He knew I didn’t have mine anymore. I wondered when he’d found out.

  I understood exactly what he was up to. Making a peace offering. A truce. I needed something to offer him back. I’d been the one to blame for the months of silence. I looked around my room, wondering if there was anything I had.

  What would Ernest want that I had? Nothing but for me to hang out with him.

  “No, man,” I said. “You hold on to it. I’ll come over when I’m feeling better. You can show off your Nintendo ninja moves then.”

  He laughed, and suddenly, all those months of not speaking? They were gone, in a flash. The months of loneliness just became another part of our friendship, like one side of a diamond. Like treasure.

  The line buzzed again, and I leaned out my window, staring at the darkening ground in the backyard. At the stump of the oak tree, and all the small branches that lay around it, scattered like pick-up sticks.

  “All right,” Ernest said, after a few more seconds. I could hear his mom’s voice in the background, calling him. “Well, I gotta—”

  “Wait.” I stared at the sticks outside, my mind spinning. “There is something you can bring,” I said. “If Isabelle has any. Can you ask her?”

  “Sure,” he said. “What do you need?”

  “Pipe cleaners,” I said. “As many as you got.”

  Ernest brought them over a few minutes later, and picked up one of his mom’s Pyrex casserole dishes. He asked what I wanted the pipe cleaners for, but Mom was putting dinner on the table, and I didn’t want to tell her. Or anyone, for that matter. They wouldn’t understand.

  No one would understand, except Gayle.

  At least, I hoped she would.

  “Did you hear?” Mom said at dinner. She passed the mashed potatoes to me. Dad’s chair was empty. He’d worn himself out, Mom had told me, just going out to the Cutlins’. He had to sleep, so we talked low. “About Mr. King?”

  “No,” I said. “What did he do now?”

  “He’s sick. Dying, is what Trudy Lester said this afternoon. He had some sort of an attack on the front porch of his house the day before yesterday. It was horrible.”

  I couldn’t look at her. Had it happened when I had been there? Mr. King had looked sick. And I had hoped he would die. I’d thought I’d be happy if he did. But now, it just made me feel ill. I tried to swallow. “How?”

  “Well,” Mom went on, “he must have fallen—Trudy’s son Paul is the paramedic, you know—he was all beat up and bruised. Paul said he thought it might have been a heart attack, but Mr. King wouldn’t go to the big hospital in Abilene. He just checked himself out against doctor’s orders, and went home. The poor man, he’s all alone in the world.”

  I didn’t say anything, just mumbled and finished my plateful of food.

  So what if he was sick? If there was any man in town who deserved a heart attack, it was him.

  I didn’t care a
bout him. I mean, I couldn’t be blamed for a man having a heart attack, could I?

  I excused myself from the table and went outside with my handful of pipe cleaners. I wasn’t going to think about Mr. King anymore. I had a more important job to do.

  And only one chance to get it right.

  The run to the Cutlins’ house seemed longer the next morning. Maybe because the storm the night before had left puddles in the street I had to dodge, or maybe because I was holding a plastic grocery bag in front of me, trying to run slow enough not to knock it around and damage what was inside.

  Maybe because I wasn’t sure what Gayle would think when she saw me. Or if she would even come out of the house to see me at all.

  Remembering the scream from the day before, the one I’d hoped was the television, I held the bag closer to my chest and ran a little faster. I had to see her, had to see if she was all right.

  It was early enough that the streetlights were still on in town. By the time I reached the Cutlins’ house, the sun had just started to brighten the edge of the sky.

  I was about to knock on the front door, when I heard the dawn chorus start up in the backyard. Mockingbirds, sparrows, chickadees—there had to be a hundred birds, and it was like they’d all picked that very moment to start singing. It gave me an idea.

  I walked to the backyard, slowly, not wanting to startle the birds. Or Gayle, if she was there.

  My eyes automatically went to the place where the sycamore tree had been. All that was there now was the stump I’d promised Verlie Cutlin I’d burn out in a few days, and above it, a jagged swatch of sky that shouldn’t have been visible.

  The birds were still calling like crazy, from farther back in the yard. I walked a few more steps, to see where they were perched. My feet squelched in the boggy lawn, and I felt the wetness rise up over the toes of my shoes, but I went on. There were a few trees near the back fence, a cedar elm and two red oaks. Not as big as the sycamore had been, but big enough for a kid to climb, if she was a good climber.