Skyward

by Mary Alice Monroe

  Listening to the descriptions of the birds, Harris realized Lijah was right on the mark.

  “They show who they is and how they feel all the time,” Lijah continued, “if we watch close. And you know with their sharp eyes, a hawk can figure what mood we be in before we even reach the pen, just by the way we walking or the way we move our hands. It the same with people as birds. Problem is, we don’t pay enough mind. Most folks look, but they don’t see.”

  Harris grew agitated. They were getting close to what he really wanted to learn about. Whether this something extra—this gift—he coveted so desperately really existed. He’d heard tell of it, wondered about it, but had never really witnessed it—until he’d seen Lijah with the birds.

  “When we exercise the birds, if there’s no tidbit on my glove, sometimes they won’t come. But with you, they do come. Every time. Even without the food.” He leaned forward against the wood frame. “I’ve thought about it, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s habituation. The birds got used to you tending them. So they didn’t bate and come to you expecting a reward. It’s a simple form of bird learning.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  Harris saw the humor shining in his eyes and chuckled in a self-deprecating manner. “Well, old man, how do you explain their coming to you when you call?”

  “I never claimed I could explain anything. I just ask the bird to come and it comes.”

  “You mean, you will it?”

  Lijah opened up his palms in a gesture of frustration. “I mean I just do and they just do. I can’t put words to it. Son, why you have to work things till you agonize the brain so? You have to learn to let things be. You have to be natural, not control nature.” He shook his head as a smile played at his lips. “Your little missy, she’s a lot like you. If you just settle and listen and watch, you’ll get what I’m talking about by and by.”

  Harris shifted his weight, then cleared his throat. “Will you teach me?”

  “Son,” he asked, troubled. “What can I teach you?”

  Harris’s mouth felt dry. He licked his lips. He had to ask. “Teach me how to communicate.”

  “With who?”

  “The birds, of course.”

  The old man’s eyes seemed to grow cloudy in rumination. When he spoke, he appeared weary. “See, that’s the thing right there. Ain’t nothing you can do just with the birds. Or just with people, or pets, like some folks think they can. It be about you and how you do with everything around you. Even the elements. Like this,” he said, holding up his hand and showing two long, brown fingers entwined. “It don’t work like this.” He separated the fingers in two. “Don’t work like this, neither.” He brought the fingers in to form a tight, angry fist. “Just like this.” Again he relaxed his hand and raised the laced fingers.

  Harris stepped closer to the wood bars that separated them. “I’d like to learn how.”

  Lijah nodded his snowy head and sighed heavily. He rose in a stiff manner to a stand, putting his hand to his back. Be side him, the eagle shook open its wings, startled, and honked its guttural cry.

  “Hush now, Santee, and mind your manners before you wake the others. Good night,” Lijah said to the eagle on leaving the pen. “Good night, Harris,” he said as Harris fastened the door behind. “I’m weary, my bottom done gone cold and I’m heading for my bed. Santee and I will see you in the morning. And after, maybe we can go to the birds together, if you want.”

  “I would. Thank you.”

  “I ain’t done nothing yet.” He turned to leave, then quickly turned back. “Oh, one more thing I been meaning to ask. That boy, Brady?”

  Harris tilted his head. “What about him?”

  “He got the gift for true. He needs to do more.”

  “Are you forgetting what he did to that bird in there?”

  Lijah’s face grew solemn. “I know exactly what happened that morning. And I’m telling you, I been watching that boy real close. He be healing same as my Santee.” His face set in resolution. “And if the birds trust him, that’s good enough for me.”

  Still, Harris was resistant. “Ella’s already after me to have him help Clarice with the feeding and leftovers, which is more than I’d ever intended. Just what else do you have in mind?”

  “I won’t tell you your job,” Lijah said archly. “I’m just saying that boy can be more help to you than you might know.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “And another thing,” he said, lifting his finger into the air.

  “You’ve got a lot to say tonight,” Harris said with a wry grin.

  “I do,” he agreed, returning a slanted smile. “You been working that young woman awful hard. She tending to everyone’s needs, except maybe her own.”

  “Which lady?”

  Lijah gave him a look that said, Now, just who do you think you’re fooling?

  “You mean Ella.”

  “The weather’s fine. Show that woman a good time, hear?”

  With a final wave, Lijah left. Harris stayed back to lock up the med enclosure, then stood for a while staring after Lijah as he walked across the grounds under the shifting moon light in his stiff-legged gait. He continued staring after him, lost in thought, long after the old man disappeared from his sight.

  Hearing. Although most raptors rely on their remarkable eyesight for hunting, they also have an excellent sense of hearing. Northern harriers fly close to the ground with their heads cocked to use both sight and sound. Cooper’s hawks hunt quail by following their calls. Owls have highly developed ears that can hear sounds ten times fainter than the human ear can detect. Owls depend on hearing to locate their prey, even in total darkness.

  13

  BRADY SAT BY THE GATE OF THE CENTER EATING a sandwich and waiting for his ride. He preferred to wait here rather than up at the center where everyone would know his mom still had to drive him. Mostly Clarice. That would be really embarrassing. He only had to hold out a little while longer. His parents had told him they’d suspend his license until he finished his community service, but his mother was getting fed up with having to drive him back and forth twice a week so Brady figured it was just a matter of time before he got the keys back.

  Not too far away from where he sat, the white rooster was pecking at the corn he’d tossed. Every Saturday and Wednesday the two of them had been hanging out together and sharing lunch. Neither of them spoke much and that suited Brady just fine. Working with the birds was exhausting, and he didn’t know why, exactly. It wasn’t just that he was doing physical labor. It was more that when he was in the pens with the raptors, feeding them or just picking up the leftovers, all his senses were on high alert. He tried hard to keep his voice low and his movements slow. He was always aware of where they were in the pen and he never stared directly at them. He did this to make them feel comfortable around him.

  And he did it for Clarice, too. He couldn’t believe his luck when Ella had asked if he’d like to team with Clarice for the feeding shifts. He’d agreed on the spot. Later on, he figured both Lijah and Clarice had put a good word in for him or else that tight ass, Harris, would never have let him near those birds. But ever since Ella had started working there, things had been different. The place was a lot cleaner and more organized, even a know-nothing like himself could see that. Just her being around made folks seem to smile more, like they knew things were on the upswing. And they were being nicer to him, too. Even Harris. Anyway, it didn’t matter which of them moved that mountain. In the end, he and Clarice formed a volunteer team. Brady grinned as he bit into his ham sandwich. Sometimes, the Fates were kind, he thought.

  He didn’t know what to make of Clarice Gaillard. She wasn’t just pretty. She was smart. The kind of real smart where she didn’t have to talk down to him or boss him around, like some kids did when they had something to prove. Anyone could tell she really loved being with the raptors, especially those teeny screech owls, and she passed that enthusiasm on to him. That’s what he admired mo
st about her. She was real good at stepping back and giving him a chance to try new things instead of hogging the birds to herself.

  Like when he’d been learning to grab hold of the birds. He was nervous at first, damn nervous. The little ones, like those screech owls, were so fast and they tried to escape right under your arm. And those big ones, man! Those talons could make mincemeat out of his face if he screwed up. Seeing tiny Clarice move in and grab those talons with precision and speed was, well, it was a challenge to his manhood. He couldn’t wuss out when a girl could do it. He did pretty good the first time, too. He liked the way she’d smiled then, warm and with approval shining in her eyes. He hadn’t seen that look too many times in his life and it made him want to try all the harder the next time.

  After a while, he got so he could collect a raptor as good as her. It was all about reading the birds and thinking about how nervous they were instead of himself.

  He heard the sound of a car’s wheels crunching the gravel and got up out of the way of the gate. The rooster scuttled farther back into the woods to stand just at the perimeter of the trees. Soon he saw a white Ford sedan round the bend. It slowly came to a stop at the gate, the window rolled down, and Clarice stuck her head out.

  “Hey, Brady. What are you still doing here?”

  “Waiting on my ride,” he mumbled, about ready to die. Goddamn, he thought. Why couldn’t his mother have come on time for once?

  “Still? Are you sure she’s coming?”

  He looked down the road as if checking to see if she wasn’t coming at just that second. “Yeah, she’ll get here.” He looked back and shrugged his shoulders, averting his gaze. “I don’t mind waiting, if it doesn’t start to rain again.” He looked up with speculation at the gray clouds in the sky. “Anyway, I’m just sitting here, eating my lunch.”

  “Oh, yeah? I haven’t eaten mine yet. Want some company?”

  The question caught him by surprise. He got a little heady. “I already have company,” he said with a wide grin, stepping back and gesturing toward the rooster. “But you’re welcome to join us.”

  The western sun shone in her eyes so she had to squint and raise her hand as a shield. But he could tell she was smiling. “If you’re sure I’m not interrupting your conversation…”

  “Nah,” he replied with a short laugh. “We’ve already solved the problems of the world today.”

  She laughed and he thought it sounded like bells trilling.

  “In that case, I’ll just move the car out of the way, if you don’t mind opening the gate for me.”

  He couldn’t believe the way his heart was pounding as he opened the gate and then closed it after she passed through and parked the car on the side of the dirt road. Where would they sit, he wondered? Did he have anything he could offer her? He looked in his brown paper bag. All that was in there was a half-eaten ham sandwich, an empty bag of chips and two broken Oreos.

  He looked up and there she was, standing beside him, smiling and looking around, her beautiful dark eyes alighting anywhere but on him. Brady wondered with a quick stab of surprise if maybe she was a bit nervous, too.

  “Where do you sit?” she asked.

  “Over there. There’s a big rock by the tree. You go ahead and take it,” he offered with clumsy chivalry. “I’ll sit on the ground.”

  “Thank you.”

  He sat down on the earth, sorry for the rain they’d had the past few days. While he dug into his brown bag for the remainder of his shredding white-bread sandwich, Clarice pulled out a bunch of green grapes from a Ziploc bag and began eating them, popping them between her full lips one by one.

  “So, you and that rooster are getting to be pretty good friends, huh?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I kinda like sitting down here with ol’ Buh Rooster. That’s what Lijah likes to call him. Sometimes he calls him Chanticleer, too, after some rooster in a story. Lijah’s always telling me stories while we’re working. That man’s a bottom less pit of stories, as far as I can tell.”

  “Of course he is,” she said, matter-of-factly. “He’s a griot.”

  “A what?”

  “In Africa, our people called our culture keepers ‘griot.’ Gullah/Geechees continue that. It’s what you call a historian. Except, what he knows isn’t written in books. Our history is passed on through word of mouth. He knows things that happened in our community from way back to the slave days. It’s part of the oral tradition of our culture.”

  “You’re Gullah, but you don’t talk like him.”

  “I’ve been educated by mainland teachers. I was taught that the Gullah language was not a good thing. It’s sad. The language isn’t spoken much anymore, except by the elders. As the old people pass away, much of the language passes with them.” Again, her brow furrowed and she dropped her hands to her lap.

  “Sometimes I worry that everything’s sort of dying away,” she said. “The Gullah cooking, arts, medicine—even the stories—are disappearing just like the farms and the fishing holes on the Sea Islands. Disappearing to bulldozers for fancy new houses and resorts and roads that will change the face of the Sea Islands forever. But we’re fighting to keep the culture alive. We’ve come together as the Gullah/Geechee Nation. We have a queen mother and a council of elders to keep the language and traditions of our people. That’s why a griot like Lijah is, well, honored by the Gullah/Geechees. You see? There is more to understanding our people, just like there is a lot more to Lijah.”

  “Then what’s he doing sleeping in a cabin like he’s got no where else to go?”

  Her lips pursed as she shook her head. “My mama’s real upset about that, I can tell you. It’s not like he doesn’t have anywhere to go. He’s got his own house in St. Helena waiting on him and there isn’t a family that wouldn’t take him in as an honored guest, if he asked. But you know Lijah. He likes to be free to do what he wants, when he wants.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  “What’s so strange about that, anyway?” she said, her voice rising in defense. “It’s not like the roaming storyteller hasn’t been around since the time of the knights. Only then they called him a bard.”

  “Hey, don’t get all fussy with me. I wasn’t saying anything against Lijah. I wouldn’t do that.”

  She took a breath and exhaled slowly. “Oh, I know.” She plucked at her grapes. “It’s just that I worry about him, too. He wasn’t always this way. I think it all started after his wife and children died.”

  Brady swayed back and put out his hand. “Whoa, slow down. What’s that about his wife and children?”

  “Now don’t go telling him I told you this,” she fussed at him.

  “Who am I going to tell? Come on, Clarice,” he cajoled.

  She popped a grape in her mouth, considering. “It’s not like it’s a secret,” she said. “Most everyone knows so I guess I can tell you. It happened a long time ago. In the sixties, I think. His two boys were out fishing one day when a nasty squall came up all of a sudden and overturned their boat. They were far out and both of them drowned.”

  “Damn…”

  “Lijah just stopped telling the stories after that. And I guess his wife never got over it. I don’t know the particulars, but she wasn’t quite right in the head after. Lijah took care of her for years until she passed on—oh, about ten, fifteen years ago. She was all he had in the world that mattered and when she was gone, too, he just put away his tools and gave up boat-making.

  “That’s what he was. A boat-maker,” she explained. “He never used plans, but people used to come from all over for one of Elijah’s boats. My daddy has one and says he’s never seen the like. Anyway, sometime after his wife died, he began telling the stories again.”

  “Huh. Why do you think?”

  “Who’s to say? Maybe telling the stories brings him closer to her? To his children? Or maybe he can lose himself in the telling for a little while.” She sighed and popped another grape. “I hope so.”

  “And now he just follows thi
s eagle around?”

  “I guess. To hear him tell it, the eagle chose him.”

  “Maybe it’s his totem,” he said with faint sarcasm.

  Clarice tilted her head and gave him a slanted smile. “Maybe. Or maybe he just needs something to cling to. Whatever, he seems to have found peace and God knows he deserves it.”

  She stopped talking and he didn’t know if he was supposed to say something. He couldn’t think of anything to add except, “Well, he’s a good friend to me. I’ll do anything I can for him.”

  Clarice ate the final grape on her branch and gathered her things. “I better get going. I’ve a lot of homework tonight.” She looked down the road, then at her watch. When she looked back at him, her brow was furrowed with concern.

  “Listen, are you sure you don’t want me to drive you home? It’s looking like it might start raining.”

  He was torn between wanting to go with her and talk some more and having to deal with her seeing his crappy house. Pride won out. “No. Thanks, but she’ll get here soon.”

  “It’s no trouble.”

  “There’ll be hell to pay if she comes and I’m not here. But thanks.”

  “Okay, then.”

  He walked Clarice to her car. With each step he agonized how he could work it so they could talk again like this. Not a date, he told himself. He was already dating Jenny and he liked her fine. Clarice was more like a friend. He just wanted to spend some time talking with her. She made him think of different things than he was used to, things that made him feel better about himself.

  Clarice climbed into the car. He wanted to ask her to meet again but his tongue felt frozen in his mouth.

  “See ya on Saturday,” she said.

  “Uh, yeah. Sure.”

  She started the engine. It revved and purred and still he couldn’t say anything. He stepped back, telling himself that working with her on Saturday would be fine. They could share lunch again.

  “Oh, wait,” she said, poking her head through the window. “I won’t be here on Saturday. I’m taking advanced placement tests. See you next Wednesday, I guess.”