The Man Who Loved Birds

by Fenton Johnson

  “Let me just say that I’ve heard talk—my husband and Little—Benny Joe—one of Johnny Faye’s crew—guy that owns the auto parts store. Not the first person I’d want to get tangled up with. Talk.”

  “A doctor cannot concern herself with talk.”

  “You’re right there, but this kind of talk—money talk—I don’t know. I aint heard this kind of talk before. Drug talk. It’s new to me. Anyways, you be careful.” Rosalee knocked the dirt from the weeds and tossed them on the compost pile. “Your Arjuna always does his duty.”

  “Yes, the stories teach us to do our duty. When I was a child I thought that meant only one thing—to live as others would have me live, and so I always did what I was told. A thing aint happened until it’s been told, according to Mr. Johnny Faye.

  “And so I will tell you the unhappy story of my marriage. My grandparents married me to a rich man three times my age. How fortunate I was, a penniless young girl with only her wits for her dowry, to find such a husband! Or so I was told and so I told myself, but when I could not give him a son he took a second wife. She was pregnant within the year and my disgrace was complete. But in my disgrace I discovered a different duty—a duty to myself and to others, to people outside my clan and my village. That is when I left for medical school, for America. Perhaps you are discovering the same. Perhaps that is why I have been brought into your life.”

  “I wouldn’t know much about that. I caint afford to think about that kind of thing.” Rosalee stood. “I got to get inside now to see if that boy finished his drawing. Let me bring you a jar of juice—it ought to be cool enough to carry by now.” She returned carrying a jar wrapped in a towel. “It’s still a little warm, but this way you can carry it.”

  Meena crossed the road and sat outside for a long while with the jar of juice, still warm, wrapped in a towel and resting in her lap. If she were possessed of Matthew Mark’s imagination, she could deceive herself into thinking she cradled a child.

  Chapter 27

  Flavian stood at the lip of the bluff above the oxbow bend, hands on his hips. These days the cedar thicket all but parted in welcome—he’d make his mourning dove’s call and stroll right through. This particular Sunday he clutched in his right hand the Department of Justice press release. Below him Johnny Faye was clipping away the lower leaves of his plants. Flavian rattled the paper. “You listen to what they’re saying about you.”

  In the creek bed Johnny Faye gathered a cluster of clipped stems in one hand and heaved them to one side. Flavian thought again of Palm Sunday—oh, for those days of innocence, before he’d met the Voice, before he’d brought the envelope of money back to the monastery, before he’d been born—but Johnny Faye’s gesture drew his eyes to the stack of discarded stems and leaves. “Why on earth are you doing that?”

  “Doing what.”

  “Cutting them down. After all the work we—you put into growing them.”

  “I aint cutting ’em down. I’m cutting ’em back.”

  “In August? I don’t know a thing about raising plants but even I know you don’t prune plants in August.”

  “I told you I know what I’m doing.” But then Johnny Faye straightened from his task. His voice took on a patient tone, as if he were talking to a child. “You trim off the bottom leaves because they aint gotten enough light to be worth much of anything to anybody except maybe a compost pile. Then you cut off all the buds except those at the end because a plant aint like a human being. Well, it is and it aint. It is because no matter what anybody tells you, they got a sense of the world. They seek out what they need to grow and prosper, and they will do amazing things to get what they need. Especially this particular plant, which as plants go is somewhere well nigh a genius. But you cut your skin, at least up to a point it’ll heal over. You nick a plant and it just dies. We got our power scattered throughout, different kinds of power in our heads and hands and feet. You cut off a guy’s hand, the guy works at it hard enough and all that power shifts over to his other hand, I seen it happen to a guy who lost a hand in Nam, you’d see what he could do with the hand he had left and you’d hardly even notice he only had one. Not so with a plant. They send all their power to their tips. Once you know that you can shape them so that all the power goes where you want it to go. I want the power to go to a few buds at the end of each branch, I don’t want it wasted by getting spread out over a lot of leaves and stems and puny little piss-ant bottom-feeding buds. So I cut off the lower leaves—they’re just sucking the power away from the ones higher up—and I cut off all the buds except the ones at the tips of the branches. Don’t you worry yourself, I don’t waste so much as a twig. I’ll dry this early cut and bake it in cookies. Then the buds left on the plant—I’ll leave them on a few more days so the sun can finish ’em out and fill ’em with its power. That way all the power of this place”—he waved in a big arc at the sun overhead, the creek bed, the bluff on which Flavian stood, the great mottled three-armed sycamore—“gets into the buds I leave behind. And when the winter comes, you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.” He grinned.

  “Well. You’ve really thought this process through, I give you that much.”

  Johnny Faye turned back to his plants. He was shirtless and his back gleamed with sweat—from the bluff Flavian could count the knobs on his spine and see the workings of the muscles in the broad universe of his star-speckled back. Flavian looked for longer than he ought but not as long as he wanted. Then he unfolded the press release and read aloud.

  The Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, consisting of representatives from the Drug Enforcement Administration, State Police, Internal Revenue Service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation, has entered an investigation of residents growing marijuana outside the state. To date marijuana has been seized from 29 sites . . .

  When Flavian finished reading he looked down to see Johnny Faye standing in rapt attention. Johnny Faye arched his neck and then doubled over from some kind of shaky feeling, then he raised his head to the sky and roared. “Yeeeee-hi!”

  A flock of crows rose from a copse of water maples and circled three times, their raucous caws echoing Johnny Faye’s shout. Johnny Faye scrambled up the clay bank and plucked the press release from Flavian’s hand and studied it. “That’s what this says about us, huh.”

  “You better believe it.”

  “Well if it aint true it ought to be. I’ll have to see what I can do about that.”

  “I don’t think you understand what this means. These guys are playing hardball.”

  Johnny Faye doubled over again, gasping with laughter. Flavian snatched at the press release and it tore down the middle. Flavian looked at his half and sighed. “Explain that to the abbot.”

  “What the abbot don’t know don’t hurt him. Why does the abbot need to see this.”

  “What the abbot don’t know—what you don’t know might get us all a long term in the penitentiary.”

  “I’ll make sure I go alone, don’t you worry your holy head. Look. I’m living my life in dog years. I do things different from what you might expect, you know that. Hell, if they don’t talk about you, you aint no count.”

  “Then I guess you’re the number one count.”

  “That is the objective. Although I truly acknowledge before the Virgin Mary that I never thought it would come to this. Those are United States government lawyers talking, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Holy shit. Good thing this crop is closing in to harvest.” He took Flavian’s hand and gave it a shake. “My brother, I thank you for the information. I got some guys in my crew sniffing after the hard stuff. They watch too much television, they aspire to be among the idle rich, caint stand prosperity, no, they got to make easy money. You remember Little. Big buck of a guy you almost beat playing pool with a little help from Lady Luck and yours truly? First night we met.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember. Big red-faced guy.”

  “That’s right. He’s itching to have
stuff he don’t even know he wants and he’s ready to do whatever he has to do to get it.” Johnny Faye stuffed his half of the press release into his rear pocket. “Maybe I can use this to talk some sense into him.”

  And then he was back down in the creek bed, back at his job, clipping and tossing aside, and Flavian allowed himself the guilty pleasure of watching his brown, gleaming, mottled back, the glistening ropy muscles of his arms, the excellent hollow in his lower back just above the waist of his jeans, where the sweat pooled before seeping into the denim to make a dark inverted pyramid of wet, the flip of his sun-streaked hair bound with a bright purple rubber band into the rattiest of pony tails, the half of the press release that Johnny Faye had stuffed in his rear pocket twitching with every waggle of his hips like some wildwood fan dancer’s tease, switching back and forth as his body moved in the easy working rhythm that across these summer months Flavian had come to know and love.

  The word presented itself to Flavian with the ease and inevitability of sunrise, and his very next thought was what could he do, what must he do to distract himself, to cut this desire from his mind and heart and some other deeper place, whatever it took to save him from himself.

  But after a moment to gather his self-control Flavian was able to tell himself that love was a good and natural thing, especially the love of a teacher for his student. After all, if Johnny Faye could really learn to read and write he could free himself from the poverty that gave him no choice but to grow pot—that was the goal, that was Flavian’s objective. And so he climbed down the bank and into the seat of the sycamore throne. He pulled his writing tablet from his tote bag. He did not permit himself to watch Johnny Faye but waited for a pause in the clip and swish of his pruning and when that moment came he cleared his throat. “Let’s give writing one more try.”

  “I hadn’t done my homework, if that’s what you’re asking. You’re slipsliding down a pole covered with shit and nothing at the bottom but more where that come from.”

  “No, I had a bright idea about how to teach—how you can learn to write. I want to try something different. Just this once. If this doesn’t work, fine. I will type out and sign a certificate suitable for framing that absolves you from ever having to try to learn to read and write and that you can show off to any idiot dumb enough to take you on as a challenge.” Flavian studied his blank tablet, not allowing himself so much as a peep in Johnny Faye’s direction, but he could hear him thinking it over.

  “OK, teach, you’re on. What do you want me to do.”

  Flavian patted the trunk of the sycamore throne. “Come up here. Settle in.”

  After a moment Johnny Faye was standing above him in the tree.

  “OK, have a seat. Right here, next to me. I need to be able to wrap my arm around you.”

  Johnny Faye sat. The salty, fecund smell of sweat assaulted Flavian but now he was all teacher, all business. He settled Johnny Faye inside the crook of his right arm.

  “OK. Here’s my idea. Learn it in your body, not in your head. Forget about your head. Forget about everything anybody ever told you about how to write. Close your eyes. I want you to take up the pen and then I want you to let me wrap my hand around yours. That’s right. Keep your eyes closed. I don’t want you to look anywhere or at anything. Just let your hand go loose and follow where my hand goes. Learn it in your body, not in your head. Let your hand follow what it is I’m doing. That’s it, let it go loose. Can you tell me what I’m doing, what letters we’re making? Never mind, forget I asked that, just keep your eyes closed. Don’t worry about thinking about what letters we’re making, just do it from the same place where you are when you pick up a pool stick or a hoe. That’s right. Take a breath, a deep breath—you remember telling me that? Well, you were right. And then let it out easy. The power comes natural, it’s already there, it’s always been there, you don’t have to make it happen, what you have to do is learn how to use it.”

  And so for some timeless time they wrote, or rather Flavian wrote, his hand over Johnny Faye’s, his fingers guiding the pen that Johnny Faye held

  J-O-H-N-N-Y F-A-Y-E

  J-O-H-N-N-Y F-A-Y-E

  J-O-H-N-N-Y F-A-Y-E

  until Flavian’s hand grew tired and he laid down the pen. The length of his left arm, wrapped around Johnny Faye’s shoulders, felt the rise and swell of Johnny Faye’s chest.

  Then Johnny Faye shrugged free and stood and stretched. “We got just enough time to go looking for ditch weed.”

  “Ditch weed?”

  Johnny Faye was on the ground and scrabbling around among his tools. “See, they planted hemp all over this countryside until just before World War II—I’d be surprised if the monastery hadn’t grown some—turned it into cloth and rope and even paper. And hemp is just another name for marijuana—same plant, same pollen that comes floating through the air in search of my babes.

  “And that means this creek bottom is filled with pockets of ditch weed left over from the days when it jumped every fence and river and went wild. And in that ditch weed there are male plants dying to get their pot pollen jism into my big fat female buds, which I have kept innocent as the farmer’s daughter because—exactly like the farmer’s daughter—the longer they’re unsullied as the driven snow, the harder they work to get the guys. By denying these girls what they want we have caused them hardship. And just like with people, hardship makes them work harder. They don’t want the silver spoon neither, which in the female case of this particular plant means they make more of the gooey sap to catch whatever male pollen might be flying around. And the stuff that brings you closer to God or makes you believe you’re closer to God for a little while anyways is the gooey sap, yee-hi. We have here a creek bed Playboy Club for the male marijuana plant, all those luscious babes longing for that pollen, yearning for that pollen, ready and eager to give up their power for that pollen. And our last job of the afternoon is to make sure my babes don’t get what they want, that they stay as innocent of pollen as the Virgin Mary of Saint Joseph.” Johnny Faye held out a tool, a long handle with a flat, toothed blade at its end. “It’s for cutting down the ditch weed. I’ll show you how to swing it.”

  Flavian climbed from the tree. “OK, whatever, lead the way, but see if you can pick up a pen sometime in the next week—or any kind of stick, doesn’t have to be a pen, maybe it’s better that it’s not a pen, any kind of stick and write on some surface, any surface. I just want you to see if you can remember—I want your hand, not your head to see if it can remember how to write your name. Don’t worry about whether or not you’re writing. Just move your hand exactly like I moved your hand, over and over and see what happens. Will you promise me that? Promise?”

  “OK, teacher. You got my word.” Johnny Faye crossed his heart with the blade of his sickle. “I’m a man of my word. If I say it I’ll do it.” He pointed down the creek. “This won’t take long. I spent the last few weeks cleaning out the half-mile or so upwind and now all we got to do is check a few hundred yards downwind to make sure I didn’t miss out on some little scrawny guy that’s waiting for the wind to blow in the wrong direction. Those are the ones you got to watch out for, the scrawny little guys, they look like they couldn’t push over a cornstalk and then you get ’em in bed and they got all the juice. Same as with people. All it takes is one of those little guys and my whole crop goes to seed.”

  “Literally.”

  Johnny Faye cocked his head and twisted his mouth and then laughed. “What the hell—you do have a sense of humor. You been spending too much time down in this creek bed, watch out, you’ll start sounding like me. Anyways you just come along with that sickle and chop away at anything you see that looks like it’s the wild-ass version of the same plant—like it’s hungry for my girls.”

  They rolled up their pants legs and made their ways down the creek. All the dense growth on the banks looked the same to Flavian, one big wall of green, but in one or two places Johnny Faye waded into the green and swung his sickle, and Flavian,
feeling useless and dumb, followed his example.

  Then the creek narrowed and grew deeper and they came to a water maple that had fallen across the water, bank to bank. Johnny Faye climbed to the bank and pulled off his jeans and underwear. “No way to get around this tree except climb up and over the bank and I could do that early in the season but I tried it last week and got a butt full of smartweed. The creek gets deep on the other side so you got to get your pants wet or take ’em off and swim across. Best thing is just to strip and duck under.”

  Flavian hesitated a moment, but what was the difference between stripping to swim in the lake and stripping to swim in the creek? By the time he had pulled off his clothes and placed them on the bank and ducked under the tree Johnny Faye was far downstream—only the whites of his untanned buttocks showed through the overhanging branches.

  And Flavian followed after, flailing his sickle at random weeds that were probably innocent bystanders—after all, sharp-eyed Johnny Faye had already passed by—but doing something, anything made him feel less stupid, a naked middle-aged monk wading in knee-deep water and swinging a sickle.

  They thrashed their ways down the creek. To Flavian every branch seemed adorned with poison ivy, every rock concealed a cottonmouth and so he anticipated the attack—maybe in some pheromonal way brought it on. All he knew was that in a single moment he went from a place where he was thrashing along in a fog of foolishness, to a place where Johnny Faye was splashing past him yelling “Run! Run!” and Flavian, ignorant but aware of something gone wrong, went splashing after him, scraping and cutting his bare feet on gravel and the razor-sharp shells of freshwater mussels. Spider webs filled his mouth and he had some dim worry of ticks amid the adrenalin rush, but Johnny Faye was crying “To the hole! The hole!” and Flavian realized he meant the deep pool where they’d first ducked under the fallen water maple, and then he felt a hot white brand of fire on one arm and he got the picture, he went double-time for the last twenty yards and dove into the pool of water even before Johnny Faye got there—though later it occurred to him that Johnny Faye hung back so as to present a diversionary target.