The Wild Birds

by Emily Strelow

  “Are you lost, ducky?”

  Startled, Olive met the woman’s gaze.

  “No. Just watching.”

  “You waiting for someone?”

  “Of a sort,” Olive said, lowering her eyes.

  “Well, why don’t you come with me on my errands, tell me your story.” The tall woman tucked Olive directly under her arm and walked toward The Emporium, a store known for selling everything “from needles to anchors.” The woman smelled dank, her personal earthy scent covered over by an almost sickly sweet aroma of rose. There was the tender interest of a predator in the way the woman held Olive’s gaze.

  The woman’s name was Hazel and she was a prostitute. It came out naturally in conversation, as though it were between items on her sundries list: Oats, soap, thread, by the by, I work in a brothel. Oh! Ducky, let’s go see about those new citrus fruits just come to market from down south. Olive stood frozen, tucked under Hazel’s arm as she handled the strange grapefruits, stroking them with long fingers as she might a lover’s back. Knowing the common plight of orphans, Olive’s mother had held Olive’s hand one night as she lay ailing and begged her to avoid the profession at all costs. So later in the day, as the fog rolled in over the harbor and the streetlamps were lit by the longest candleholder Olive had ever seen, when in the darkening street Hazel held Olive’s chin and complimented her young skin and light eyes, telling her she could fetch a nice price with such assets and youth, Olive averted her gaze and quickly excused herself back to the boarding house. “Don’t run, little rabbit!” Hazel had shouted after her.

  Lying that night close among the snoring scullery maids and other lost souls, Olive felt a strong pull to find Hazel again and give in. After all, any kind of friend was better than none at all. But as she finally drifted off, she heard her mother again, who entreated, pleaded, and begged that she resist. Be my strong and resourceful fawn. Make your mother proud.

  The next day, Olive emerged from the boarding house in the afternoon to go check the train platform one last time for her absent, and at this point verging on mythical, aunt. As she passed by the stand where Hazel had stroked the grapefruits so seductively, Olive saw a tall woman with long brown hair like Hazel’s tuck into a small doorway on the arm of a much smaller and much fatter man. The man slapped the woman’s rear end hard just before they disappeared from view into the exotically tiled hallway. Olive followed and slipped into the dark passage after them by a few paces, watching as they knocked on a carved wooden doorway. They slid through a curtain made of glass beads, the sound of the beads clinking against one another setting Olive’s neck hair at attention. A strange smell hung heavy in the hallway, like burning herbs mixed with horse sweat. Peeking through the still-swaying beaded threshold, Olive saw Hazel from the front, reclined on a long velvet couch next to the portly man, also reclined. The man grabbed at Hazel’s breast and Olive saw the briefest glimpse of her swaying flesh and exposed nipple before Hazel tucked it back into her dress and playfully slapped the man on his wrist. They were handed long, carved wooden pipes by a Chinese man with the longest braid Olive had ever seen on any human. She coughed at the thick smoke filling the air, and the Chinese man turned quickly and shouted something at her in a foreign tongue, and she met Hazel’s lidded gaze only briefly before darting back down the hallway. She thought she heard “Ducky” faintly echo through the hall as she ran out into the confusing sun, dashing through the market and knocking a pyramid of oranges down as she turned a corner. She careened through the streets and right back to the boarding house, where, by some miracle, she was completely alone in the bedroom to catch her breath.

  Staring herself down in the mirror, Olive staved off tears as she unbuttoned her mother’s vanity case and extracted a large, sharp pair of engraved silver scissors. Desperation welled up in her, underpinned by all the love she had for her mother and the anger she felt toward a world that had taken her away too soon. She pulled her braids over her eyes and in the cool dark remembered her mother’s hands pulling the pieces of hair tight into formation, but never so tight that the pain was unbearable. After Olive’s braids were sorted, her mother always put her hands on her shoulders, squeezed gently, and said, “Now you can face the day proud, my love.” The reverie ended as Olive let the braids fall and the harsh sunlight flooded her eyes with the reality of another calendar day. She could see the days ticking into the future like a line of motherless girls, walking into the unknown. How many of those girls would be condemned to a life like Hazel’s? She looked hard at herself before letting the scissor blades slice through one of her braids, pausing in a liminal, lopsided state to observe herself as she might another. She cut off her other precious brown braid and tucked them both into her suitcase. She shook her head back and forth. There was a lightness in the shearing—like she had shed her mother’s, Hazel’s, and society’s expectations. This is a man’s world, she could hear her mother sigh, and Olive let out a little laugh at the thought. So be it. She would avoid the social pitfalls of being a young and destitute girl; she would henceforth be Oliver. As Oliver, she would face the day proud.

  The next day, she bound her small breasts with the softest cloth she could afford and finished cropping her dark hair close to the scalp but for the front, which she smoothed with bear-fat pomade. Down at the tailor, she spent the last of her paltry inheritance on high-quality boys’ wool trousers, a vest, and a cotton shirt before winding her way to the employment office. Outside, a gruff-looking man with wild salt-and-pepper hair was just posting a sign on the board: Farallones Lighthouse Assistant needed. Hard work, low pay, on an isolated and barren island west of San Francisco. Olive turned to the man posting the sign and said, “Sir, I’m your man,” in her most confident voice.

  A man of vanity and letters who believed himself above his post, Amos Richardson found himself strangely taken with this delicate boy’s formal demeanor and fine suit, as well as his confidence and the fact he could read. Amos decided to employ him on a trial basis. He said, “You are a touch small, boy. But if you can work hard, you may do.” Amos’s last young assistant had fallen from the cliffs and broken both his legs.

  They left for the Farallones the next morning before dawn on an old and mottled tugboat called the SS Atticus that marked their wake with a trail of black coal smoke. The deep devilish scent seemed to engulf Olive’s entire past with its plumes. Standing on the bow, she let the strong breeze and the spray of the ocean renew her, her short past retreating with the smoke lingering above the city skyline as they passed through the wide, unobstructed bay.

  “Oliver,” Amos said, looming two heads taller than she on the deck of the ship as it heaved and fell on the open ocean. “Change becomes rest to the weary. Ready yourself for the greatest change you can fathom in the Farallones.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, thinking, Change, indeed.

  It took the tug almost all day to travel the twenty-seven miles off the coast of San Francisco and reach the Farallones, with their jagged cliffs of granite stone rising from the sea like teeth from some mythic, sunken monster. “Some call them the Devil’s Teeth,” Richardson offered as the islands drew nearer, as though this might ease her anxiety. Olive felt a shiver up and down her back and her skin goose-pimpled from top to tail as the pointed rocks came into focus. As they approached the northwestward side, the tug seemed to recoil from nearing the cliff and the bow swung suddenly away from the islands as a horse might rear from fire, the captain and deckhands cranking and swearing to right the course. She heard one of the sailors yell something about the selkies at it again with their tricks as hundreds of sea lions that had been camouflaged by the rocks dove into the ocean all at once. This collection of asperous cliffs did not seem like the kind of place humans should dwell.

  Olive, Richardson, and a deckhand from the Atticus transferred into a dinghy that listed back and forth in the waves like a toy and headed toward what Richardson called the “North Landing.” Th
ey closed in on a sloped edge with what appeared to be a miniscule, flat landing. She almost expected Mr. Richardson to say, “Ladies first,” and offer her a hand as they docked, but instead received a short and gruff, “Stay here. Watch how I jump and then do the same. Stay in the center of the boat for ballast. Use your back foot when you jump. Don’t you dare tip over my boat.” Richardson paused with one foot on the edge of the crosswise plank used as a seat in the dinghy, frozen in a running position and waiting until the boat rocked back toward the shore, before leaping over the three-foot gap between the dinghy and the rocks onto the small, six-foot-squared landing area. He held the rope in his hands to steady the boat and tied it off around an iron cleat camouflaged among the dark rock. Richardson asked the deckhand and Olive to toss him the ten large burlap packages tied with string. Each one felt as though it weighed at least half her own body weight, and she had to put all her strength into each throw so that their precious supplies might clear the gap and not end up sinking down into the dark blue-black water as shark food.

  By the time the last package had been flung, she found herself winded, her muscles stinging, exhausted before she even made it onto land. Her time had come. She would have to leap the gap and summon all her courage to do it. A “leap of faith,” her mother would have called it. She mimicked Richardson’s running pose, one foot on the edge of the boat seat, weight in the center, one on the boat lip. The boat rocked back and forth, and back and forth again, and back and forth a third and fourth time, before Richardson finally screamed, “Now, boy!” and something in her body responded with uncanny strength as she flung herself up over the dark blue chasm and all the way to the back of the landing pad, palms flat against the sharp rocks. She pulled away from the rock wall and stood up, inspecting her new ragged stigmata, two bleeding palms, as Richardson erupted into laughter.

  “Well you jump like a gazelle, boy. Next time try half speed.”

  They waved at the deckhand who untied the dinghy and was gone in a splash back to the tug. They gathered what they could carry and headed up the path. A ways up the steep path, they found a very old donkey tied to a rock, staring off into space like a poet.

  “Good. Charles remembered to bring the burro down. He’s another lighthouse assistant. It takes a team, here, to keep the great light shining brighter than the moon.” Richardson took a deep breath of pride. “I wasn’t sure if the ass would be here, as the eggers have been known to untie them just for sport.”

  “The who?”

  “There are good eggers and bad eggers, Oliver. But mostly they are all rapscallions and layabouts. Remember that.” Richardson looked up into the descending fog, as though there were more words of wisdom to be gleaned from the mists.

  “Eggers?” Olive inquired, clarifying her question.

  “Ah. You are green, aren’t you? The eggers are the men who collect seabird eggs to sell back at market in San Francisco. There have been wars and shots fired over those eggs, I tell you, Oliver. I just leave them be for the most part and you should do the same.”

  “I see.”

  “Let’s load this ass up and bring our supplies to the lighthouse quarters before the evening winds rise up.”

  They clambered up the steep cliff trail toward the lighthouse. The lighthouse appeared through the fog as an apparition at first, its giant beam of light cutting a rhythmic path in circles, lighting up a tunnel through the fog about once a minute. The winds picked up significantly as the sun set. They stood on the stoop and Richardson regarded the lighthouse and sighed. They had not even stepped foot inside before he pointed down a path and sent Olive out on an errand to retrieve rabbits from the traps a quarter mile away. He handed her a basket from inside the doorway and sent her on her way. There was to be no welcome rest, no cup of tea to cut the journey’s aches. Straight to work.

  “I’ll unload the supplies. You go down that path there about a quarter mile and check the rabbit traps so we will have something to eat for dinner. We’ll be staying in those barracks with the lights on down there at the bottom of the hill. I take it you can find your way without plunging off the cliff and breaking both legs?”

  Richardson’s tone suggested the question was not so much that as an accusation. After an all-day voyage, Olive’s bladder was so full the errand was welcome, as in order not to be found out when relieving herself, she would have to ensure she was alone. She walked far out on the cliff trail, gathering the evening dew with each step. Just before arriving at the rabbit traps, she scaled over a small bare rock peak to find a secluded spot out of the lighthouse sightline. She sighed with relief. With her pants still around her ankles, squatting behind a small outcropping, the voices of men below startled her. She pulled up her pants and lay as flat as she could, peering down. Three men in odd-looking, lumpy canvas vests made their way away from her some seventy feet below, scrambling along the rock toward a small, sandy beach where a soiled tarpaulin tent listed in the wind. Their canvas vests bulged with hundreds of seabird eggs, some clearly having ruptured as marked by wet yellow stains on the front and back. In the weakening light she could just make out that the men were tanned, hirsute, and rough-looking. They reminded her of loggers back in Colorado who’d come into town after weeks in the forest with their beards unruly and hair long in wild curls. Her mother always warned her to steer clear of such company, to stick to the planked sidewalks of Boulder and never deviate from her path. But there she was, clinging to a cliff, sans mother, from Olive to Oliver, with hardly a path to speak of.

  Once the men disappeared back into the tent, she clambered back up and over the rock back to the wicker basket and made her way along the narrow path with slow, careful steps toward the rabbit traps. A dense fog rolled in, making visibility almost naught, each footstep risking a potential plunge to her death. At the rabbit traps, Olive bent down to find all three gin traps tripped, their snares sprung. A small coagulating pool of blood seeped out from underneath three lifeless tawny forms. She extracted them with some difficulty, pulling the metal jaws from the rabbits’ necks, the blood seeping up her hands and onto the cuffs of her new, and only, shirt. One of the animals still had a slow pulse and was slightly warm. It twitched when she released the trap, a final, indelicate dance toward the beyond. She put the two dead rabbits in the basket and held a rock above the head of the third before delivering a blow. With the rock raised above her head, the sound of thousands of seabirds converged as a banshee wail on the winds, furnished, it seemed, for her ears only. She willed her arms down and the animal shuddered and became still. She was alone. Olive put the final rabbit in the basket and felt the night settling in as she walked back to the lighthouse, her basket heavy with dinner. Survival, she thought, is cruel.

  Back on the stoop of the lighthouse, Richardson inspected the rabbits and said, “One fresh kill. These other two are too far dead,” as he tossed the two rabbits high into the air and over a hill out of sight. “The last five days were the shortest mainland trip I’ve ever had, but I couldn’t trust Charles with the lighthouse for any longer than that.” He sighed.

  “But he’s a lighthouse man?” Olive asked.

  “Yes. But he used to be one of the Egg Company folk. Bastards and cheats, all of them.”

  “Yes, sir.” Olive decided not to mention her one-way encounter with the eggers.

  “Do you know how to skin a rabbit, Oliver?” Richardson asked from the small stone-countered barracks kitchen as he pulled the first animal inside out. The skin seemed to slide off easily, like it was merely a costume.

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, never mind. You’ll learn soon enough. And enough of the ‘sirs,’ thank you. Go change your shirt for supper.” He looked at Olive’s bloodstained cuffs.

  “This is my only shirt.”

  “Then you best wash it. The last keeper’s assistant was an ignorant man, and fiscally irresponsible. And as you are aware, at such a remote location one might qu
ickly fall into a hurly-burly and rugged countenance. But I will not let that happen under my watch, Oliver. Use cold water for blood. Always use cold for blood.”

  Olive went to her room in the back of the stone house and unpacked a wool sweater to wear while she rinsed the blood from the sleeves in the tin washtub. Without an undershirt, the sweater raked against her skin. The soap flakes smelled of her old life in Boulder as she rubbed them into the cuffs and pulled the linen cloth over the washboard, a scent that was just part of the full aroma of the tiny kitchen where her mother had made venison pasties and huckleberry jam before she fell ill.

  Olive took out the last gift her mother had given her, a silver collection box with thick, beveled crystal and deep red velvet lining. In it laid one single egg, that of a Broad-tailed hummingbird that had nested in a tree outside their home. Her mother helped her collect the egg, no larger than a pinky fingernail, from a nest smaller than a half-dollar coin. Olive tucked the treasure away underneath her bed, laying a cloth over it to disguise it from prying eyes, and hung the shirt up to dry. The smell of the rabbit stewing wound its way around the small barrack rooms as a spirit, beckoning her back to the kitchen where Richardson was singing at full volume a song about sailors and their one true love, the whiskeyed sea.

  “How old are you, Oliver?” Richardson asked over dinner, dipping his hard bread into the under-salted stew. “Fourteen? Younger?”

  “Yes, sir. Fourteen,” she lied.

  “Manhood has not yet found you,” he said, rubbing his own stubbled chin. “Your skin is as a fawn’s.”

  It didn’t seem as though Richardson required an answer to such a statement. Noting the blush combing Olive’s neck, Richardson took off his thick glasses and rubbed his eyes, changing the subject. She decided not to tell him that “fawn” was one of her mother’s nicknames for her.