The Wild Birds

by Emily Strelow

  “You’re more of a bunny than dinner,” she said, glancing back at the house to make sure Richardson wasn’t watching from the doorway. “Let’s find you a safe place.”

  And with that, Olive had herself a pet. She found a little rock outcropping far behind the barracks and stacked some rocks around as a makeshift cage. She left the Russian blue there and petted its head, promising carrots and maybe some dried apple if she could swing it.

  Once back inside the barracks kitchen, she threw her arms in the air and said, “I’m sorry, Richardson. He got away.”

  “Well, damn. Those rodents are fast. You know, Oliver. You have a knack for the kitchen life. Something tells me you can make a stew fine even without meat.”

  “Thank you,” Olive said, returning to memories of her mother’s warm kitchen, her soda bread and preserves. She could feel the tang of the baking soda on her tongue, in her chest.

  That night, Olive snuck a carrot or two and some dried fruit out to the rabbit and watched him consume them with the brutal veracity of hunger. The carrots were gone in mere seconds. She secured some planks around him to keep him safe from predators—what exactly those would be on the island were beyond her ken. Back inside, she snuck a few of the dried and tanned rabbit hides into her room and covered her body under the blanket, pulling the thin wool over to keep them in place. Within minutes she was warmer than she had been since the day she arrived at the windy, foggy Farallones. The soft fur against her skin let her drift into a warm, gentle sleep.

  At first the dream was idyllic. There were rabbits jumping everywhere, over one another and into holes and out. The field of green grass was full of them as far as the eye could see. She found an apple tree and picked an apple. In the dream, it was the most delicious fruit she had ever eaten. She threw the core for a rabbit to enjoy, but the scene turned dour. The first rabbit began to consume the apple ravenously until a second and a third tried to steal it away from the first. Then the rabbits started consuming one another with the same rabid ferocity with which the first had bitten into the core. A chain reaction started and the rabbits began eating each other in a huge cannibalistic mass of blood and skin and fur. Olive jolted awake and flung the blanket off in a sweat. She examined her arms for signs of the bloodbath she’d just experienced, but she was free from stains. She let the rabbit skins slide down to the floor and pulled the wool blanket back over herself, creaking as she changed position onto her side and closed her eyes, trying to think of anything else she could. She settled on Warren as she tried to reconstruct his swarthy features in her mind.

  She put together the puzzle pieces of the tall, rugged egger and his gentle tones, the shotgun slung over his shoulder, as he called her clever. She could hear an echo of her own laugh and how for just a moment, the first since the passing of her mother, she had felt freedom from trouble. Lingering on his curly dark hair and beard, she wondered what it might feel like against her cheek, soft or raking, and speculated what he was doing at that very moment in time. She hoped she might catch a glimpse of him again the next day when Richardson took her to the abalone caves. She cringed at how the handsome egger must have thought her a silly little boy, guffawing with the clear pitch of a giggly girl at her own joke.

  The next morning, Richardson and two other lighthouse assistants wrestled with one of the heavy iron attachments for the Fresnel lens—many giant, magnificently curved pieces of glass that fit together perfectly to project light unlike any other prism on man’s green earth. Through the magnifying prism, the beam extended its long arm of warm light into the darkness of the ocean nights with the fearless might of an ancient god. After mending the attachment, they swore and sweat as they tried to return a slat of giant rounded glass back into a secure position. Richardson asked Olive to come take a side and she did, the weight of the thick glass seemingly impossible to uphold. She would almost have thought that the other men were not pulling their weight if she couldn’t hear their grunts and smell their sweat as they struggled under the weight. But the heft of it felt good despite her screaming muscles. She could feel herself alive under the pressure not to let the magnificent glass tiers drop. Her blood pounded into her neck and she could feel her heartbeat in her ears as she strained to keep upright. They finally returned the lens to its position and let the glass down gently into the newly mended attachment. It stared back at her with its concentric circles like a crystalline cyclops. She wondered if men didn’t fall under its spell out here, thrust into servitude to its spectrum. One of the other lighthouse men patted her hard on the back, breaking her free from the daydream.

  “This work will grow some muscles on you, boy. How old are you? Thirteen?”

  “He’s a small fourteen,” Richardson offered. “But more sturdy than he looks.”

  “Well, we’ll see some hair on your chin soon, I suspect,” the lighthouse man said in a less than convinced tone.

  “I suppose so,” Olive said, hoping dearly this would not be the case.

  “And if not, he’s a pretty great cook, so at least he’ll still be useful in the kitchen.” Richardson winked at Olive in a way that made her fear he might be beginning to suspect her deception. She glanced back at the lens and its opened glass eye, silently asking for some help in upholding her thin ruse.

  Wild Ginger

  Burning Woods, Oregon, 1977

  The baby growing inside her reminded Alice of a parasite. It sapped her of energy and kept her hungry, but the nausea made eating anything except toast or pretzels unbearable. She continued to be enervated day by day, slipping into a dull and thickening fog and resenting the “thing” as it drained her of her life force. It wasn’t until she made a discovery in the patch of earth on the far hill behind the filbert orchards that things started to improve. Wandering out where the coyotes were rumored to den and the barn cats dared not go, back on the steep slope of sedge and alder giving way to Douglas firs and even a few small hemlock, she found a patch of dense earth that held some potent magic.

  Confronted by Alice’s sallow face every time they opened her bedroom door, her parents decided to ease up on their forced confinement and allowed her daily strolls—for the baby. Alice suspected this had been her father’s idea when he winked at her one morning and said, “Enjoy your stroll, hon,” in his quiet timbre. On one such morning walk, as she tried to keep one step ahead of the nausea to give the slip to brain fog, she found wild ginger growing around the base of a Doug fir. The flower was different from the run-of-the-mill wildflowers that grew in the area—the asters and the blue dwarf lupine, the Douglas’s catchfly and Indian paintbrush. The deep blood-purple petals tapered into long fine points that curled up and out. She pulled her finger along the exotic edges of the curled petals. She dug out the leaves a little to see the half-hidden flower better, noted its hirsute petals and white interior, and just by chance, put one of her dirt-covered fingers in her mouth. It was the best thing she’d tasted since the morning sickness had hit. The fecund flavor of the black earth was at once bitter and sweet. She dipped her finger back into the roots and tasted the earth again. The flavor was delicious and somehow smacking of the forbidden. Good girls don’t eat dirt, her mother’s voice hissed in her head.

  But eat dirt she did, fingerful after fingerful, until she became full in a new way. Full of earth like a freshly potted houseplant. Full like the swelling of the earth toward the moon. The flavors in the dirt changed with her imagination. She held the idea of a cherry in her mind, and up little flavor seedlings pushed through her taste buds. She thought of chocolate, lemon, and heartache. She thought of loneliness and there it was on the tongue—reminiscent of almond or marrow. And so it was that Alice found her energy and solace in a spoonful of dirt. She upped her trips to twice a day and snuck an antique silver jam spoon from her great-grandmother’s silver set into her pocket and into the hills to taste away her worries. She ritualized the trips, looking forward to them for hours before she allowed hersel
f to go. And after a few weeks, the little tiny seedling baby inside her stopped making her as sick, apparently also pleased by the strange nutrients and minerals. The color returned to Alice’s cheeks and the fog parted just enough for her to feel that she might survive the most bizarre turn of events in her young life.

  She tried dirt from different aspects of the hills on her parents’ property, from the shade of the canopy to direct sunlight, from mossy to dusty, but her favorite dirt by far was that which clung to the roots of the only wild ginger bloom on the property. She scraped the spoon along the white fragile root system, careful not to completely uproot the flower, and delivered the spoon to her mouth slowly, her taste buds stinging in anticipation. The first bite was always the best. The spice of the dirt and root residue felt like miniature lightning finding its way along her tongue. After four spoonfuls of dirt, she kneeled on all fours and stretched like a cat curling her back toward the sky and then the earth. She was free and wild. And then she heard her mother’s voice calling her in to eat dinner from across the field like an arrow finding its way to her side. She sat back up as though hit, but obediently went back to the house to eat. The nausea was starting to subside and she was hungrier than she’d ever been in her life.

  “You’re three and half months along now,” her mother said, gesturing with a stiff hand for her to sit down at the kitchen table. “And your father and I think it’s time you told us the truth about how this happened.”

  “I did already,” Alice said, slumping in her chair. “Donnie. The comedian who left for Vegas. I honestly don’t remember his last name.”

  “Well, dear,” her father tapped the back of her chair with his cane to indicate she should sit upright. “We just don’t buy what you’re selling.” He looked at his wife as though for approval.

  “I don’t know what to tell you.” Alice interlaced her fingers in her lap. “I’m not trying to sell anything.”

  “And not to change the subject, but what are you always doing in the backwoods there?” Her mother put a steak down hard in front of her with a pat of butter and boiled potatoes on the side. “Eat,” she said forcefully. Alice was suddenly less hungry.

  “I don’t know. I just like it back there.”

  “Well, your father and I think we need to raze a few trees to make room for a burn patch back there.”

  “A burn patch? Why does it have to be there?” Alice was horrified.

  “Why not is a better question,” said her mother. “Tell us what’s so important to you back there and we might reconsider the location.”

  “If you tell us the whole truth—everything—maybe we can think of putting the burn patch somewhere else.” Her father looked at her with wide, soft eyes. Her mother sat herself down the chair opposite Alice and stared her down with dark eyes.

  “I already told you.” Alice looked at her plate and tried to pull the tears back into her sockets.

  “Tears are a sign of weakness,” her mother said.

  “The truth will set you free,” her father added. “To quote our Lord and Savior. Now we bow our heads and pray.”

  Alice sat in silence the rest of dinner, feeling as though she might just be able to get away with avoiding the subject and that everyone might forget about the whole thing. She went to bed and prayed to God that He might spare her sanctuary and her beloved flower, its filaments providing her the only lifeline she had left. But the next morning she woke to the sound of faraway chainsaws and shouts of the arborists’ coordination. “Headache!” she heard just as she went to the window, pulled back the curtain, and saw the top of the first Douglas fir from the far back lot fall, the impact bouncing and uprooting all the nearby plants. Her wild ginger was surely torn up and crushed by the behemoth’s weight. The whole area would soon be destroyed. Heat rose in her neck. She would never tell her parents the truth, she decided. And she would no longer bend to their rules.

  That afternoon, she went to inspect the damage in the back lot, the ground littered with wood chips, completely torn up. The entire lower half of the hillside was stripped bare, the smell of fresh sap and pine needles hanging in the air. She searched around on the ground among the chipped wood, but there was no sign of her wild ginger. She had just given up hope of finding anything when she heard her mother calling her name. Her eyes darted toward the house, then up the hill into the canopy of the alders and Douglas firs. She ducked behind a downed log and looked back one more time to make sure no one could see her before scrambling up over the tree corpse and up the hill away from the house, the orchard, her parents, and life as she knew it, deep into the trees. She put the spoon into the pocket of her thin fall jacket and headed west toward the point where her parents’ property met state forestland, the tiny compass inside her flipping like a new salmon toward the sea. She would walk all the way to the ocean. And when she got there she would become a waitress, or maybe join a fishing fleet. She would be something new and never look back.

  She didn’t really start to get hungry until it got dark. But as her hunger grew, a summer night alone in the woods felt like a reckoning with God. With each crack of a branch, she dared Him to come get her. Curled up on a mossy place, she pulled the thin jacket around her, but was still cold, so she pulled some downed Doug fir branches into a pile and used them as a blanket. They worked surprisingly well and she curled up with her head on a pile of fern fronds and moss and waited for sleep to find her. Every noise made her tired body leap to attention, but when she finally fell asleep, she fell deep into an exhausted slumber and slept through till the morning. When she awoke in the predawn hour, the hunger that took over her body was unlike any she’d ever experienced. She thought with longing of the dinner she had picked at the night before—the warm steak and buttery potatoes—and her mouth filled with saliva at the mere idea. It felt like some animal inside her was tearing at her stomach. But there was something deeper to the hunger, like a presence behind her, a ghost, whispering that she must eat or die. And so she set out to find food.

  Early summer foraging in the Pacific Northwest is not so bad. Bears do it. Birds do it, she told herself. So can I. She first came upon some huckleberry bushes with a few early ripened berries which filled the wrinkled cup of one hand and went down her throat in a flash. She then found some scant thimbleberries that tasted like the most amazing rose candies, melting sweet on her tongue. She found a few salmonberries, their unique tang lingering on the palate. But the very thought of salmon made her salivate. She would have to find some protein, and quickly. She sat on the banks of the Siuslaw River for a little while listening to it talk and briefly wondered whose land she was on. The land didn’t announce its owner like the little patchwork green-and-white squares did on a map. To the animals, each hillside belonged only to itself. She listened as the stream spoke of things she did not know and never would. She fell under the spell of its rhythm and nodded her head in time. The watery sermon was more interesting to her than anything she’d ever heard in church, but with some of the same gravitas. It was Sunday and everyone she knew would be at church. They would be whispering about the wayward runaway girl and those in the know would be tsking and clucking about her poor, bastard unborn child.

  She pushed their judgment and ignorance from her mind and tried to listen only to the stream, to let it pour over her thoughts and cleanse them. Down below, she watched an eddy and imagined what delicious fish flashed in and out of the shadows, playing hide-and-seek with the sun. In the middle of the stream, she saw a group of fish swimming over one another to try to avoid some sort of blockage in the middle of the stream. Flashing finned backs jumped over one another around the blockade, their bright silver scales catching in the sun. There must have been at least six fish, and from their large size she guessed that they were the first returning Chinook salmon of the season.

  She moved down the rocks toward the river’s edge and as she approached she noticed what the blockage was—a perfectly camou
flaged net made of sticks, held out from a much longer stick on shore. The fish tried to avoid the triangular basket made out of twigs woven together by flopping in and out, but someone had made a rudimentary weir—a triangle of river rocks that siphoned them back into the net once they’d escaped. The fish moved their bodies over one another in such a sensual way that Alice almost felt as though she were intruding. She leaned farther out over the river, but there was no way she could reach the net without venturing in. She would have to walk into the swift water, so she took off her pants and waded into the stream, her toes gripping the slick rocks. She clung to a thin, bending branch of a willow as a lifeline as she waded in. The water rose up her calves as she reached the middle of the stream, then finally rose up over her knees, at which point she felt like she was more in than out of the water. Note to self—the river takes over control when it covers your knees. She closed in on the basket net slowly, trying to keep her shadow from falling over the fish. Their large bodies rolled up and over one another in a pile, in and out of the basket. Set on the long pole smack dab in the middle of the main rapid with the rough weir on either side, the fish would have to go either up or down to avoid the pit. The fish flopped against one another as though possessed. She let her feet find purchase slowly on the smooth stones and told herself that steady was just a state of mind. The water was almost at her thighs. There was a small waterfall and rapid just downstream in the swiftly moving current, and she knew if she were to let go or slip, that could be the end to her baby and more than likely to her as well.

  But she was mesmerized by the fish and their flashes of silver and green. They almost seemed to be teasing her with the temptation of pink flashing flesh just below the surface. The predator rose strong in her throat and brain. She was no longer thinking in words and phrases, acting only on instinct—triggers and sparks of color and longing. She eased her feet down onto a rock above the fish and finally let go of the branch she’d been clinging to for support. It rebounded hard and a flurry of green leaves rained down. She bobbled, then steadied herself and waited for just the right moment before lunging her hands down into the water and net. The fish separated and bounced, finding their way out of the basket and into the weir’s shadows with lightning precision. All but one smaller fish bounced out of the net, the small fish flopping once or twice against the woven sides before Alice got her hands firmly around the head and fins. Before it could bounce back into the water, she slowly retraced her steps through the water back to shore holding the flopping fish around the gills with one hand, steadying herself like a tightrope walker with the other outstretched arm. Once on shore, she pinned the fish’s tail against a rock with her fist. She brought her hand down hard on what should have been its head, but the fish flexed up and the side of her fist hit only rock. A throbbing rose in her rattled hand bones. She wrapped her fist with her scarf using her mouth, keeping the struggling fish pinned to the shore by its tail with the other hand.