“Again, we’ll have to wait for a determination on that,” I managed. “As to what caused this, I don’t have any better idea than the health department, and they’re only starting their investigation. It’s premature to try to answer that,” I said, feeling both helpless and like a transparent fake.
I couldn’t catch the train out of Manhattan fast enough. Something nuanced but quite new had come into focus that day. The mass fatalities of birds had suddenly entered, at least for me, a different phase. Living with Caitlin and her beloved finches in our dire but very familiar cocoon of mourning Laurel, making our breakfasts together before Cate headed out for school and I hit the road, cooking dinners together at day’s end, she inviting her friend Jen over to watch movies or study while I worked in my studio, hoping to bury my sorrow in insurance paperwork—all this had wrapped me in a kind of warm blindness as to what was happening not just to all these poor dying birds, but to me. Had I devolved into a fool, standing in Washington Square rhapsodizing to myself about how pigeons are like doves and related to the three billion passenger pigeons our pioneer forebears slew into extinction? Yes, I guess I had. Still, my encounter with that restaurateur, whose entire concern was with his income stream, not the birds’ plight, troubled me.
At home, I couldn’t help but look up a passage I remembered in Caitlin’s Audubon biography, one she’d read aloud to me and Laurel when she was going through the book a third time. The passage quotes a sixteen-year-old named Will Bakewell, who witnessed along with Audubon the mass slaughter of passenger pigeons—with guns, poles, torches, even large pots filled with burning sulfur to asphyxiate them out of the sky—along the Green River in 1816. “It was then that the authors of all this devastation began their entry amongst the dead, the dying and the mangled,” it read. “The pigeons were picked up and piled in heaps, until each had as many as he could possibly dispose of, when the hogs were let loose to feed on the remainder. . . .”
The more things change, the more they stay the same, I thought. And yet none of the birds in Washington Square, indeed not one of the dead birds I’d witnessed, had been prey to gunfire or anything similarly deliberate. That said, I hadn’t seen the restaurateur’s level of disregard in evidence among the other dozen claimants who, by the way, were also in business to make money and insured so as not to lose it. If the dying birds were already having a mounting financial impact on us humans, did it mean we would soon find ourselves targeting them even more than we already had been, unwittingly or not?
Fortunately, our trip to Maine saved me from myself. At least for a time.
Laurel’s brother-in-law, Ben, was an accomplished sailor. Out on the ink-blue water as we crossed Penobscot Bay toward Deer Isle, tacking back and forth in a sharp breeze under a flawless sky, Caitlin came to life. I hadn’t seen her smile and laugh like this since before her mother was first diagnosed with cancer. Hadn’t seen her so engaged, as Ben let her take the helm, instructing her while we whisked along through the light chop.
Plus, bird life out on the water was, if not abundant, at least present. A cormorant aired his articulated wings as he corked up and down on a buoy. A lone osprey soared overhead while a few eiders patrolled the starboard waves. Though we’d been discouraged during the long drive up by the paucity of birds we spotted, this place seemed at least a touch more welcoming to waterfowl. Granted, these were not the numbers we were used to seeing, when every buoy sported a shag and legions of eiders bobbed in the saltwater along with seagulls, mergansers, and a host of others, but we would take what we were given. For a day or two, as our family picnicked together on a rocky beach near Vinalhaven or visited a lobster pound not far from Ben and Nicole’s cottage in Camden, life took on a rosy cast. No doubt a melancholy rose was its tint and tone, as Laurel was never far from anyone’s thoughts, but the siege that Caitlin and I’d been experiencing back home lifted just a little, took a temporary respite.
I often wondered whether Laurel’s deathbed decision to be buried here in Camden where she grew up, in the same cemetery as her parents, was in part inspired by the idea that Caitlin and I would be forced to remain in close touch with Nicole and her family if we wanted to visit Laurel’s grave from time to time. Would have been classic Laurel, if this was even somewhat behind her choice. She knew that Nicole and Ben’s daughter, Emily, two years older than Cate, might be counted on to take her cousin under her wing whenever we were in Maine. Nor was she wrong. When the five of us weren’t all doing something together, the two of them spent hours on end walking downtown, exploring shops, doing whatever girls their age liked to do. Emily, home from her freshman year in college, was central to Caitlin’s heartening personal renaissance, and one more reason I was glad to have made this trip north. At the same time, Laurel’s sister and brother-in-law were kind and caring toward me in subtly respectful ways. It wasn’t by chance that a copy of C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed was among the books on the bedside table in my room. When I read by lamplight while lying alone in the four-poster Laurel and I always shared when we visited Camden in the healthy old days “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything,” I felt these words had been written for me. And, of course, in a way they had been.
Cate and I had visited Laurel’s grave on the first evening of our arriving in Camden, and we invited the others to join us for a farewell cemetery visit before we were scheduled to head back down the highway toward home. Though I didn’t say anything about it to Caitlin, hoping that in her momentary happiness she was too distracted to notice, it dawned on me as I packed that I was hearing no birdcall this morning. I refused to make too much of it. Or, that is, I did my best not to. Birds, if you take the time to listen to them, are quite symphonic in their dialogue with one another. They’ll warble and trill and carol and whistle, piping phrases of indescribable variety. They’ll chip and chant, twitter and gurgle, slur and rasp. Now liquid, now creaky, now improvised and melodic, now repetitive and grating—there seems to be no end to the variations on their themes. But then, and I’ve heard this a thousand times since long before the odd behavior and mass deaths began, an entire forest of them will suddenly go silent for no apparent reason. Maybe they sense a change in the weather. Maybe they’ve temporarily run out of things to say to one another. Perhaps some invisible conductor telepathically raises a baton in their collective minds, signaling a dramatic pause in the score, an intermezzo of silence, a chance to let the rustling leaves have a moment to applaud or add a bit of percussive voice to the symphony themselves.
The silence I was hearing out the upstairs window went on far longer than those symphonic pauses. I heard cars, children playing games, the hum of a faraway lawn mower, could even make out the distinct growl of unseen lobster boats plying their rounds in the nearby bay. But did I hear so much as the distant squeal of a single gull winging toward the water? No, I had to admit I didn’t.
After breakfast, we caravanned to the quaint cemetery where Laurel was laid to rest—Caitlin and me in our car, the others in theirs. We planned to leave for parts south right after we paid our respects. Walking from the peastone parking lot up through an old black wrought-iron gate, I quietly continued my vigil, hoping to hear some sparrows or warblers pick up with their singing. The only sounds audible were either manmade or the result of breezes riffling through the enormous ancient trees that stood like kindly ancestral sentinels over the uneven rows of tombstones, a few of which dated back to the eighteenth century. As we approached Laurel’s resting place beyond a hedge of bayberry, I began to feel oddly at peace with the quiet. There was a sort of holiness to the great hollow silence of this place, and I let go of my anxiety about the birds’ noiselessness.
Nicole and her family were more religious than I was, and when they joined hands with me and Caitlin in an informal semicircle around the grave and began to pray—reciting the Lord’s Prayer together with eyes closed, Cate joining them in a whisper—I allowed my gaze to settle on the simple granite headstone with Laurel’s name and dates
incised on its face. How I missed my wife at that moment. How I wished she were here to help me get through whatever I sensed deep in my gut was beginning to change, maybe irremediably, in the world she left behind. How I regretted my shortcomings as a father to her Caitlin, which I was doing my level best, I told her silent as a bird, to improve.
Then, without forewarning, a blurry fist of electricity bounded over from a nearby hedge and lit on the stone. Once settled, the blur became a bird, an indigo bunting. His pate and breast were that dark, rich, deep blue of the ocean; his back the lighter blue of a sky untroubled by cloudiness. He cocked his head, quick as a blink, and stared at me with one glassy black eye. Without a conscious thought, I tilted my own head to one side in a kind of clumsy human greeting. Tipping his head to the other side, he swiftly looked away, then brought that discerning eye back to mine as if trying to remember me. For an instant, I felt as if I were gazing into a benevolent abyss. After giving me one last quizzical sidelong glance, he darted off in a direction opposite the hedgerow and up into a tree, no longer visible within the canopy of leaves.
After my family’s prayer was finished, we lingered a few minutes, none of us saying anything. And then I heard the bunting’s metallic warble, unmistakably high and sharp. Tie-tie. Sweet-sweet. Tchu-tchu. After a crisp, gaunt cry that sounded like the word “spit,” it was gone. I didn’t see him leave and didn’t hear him again. For reasons I could not explain, I felt devastated by this brief encounter.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that the indigo bunting’s presence was not lost on Caitlin. Though she hadn’t seen it when it flew across and stood on her mother’s stone marker like a brilliant blue flame, given her eyes were closed in prayer, she hadn’t missed hearing its call. It took her a few guesses in the car as we started down the winding seaside highway below Camden that would lead us through one picturesque fishing village after another. But she soon got it right.
“Well done,” I complimented her. “Passerina cyanea.”
“Not that hard,” she fudged. “We get those once in a while back home.”
“Well, it’s still a good call,” I said.
And it was.
The gentle nimbus that haloed us for a day or two upon our return, a temporary magic bolstered by the discovery that one of the Zebra finches had laid eggs and was comfortably nesting in our absence, soon dissipated and disappeared. For better or worse I decided not to tell Caitlin when I found a small clutch of dead chickadees on the far side of the detached garage. I managed to bury the little guys quickly, without her having seen me. Among her favorites, chickadees were as close to family as wild birds could get, in part because they stuck around throughout the year, living within a couple-mile radius of the house their whole lives long. Meantime, my workload all but doubled, if that were possible. And no, not every claim had to do with aberrant bird behavior causing destruction at this business or that home. Instead, fires seemed to be the loss most often recorded during that first month of summer.
Granted, it was hot, and the blizzards of winter had given way to Kalahari-like drought, especially out west and along the southern tier of states, but to some degree in our region as well. Yet as I went out to make my visits with claimants, I found myself suspecting arson more often than at any time in my career. The economy was shambling along, but the country was not in a full-blown depression—just crawling forward a quarter at a time with the promise of something around the corner, if we could only hang on long enough to get there.
After that disturbing day down at Washington Square, I’d gotten out of the habit of listening to my audiobooks for a while. I certainly had no interest in driving Caitlin crazy on the seven-hour drive to and from Camden, so we’d listened to music—she was our radio DJ—during our pilgrimage north. But when I got the inevitable call one morning last week, on a muggy nondescript Tuesday, informing me of another bird incident northeast past the town of Hudson, midway between the river and the Berkshire mountains, I took it as a sign that the time had come to resume The Woodlanders.
I drove upstate on the Taconic side of the river rather than take the Interstate, in part because I wasn’t in the mood to do eighty miles an hour jockeying with eighteen-wheelers, and in part because I suppose I was in no great rush to arrive at my destination. Having forgotten some of the plot, I backtracked a number of chapters, picking up where the young Dr. Fitzpiers, bored and restless, begins the conquest of his future wife, Grace, during the spring season when, as Hardy suggestively puts it, “The rush of sap in the veins of the trees could almost be heard.” I remembered there were quite a few references to birds in this section, and wasn’t disappointed when the actor read the line “In-door people said they had heard the nightingale, to which the out-door people replied contemptuously that they had heard him a fortnight before.” All good stuff, I thought with a small smile. What a different world it was back when the knowledge of nature, its flora and fauna, actually mattered, was a measure of a person’s connection to life itself. Was the measure of a person, period.
I listened as I drove, but as ever let my mind wander. I thought of that bunting on Laurel’s headstone and wondered why it had affected me so. And once more I marveled at Caitlin’s identifying its call. I thought about how it wouldn’t be long before she went off to college, leaving me as alone and assuredly restless as Hardy’s solitary, bedeviled Fitzpiers, who was far younger and more dashing than some twenty-first century insurance adjuster—a bird-loving widower soon to be living by himself in a house of ghosts.
This was horse country, mildly hilly and paddocked, that I entered. Pristine acreage with huge barns painted the precise dark red that any idyllic, ideal barn ought to be painted. I was overwhelmed by the elegance of the farms, the miles of post-and-rail, the chestnut and dappled horses that ranged in their pastures. By the way, I hadn’t expected to see many birds, if any, on the way up, and my expectations were fulfilled. One exception, as in times past, was crows feasting on roadkill. They hopped nonchalantly away when my car sped by, but I saw in the rearview mirror that they got right back to work on the remains of whatever small beast it was, now unidentifiable, that had been hit by a passing vehicle and was reduced to a slurry of meat for foragers.
Soon enough I pulled into a long paved driveway flanked on either side by white fences and rolling meadows, and stopped in front of a large Federal-style house. When I rang the doorbell a young boy, about ten years old or thereabouts, with quite a spray of freckles across his face, invited me in. Without saying more than a few words, muttered ones along the lines of “Follow me, they’re out back,” he led me through the house, and as he did a wave of dread came over me so abrupt as to be nauseating. By whatever power of intuition, I knew this was going to be awful beyond anything I’d previously seen.
I wasn’t wrong. Out back, the place was like some battlefield littered with the fallen.
This time the police had come and gone before I’d arrived. Yellow plastic tape fluttered along a large irregular perimeter within the nearest paddock, which turned out to be the main riding ring of the horse farm. A dark canvas tarp lay draped over a substantial form toward the center of the area that had been marked off by police, and a backhoe was parked nearby. The owner emerged from the nearby stable and walked me into the show ring. I had already guessed what lay beneath the tarp, and when he confirmed it was his most valuable, productive studding horse, the extent of his claim became clearer.
“Were you here when this happened?” I asked as we stepped over birds and ducked under the police tape.
“I was in the barn,” he said, his voice tight. “Came running out when I heard what sounded like long, heavy pounding thunder. They were just raining down, flopping, like they just all of a sudden forgot how to fly.”
“Awful,” I mumbled.
“Most awful thing I ever saw.”
It was not hard to imagine him on a regular day as a tall, extremely confident man with his narrow suntanned face, lanky and comfortable in his bod
y, a person of some wealth and much expertise in his field. He struck me as more shaken than even the loss of a profitable favorite stallion would provoke.
“I’m sorry,” I said, pulling my camera from my bag. “For the file.” The fact was, I didn’t want to view this any more than he wanted to show me.
“Here, let me pull this tarp off for you,” which he did with hands visibly quaking.
I took my shots, appalled by the injuries on the horse’s head and rump. The beast still had a saddle on his back, which made me wonder whether the police had been here because a rider might have been injured while exercising him. I asked, even though personal injury was outside my purview.
“Badly hurt. If he didn’t have his riding helmet on, he could have been killed.”
I shook my head. “Are you sure they weren’t attacking? This looks like a scene out of The Birds.”
“No, no. They weren’t attacking anybody. Wouldn’t even have been able to if they wanted. Poor bastards were just dying right out of the clear blue sky.”
The rest of my visit to High Hill Farm was solemn as I was shown further damage to the roof of the main house, the tacking shed, and elsewhere. This was without question the most extensive physical wreckage I’d seen from one of the bird incidents, the injury of a rider altogether aside. What was more, instead of a particular flocked species, or one species with a couple of unwonted others, such as Caitlin and I saw in Stone Ridge, the variety of birds here was beyond belief—as if some hungry zephyr had swept across the country, gathering birds in its invisible maw, and then disgorged them on this spot. I counted no fewer than twelve different kinds, including flickers and sedge wrens, brown-headed nuthatches that rarely if ever strayed this far north, as well as others I couldn’t immediately identify—an impossible mélange whose most disturbing member was a pileated woodpecker that lay on his mangled side in primeval magnificence. I’d seen many a pileated before, largest of all woodpeckers, but it seemed unthinkable to see one, such a regal dinosaur, lying in broken disarray. It was like the death of a patriarchal feathered god. Before I realized what I had done, I’d photographed as many of them as I could. These were less for the case file than for myself—although I would include some for documentation. I wanted them, I suppose, as proof, because even standing amid the horror of it, I could hardly believe my eyes.
Fall of the Birds Page 3