Snow Falcon

by Harrison, Stuart

  Eventually he wrote the number down. All he had to do was call, and somewhere in a house across the miles the phone would be picked up and it might be his daughter. He had no idea what he would say.

  When he went upstairs to his bedroom he paused on the landing by the door to his mother’s room, then opened it and stepped inside. He stared at her bed and the chest of drawers. None of her personal items were still there, and he supposed they’d been disposed of a long time ago. A memory filtered into his mind.

  How old would he have been when he first understood the currents of uncertainty and recrimination that swirled around him in this house? He thought he was perhaps seven years old. He had woken in the night feeling thirsty, and went downstairs. The light was on in the passage on the way back to the kitchen, and the door to the living room was slightly ajar. He stopped to listen to voices irritably batting back and forth. He dad’s voice was surprisingly deep for a man who wasn’t physically large. He had been thin all his life. No matter what he ate he just burned it up. His mother was thin too. She moved about the house in flowing dresses, looking pale and wan. There was something brittle about her that originated inside and was reflected in her physical demeanor. That night she had sounded angry and frightened at the same time.

  ‘He’s a child and he’s our responsibility, we have to do what’s right for Michael.’

  ‘Who says this is right? That’s what I want to know?’ His dad’s voice, not raised, but with a kind of weary patience. It was also blurry at the edges, like words on blotting paper, a sign he’d been in his den drinking.

  ‘I don’t know how you could even think it,’ his mother said, her voice rising with a slight hysterical edge. ‘He’s your son.’

  He wondered what it was his dad was thinking of. Something that affected Michael.

  ‘You think this is doing him any good?’ Michael’s father had questioned.

  ‘You’d have him grow up without a father?’ His mother shot back.

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘And what about me? How would I manage? You know I’m not strong. Did you ever think of that or do you only care about yourself?’

  It was a strange argument, a lot of questions thrown like daggers back and forth, nobody ever answering. He understood the conversation was about him, and it seemed like his mother was trying to protect him.

  ‘This is getting us nowhere,’ his dad had said impatiently. Footsteps came towards the door.

  He’d scooted down to the kitchen, where he waited until it was quiet, then crept back toward his bedroom. On the way past the living room he heard his mother crying and further on a bar of light spilled out from beneath the closed door of the den.

  Sometime after that, whether it was days or weeks Michael didn’t know, his mother told him she’d stopped his father from leaving them.

  ‘He doesn’t want us anymore,’ she’d said.

  It was a shock that his dad should want to leave. That he didn’t want them. Him. His mother planted a seed and she turned out to be a diligent gardener. She would complain of his dad’s drinking and how he didn’t really love either of them.

  ‘We have to be nice to him or he’ll leave us,’ she used to say. ‘Especially you, Michael. You have to be nice to him or he’ll go away forever.’

  His mother made him her co-conspirator as he grew up. They stuck together, united against his father, and to please her he did as she asked. By the time he understood that she was sick, which was a gradual process rather than any kind of sudden illumination, his feelings towards both his parents were a mess of contradictions. Some things, he thought, don’t easily go away.

  Memories whispered in his mind and faded until there was just the quiet empty room. He closed the door

  ***

  In the morning, when he weighed her, Cully was exactly at her flying weight. She watched him with avid interest, now and then flicking her wings open and tensing as if to launch herself into the air, signs he had come to recognize as hunger.

  Beyond the clearing the woods were deserted. He was a little earlier than normal. He took his coffee back inside the house, and while he finished it his eye fell to Frank’s copy of The Goshawk lying on the table. On impulse he put it in his pocket before he went back outside.

  Cully stood tethered by her leash to the railing. He put on his glove and suddenly her demeanor changed. Her feathers flattened against her body and as he approached she leant towards him, searching for food. When he showed her a tiny piece of meat she seized it hungrily, and while she devoured it he exchanged her leash for the line he planned to fly her on for the very last time.

  He caught a movement in the trees. It was the boy from next door who had been showing up morning and afternoon like clockwork since the day Tom Waters was there. At first Michael was worried Jamie would do something to spook Cully, but he never spoke or moved a muscle. He simply looked on with an expression of rapt fascination and at the end of every training session he slipped away as unobtrusively as he arrived.

  Michael wasn’t sure how he felt about Jamie. At first he didn’t want him there. There were things going on with his mother and the cop that Michael didn’t want any part of. He thought of their lives as a part of the infinitely complex pattern of human interactions, like the myriad eddies and currents in a broad, fast-moving and ever-changing river. He preferred to remain marooned on the island he was building for himself.

  But he felt some affinity for Jamie. He thought about the kids calling him names that day at the bus stop, and about the story Tom Waters told about Jamie’s dad.

  He set off across the clearing unraveling the line as he went. When he turned, Cully was halfway towards him already. He just had time to grab a piece of meat and hold out his arm and then she was there, throwing out her feet and landing with a thump before swallowing her prize whole. She fixed him with a wild gleam as if he had cheated her.

  It was now or never. He went back to the house and started taking off the line. ‘I’m going to fly her free today,’ he said, speaking loud enough for Jamie to hear. ‘Don’t do anything to startle her. Just stay where you are.’

  There was a flicker of understanding in Jamie’s expression, as though he knew what was at risk. Perhaps he picked up on the tension in Michael’s voice.

  He removed the swivel joining the jesses on Cully’s legs, and then the jesses themselves. She examined her feet and bit at the unobtrusive leather anklets remaining, then roused her feathers, her eyes - glistening black and eager - fixed on him again. He had the feeling she understood something was different. She shifted position and the tone of the bell sounded across the clearing.

  He began to walk away, his heart beating a furious rhythm. He glanced at Jamie and tried to smile encouragingly, though he doubted it came across that way. At fifty yards he turned and raised his arm.

  When he called her his voice sounded strangely hoarse. She didn’t respond and he called again. She looked skyward at a crow that flapped like an ungainly black doll above the trees, and its call seemed to mock her. Michael knew she was going to go after it and when she did he would lose her. Suddenly he understood their fates were entwined in some way. A part of him experienced what she did, the tug of the wide sky, the inexorable pull of the mountains beyond the river, the high wide open spaces where the snow lay undisturbed by human tracks.

  He called her again, and this time she left the rail and skimmed above the ground. The crow called again, but she ignored it as she rose and reached for his fist. She settled, her wings held slightly open, quivering, her quick gaze fixed on his face for just a moment before she bent to tear at the meat in her talons.

  Relief flooded over him, and he glanced towards the trees where Jamie was watching. He grinned, and after a moment, Jamie grinned back at him. Some understanding passed between them. A boundary tentatively crossed.

  When Michael went back to the house he showed Jamie the book he took from his pocket, and told him what it was. He left it on the porch, and when
he came out later it was gone.

  CHAPTER 19

  Business was slow, but with spring not too far around the corner Susan was preparing for the busy period. She was working on her advertising for a real estate magazine that was published monthly and covered an area around Williams Lake that took in Little River. She finished scanning the last of the house shots into her computer and typed up the accompanying text. She was using a desktop publishing program that allowed her to prepare her page and send the file electronically to the magazine publisher.

  Once she’d sent off her work she checked the time and closed up the office. The school bus was pulling in as she reached the stop. Jamie stepped down and looked around for her. She waved, and as he came over it struck her there was something different about him. It wasn’t anything dramatic, just a spring in his step maybe, a different light in his eye. She allowed herself to entertain a glimmer of hope that this could be the beginning of something. Perhaps Doctor Carey had been right; Jamie had just needed some time.

  ‘Hi,’ she said as he got in and threw his bag on the floor. ‘Good day?’

  He shrugged and smiled.

  ‘How about hotdogs for dinner?’ He never turned down hotdogs and Susan decided perhaps she would join him and the hell with watching her diet for one day.

  When they got home Jamie ran inside and a few minutes later she heard him running down the stairs. She caught up with him at the door.

  ‘Hey, slow down there a second. Where are you going in such a hurry?’

  He didn’t respond other than to give her an impatient look. The dog came through from the kitchen, wagging his tail expectantly when he heard the door.

  ‘Can’t you take him with you?’ Jamie frowned and shook his head. ‘But you’ll take him out later, right?’

  He nodded and then he was gone, while Susan held the dog’s collar to keep him back. She hadn’t seen Jamie look excited for a long time, but it puzzled her. She patted the dog’s head absently, assuring it that Jamie would be back soon. But back from where, she wondered.

  Upstairs, as Susan was getting changed, she glanced out the window. The roof of the house next door was visible across the trees. A nagging suspicion formed. Jamie had been heading in that same direction. She went through to Jamie’s room and started picking up clothes he’d thrown on the floor. Under a T-shirt on his bed she found a paperback book with a drawing of some kind of hawk on the cover. As she flicked through it she guessed where it must have come from. She read a passage and wondered if Jamie was reading it. The style of writing was dated, describing a vanished era of people and places in a rural English setting, but it was also quite beautiful. It wasn’t the kind of thing a kid raised on X-Box and CGI movies would ordinarily be interested in. She also found a sketch pad and some pencil drawings of what was obviously a falcon flying towards a figure standing with his arm outstretched. Intrigued, she flipped through the pages, then she went downstairs and pulled on her boots and coat.

  As she made her way through the woods, Susan tried not to make a sound. Eventually she spotted Jamie standing with his back to her, close to the edge of the clearing outside Michael’s house. She went around him and found a place where she could watch what was going on without being seen herself. Jamie hadn’t noticed her. His attention was focused on the house, where Michael was doing something on the porch. Susan saw the flick of wings as the falcon stepped from what appeared to be an old-fashioned set of scales on to Michael’s fist. For a moment he stroked the falcon’s breast, then he saw Jamie, and raised a hand in a gesture of greeting. To Susan’s surprise, Jamie returned the gesture.

  Jamie stayed where he was, while Michael lowered his fist to let the falcon step on to the porch rail. Leaving her there, he began walking across the clearing, and Susan hid herself by the trunk of a cottonwood so she wouldn’t be seen. He took something from the bag at his side while back across the snow the falcon waited, watching him intently.

  Michael looked different from when she last saw him, Susan thought. He seemed less guarded. He raised his arm and called something and the falcon left the rail, dipping down to fly a foot or two above the snow, barely making a sound. When she was several yards away, she swooped up dramatically with her tail spread wide, and reached for Michael’s gloved fist with her talons.

  In the trees, Jamie looked on, wearing a huge grin.

  ***

  Linda Kowalski clipped an order above the grill where her husband could see it. ‘This guy’s in a hurry, Pete.’

  Pete glanced up and flipped hamburgers on the grill. The diner was quiet, but it would start to fill up in fifteen minutes or so as the lunch trade started to filter in. Linda poured two cups of coffee and put one in front of Susan

  ‘May as well take a break while I can,’ she said. ‘You and Coop haven’t forgotten about tonight have you?’

  Susan came to, distracted, then smiled and shook her head. ‘Dinner at eight. We’ll be there. Do you want me to bring anything?’

  ‘It’s all under control. Maybe some wine.’

  ‘Wine it is.’

  She and Linda had become friends soon after Susan moved to Little River. If things were quiet Susan liked to come over and chat while she kept half an eye on her office from her stool at the counter. It was one of the things she enjoyed about living there. Occasionally she thought about going back to the city and imagined herself wearing a business suit, working long hours with a commute at either end of the day.

  It had been David’s idea to leave. He’d brought her up here for a weekend to see what she thought. She’d had to admit it was a pretty spot. After that he’d worked on her until she finally gave in. She agreed to give it six months on the condition that if she didn’t like it they would go back to the city. Plus she got to start her own business.

  That was five years ago. She’d been twenty-eight then and Jamie almost five. David brought her to his hometown in spring, when the snow was gone from all but the high ground, and the meadows along the river were lit with sparks of yellow and red from the wild flowers that grew there. She’d felt an enormous trepidation about living in a small town again. Little River reminded her of the place where she grew up. All her life she’d dreamed of travelling, living in exotic cities, forging some kind of career. The career part had been a vague ambition, more about achieving independence for herself than becoming like her mother, who’d never worked after she married. Her dad was a slave to the company he’d worked for most of his adult life, only to be made redundant in his middle fifties. After that both her parents lived a kind of helpless bewildered existence without direction, and neither of them with a clue what they ought to do about it.

  Getting married at twenty-two had never been part of Susan’s plan, even less that she would have a child a year later, but both had happened anyway. The pregnancy was a mistake, but she’d never contemplated a termination and when Jamie was born they were suddenly a family - which both pleased and mystified her.

  The idea to move was about having more children and not having to work so hard that David never saw them. The children didn’t happen. It turned out Jamie was a fluke because David had a low sperm count. They carried on trying anyway and were talking about getting some help when the accident happened.

  The shock of his death had been devastating. Susan had no illusions that her marriage was idyllic, but she’d loved David and never really appreciated how much until she saw Coop’s face that day as he climbed out of his car.

  ‘Hey.’ Linda nudged her and she came to.

  ‘Sorry, I was miles away. Did you say something?’

  ‘I asked about your neighbor.’ Linda nodded towards the window.

  Across the street, Michael’s car was parked outside the store with papered over windows.

  ‘They say he’s going to open it again. I hope they’re wrong, for his sake.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  Linda arched her brows. ‘Who do you think is going to go in there?

  She was p
robably right, Susan thought.

  ‘Do you see him much?’

  ‘Not really. He keeps to himself. Did you know him when he lived here before?’

  ‘I remember him, but I wouldn’t say I knew him. He was quiet I think. I remember his parents better, especially his dad because he still ran the store until he died about ten or twelve years ago. He was a nice guy. His mother was a little strange.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘She didn’t come into town much. I don’t think she was well.’

  ‘He has a falcon,’ Susan said. ‘Jamie’s been going over there to watch him train it. Every morning, and again when he gets back from school.’

  Linda was surprised. ‘Jamie is?’

  ‘Do you think I ought to be concerned about that?’

  Linda studied her thoughtfully. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I see how excited Jamie is when he goes there.’ She paused, aware that wasn’t exactly an answer, and she thought about the scene she’d witnessed in the clearing a few days earlier. There was something about Jamie looking on from within the trees that had touched her. Michael and Jamie had struck her as both isolated in their different ways, and yet the falcon drew them together. She recalled the way it flew across the snow, and how beautiful it was.

  ‘What does Coop think about it?’ Linda asked.

  ‘Coop?’

  ‘Doesn’t he know?’

  ‘No, I haven’t mentioned it.’ It struck her that Linda was surprised. ‘Do you think I should have?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just assumed you would have. He thinks a lot of Jamie. I mean I don’t necessarily think it’s right the way some people talk about Michael Somers. Whatever he did is in the past…’

  ‘There’s a ‘but’ coming,’ Susan prompted.

  ‘You asked me if I thought you should be worried about Jamie going over there. That tells me you must’ve thought about it. I thought you might have talked it over with Coop.’