The Yellow Birds

by Kevin Powers

  We walked the body in the cart down to the edge of the river. The hermit walked around to the rear of his cart, stroked the mule’s flank and then embraced Murph, lifting him out of the flat carriage. Sterling and I each grabbed a leg and we walked the last few steps to the river and laid him in. He floated off quickly in the steady current, and in the water past the bulrushes little pools formed where his eyes had been.

  “Like it never happened, Bartle. That’s the only way,” Sterling said.

  “Yeah, I know.” I looked at the ground. The dust blowing in fine swirls around my boots. I knew what was coming.

  Sterling shot the cartwright once, in the face, and he crumpled to the ground. No time to even be surprised by it. The mule began to pull the cart, unbidden, as if by habit. The two dogs followed it into the coming night. We looked back toward the river. Murph was gone.

  11

  APRIL 2009

  Fort Knox, Kentucky

  Then it was spring again in all the spoiled cities of America. The dark thaw of winter fumbled toward its end and passed. I smelled it reeking through my window during that seventh April of the war, the third and last of my confinement. My life had become as ordinary as I could have hoped for. I was happy. The prison was only tier II, for convicts serving terms of five years or less, a Regional Confinement Facility, which all the Joes called “adult day care.” It made me laugh.

  I had been pleasantly forgotten about by almost everyone. The staff allowed me to check out books from the moderately well run prison library. I learned that when I finished reading them they could be stacked on the metal desk that jutted out of the cell wall and I’d be able to look out the window, which was large enough to let in light but far too high to see out of without the aid of something else to stand on. I had a fine view of the exercise yard and the tree line past the concertina fence, which more or less marked the limit of the base’s prison grounds, for as long as I could balance on the ever-weakening bindings of whatever stacks of books allowed my looking. Beyond the tree line the dull world that ignored our little pest of a war rolled on.

  My first few months inside, I spent a lot of time trying to piece the war into a pattern. I developed the habit of making a mark on my cell wall when I remembered a particular event, thinking that at some later date I could refer to it and assemble all the marks into a story that made sense. I still remembered what some of them meant for a long time afterward: that long chalky scratch below the mirror next to “FTA” stood for that kid whose head Murph cradled in the orchard as he died. The one above my bunk reflected an instant of thought I’d had in an alley in Al Tafar, in the heat of that first summer when the shade of webs of power lines were little blessings as we passed beneath them, and a corner was turned by whoever had been on point that day, and I saw Sterling as he turned around and waved for me and Murph to cross into the open road, and it occurred to me that Murph had had a choice, there were two paths he could have taken and I was one of them, and I asked myself if I could be worthy of that task, and wondered if that is what his mother meant when she asked me to take care of him, and is that why she asked? As I made my mark, if I remember right, the chalk broke and the mark became much shorter than I could recall intending, and what did it mean that this choice was an illusion, that all choices are illusions, or that if they are not illusions, their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all the other men and women deciding anything in that moment? I’d made that mark into a kind of flash, an explosion in chalk dust on the light green painted concrete of my walls. Who could ask to have their will be done against all that? And what about the choices we don’t ever get to, like Murph’s, which was not and will not be gotten to because he died, like me being that which was not gotten to? It seemed silly, but I remembered that mark and what it meant. Eventually, I realized that the marks could not be assembled into any kind of pattern. They were fixed in place. Connecting them would be wrong. They fell where they had fallen. Marks representing the randomness of the war were made at whatever moment I remembered them: disorder predominated. Entropy increased in the six-by-eight-foot universe of my single cell. I eventually accepted the fact that the only equality that lasts is the fact that everything falls away from everything else.

  Sometimes the staff would come by my cell and see a new collection of marks. They were never able to distinguish new marks from old ones, but a few of the guards had a sense of what the volume was before they’d gotten their forty-eight hours off, or gone on vacation, and they recognized, if nothing else, when the randomness expanded. Now, I understand why they would have seen this as a pattern, and perhaps there was a pattern there after all, for I confess myself that had I been confined for another year or two the walls would have been full, there would have been no marks at all, just a wash, a new patina whitening the walls with marks of memories, all running together as if the memories themselves aspired to be the walls in which I was imprisoned, and that seemed just to me, that would have been a worthy pattern to have made. But it was not to be. Everything disrupts. The guards seemed to understand that my marks had meaning, so surely they can be forgiven if their error was one of interpretation.

  They’d ask, “Getting near to your earliest possible release date, right?”

  “Sure,” I’d say. “Seems like I must be.”

  “Ah. You’re a shoo-in for early release, a model prisoner.”

  “We’ll see, I guess, but thanks.”

  “How many days you got down?” they’d ask, pointing to the marks on the walls, what I then would realize could appear to be an accounting of the passing days.

  “Must be nine eighty-three, nine ninety, right? Almost a thousand?” they’d say and smile.

  “Must be,” I’d say, thinking of Murph, who was not counted for a while, wondering what his number would have been if I hadn’t lied about it all.

  His mother came to see me once, that spring before I was released. I could see that she’d been crying as she waited for me to come into the visiting area.

  “Y’all can’t touch, but I can get you coffee if you want,” the guard said.

  I didn’t know what to say to her at first, but it seemed unfair that she had to bear it like this, to be responsible to start, so far away from any comfort or understanding. And if she should accuse, then I should be accused. His absence from the family plot was my fault. I had left him in the river. I had feared the truth on her behalf and it had not been my right to make that choice for her. But this was not her way. Her grief was dignified and hidden, as is most grief, which is partly why there is always so much of it to go around.

  “I don’t know why I’m here,” she said.

  I didn’t know how to respond.

  “Just needed to see, you know?”

  I looked down at the linoleum.

  “No. Course you don’t.”

  She began by telling me that back in that December, a black sedan had driven slowly through town. One of her friends had called her to tell her it was coming. The woman had seen the dress uniform of the man in the passenger seat and she told Mrs. Murphy that the men in the car seemed lost, but that they’d be there soon.

  I tried to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Murphy watching from the kitchen window. Snow surely fell as it had fallen all through the evening, over the eaves of the porch and over the hills and lining the branches of the trees. The world clean and obtuse. No angles, nothing hard. The car coming around the last bend in the road, unacknowledged, as if it had not been seen.

  Mrs. Murphy and her husband saw the car, to be sure, but some part of it did not register. They stood by the window as if struck by some strange palsy. They were mute and nothing changed in the scene but the snow falling a little harder and the black stain of the car becoming larger as it moved through that blank canvas. And yet they stared. Even when the car stopped in the small turnaround of their driveway—the idle of the engine soft but undeniable—they did not move. Nor did they move from the window when the captain and chap
lain removed their covers and knocked on the door. And despite the fact that the gentle rap of their knuckles asserted the fact that they were truly, wholly real, Mrs. and Mr. Murphy remained looking out the window at the car as if it were one of God’s unknowable mysteries.

  When the two men gently forced the door open, Mr. Murphy had kissed his wife and put on his hat and coat and left the house out of the back door. When they said to her, “We regret to inform you that your son, Daniel, was killed,” she only looked at them with her arms crossed as if waiting for some unseen third party to elaborate. None did. The men, fulfilling their obligation with all the grace and deference that men could be asked to, finally left a card in Mrs. Murphy’s hand that gave the address of the rooms they’d rented while they waited for a break in the weather. It had a number to call if she had any questions.

  As she spoke, I thought of where I had been at that exact moment, but I could not calculate the time difference, nor could I distinguish between all the cold predawn patrols that marked my tour after Murph had died. She said that she’d stood in that same spot for hours. So long in fact that the heat of her body had affected the way the snow collected on the window, leaving the small outline of her figure cleared in the iced-over glass. When she did finally move, it had almost been evening. She walked outside through the still-open back door and found Mr. Murphy there, cross-legged in the snow, which swirled in drifts sometimes up to his waist and collected on his hat and shoulders like a shroud. They sat there together like that in silence. Night began. More fell.

  By the time she finished telling me about that day, the coffee had gotten cold, the steam spread out and dissipated above the passing hours. Mrs. Murphy took our mugs and absentmindedly dumped the dregs into a third cup and handed it to me.

  “I didn’t mean for it all to happen like that,” I said.

  “Well, what you meant can’t do anything now.”

  “No. You’re right.”

  The army had given up on her eventually, her fight for truth and justice, to know how it was he’d gone from MIA to dead so quickly, why the explanations never fit. But they knew that if they waited long enough people would forget about her pain, and finally a cost-benefit analysis was done and it reached the conclusion that she could now be done away with cheaply. The story of her fight had long since passed from the TV news to tabloid rags, the headlines gaudy and absurd, with pictures of her sitting on a rocking chair, a cigarette dangling from the thin line of her lips. She’d settled for an increase in her SGLI payout and my imprisonment when everyone stopped listening to her, when America forgot her little story, moving as it does so quickly on to other agonies, when even her friends began to smile at her with condescension, saying, “LaDonna, you just gotta find your truth in all of this.”

  That’s what she told me anyway. “As if mine’s supposed to be different from yours, like you got one and I got another. What the hell’s that mean, your truth?” she said.

  I didn’t know. Neither of us said anything for a while and it seemed OK.

  “I just wish he hadn’t left home,” Mrs. Murphy said. She looked at me for a moment. “What about you? You got big plans for getting out?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I had never really paid attention to where I might end up, which is what I could control, and what mattered. I’d like to think I could choose well if given half a chance. But I had always done something else, always looking back instead on the nothing that remained in memory. I never got it right. All I knew was that I wanted to return to ordinary. If I could not forget, then I’d hope to be forgotten.

  I was glad she came. Not because there was any unexpected reconciliation, but because she was tolerant and seemed to want to understand what happened to her son, why I’d made her read a letter that wasn’t real, standing in the snow, as I had. I was the last witness to her son’s irrevocably human end. He was now just material, but I hardly knew what to make of that. I guess all the words I used to try to explain it to her were like so much straw compared to what I’d seen. But I appreciated the way she reacted to my explanation, as roughly as I told it to her, the connections failing as they did daily on the walls of my cell. I can’t quite say what her reaction was exactly; her face still had the dull glow of loss, faded from a feeling always felt toward something else that she would now be forced to measure. Even after talking for six hours straight I couldn’t swear to any visible relief. She hadn’t offered forgiveness and I hadn’t asked for it. But after she left, I felt like my resignation was now justified, perhaps hers too, which is a big step nowadays, when even an apt resignation is readily dismissed as sentimental.

  All of that was a long time ago. My loss is fading too and I don’t know what it is becoming. Part of it is getting older, I guess, knowing Murph is not. I can feel him getting farther away in time, and I know there are days ahead when I won’t think of him or Sterling or the war. For now, though, they’ve let me out, and I’ve allowed myself the gift of a quiet quarantine in a cabin in the hills below the Blue Ridge. Sometimes I will smell the Tigris, unchanged forever in my memory, flowing just as it flowed that day, but it is soon replaced by the cold clear air coming down the mountainside between the mezzanines of pines rolling ever upward.

  I do feel ordinary again. I guess every day becomes habitual. The details of the world in which we live are always secondary to the fact that we must live in them. So I’m ordinary, except for a few peculiarities that I will probably always carry with me. I don’t want to look out over the earth as it unfurls itself toward the horizon. I don’t want desert. I don’t want prairie and I don’t want plains. I don’t want anything unbroken. I’d rather look out at mountains. Or to have my view obstructed by a group of trees. Any kind would do: pine, oak, poplar, whatever. Something manageable and finite that could break up and fix the earth into parcels small enough that they could be contended with.

  When Murph’s mom came to visit she brought me a map of Iraq. I thought it was an odd gesture when I first began to look at it, folding and unfolding it in my cell, struggling with the arrangement of the arbitrary lines that it would fold itself along when I went to put it up at night. Within the map there was a section magnifying Al Tafar and its surrounding landscapes. It stopped being funny after a while. The grid seemed so foreign and imprecise. Just a place scaled out of existence on a map.

  The first day in my new cabin I unpacked and laid out a few things on the old olive drab cot I’d bought from the army-navy store outside the base that housed the prison. I didn’t have much: some clothes, the map that Mrs. Murphy had given me. I put some tape on the corners and flattened it as best I could against the wall, but the lines of the folds remained. I remember rubbing my finger along one of the creases that ran straight along a very small section of the Tigris. It was the part of the river that ran through Al Tafar. I dug in my bag and found one of my medals and I stuck it in as near as I could figure to the place where we had left him. That map, like every other, would soon be out of date, if it was not already. What it had been indexed to was only an idea of a place, an abstraction formed from memories too brief and passing to account for the small effects of time: wind scouring and lifting the dust of the plains of Nineveh in immeasurable increments, the tuck of a river farther into its bend, hour by hour, year by year; the map would become less and less a picture of a fact and more a poor translation of memory in two dimensions. It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn’t much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow.

  I went outside and walked around a bit. It was quiet. I dozed off under the bright sun in the mountains. I heard the rustling of a cloth as it was taken off some small monument in some small corner of America. I heard the soft rustle of other voices, too.

  And then I saw Murph as I’d seen him last, but beautiful. Somehow his wounds were softened, his disfigurement transformed into a statement on per
manence. He passed out of Al Tafar on the slow current of the Tigris, his body livid, then made clean by the wide-eyed creatures that swam indifferently below the river’s placid surface. He held whole even as the spring thaw from the Zagros pushed him farther downstream, passing through the cradle of the world as it greened, then turned to dust. A pair of soldiers watched his passage while resting in the reeds and bulrushes, one calling out to the battered body while the other slept, not knowing Murph was ever one of them, thinking that he must be the victim of another war of which they likely did not feel they were a part, and the voice rose softly through the heat, and it sounded like singing when he said, “Peace out, motherfucker,” loud enough to wake his friend, but the body that he called out to would have been, by then, little more than skeleton, Murph’s injuries erased to the pure white of bone. He reached the Shatt al Arab in summer, where a fisherman who saw him flood into the broad waters where the Tigris and Euphrates marry unknowingly caressed his remains with the pole that pushed his small flat-keeled boat along the shallow waters of the marshes. And I saw his body finally break apart near the mouth of the gulf, where the shadows of the date palms fell in long, dark curtains on his bones, now scattered, and swept them out to sea, toward a line of waves that break forever as he enters them.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book was primarily written alone. The process of turning those private efforts into what you have just read, however, required many people. Thanks are due, above all, to my mother and father for their endless patience. I’ve also had extraordinary teachers throughout my life, and many thanks are owed to Patty Strong, Jonathan Rice, Gary Sange, Bryant Mangum, Dean Young and Brigit Pegeen Kelly; your dedication, intelligence and kindness amaze me. I greatly appreciate the opportunity given to me by the Michener Center for Writers, and I’d particularly like to thank Jim Magnuson, Michael Adams and Marla Aiken for their guidance and encouragement. For reading drafts of this novel, and for their friendship, I am indebted to Philipp Meyer, Brian Van Reet, Shamala Gallagher, Virginia Reeves, Ben Roberts, Fiona McFarlane, Caleb Klaces and Matt Greene. Thanks to everyone at Little, Brown, especially Michael Pietsch, Vanessa Kehren, Nicole Dewey and Amanda Tobier. Thanks also to Drummond Moir and Rosie Gailer at Sceptre. I could not imagine a better group of people to entrust my work to, both at home and abroad. I am also grateful to everyone at Rogers, Coleridge and White for their tireless efforts in getting this book out into the world, especially to Stephen Edwards and Laurence Laluyaux. Lastly, to Peter Straus, it is a privilege. There is nothing else to be said. A complete list of those people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude would be impossible. For this fact alone, I consider myself very lucky.