The Lord God Bird Read online

  The Lord God Bird

  A novella by Russell Hill

  Copyright © 2009 by Tim McNulty

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or part, in any form, except by reviewers, without the written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-929355-53-2

  Published by Pleasure Boat Studio Books at Smashwords

  URL http.//www.pbstudio

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  A man arrested by Weymouth police was found preening himself on Chesil Beach,

  Sunday, clad only in a cape, shouting and gesturing at the sea. Police Constable White, the arresting officer, reported that the unidentified man was unable to speak, and could only utter shrill gull-like cries.

  Dorset, England, Western Gazette, Nov. 21, 1972

  I am like a pelican of the wilderness. I am like an owl of the the desert.

  Psalm 102

  When the egret rose from the reeds I thought it was a woman rising from the green river.

  Jean-Jacques Audubon, Florida, 1832

  1.

  It began with birds. It ended with a bird.

  It was 1939 and we had a lawn in Arlington Heights. It was a scruffy lawn, and it sloped toward the lilacs. The scent of the lilac bush permeated the air and it was a perfume that women wore and it drew hummingbirds. Even now I can smell those bushes and see the fireflies in the Illinois summer darkness. The hummingbirds were iridescent, hovering jewels. Those are the first birds I can remember, but they were not the important birds.

  On the other side of the house was a long driveway that led to a garage and behind the house, to the right, was a garden. Swiss chard. I remember the Swiss chard. Beyond that was an empty lot, somebody else's lot and I have no memory of neighbors. It was a rented house with a basement with a dirt floor and Paul and I slept in a second-floor room that looked out onto another vacant lot next to the driveway. It was mowed in the summer. I do not remember who mowed it. Perhaps my father did. In the winter it was covered with snow, a white expanse, and once I saw a scarlet tananger, like a clot of bright blood in the middle of the whiteness before it flew up into the bare branches of an elm tree. The sidewalks on both sides of S. Mitchell Street were buckled where the roots of elm trees had raised them.

  If I went down the steps and turned left, I was aimed at the elementary school, a two-story brick building several blocks away. I must have been in fourth grade. I remember nothing about the school or the teachers. Only that we lived in Arlington Heights and my father taught at the high school on the other side of town and there was a race track nearby. Once Paul and I went out to Arlington Park on a November day, taking cheese sandwiches wrapped in wax paper with us, going past the lot where my father and mother had a victory garden and then across empty fields toward the track. We could see the grandstands in the distance but they loomed big enough so that it took far longer to reach them than we thought. The track was closed and the grandstand was cavernous and spooky. It turned cold and dark and we came back through muddy plowed fields with sharp spikes of corn stalk that cut our ankles.

  There was an iceman who came on hot summer days and we waited until he went into the house and we went to the back of his truck and gathered slivers of ice from the wet wooden slats that covered the bed of the truck.

  There were elm trees on S. Mitchell Street. There were elm trees on nearly every Midwestern street. Sometimes there were red-headed woodpeckers in those trees. I got a bird book for Christmas that year. Because my father was a teacher and my mother had taught school before she was married, they bought us books for birthdays and Christmas. They were usually books that had educational value, like a book about Abraham Lincoln growing up in a log cabin or young Audubon growing up in the West Indies. That book was one of my favorites, along with the Yankee Flier books. The Yankee Flier joined the RAF to fight the Nazis and he had incredible adventures, in books with boiled cardboard covers and pages that turned yellow if you left the book open in the sunshine.

  But Audubon caught my fancy. He was my age and he didn't go to school. His father was a French sea captain who had a wife in the West Indies. Or at least that's what the book intimated, although now I'm pretty sure she wasn't his wife. Audubon spent his days in swamps and forests, shooting birds, training himself to stuff them, buying the carcasses of exotic birds in the market, and learning to draw them. My fascination with Audubon is probably why my folks gave me the bird book. It was Audubon's Birds of America, the "popular edition," 320 pages of copies of Audubon's paintings. I found all of the birds that I knew from the vacant lots around our house: the scarlet tananger, the downy woodpecker, doves and pigeons, the purple martins that lived in the eaves of an old barn near the victory garden and a meadowlark. I especially liked the picture of the ivory-billed woodpecker which, the caption said, was nearly extinct. There were three of them in the painting, clinging to a dead tree, and one of them had a red crest that curved back over its neck, long and shaped like a costume hat, framing a yellow eye with a brilliant black dot in the center. It lived, according to the book, in primeval timber of the southern states. I wasn't sure what primeval timber was and when I looked it up in The World Book, there was a picture of huge trees with water surrounding them, a gloomy swamp-like scene.

  2.

  My mother took us to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It was an immense building, far bigger than a city block, surrounded by green lawn, Lake Michigan off in the distance and inside was a room that seemed as big as a football field with model railroad trains. We stood on a mezzanine terrace and watched them rattle through papiér maché mountains and across mirrored lakes. There was a fake coal mine and we went down the dark elevator into the mine and later we went outside to climb into the captured Nazi submarine. But the part I liked best was a room with bird dioramas. Behind glass in little rooms that lined the walls were every bird I could imagine, stuffed, their glass eyes alert, woodpeckers attached to trees that came out of the floor and disappeared into the ceiling; herons and egrets that stood in plaster-of -Paris water, heads cocked; an eagle suspended above a running rabbit, the rabbit in mid-jump, one foot attached to the dirt floor, the eagle suspended by wires so thin, if you squinted your eyes, they disappeared and the eagle seemed ready to sink its extended claws into the frightened rabbit. My brother got bored and wanted to see other things and my mother took him off, leaving me to wander from window to window. There was a pileated woodpecker, which is about as close as you can get to an ivory bill, its red crest on the back of its head like an irrational hairdo, something a madwoman would wear to a costume ball.

  Like Audubon, I tried to draw birds, and like Audubon's first efforts when he was my age, I wasn't successful. My birds were, like his, lifeless and wooden. Even copying them from the book of his paintings didn't work. I drew copies, flat things that lay on the page, pressed to the paper so that they seemed never to have lived at all. We moved to Elgin and lived in an apartment building with four apartments and I went to fifth grade at a new elementary school. Miss Higginbothan, the teacher, had us all memorize a poem for a presentation to mothers one morning. Most of the mothers didn't work, but my mother had taken a job at the Elgin watch factory and my father had left his teaching job to become a draftsman at the Kaiser shipyard in Seneca. He stayed in Seneca during the week, coming home on weekends. I remember that the poem I had to memorize began, "The woodpecker pecked out a little round hole, and made him a house in the telephone pole." I protested to Miss. H. that woodpeckers didn'
t peck out holes. They looked for holes already in trees where rotted limbs had dropped off, but she insisted that I was wrong.

  "Certainly the man who wrote this poem knew more about birds than an eleven-year-old," she said. She was, of course, wrong.

  In one of the other apartments was an old lady who had a parrot. Her apartment smelled musty, bird-like, and I never saw her go out. A boy from the grocery store brought her groceries. Sometimes I went to see her and she would give me a ginger snap and I talked to the parrot, trying to make him talk back. He could say things like," Hello, Jack!" and "Pipe down!" and sometimes he whistled a song. Mrs. Kowalski said that her husband had taught it to speak and there were other things it could say, but it chose not to say them in the company of children. I asked how old the parrot was.

  "Who knows?" she said. "Maybe older than me," which I found hard to believe because she was a tiny, wrinkled woman who spent her days crocheting lace doilies. They were everywhere, on the backs and arms of chairs, hanging off the mantle, draped over lamp shades.

  I brought my paper and pencils and sketched the parrot, but about all I could do that seemed right were the beak and the eyes. My mother bought me a little watercolor set and I tried to capture the colors of the parrot, but the feathers were brilliant, iridescent red and yellow and a green that changed when the sunlight struck it.

  I found a bird book in the library and read everything I could about parrots. There were more than three hundred species and despite the tiny size of their brains, they were rated among the smartest creatures in the animal kingdom. In that same book was more about the ivory-billed woodpecker and I found out that there was only a handful of them left, living in a forest on the border between Arkansas and Louisiana.

  3.

  We didn't stay long in Elgin. At the end of the school year, in June, we moved back to Arlington Heights and back into 123 S. Mitchell Street. My father mowed the lawn and my mother planted the garden in back. There would be more Swiss chard in the Fall.

  I spent that summer finding dead birds. There was a big window at the end of a building downtown and apparently birds thought that it was still part of the sky, and when they banged into it, they sometimes broke their necks and I found them next to the foundation. Thrushes and sparrows and once a bluebird. I brought them home and following directions from a library book about taxidermy, I gutted them, took off the skin and tacked them to the wall of the garage to dry. But my bird skins were stiff and the eyes shrank into the skulls, leaving a hole. I knew that there were places where taxidermists bought glass eyes to insert in the holes, but I had no idea where they were or how to go about buying glass birds' eyes.

  Sometimes my brother and I played baseball in the vacant lot next door, a complicated game in which we were all nine players on two teams, alternately pitching and hitting, sometimes throwing the ball up in the air and hitting it to the outfield, running the bases. Paul helped me look for dead birds and on one of our journeys to the outskirts of Arlington Heights we found several dead crows in a field of corn. When I took them apart I found tiny lead buckshot. A farmer had shot them. The back wall of the garage now had nearly a dozen feathered skins spread-eagled in the sun.

  When school started in September, I was back in the same two-story brick building, but it held little interest for me. It would hold little interest for me for the next several years, much to the chagrin of my schoolteacher parents.

  Two things of importance happened when I turned twelve. The war ended and Mrs. Kowalski died. I had forgotten about visiting her in the Elgin apartment, but one night my parents announced that she had died and she had left her African Gray parrot, Oskar, to me. I remembered Mrs. Kowalski telling me that his name was spelled with a K, not a C. He's a Polish parrot, she said.

  So on a Sunday we drove to Elgin and came back with Oskar in his cage. My mother was reluctant to have the bird in the house, fearing that it would smell, but I promised to spread newspapers under the cage to catch spill-overs, to clean it regularly, and it ended up in the room with Paul and me.

  We spent hours talking to Oskar, although Paul soon tired of it and I was left alone with the bird that cocked its head to one side, fixed its eye on me and would finally say, "Pipe down!" Eventually I found it could say, "Kill the Cat!" And "Oskar wants a beer!" and "Good night!" and "Good morning!" and one afternoon Oskar came out with a racking cough that sounded just like a dying old man, followed by a series of "Fuck This! Fuck This! Fuck this!" in a man's guttural voice. The voice had an accent, and when Oskar shouted the words I had the startling impression that someone else had entered my bedroom.

  I read everything I could about African Grays. They were the smartest and most expensive parrots. The most famous one was named N'kisi and he had a vocabulary of a thousand words. When I looked up his name I found it was an African word for a wooden statue that people in a village drove nails into. Each nail was meant to remember someone, like a grandfather or a child who had died. There was a man in each village who was in charge of the N'kisi and his job was to memorize each of the nails so that people knew who they represented. It was a good name for a bird who had memorized a thousand words

  I got good at drawing pictures of Oskar, but the color of his feathers continued to elude me.

  My mother took me to a lecture at the public library. A man named Albert Tanner talked about the Ivory-billed woodpecker. There was a slide show, with photographs taken in the 1930's of the ivory bill, and there was a sound recording of the nasal KENK! KENK! of the ivory bill, recorded in 1944 by a man named Allan Wisdom. The last sighting had been in 1944, but Tanner said there were, possibly, more of the birds somewhere in the dense forests of Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. The forest had once covered eight million acres, but they were a fraction of that now, and Tanner said it was critical that we save the forests where this magnificent bird lived. There was only one woodpecker in the world bigger, and that was the Mexican woodpecker. The ivory bill was, he said, a symbol of what America had once been.

  "A squirrel could have hopped from tree to tree from Pennsylvania to Chicago," he said. "It could have started in Tennessee and gone all the way across Arkansas into Oklahoma."

  I had an image of a squirrel carrying a small suitcase, traveling to Chicago to see a cousin.

  When I got home, I practiced making the KENK! sound of the Ivory bill. It had sounded a bit like a cheap automobile horn. It made two knocks when it pecked at trees, resounding knocks that were more like two blocks of wood being struck together. Tanner said that the bill was remarkable, long and stout.

  "Whoever sees an ivory bill will be remembered," he said. I resolved to be one of those people.

  4.

  When I met Robin I was nineteen. It wasn't her name as much as the way she looked. Bird-like. Not delicate, but structurally she was like a bird, and the first time I saw her naked, she lifted her arms and there were the patagialus tendons, just the way they would have been on the delicate underside of a bird's wing, stretched between her pectoralis major and the levator caudae and there was a muscle that ran from the inside of her knee up to her pussy that was exactly like the pronators on a bird. I touched the hardness of that muscle when she stretched her leg out to the side and I fully expected her to hop off the bed, lift her wings and dart off in fright.

  I never finished high school. School bored me. My parents couldn't understand. I was an avid reader, and it wasn't that mathematics or science weren't interesting, but the teachers seemed dull, lifeless people who insisted in putting us in careful rows, the wooden desks bolted to the wooden floors of Arlington Heights High School. I wanted to take biology and find out as much as I could about birds. I had read everything I could find, had spent hours in the garage taking apart bird carcasses, and I had notebooks filled with sketches, some of them quite good. By now I had learned to stuff the bird skins, and had used my paper route money to buy glass eyes. I had a very life-like crow attached to a branch that stuck out from the garage wall and a diorama of c
hickadees at a mirrored puddle. But I was told that I would have to start with General Science and a stodgy man named Mr. Weiner lectured about the position of the planets and why it was colder in the winter, and chalked diagrams of volcanoes on the front board, white pimples with a pipe of red chalk coming up out of the center of the earth. I drew pictures of Mr. Weiner impaled on a stick, being held over a volcano by a group of laughing kids and had to explain them to the assistant principal, a stocky man with hair sprouting from his collar and the backs of his hands. I suspected he was Darwin's missing link.

  After two years I simply stopped going, and my parents gave up. I took a job in a hardware store sweeping up and unpacking nuts and bolts and stocking shelves and by the time I was seventeen I could tell customers how to wire the light fixture they had bought and could draw diagrams of framing and plumbing projects, knew how to drill a bolt out of an engine block and re-tap the threads. I continued to live at home, but Oskar and I moved into the garage where I was perfecting my taxidermy. My brother was happy to have the bedroom to himself and I think my parents were uncomfortable with my presence. The less they saw of me, the less they had to think about what I was becoming.

  By the time I was nineteen I often ran the hardware store by myself while Jerry had coffee in the diner a block away or played cards with cronies in the storeroom in the back of the store. Then I met Robin.

  The dime store was down the street from Jerry's Hardware. I went there for some shelf paper for a display of vases that Jerry had picked up second-hand and Robin was there. Something about her interested me. She wasn't pretty in the usual way; she was tiny, only about five feet tall, and she had no figure. She looked more like a slender boy, but when she looked at me, her eyes held mine, direct, not confrontational, but with that sort of look that says, I don't take any shit off anybody, even if I do work in a dime store. Her eyes were green and wide and I came back to the dime store to buy more shelf paper, even though we didn't need any.