Whippoorwill
I imagine Dad would have driven home from the refinery every day after work, through the industrial park and off the surface streets, into freeway traffic. Hundreds of tail lights would have pointed the way south, out of the city. He would have drifted down that river of fuming machines until it branched and flowed into the suburbs, past thinning clusters of developments and shopping centers, down to the Mississippi and across a bridge. And he would have continued on, away from it all, through a countryside with red barns and fields, over gravel, into the forest along the bank of the Vermillion, down a big dusty hill where the trees crowded in on the road. Eventually, a driveway would have plunged him even further down, down into the woods. There, he would arrive at a little yellow house, his wife and five-year-old son. Little else was there. That’s why he chose that spot, so we could be alone.
In front of the house, two concrete steps ascended to a landing at the front door where I had once slipped on the ice and split the skin through my eyebrow. I remember that it happened, but not it happening. The record shows a white-hot flash of light, blood and terror sometime around then. Maybe that was the fall. I can’t be sure. I’m told there were six stitches. As I write this, a scar divides my right eyebrow, so I guess it did happen.
Upon being taken home from the hospital for the first time after I was born, a tornado touched down so close, it could be seen even through the trees from that landing above the steps. My mother had held me out to show me. She thought it was an omen. Some people are tornados; maybe I would be, too.
I used to believe I possessed memories of that tornado and the fall on the steps. They were combined together so that I was running from the tornado when I slipped and hit my head. Of course, as I grew up, I came to understand that like a meaningless dream suddenly gaining towering significance over morning coffee, the memory was probably a confabulation.
*
One autumn, I sat up the hill on a tree stump in the woods while Mom called my name from the other side of the house. I remained perfectly still and bush-like. Mom called again as she came into view and swished through the detritus on the hillside.
This was around the time I realized I had a kind of magic power. Even then I knew that while there was such a thing as powerful magic, there was not such a thing as real magic. It was instead a power born of angles and knowledge and confidence. There was a moment, hiding from Dad under an end table, during which I realized if I could not see his eyes, he could not see mine. With the advent of this discovery, I became able to disappear.
Mom entered the woodline tentatively. There were no cars up on the road to diminish the clattering puppetry of branches in the canopy. She was alone. Somewhere along the way to growing up, age introduces the menacing power of forests into a person’s imagination. It occurs to me now that this power inspired Mom, in that moment, with the horror of a dead child.
She moved to within ten feet of me. I couldn’t see her eyes through the curtain of thorns between us. “Deryn?” she shouted. She stood silent in the swaying forest for some time, then turned and rushed into the house. I followed her out of the woods, crawled in through my bedroom window, and greeted her in the kitchen as if I had been there all along.
*
One summer, I showed my friend Lara how to handle bumblebees. Mom had a garden out by the road, a deep rectangle of blossoms that sustained a florid civilization of insects. At first Lara was afraid of bees, but I can’t ever remember feeling the same way. It must have been Mom who told me, before I ever encountered a bee, animals will not hurt you unless you intend to hurt them. They can tell this about you, instinctively. They understand fear motivates harm. If you do not fear an animal, it cannot harm you. The magic was bound up in something as simple as not being afraid.
I taught this to Lara by gently enticing a giant bumblebee to crawl from a leaf onto the back of my wrist. I passed it into Lara’s tiny cupped hands. We watched it pace and explore her fingertips, and Lara stroked its fuzzy abdomen. “Soft,” she giggled. The bee was not afraid, nor were we. It was our friend. We did not prevent it from flying off, but asked it to stay for a while, which it did. Together, Lara and I developed this rapport with other insects, spiders, toads, and snakes.
Lara lived with her dad, Barrett, in another hollow up the road. She didn’t have a mom, and I’m not sure why. Barrett was a duck hunter. He had two big labs and a flock of specially trained doves. Lara told me the doves knew how to dive to the ground when her dad fired blanks from his rifle. This was to train the dogs, whos’ job it was to retrieve the doves without damaging them. This way, when he hunted ducks, the dogs would know how to bring them back to him without eating the meat, as dogs would otherwise naturally do. I asked my mom about this, and she confirmed it. I imagined the dogs gently taking the doves up between their jagged teeth and delivering them back to Barrett. For this to work, the doves must not have been afraid.
Barrett trained his dogs often, almost every day. I knew because I could hear his rifle firing into the air, and I once saw a dove far away, past the treetops, swerve and dive to the ground. I ran up to the road where I could see Barrett in the big clearing beside Lara’s house. He blew coded instructions through a police whistle, and pulled a swig from a can of beer. One of the dogs ran out, and brought the dove back to Barrett. He took the dove from the dog and tossed it into a bucket where it laid there playing dead for the dogs, I guess. He released another like a magician, and it flew directly away from him. Again, he fired his rifle into the air, the dove swerved and dove to the ground, and the dogs went to retrieve it.
Lara and I got married. We had a ceremony in my yard, under the crabapple tree where a whippoorwill perched and haunted each night with its endless repetitions. It was Lara’s idea. She had suddenly interrupted the afternoon with it. “We should have a wedding. I’ll go put my dress on,” she announced, taking off toward her house. But then she stopped. “You have to propose,” she instructed.
I knelt and whispered, “I love you. Will you marry me?”
Lara answered, “You have to have a ring.” I retrieved a diamond and gold engagement band from my pocket and placed it on her outstretched finger. “Yes!” Lara assented, and ran home to change.
I couldn’t go with her because of her dad. She had told me so once a long time before the wedding, when I asked her if we could play with her dogs. Her house wasn’t for kids. They were her dad’s dogs, and they were mean, anyhow. And we can’t just go over there and look at them because my dad will get mad. Please don’t go. I asked you not to. She had cried, so I didn’t go over there and never asked about it again.
While Lara was gone to put her dress on, I picked a green shoot with an opening bud on the end of it from the crabapple tree, and fashioned it into a circle.
*
One spring, Dad and I built a teepee together out of poles and a big piece of canvas he had gotten from work. The teepee had a flap door, and contained two overturned milk crates and a flashlight hanging from twine. Mom and I dipped an ear of Indian corn in paint, and used it as a stamp to make a border around the bottom of the canvas.
I must have played in that teepee all summer, but aside from the assembly, I have just one memory of it. It is another flash of terror that I can neither reconstruct in a believable format nor completely forget. A gander had escaped his enclosure in the back-yard, and through random misfortune, we encountered each other coming round the corner of the house. He was taller than me, with a gaping, serrated maw that filled the universe with hissing rage. Remember my pounding chest footfalls and quickly found myself in the teepee, all scratched up, whipping the flap closed and holding it that way. I must have cried out because Dad appeared so quickly, it was as if a storm had spun him up and dropped him from the sky.
“You fucking piece of shit animal!” he screamed. The gander ran off, and I opened the flap to see Dad sprinting like a predator. He cut down the angle, and kicked the gander with murderous effort. It emitted a mammalian squeal as it tumbled through the air, into the woods. Dad didn’t look at me. He went directly back to the garage where he had been working, and proceeded with his day. Mom swooped me up out of the teepee, and searched my eyes for comfort.
For the rest of the evening and into the night, the gander cried in the forest. I lay awake listening to his raspy sorrow. It was a quiet, begging honk that came and went through a thousand cycles of the whippoorwill’s indifferent metronome. Eventually, this cry began a transition. It grew louder, stronger, moved closer. I sat up, and silently rooted for him. But soon Dad’s boot laden gate moved through the house to the front door. I crept out my window.
Around the side of the house, I waited for Dad to exit, then followed him toward the gander and took up a position along the fence where I couldn’t see Dad’s eyes. The gander had made its way back into the yard, and was limping toward his pen when Dad got ahold of him. He moved in swiftly, and snatched the gander’s neck like a snake charmer. It attempted a hiss, but that was cut short as Dad yanked it over his head and clubbed it repeatedly against the ground. The night rang with crickets and toads, and the whippoorwill, and blood pumping in my ears, and the thump of the gander against the ground.
When he was done, Dad stood for a while in ponderous regard of the body. I experienced the full, granular duration of every second in my struggle to remain silent. For some reason, I expected him to bury the gander, and was preparing to remain hidden for a long time while he did so. In the end, he just picked it up and discarded it over the fence, back into the woods. Then he turned my way, and looked right at me. His eyes were full of fear.
Dad went inside and I fled around the house, in through the window, back to bed just in time to pretend I was sleeping when Dad came into the room. He stood over me, and I played possum. The whippoorwill went on and on outside and every my nerve stood in absolute vigilance. When he was done contemplating, Dad walked over to a chest of drawers and placed his belt there before leaving.
*
I lay awake late into the night sometimes, running a fingertip along my scar and listening for the gander. Somewhere deep within the texture of the whippoorwill’s song, a perfect replica of a duck’s cry can be divined, along with the hum of bees and wind, the rolling wetness of tears, and a multitude of other imitations.
*
We found out Lara was allergic to bee stings the same summer she and I were married. We were playing in the garden, and must have disturbed a hive. It was the third and final dissociative supernova in my life. Just like the icy-steps and the gander, I believe it happened. The circumstantial evidence is strong. But if I turn my memoir to the pages where the bees should be, it looks like someone tried to write those words with a blowtorch.
Mom says Lara and I were both stung dozens of times. I got sick with itching hives for a week. Lara’s trachea swelled closed, and she died of suffocation in the yard by the crabapple tree.
The winter came through and then the spring, and I was still afraid to go back into the garden. Dad had long ago knocked the beehive down with a stick, and thrown it in a bonfire to show me it was safe again. It burned up like a tome.