The Afterlife of Birds

by Elizabeth Philips

  The sun is gone now, and in its place an afterimage, like doubt, or a misimpression, the landscape blurred and indistinct. The highway unfurls as if his headlights are inventing it, laying the road down in front of his wheels. The few stars he can see are fine as knife points.

  He’s passing an abandoned farmyard, a bluff of big cottonwoods, and he slows the car. There might be owls nesting here — and as if his thought has invited it, the wide-winged, shimmering form of a snowy owl ghosts up and out of the trees, sails parallel to the car for an instant and then disappears over the fields to the east — and Henry realizes exactly what’s wrong with Amy’s crow. The bird needs to have greater lift in its wings. It should be soaring, not about to land or take off — not hesitating or choosing, but decided, committed purely to flight. The reconstructed crow will glide free of the earth, of all the forces that want to pull it down, to nest, to mate, to scavenge for food.

  In a few minutes he’s crossing the river, so he’s missed it, he’s beyond the place Dan has claimed as his father’s field, scuttling his vague, unformed notion that he might stop and get out and look at it. The lights of the bridge make the ice glow; on the far bank the base of the hills rise out of the sleeping river, the shape of each slope implied by its shadow. The trees on that side were ravaged by a fire several years ago, and spars of blackened pine are surrounded by new growth, a crowd of soft green limbs not much taller than he is.

  An hour later, he sees the greenhouse in the distance, a light on in the office, and he knows that’ll be Marcie, because his mother has her working late this week at some kind of administrative chore. “Weeding files,” his mother called it.

  Henry brakes, tempted to go in and say hello.

  While the fox kits were disappearing, over a period of a week or ten days, his mother had been busy with the greenhouse, trying desperately to keep it afloat, and Dan was working for her, helping with ill grace at the checkout. Marcie started working there that summer — though his mother couldn’t afford even student help at that point — but she worked for cash under the table, and flats of bedding plants for her grandmother’s garden. Marcie was a little older than Dan, maybe seventeen, though she seemed a lot more grown up than both him and his brother.

  On the day Henry found the remains of a dead kit, he raced home, hoping his mother would be there. She wasn’t, and he dropped into a chair at the kitchen table with his head on his folded arms, not caring that he’d trailed mud across the floor and was now rubbing it into the tablecloth. He’d fallen — not quite into the Torch, but almost — when he was searching for some sign of the vixen and the last surviving kit — if there was one. That morning none of the foxes had been there and he’d been frantic, tearing through the brush at the river’s edge.

  He heard singing and before he could haul himself out of the kitchen, Marcie was there, her accidental serenade cutting right through him.

  When she saw him, Marcie hesitated, standing just inside the door before coming farther into the room. She was still singing, but now her words had a whispery edge as she opened the fridge and got out a pitcher of lemonade. She took glasses out of the cupboard, poured lemonade into one, and offered it to him, but he could only shake his head in dumb misery. She drank it herself, tipping her head way back, and he stared at the muscles working in her throat, at her collarbone, the earth under her nails — he blinked hard, fighting tears.

  The foxes were gone; he wouldn’t see the kits grow up, not even one.

  Marcie filled another glass and held it out to him again, and this time he took it, and the sour sweet of it felt wonderful on his parched throat. Then she picked up the pitcher, and a couple more glasses. As she brushed past him, she gave off a scent of sweat mingled with marigolds, which they’d been planting outside. She interrupted her humming and said, “Hang in there, Henry.” And after she left he went down into his bedroom in the basement and closed the door, and wept until sleep overtook him.

  The light has gone off in the greenhouse — it’s late, probably Marcie just wants to get home now. Maybe she’ll be in to work tomorrow and he can catch up with her then. He lifts his foot off the brake and drives up to the house. His parents opened the greenhouse just a year before his father died. The first time his mother found him playing with the plumb bob, she took it from him gently, as if it were made of glass. He must have looked like he was going to wail, because she sat down on the bed and held him on her knee, her breath in his ear as she told him how his father used it when he built the greenhouse.

  “He believed in making things properly,” she said. “He loved to make every corner square and all the beams perfectly level.” And after that Henry was allowed to handle its silky weight whenever he wanted, as long as he was careful.

  He doesn’t know if his father was going south that evening, coming back to his family, or going north, driving away. The leaves on the aspens must have just been coming out, a green mist over the branches. Did he drive into the field deliberately? More likely there was a spasm in his arm that travelled into his chest, and he veered onto the approach and into the field. His face, the face Henry only knows from photographs, distorted, transformed by pain. And from that moment, the lives of his wife and two sons fly off in another direction, as if they had been in a separate vehicle and had been knocked off course, sheering one way then another and finally driving straight again — going on, unstoppably, year after year, without him.

  Eleven

  “THERE YOU ARE,” his mother says. She’s standing in the living room doorway, her hair down around her shoulders, silvery in this light, and she’s smiling at him, the fine lines around her eyes deeper than he remembers.

  “I saw a snowy owl,” Henry says. “It was huge.” He spreads his arms wide apart to indicate the wingspan.

  “Nice,” she says, stepping toward him. She has a paperback in her hand, one finger tucked into it, marking her place. “Were the roads good?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Perfect. Almost like summer.”

  She makes them hot cocoa and they sit in the living room. He’s sleepy and doesn’t have much to say.

  After a few minutes, he asks how things are going at the greenhouse.

  “Okay,” she says, and the way she says it, he knows there’s something. “Had to replant three varieties of geraniums because the seed was bad. And we replaced one of the fans.” She puts her cup down on the end table.

  He waits. She’ll tell him eventually: if not now, then tomorrow. He’s confident the financial side is okay. He’s helped her with the books on and off since high school and knows she’s been making a pretty good living for at least ten years now.

  She’s watching him, her eyes narrowed, without their usual glint of wry humour. “Marcie is probably quitting,” she says.

  “No,” he says. “I mean, she loves working for you.” He tries to remember the name of her latest beau. “She isn’t engaged again, is she? To the bean counter — accountant — Gerald?”

  Marcie has a bad habit of agreeing to marry men she subsequently discovers are losers, the kind of guys who have dead cars in their front yards and a tendency to spend a lot of time at the bar in town. She’s actually only married one of them. She stuck it out for a year and a half, dumped the guy, and dragged herself around for a few months looking like a train wreck, until Rae swept in and whisked her away to Vegas. Marcie came back vastly cheered up and with her hair dyed red.

  “No,” his mother says. “Not as far as I know.”

  She looks out as a car passes on the south road, an expression on her face he can’t quite read. “Says she needs a change, and so she’s moving to the city. Before she’s too old to adapt,” and his mother smiles ruefully. Neither of them mentions it, but Henry bets she’s recalling Marcie’s other, earlier attempt at a change. Ten years ago, when she was twenty-three or so, she’d quit the job and sold everything she owned, giving his mother very little notice, though it was late summer, so she wasn’t really leaving the greenhouse in the
lurch. She was off to Nashville to sing in a band, and was there maybe five months. When she came home she had a cut above her eye that healed into a scar you could still just make out, if you were looking at her from a certain angle. His mother knew what had happened, but despite some pretty determined questioning on his part, had never revealed the details.

  “She’s going to work at a greenhouse on the outskirts. Her sister’s got a bunch of kids, a real handful, so Marcie figures she can help out. And there’s always Rae, they used to be close, remember, when Rae worked at that kids camp north of the Torch?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” he says. “Didn’t Rae use to come out here to stay with Marcie when she was cramming for her law exams? She had to, to get away from that organization she was president of. It had some crazy name. ‘Free the Trees,’ or something like that.”

  His mother laughs. “I think it was crazier than that — ‘Tree Huggers Unite.’ Serious bunch of kids though. It seems to me that one year they convinced the province to plant something like a million more trees than they usually did.”

  Henry bites his thumbnail, then examines it critically. Rae — he wants to tell his mother about her visit, about the lump in her breast, but it isn’t his news to tell, is it? “Could be a problem, unless you hire someone else really soon,” he says.

  “Well, Marcie knows a guy who used to run the Esso station over in Melfort. He has a degree in agriculture and he’s a good businessman, she says.”

  “Marcie isn’t the greatest judge of character where men are concerned.”

  “She has no interest in him that way. So maybe she’s being fairly objective. She says he has a wild garden in his backyard.”

  “Has she actually seen it? Does he know weeds from wild-flowers?” he asks. Neither of them has ever seen a successful wild garden in this town. Mostly the end result is a crop of thistles with a few thin bachelor buttons mixed in. And sooner or later the town makes them apply a herbicide and that’s the end of that.

  “Well, I said I’d look at his résumé.”

  “Marcie’s judgment has improved lately, hasn’t it?” It must have. She looks so much happier the few times he’s seen her lately. “I mean, Gerald’s a good guy, isn’t he?”

  “Successful, anyway,” she says.

  After that, they watch the last half of an old Hepburn movie. A sappy thing, but Hepburn is amazing. Her skin, her eyes incandescent — even, or maybe especially because, the film was shot in black-and-white.

  WHEN THE MOVIE ENDS, they don’t feel like calling it a night yet, there’s nothing on TV, and Henry remembers the DVDS Dan gave him three weeks ago, which he’s pretty sure are still in his backpack.

  “One of these is a documentary, about the kind of far-out science Dan can’t get enough of, and the other one, who knows,” Henry explains as he slots a DVD into the player.

  On the screen, a flock of cartoon bugs — that’s what they look like, cutesy lice, they almost have faces — are attacking, eating supposedly, what the voiceover calls a fourth-stage tumour. A big hideous red-veined blob.

  The male narrator intones: “These nano-robots, here seen magnified to five hundred times their actual size, are microscopic. They’re so infinitesimal they can be injected into the bloodstream of a cancer patient, where they travel to the source of illness to combat the alien cells.”

  “Alien cells?” his mother says. “Sounds like terrorists.”

  Henry wonders if this is something Dan thinks will help Rae — no, that’s not possible, because he didn’t know about her situation when he recorded it. Unless he guessed somehow, which seems unlikely considering how fixated he is on his marathon training.

  “Bloody hell,” Henry says when another image appears, this time of the nano-whatevers darting around, “mending” a severed spinal column that looks more like a colossal segmented worm than the spiky stack of vertebrae that holds a person upright.

  Henry laughs. The film is so badly produced, with starkly lit stage sets — the narrator sits in a leather chair behind a big desk — that he’s almost expecting some snake oil pitch, selling vials of nano-lice for a great price if viewers “Call Immediately!!”

  “Why is Dan interested in this?” his mother asks, and she sounds worried now.

  “Well, you know Dan and his fads,” Henry says lightly.

  “Like wearing black, you mean?” Dan wore nothing but black for about two years, until Rae came along.

  “Yeah, and eating a caveman diet. That was nuts. Literally.”

  His mother smiles. “That didn’t last long. The one that worried me was his conviction that seatbelts kill people.”

  And these days it’s running, but Henry doesn’t want to mention Dan’s latest obsession this late in the evening. “Rae talked him out of that one too,” he says.

  “Thank god for Rae.” His mother’s face has relaxed again.

  “Yeah,” Henry says, letting out his breath, which he has been holding, it seems, for the last few minutes.

  The film keeps delineating the same idea, over and over again, in very simplistic terms. The nano-robots aren’t “alive” exactly, though they are biological, a distinction that the narrator doesn’t attempt to elucidate.

  With a whirling image of the earth in the background, slowly changing from a sickly green to a healthy blue, as if it was the land and not the people being healed, the voiceover proclaims that, “In time, not immediately, but very soon, this amazing invention will cure mankind of every plague that besieges us, from accidental injuries to diabetes, heart disease, and perhaps most significantly, cancer.”

  Henry really hopes that Dan hasn’t made Rae watch this thing.

  “Pshaw,” his mother says, getting up, and in a minute he hears her brushing her teeth in the bathroom.

  Now the globe has been replaced by a talking head; a guy with a neat grey beard and protuberant eyes tells Henry that he himself is the “father of nano-robotics,” and he pronounces, in the same pompous voice as the voiceover — outing himself as the omniscient narrator of his own greatness — that this new nano-medicine is going to extend the human lifespan by not just decades, but hundreds of years. “And we will be. You, me, everyone. Virtually invincible.”

  Henry imagines hundreds of thousands of wizened elderly people reclining in unending boredom, stacked in multi-storey bunk beds like skeletal high rises across every spare inch of the earth’s surface.

  “Lazenby,” he spits. He’d love this stupid show, Henry thinks, getting up and kicking at the wastepaper basket beside the couch, which flies across the room and smacks into the bookcase, just missing the only ornament on the shelf beside the books, a fragile green vase that once belonged to his mother’s mother — which shivers toward the edge of the shelf.

  Henry lets out an explosive sigh and carefully repositions the vase, relieved that it hasn’t shattered into a thousand pieces, and puts the wastepaper basket back where it was.

  He ejects the DVD from the player and gets out the other disc, and when he opens the case notices the words, “for Henry,” pencilled on a sticky note inside in what looks like Rae’s handwriting.

  The film is about falcons, and, blissfully, has only a few human voices in it, distant conversation, not really decipherable, not only because they are speaking Swedish or something, but because the point of view in the film belongs to the birds.

  Falcons have built a nest in the bell tower of a church on the edge of a small town. First there are three eggs, then four, then five. The eggs crack, tiny feet and beaks scratch and break the shells until chicks emerge; the chicks grow into fledglings until there is scarcely room for them all. Then they sit on a ledge outside, on the church roof, pumping their tails as if balancing precariously, while making wonderful, high-pitched, unmelodic but strangely pleasing screeches. The church bells ring and the fledglings bob, dancing with equal enthusiasm to the tolling of weddings and funerals, and the everyday pealing of the hours. The next time he sees Rae, he’ll have to remember to
tell her he’s watched this. To thank her for thinking of him.

  Twelve

  WHILE EATING HIS EGGS AND BACON, Henry tells his mother that she should ask Marcie, while she’s still around, to post an ad for the job on the Internet, as well as in the local newspaper.

  “The Internet? So people in New York can apply?” She arches an eyebrow.

  “No, no. The Internet works for local stuff too, Mom. You’d be surprised.”

  She begins loading the dishwasher.

  “I post ads on a local site for Ed when we have tires on sale, or a deal on oil changes,” Henry says. “All that information out there, a lot of it’s garbage. But for some things it’s great — an amazing number of people go online to find a better fridge, or a plumber, or someone to rototill their garden in the spring.”

  “Not to change the subject,” she says, clearly intending to, “but remember those shelves Dan was going to build?”

  “The ones for knick-knacks and such?” Last spring Marcie finally convinced his mother to make a place for all sorts of fanciful but useless items, like signs saying “Welcome to My Garden” or handsome ceramic plant markers or fake rocks for hiding a spare house key. Dan started the job in the summer but the couple of times he’d been home since he hadn’t gotten around to completing it.

  “I’ve got some of the stock in now, but no shelves, so would you mind …” She smiles hopefully.

  “Sure, I could do that this morning.”

  “You want any more coffee?” She holds the coffee pot over his cup.

  He shakes his head and she pours the rest of the coffee into a thermos for him to take to the greenhouse.

  “Where are the boards?”

  “Everything you need’s in the white shed.” She pauses, thermos in hand, to look out as a flock of evening grosbeaks settles on the feeder, the yellow and black males brilliant against the snow, the females a soft creamy colour, more beautiful, even, but only if you take the time to really look at them. “Dan’s busy these days, eh,” she says neutrally.