Sugar Birds

by Cheryl Grey Bostrom

  I turned toward the big old barn. As a child, I often ran out here as soon as Mother, Daddy, and I arrived from Texas. I would be eager to find my grandfather holed up inside, engineering his latest invention. His shop filled an attached shed about ten feet wide that spanned the full length of the barn. Seven small, square windows over the long workbench faced the mountains and the house.

  Granddaddy would park me on a stool beside him, where he taught me bits of plane geometry, algebra, and physics before I knew what to call them. From illustrations he later framed and hung over the workbench, we built prototypes of gadgets and tools, which he displayed in our own private museum at the far end of the shop. On each of my trips north, we worked on designs for future projects and put finishing touches on old ones, which he spent his free time dreaming up and building.

  My favorite was a life-sized pony we called Picker, built on a padded frame, covered with tricolored cowhide, and wearing a real leather saddle and bridle. Granddad finished her when I was ten—Aggie’s age. Designed to replace the orchard ladder, the pony lifted me to apples and cherries on hydraulic legs that I raised and lowered by tugging on opposing reins. When I dismounted and pulled the reins out front as if I were leading her, wheels lowered, and I rolled her to another tree. When I looped the reins over the saddle horn, the wheels retracted and Picker’s legs regained their stability. I held apples in front of her blocky, hide-covered muzzle and imagined her crunching them, her rough tongue licking my palm. Lying under her wooden belly in the orchard, I pretended she could talk.

  Was Picker still inside? I had to see. Be alone with my thoughts at the site of some of my sweetest memories. Gram had locked the workshop after Granddaddy died. I hadn’t asked to enter the building since.

  A heavy padlock still hung from the latch. Disappointed, I ambled around back, where I stopped short. The huge sliding door gaped. A red pickup truck idled outside with a board ramp sloping off its tailgate.

  Who was in Gram’s barn? Yet another person sideswiping my plans? I slipped up next to the opening and listened as someone dragged something heavy across the concrete. A door deeper inside the barn opened, squeaked shut.

  Anxiety still toyed with my throat, so I waited for, oh, two minutes. Three. Hearing nothing more, I peeked inside. A large insulated cooler sat askew near the interior workshop door. Then, from inside the shop, an unearthly, muffled wail seeped into the barn’s cavernous expanse. I tried to make sense of the sound and concluded that someone, or something, was crying.

  I sidestepped the cooler and knocked. “You okay in there?”

  The wailing subsided, so I stooped and pressed my ear against the wood. From that compromised position, when the door opened, I stumbled into the room and nearly tripped over Burnaby, who had reached up to let me in. He sat cross-legged beside the door with a little glass bowl in his lap. His moist eyes recorded me with a blink before he again hung his head over the bowl’s clear rim.

  “Stay there, Burnaby. I’ll turn off your truck.” I dashed outside and shut down the engine, then returned and sat across from him. Our knees nearly touched. Funny how a few hours of hunting in the woods with him gave me permission to sit there like his counselor. Well, I gave myself permission.

  He wasn’t sobbing anymore, but his tears still dripped into his little bowl, which almost held enough liquid to sauté vegetables. I had never seen such an emotional wash. After we sat there awhile, I couldn’t contain myself.

  “Why the bowl, Burnaby?”

  “I’ve wasted too many.”

  I waited for him to say more. He didn’t.

  “Too many. Too many what?” I racked my brain. Guessed. “Tears? What do—?”

  “According to Mama, tears carry our feelings.”

  “Really.”

  I was trying, I truly was. I didn’t intend to mock him, but the guy was catching tears in a bowl, for heaven’s sake. I saw no counseling credentials in my future. Or poker playing.

  “She says the best artists put feelings into their work.” He hiccoughed in that twitchy way children do after a tantrum.

  “What’s that got to do with the bowl?”

  I may have rolled my eyes. Or simply shifted them to the ceiling. Either way, they landed on a mobile of bird skeletons overhead, wired into positions of flight and gyrating from the sloped ceiling. I jumped to my feet to get closer. “What is this?” I blew on the nearest skeleton and the entire mobile, composed of dozens of birds, tipped and spun in perfect, floating balance. It was breathtaking.

  Burnaby rose slowly and set the bowl on the workbench. His gaze sharpened, alert and protective. Both hands swiped his eyes. “A murmuration of starlings. Or it will be, when I finish.”

  A murmuration. I saw one once, flying over a bayou along the Gulf Coast. A mesmerizing cloud of birds swam through the sky like an amoeba. And now, right here, Burnaby was creating one from skeletons.

  “Gram didn’t give you all these birds. Where’d you get them? And how in the world do you strip them all?”

  “Sturnus vulgaris. Starlings. Uncle Loomis calls them sky rats. They eat his cow grain. So he shoots them.” He stepped outside and opened the top of the cooler he had dragged into the barn. Damp topsoil, laced with clumps of uprooted grass, filled it to the brim.

  “I bury them in here. During cold weather, I store the tub indoors to keep the temperature elevated for microbial activity. Bacteria and beetles facilitate decomposition. Then I screen out the bones. Bleach them in hydrogen peroxide solution. Assemble them.” He scraped away some dirt, exposing loose feathers.

  If my eyes bulged, Burnaby didn’t notice. “Where did you keep them before?”

  “Mama wanted them out of my bedroom. So I placed the cooler in our barn. Put a heated seedling mat over the soil all winter. Now that I am staying at the dairy, Mender suggested I bring them here.”

  Of course. A guy must have his garden of dead birds handy. “Makes sense. Now. About those tears.”

  “Never mind the tears.” He closed the cooler and sat on it.

  “Burnaby. Seriously. Talk to me.”

  He frowned and tipped his head. “I was talking.”

  “I mean about this.” I tapped his chest over his heart and he jumped away, rubbing his shirt as if to obliterate my fingerprint.

  “No touching.”

  I sighed and cast my eyes around the rest of the workshop, finding no evidence that my granddaddy ever spent time there. Nothing remained of his work. Instead, an orderly riot of skeletons in various stages of completion covered every available surface.

  “When did Gram move Granddaddy’s things out of here?”

  Burnaby’s eyes outlined a ceiling beam. “August 17, 1984, 367 days after Dr. Burke’s funeral. That day, my dad told Mender that he would be removing my projects from the seed barn. To make way for more supply bins. Mender offered me the shop. On the condition that I help her remove Dr. Burke’s belongings. I complied. Relocated them to her garage.”

  “I see.” I fed the dogs in that garage. They slept there in chain-link kennels next to Gram’s car. Far as I could tell, they didn’t share that space with Granddaddy’s stuff. Did Gram stow it all somewhere? Pitch it?

  I chalked her up as yet another family member who made decisions that affected me without my consent. Or at least without my input. Or at the very least, made family decisions without telling me. The heat in my burners was rising.

  And Burnaby came here constantly. Why had she kept him a secret?

  CHAPTER 12 ~ AGGIE

  Shotgun

  The beautiful man outside the root cellar crunched through the woods, crashing brush until he stepped onto a neglected trail up the hill. The trail to the dairy. Aggie watched from a maple until he dropped into a draw and hiked the next rise, where the trees were farther apart. She lowered herself to a bear crawl and crept after him to the edge of the forest.

  Ahead of her, the man crossed a weedy pasture and passed behind the smaller of two barns—a low, weathered buildi
ng where Aggie helped Aunt Nora bottle-feed calves. Beyond it, cows ate their sweet-smelling hay in a larger barn where, according to Uncle Loomis, they loafed on fresh sawdust bedding. Her brother’s truck was parked near the big barn’s newer section, a slope-roofed addition that housed the gigantic milk tank, an office, and the parlor where Burnaby milked all those cows. Across the barnyard, chattering swallows rocketed through the interior of the three-sided machine shed. Her Aunt Nora and Uncle Loomis’s farmhouse, most of its blinds closed, as usual, sat nearest the road.

  For years before he got his truck, Burnaby had ridden his bike here. He checked the odometer on his handlebars after every trip. “Exactly zero point six miles of gravel and seven point three miles of pavement. One way.” She could hear him saying it for the thousandth time. Then he would push the reset button and measure again the next day. She imagined him measuring the distance from the milking barn to her cave, and her insides warmed. Compared to his bike ride? Not far at all.

  She dodged toward a fencerow lined with densely leafed poplars, from which she could spy without being seen, keenly aware that her real invisibility came from the fact that people didn’t expect to see her. As long as she stayed still, they wouldn’t. She copied killdeers and rabbits, who hid right under predators’ noses. Even so, sneaking around the dairy would be risky. She would have to be careful.

  She climbed a few feet higher and craned her neck to locate Burnaby. During the search he’d been walking funny. Funny wrong. She had to see him again. Had to know if he was okay. She would wait here until he showed.

  But then two blasts echoed past the calf shed.

  Aggie dove to the ground, sprinted along the fence line. She dipped under an electric wire and hid in tall grass behind the well’s pump house just as Uncle Loomis walked around the barn onto the gravel between the buildings, his shotgun broken open over his arm. Heat bent the air, wrinkling him into undulating waves.

  Burnaby appeared next, uninjured. Her heart banged against her ribs from the scare—and at the sight of her brother, who lagged behind Uncle Loomis and toted a metal bucket between himself and Pi. The dog walked to a dead starling and nudged it with her nose. Burn laid his hand on Pi’s head and knelt by the bird.

  Aggie calmed as she watched him. She studied his face, saw the inscrutable features that hid his dismay over the killings. He cradled the carcass in his palm and lifted its feathers to locate exactly where the pellet had struck and which bones had broken. He ran his fingers over the small body, examining its beak and skull. Between thumbs and index fingers, he gripped the leading edges of its wings and held the bird in front of him, like Mama would hold a shirt up by its shoulder seams before hanging it on the clothesline. He rolled his fingers slightly, and the wings spread as if in flight.

  Aggie knew he was deciding whether or not to repair the bird. If shotgun pellets had damaged the bones too badly, he wouldn’t want it.

  This bird interested Burnaby, though. Maybe a pellet had entered the starling under its wing. Maybe the lead ticked a rib, then quietly interrupted lungs or heart and sent the bird plunging to earth without shattering a single bone. He could resurrect this one.

  He laid the starling in the bucket and retrieved two more of the limp birds. He pushed back their iridescent feathers, mottled purple and brown and blue-black in the sunshine. This time he touched an unnatural jog in one bird’s fractured wing and palpated the other’s broken back before he carried both birds to the dumpster.

  Aggie stifled a sob. Though Burnaby would never let her hug him, she wished she could at least go to him, ask him questions, and listen to lengthy explanations she rarely understood. She longed to call out to him, but dismissed such an action outright. He knows I lit the fire. He wouldn’t acknowledge her now, even if she stood right in front of him.

  At least she knew where he was. Secretly, she would come to the farm and watch him. Be near him. Each day when she spied, she would spy on Burnaby.

  The besieged flock of starlings circled back and landed in a chestnut tree shading the lawn between the pump house and the gravel. Burnaby returned to his bucket and knelt there as Loomis angled two shells into the barrels, snapped the gun closed, and steadied the stock’s butt against his shoulder. Aggie watched intently until he swung the barrel in her direction. Astonished, she flattened herself in the camouflaging grass, smashed her eyes closed, and waited.

  The blast’s percussion vibrated into her, translating into the fear of a hunted animal. It grew into a tremor of renewed anger at her uncle—at Uncle Loomis, who bruised her collarbone when she stole cottonseeds. Who yelled at her. And now this.

  “Take inventory, Aggie.” Her dad said that to calm her, to get her to think. She blinked and inspected her body. No blood. No pain. He missed me. Relief drenched her as leaves fluttered, landing in her hair.

  “How’d I do, Burnaby? Get any?” Uncle Loomis gawked at the dispersing flock, the gun still at his shoulder.

  Burnaby perused the tree and the short turf beneath it before he picked up his bucket and stepped into the big barn’s shade, out of the heat. Pi lay ten feet away—on duty, Dad called it—watching Burnaby and panting.

  “None this time.”

  Aggie quivered as she evaluated the torn branches. Her uncle didn’t aim at specific birds. He didn’t even try to lay eyes on them. He fired in the direction he last saw the flock and hoped that the pellets inside the shell would scatter enough to hit a few. If she had been hiding in that tree, he’d have shot her.

  “Hey, Loomis.” The man she’d been following emerged from the calf shed and approached the pair.

  Her uncle lowered the gun. “Ah, Cabot. Where’d you go?” Aggie shifted onto her side, still cloaked by the grass. Where had she heard that name?

  “Checked heifers down in the lower pasture. Two of ’em are bagging up. I’ll get them into maternity tomorrow.” He began coiling a hose. “Any news on Aggie? You look by the river this morning?”

  Hold on. The man in the boat. One of the searchers. Cabot— with the hooks. Yes, the same man. Was that why he was traipsing through the woods and prowling that old farm? Was he hunting her? But why that stuff in the root cellar?

  Uncle Loomis adjusted his cap and cleared his throat. “Yeah. Nothing yet.” He nodded at Cabot, then turned and walked toward the house. Burnaby knelt by the bucket again and flipped the handle, which clanged against the rim.

  Cabot watched her uncle’s retreat, then scuffed gravel at Burnaby with the side of his boot. Rocks pinged off the bucket. Pi flattened her ears and crept toward them.

  “I’ve been scouring those woods for your sister as much as you have.” Cabot said. “So don’t get any bigshot ideas. I’m not going anywhere.” He aimed an imaginary handgun at Pi and fired, blew on the end of the imaginary muzzle, and strode into the cow barn.

  Burnaby’s shoulders rose and fell before he pulled a wooden match from his pocket and struck it on the galvanized bucket. He held the flame to a napkin he took from another pocket and dangled the burning paper between his middle finger and thumb until the fire licked him and he let go. The paper fluttered to the ground, blackened, and cooled. He crushed the char into the gravel with his heel.

  A movement in the barn’s doorway caught Aggie’s eye. Cabot was watching Burn, staring after him as her brother walked to his truck. An expression she couldn’t decipher bent his mouth.

  She stayed prone in the grass until Cabot slipped back inside the building, then crawled up the pellet-torn chestnut tree. From there she continued to spy as Burn’s truck started up and turned toward Mender’s. Cabot steered the tractor along the barn’s interior alley, pulling the mixer wagon that augured silage onto the slab. Stanchions clanked as cows swept their tongues in circles, swiping for feed.

  Half an hour later, Cabot shoved his rubber boots and stained coveralls into the trunk of his car and strolled to the milkhouse. She heard water thrum against the metal sink. Done for the day. Washing up. He paused in the doorway, ran his dripping
fingers through his hair and walked across the barnyard onto the farmhouse porch. Delicious smells wafted from the barbecue.

  Dinnertime. Hired help didn’t go in her aunt and uncle’s house, much less eat with them. What was the man up to?

  CHAPTER 13 ~ CELIA

  Paint

  Burnaby draped a cloth over his bowl of tears, slid it deeper onto the workbench, and shadowed me as I meandered through his skeletons. Until I could buy that bus ticket, I would escape right here in the barn with Burnaby’s magnificent reconstructions.

  Amidst bones in all stages of reassembly, skeletal voles and mice scampered along level surfaces. On one shelf, a rabbit and squirrel faced each other, hunched and startled. A fragile, bleached salamander climbed behind them. On another, rebuilt songbirds smaller than starlings hopped, fed, and flapped, their miniature bones wired and glued.

  “Where did you get these littler ones?” I touched a tiny skull.

  “In pellets from the woods. Under owl roosts.” He adjusted the foot of a miniature skeleton. “An owl eats small creatures intact. Bones, feathers, fur won’t digest. So his body forms a pellet, coats it with mucus, and he regurgitates it.”

  He lifted a bony vole, curled for sleep. “Mama says I should ask if a person wants me to keep explaining. Do you?”

  “No thanks. I believe I understand.” I was clear on that scenario. Night predators choked down prey, coated the hard and fuzzy parts with slime, and burped them up. Then Burnaby dismantled the package and reassembled the victims.

  Another bird mender. Like Gram, in a way. I stepped in slow motion deeper into the room. “And these, Burnaby. Where’d you find them?” All down the workbench surface, larger skeletons preened their bleached wings and pecked bony prey.