Sugar Birds

by Cheryl Grey Bostrom

  CHAPTER 23 ~ AGGIE

  Friend

  Another restless night. The baling twine that held Aggie in the tree rubbed her skin raw, and her muscles ached from sustained contortions in the branches. Again she listened for hounds. Though she hadn’t heard them for days, she kept her ears tuned as she dropped to the ground to find food.

  Her cheeks swelled with sweet, orange salmonberries when a girl’s voice echoed through the trees. “Aaa-gee. Aaa-gee. It’s me, Celia. You’ve seen me before, right? I come every day, looking for you. Well, not yesterday. Yesterday I went to the lake. Want to go to the lake with me? I can be your friend.”

  Aggie gulped the berries without chewing, and dove into the undergrowth as the singsong voice drew nearer. Oh. Celia, not Cilia. The girl she’d seen at Mender’s. What made Celia think she was within earshot, anyway?

  The dark-haired girl raised her voice. “I know your brother, Aggie. Anything you want me to tell him? He says he misses you.”

  Aggie shrank under a shrub, listening. She’s lying. Burnaby didn’t say stuff like that.

  “You hungry? I brought you a peanut butter sandwich. And this. She tossed a black bundle into the air and caught it. “Are you there, Aggie? Don’t know if you like peanut butter, but I thought … I can be your friend.”

  A sandwich?

  A hunger filled Aggie far stronger than any her body had known in recent days, and a loneliness so intense she believed it would crush her. Could Celia really be her friend? Could anyone?

  She followed until the older girl left the woods, then returned to a thick black sweatshirt draped over a boulder by the pond, its arms spread like an embrace. Big enough for her dad.

  Aggie kept a lookout until sunset, when she crept like a coyote to the shirt and sniffed it. Explored beneath it and on the ground for the sandwich, but found only crumbs. She lowered her face to the fabric and licked the remnants. Her belly hurt.

  At least she could claim the sweatshirt. At her nearest access tree, she bit the neckline and hauled the shirt between her teeth until she was again above ground, where she scrunched the fabric and buried her face in it. Laundry fresh. She rolled the cloth and tied it around her waist to climb higher, then stowed it in the feed bag for bedtime, when she would be thankful that it came past her knees. Food or no food, the sweatshirt and Celia’s visit gave her a trace of hope. About what, she wasn’t sure.

  But that night, when she skulked back to the dairy and dipped for milk, her fingers slipped, and her bottle sank deep into the creamy liquid. She lunged for it but bumped the tank’s lid, which clattered to the concrete below.

  She shot a glance at the door, then hooked her feet on a pipe and bent into the tank from her waist—hurrying, stretching as far as she dared, paddling her dirty hands and arms deep in the milk, hoping to snag the bottle’s lip. No use. The tank was too big, the bottle too far below her. She emerged drenched to her armpits, then tried again, but nearly fell through the opening.

  Distraught, she retrieved the lid and seated it, but in her rush, she knocked the aluminum ladder propped against the tank. It teetered, banged against the sink and fell. Loud. Echoing.

  She skidded to the floor, stood the ladder upright, wiped milk drips with paper towels, and ran outside with them stuffed in her shirt.

  A light came on in the house as she galloped to the tree.

  She would need a friend now.

  CHAPTER 24 ~ CELIA

  Color

  “Want to see the cutest thing ever?” I asked Cabot, intercepting him when he pulled up in front of Gram’s house. I was returning from the berry field, where I’d picked a paltry six flats after leaving a sandwich and freshly laundered sweatshirt in the woods for Aggie. It was my granddaddy’s sweatshirt, which I’d found on a hook in the storage room and washed with my dark load.

  He pulled Gram’s empty lunch cooler from the back seat and smiled. “I’m looking at her.”

  I laughed and swatted the insulated box. “Aren’t you smooth as boiled onions. C’mon.”

  Within minutes, Gram wrestled a raccoon kit into his arms. The twitchy baby patted Cabot’s bottle-holding fingers as she suckled, but the man arched away, nowhere near as charmed by the little creature as I was. Before the milk was half gone, he handed baby and bottle off to me, ignoring another kit that rolled and chittered in a cage beside the stove.

  “She takes some getting used to,” Gram said. She was studying Cabot; I could tell. I’d been too cryptic about our previous day water-skiing, and she was leery. “Nora heard her and her brother whimpering in their crawl space and caught them. I figure they’re about five weeks old.”

  “Have you seen their mother around the farm?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah.” Cabot checked his watch. “She got into everything. I didn’t know she had babies.”

  “You know what happened to her? Nora said Loomis was vague.”

  Cabot rubbed the back of his neck. “No clue.”

  Gram cleared her throat. Busied herself at the sink.

  He winked at me and cracked his knuckles. “Gotta change irrigation. See you tomorrow.”

  The drowsy kit clung to my arm as Cabot’s engine roared to life. I bumped her nose with the bottle. What did he do to your mother? She mouthed the nipple, her eyes at half-mast.

  “Celia.” Gram was on me before Cabot closed the gate.

  “Um-hmm?” I rubbed the baby’s ear and her slurping resumed. Milky bubbles gathered around her mouth. Gram had moved into emotional strike range. Here came the talk I’d been dreading.

  “Problems don’t go away when you ignore them.” Her eyes were on me. I kept mine on the kit. “And refusing to communicate solves nothing. All that bottled up sadness just gives your anger an engine.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” There was snot in my words.

  She ignored my rudeness. “You and your dad. He loves and misses you.”

  I purred at the kit, who took in my face with black onyx eyes. “Tough break for him. He should have thought of that.”

  “You’re right. He could have handled his departure better. I understand why you’re angry.”

  “So why are you bugging me to talk to him?”

  “Because your anger is coming between the two of you. Maybe affecting your other decisions, too.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Like how you spend your time? And with whom? Anger steals your curiosity, Celia. Points you at false targets. Its object is rarely the real problem.”

  So I couldn’t aim. If blood could boil, mine was fast approaching 100 degrees. Celsius.

  “He lied to me and left me, Gram. Because he was afraid of losing his job. What kind of dad does that?” I kicked at a chair and it crashed against the wall. The raccoon startled; I eased him back into his cage. “I trusted him.” At that moment, I felt a mean hatred toward Daddy—and my grandmother. The intensity surprised me. Neither of them cared a whit about my feelings or my needs.

  “It might be a good idea if you took a break from that young man. You could think about things for a little while.”

  I must have looked like a chicken about to peck her, jutting my neck like that. My mouth pursed, beak-like. No way she would keep me from seeing Cabot. I bullied the screen door open and stormed outside.

  My allies were at the dairy, so I headed straight up the road. Sprinted, actually. I was out of breath when I got there. I couldn’t find Cabot, but Burnaby was in the parlor—in the recessed milker’s pit. Cows stood in rows of six on either side of him, their udders even with his chest. He moved down the line of animals, attaching machines to teats.

  “Hey, Burn.” I leaned against a metal gatepost as I slowed my breathing and examined his profile. His mouth naturally curved upward, with little skin haloes over the corners. Was that an uptick of those lips? A tiny smile when he saw me?

  “Celia.”

  He attached a machine to the teats of a feisty kicker—a Jersey with her hoof aimed right at him. “Easy, Frannie.”
He calmly pushed his fist into the cow’s flank until she lowered her leg. Then he dipped each teat on her bulging udder in iodine and wiped them all with a towel. Vacuum hoses schlupped the milking cups onto her nipples.

  “Got a mean one there.” I pointed to the agitated Jersey. The cow’s eyes rolled wild as she craned her neck to see me. Burnaby flicked a lever and more grain poured into her feed bowl from an overhead pipe.

  “She worries. Calved yesterday. Wants her baby, not a machine. I’d kick, too.”

  Was he empathizing with the cow? I’d misjudged him. So had Gram.

  “You ever get mad?” I asked.

  “At cows?” He looked bewildered, as if nothing from those lumbering beasts would rile him. Where was Cabot, anyway?

  “Sure. Cows. Or at anything else. Mad at anyone.”

  His eyes darted toward the top of my head, in the vicinity of eye contact. “You mean my gray aspect.”

  “I do?”

  “Annoyance. Outrage. Fury. Varying shades, tints, values. Same family. And yes, regularly.”

  He sounded like a robot art teacher. I wasn’t tracking.

  “When angry, I see in monochrome. Grays. Apparently negative stress disables reception from my ocular cones …” He picked up a hose and sprayed a fresh splat of manure off the elevated ramp before his head snapped toward me. “Shall I keep talking?”

  Where was this going? I nodded.

  “Cones are cells on the retina that distinguish colors. My brain somehow loses the signal from mine when I’m upset. Therefore, during anxious inflammation, blue skies turn silver. Grass, trees, buildings—all transmute to grays, charcoals. Fortunately, my other feelings evoke different colors. Synesthesia, Mama calls it. One of my many conditions.”

  He talked as if his mother were in the next room. Last I’d heard, her survival was hour to hour. And gray feelings? Strange.

  Stranger still, I was getting it. His workshop. Those paintings. He was confirming my earlier suspicion: the guy understood his interior state far better than I did mine.

  He opened the gates, and the cows moved out, their emptied udders swinging. Six more ambled through the parlor door and into position at their respective stations. Burn released grain from the hopper and the hungry animals nosed it.

  Except for one—at the front of the line nearest me. Burnaby assessed her and squeezed each teat. Smooth, bright streams of milk hit the concrete. “Clean. No mastitis.” He widened his nostrils and sniffed the giant animal’s breath. “Smell that? Like acetone, only sweeter. She’s ketotic.”

  I drew closer and inhaled. I knew that aroma. I used acetone as a polymer solvent in my chemistry lab at school.

  “From what?”

  He pulled himself up to the cow’s level and thumped her belly with his fingers as he bent close, listening. “She’s pinging. Displaced abomasum. Twisted gut. Her digestion’s shut down.” The cow stepped wide, lifted her tail, and released a gush of yellow liquid that splattered against him. His nostrils dilated again. “Ketones in her urine, too.”

  I stepped backwards. Wearing cow pee would not improve my mood. “What can you do?”

  “Loomis will want me to roll her. Flip the displaced stomach back into position. But if it doesn’t work, she’ll die. I’d prefer to avoid that uncertainty and call the vet. Surgery takes less than an hour. Limits her suffering.”

  I remembered his painting of the goose. Imagined Jack slicing into the cow’s side with bold strokes.

  “What color are your feelings about Aggie? And your parents?”

  Burnaby rested his hand on the animal’s ribs. “Why are you asking?”

  “Cause I am gray-hot mad, and I thought you might help me out.”

  “I understand gray-hot. What’s the causality?”

  “My parents. My grandmother. I’d be better off without them.”

  “Duration?”

  “Seems pretty permanent.”

  He ran his hand along the cow’s topline. “I suspect that’s inaccurate. Imagine other colors in the scene, Celia. Think of those.”

  “Maybe I like gray.”

  He frowned. “Think of something that gives you pleasure, that you’re thankful for. Find the pleasant feeling’s color. Introduce it to the gray. Blend. Change your brain’s landscape.”

  “Where’d you get that crazy idea?”

  “Mender. She taught me to mind-paint when I want to ignite things. Sometimes works better than fire or caps.” He opened a gate and directed the sick cow into a holding pen.

  “Big help you are.” I turned to go.

  “Starling bones are clean. Come to the barn? Tomorrow?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Gram had never mentioned mind-painting to me.

  CHAPTER 25 ~ AGGIE

  Pi

  Days merged, but as Aggie tended her wound, the pain withered and retreated. When she peeled back the flaking edges of the scab, a collar of pink skin rolled toward the shrinking furrow torn by the cougar’s claw. She figured her scar would be the size of a new pencil when it finished healing.

  She recited the list structuring her hours before the cougar came. Get water. Pull cattails. Climb. Explore. Spy. Visit nests. Sleep. Not a bad list. When she followed it every day, she stayed busy. It kept her from thinking about the fire and her parents and jail as much. She had learned her way around and found Burnaby.

  But things were different since the cougar. And since the hounds. And since she lost her bottle. During the days she lay healing and couldn’t climb, she often imagined her dad hiding in the shrubs during that Homing Pigeon game. “Like the Father,” he’d said. “Always with her,” he’d said. Ha. Where was God when that lion shredded her arm? When her bottle fell in the tank? Now she slept in trees. Some Father.

  She held a strand of her hair in front of her mouth and blew on it, pulsing her breath while the wind coursed around her, as if keeping time to a song from Dad’s fiddle. Things were better when he played. Once, during kitchen church, Mama had even come downstairs and sat on the bottom stair to listen. Dad had kissed her head and played “Swallowtail Jig.”

  “Lord’s Day Nine.” Aggie pictured her brother, heard his staccato as he recited catechism while cider steamed on the stove. She pushed on her temples, recalling fragments. “… will provide whatever I need … will turn adversity to my good … in this sad world.”

  She shook her head. The world was sad, for sure. And some things were too, too sad to use for anything good.

  She climbed the dike and found a gray stone, flat and round like a Frisbee, near the waterline. With a walnut-shaped rock, she scratched a white line across the top of the larger stone and wrote “Days” above it. By her calculations, she had been in the woods for five days before her injury and had lost track of three or four days when her infected arm made her delirious. Now she had been healing for at least another six. Total days since the fire? She wasn’t sure, but she scraped shorter lines below the heading in sets of five. In each set, four stood upright and a fifth crossed them diagonally. Fifteen. She had come here right after her birthday. Late June already. Or was it July?

  All those days. She drew another horizontal line straight through all the marks. “Done. Over.” She made one more slash below them and wrote Today, then laid the stone on the calendar rock. “Dad? What now?” Her eyes filled.

  She balanced her calendar in a tree and laddered an alder. She would go to the dairy and find her brother. Only this time, she wouldn’t simply spy on him. They would talk. She wanted to kick herself for thinking he wouldn’t. Despite his quirky brain, he still had to care about her, didn’t he? Of their immediate family, only she remained. Since the fire, she hadn’t given a thought to how he was faring without her parents and her.

  And how was he managing with Uncle Loomis and Aunt Nora? Uncle Loomis made him edgy. Come to think of it, so did Aunt Nora. Would he remember his anchor thoughts? How to calm himself while he lived in their house? He needed her. She thought of Cabot watchi
ng Burn ignite the napkin and hoped her brother had left those matches alone.

  At the back of the machine shed, she dropped to her hands and knees and squeezed between the wall and a lilac bush. Footsteps crunched the gravel around the corner, coming her way. At least two people. She closed her eyes as they drew nearer.

  The crunching stopped. Did they see her?

  Keys jingled. A woman hummed. Two car doors opened and shut. An engine turned, then caught, wheels ground into the gravel, and her aunt and uncle drove off down the lane.

  She exhaled slowly and smiled. Perfect timing. Now she could talk to Burn without her relatives ruining everything. She stood cautiously and backtracked, circling behind the buildings, and peeked in the parlor’s window. No Burnaby. No cows lined up to milk, either. Animals milled in the loafing area, some with their heads through stanchions, their noses buried in hay.

  Scanning all directions, she darted between the tires of a tractor closer to the open barnyard. A better vantage point, from which she saw Burn’s truck and a blue Camaro parked in front of the milkhouse. A screen door banged, drawing her attention to the house. Maybe her brother had gone inside.

  A minute later, a movement in an upstairs window caught her eye. She remembered that room. Stuffy, crowded with furniture and hot, hot, hot all summer. Her aunt and uncle’s bedroom. Flung wide open, the window gasped for air, surely a last resort for shuttered Aunt Nora. With the shade raised, Aggie got an unobstructed view of a man crossing the room, and he wasn’t her brother.

  She watched the window intently, but he didn’t reappear, so Aggie edged around the huge tractor tire until the doorway came into view. Seconds later, Cabot exited through it, a Coke in his hand. Sure, mister. Inside for a little drink, are you? She shrank as he strode across the barnyard, fingering something in his pocket before he entered the barn, where mingling cows parted as he crossed the concrete slab.

  What else did Cabot hide in his pockets? She thought of the caps in the root cellar—exactly like those in Burn’s truck. She knew about her brother’s stockpile because she had taken some from the glove box herself—with Burnaby’s permission, of course. If Cabot had rifled through Burn’s truck, he would have found them for sure. Now the thief had been rummaging around upstairs, too. What was he after? What else had he stolen? And why?