by Lewis Nordan
There was no warning at all for what happened next, none at all, the parrot’s leaving Runt’s lap and becoming airborne.
Solon Gregg only sat impassively at the defense table, in a chair pulled slightly away from the chairs of the better-dressed gentlemen for the defense, waiting to be pointed at, and wondering how better to threaten with death the man being asked to point him out.
Auntee only wondered which direction the gunshot would come from.
And so the parrot rose up, without prelude or pretext or announcement.
Uncle was wearing clean overalls and a clean shirt. In this strange moment in his life, in which he was being asked for the first time ever to point into the face of a white man, he lifted his right arm as if it were a heavy weight.
The parrot ascended from Runt’s lap as if by magic, straight up into the air, the atmosphere, the great interior above-water sea of humidity and disappointed lives. Up and up and up, high up into the high-ceilinged room of the courthouse, as if the room were the wide, endless, hopeful, and magical canopy of the African sky.
Later, trying to recall the details of the parrot’s takeoff, Runt would say that he did not even remember the bird’s fine claws, strong as a bobcat, releasing from the fabric of his gabardine pants. He would say that he did not remember at all the brush of wing feathers against his face, as there must have been when the bird gathered up enough air beneath its wings to lift off, as if the first several feet of the parrot’s upward flight had nothing at all to do with aerodynamics or hollow, pneumatic bones, or wingspan, or wing-shape, or muscle and sinew and hot blood, or anything at all that could launch so heavy and earth-bound and satisfied and silent a creature as this feathered beast, not even a good strong jump or push-off.
One second the parrot was sitting there, content as a well-fed cat, actually purring, and the next, in the tropical humidity and other-worldly heat of this room with the same climate as an Amazon rainforest, it was rising in a straight line as if through liquid, like a porpoise torpedoing its way upward through blue bubbles from the sandy floor of the Gulf of Mexico into another atmosphere, another world, new life.
Perhaps only Uncle, preoccupied with grief and the probable imminence of his own sudden death, failed to notice the wild and magical ascent of the African parrot, generations closer to their shared homeland than Uncle himself, brother to bright plumage and courageous heart. He was lifting his weighted arm, the hand, on the end of it, which would do the pointing, like an anvil.
All other eyes were on the bird, Alice’s eyes among them, the children’s eyes, the Judge, who was pounding his gavel, “Order, order!” Solon Gregg, the murderer who knew nothing of magic or of metaphor, the great, green bird, with white feet and a red tail, that now, without apparently a single wingbeat, had attained the fullest height of the courtroom, above the great windows, and had begun in earnest to fly, and now at last using its wings, and feathers, and all the other instruments of natural and normal flight.
The parrot was large and it flew, as it must, with deep strokes, but now it flew, or seemed to, anyway, as if it were far, far larger than its actual size. It flew with enormity and ponderousness and sadness and strength, it flew with the deep, slow wingstrokes of a condor, an albatross, oh deep, deep, deep the piston plunges of those sad wings, long the distances that each stroke took the bright bird along its circular course around the courtroom.
High up in the balcony, Alice and her wide-eyed children and the embankment of dark faces saw the parrot best, the strange shape, the layers of feathers, close up, the amazed eyes, the massive open beak and prehensile tongue, the dear, white, and yoke-toed feet, the green plumage and red tail, the underwater quality of its slow-motion flight.
Alice did not travel in this magic moment, as the ebony-colored women and men around her may have done, to dark Africa, Kilimanjaro, and the Ivory Coast, and sorcerers dancing with poison cobras to ensure rainfall, as birds and monkeys chattered and jabbered from the jungle trees.
Alice traveled to her childhood in the swamp, in winter, at night, before her father died, where always, though it was Mississippi, there seemed to Alice to be snow, and always gray footprints, and smoke from the crumbling chimneys of the Negroes’ cabins and a song of trains and farm dogs through the still, cold air and the black pine trees, and her father’s face a bright mask in the light of the big moon.
These were the days when her father took her owling, when she stood beside his leg and he lifted his mittens to his mouth and called, “Whoo, whoo,” and sometimes an echo threaded its way back through the trees, and the echo, her father told her, was the voice of the Great Horned Owl, answering—these were her father’s words—“blood with hot blood.”
The parrot kept on flying, in its wide circle around the courtroom, and Alice remembered a time when her father had told her, “Call him,” meaning the owl, and she had said, “Me?” and he said, “Nobody else,” and little Alice, when she was that child in the wilderness with the only man she had ever really loved, put her own hands up, no mittens, and from her throat released into the moony fragrance of the Mississippi darkness and a hunter’s moon, a voice she had not known was inside her, a sound of Whoo, whoo, which for the first time in all these years came back to her now like a spirit, like justice and freedom, and she had said to her father in that moment, “My breath warmed my hands just now,” and her father had said, “You got to make your own heat, sweetness, always, always.”
The great exotic bird, the parrot, went on flying, once around the courtroom, twice around the courtroom, faces turned, necks craning to see. Alice heard the bird in near-silent, buoyant flight. It hissed like a cat. It clicked with its bill. Its pneumatic bones creaked with strange joy.
Alice thought of the owl that she called up that night, the voice, the deep boom and monotone of its need. She thought of the cypress trees, like great silver candlesticks in an enchanted wood. She thought of the swamp water, white as a snowfield, though there was no snow, of course, not even in winter. She thought of the rising mist, like the liquid air of this courtroom, and the silence and impossible solitude.
Solon Gregg sat in his chair, in the steaming intensity of hatred and body odor and old fear, and with a blast of hatred and ancient rage at his father for his sister’s rape and for everything else he ever lost or feared, with the glare he directed towards the old colored man up on the witness stand, he dared Uncle to point a finger at him.
Alice watched the parrot make its third, its final circle around the courtroom, hopeless beast, world-weary bird. She thought of Jeeter Skeeter, the little Indian boy who could sometimes not speak to Alice at the end of a day, or even look at her, but could only walk around and around her chair, where she sat, as if to weave some magic spell of gratitude and love, or maybe of disbelief that good things are real.
She thought of Dr. Dust, and of Kubla Khan. She called out loud to the parrot from her balcony roost: “Weave a circle round him thrice, for he on honeydew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise,” and even as she chanted this magic charm, she knew it did not apply to the murderer around whom the circle was woven, unless all magic was black to the core and there was no difference between murder and the poetry of owling with your father, and this she could not accept.
The children in the front row of the balcony called out after her, in unison: “Weave a circle round him thrice!” It was their favorite poem. Don’t leave us, Alice, don’t ever leave us in our narrow coffin of a world without you! “And drunk the milk of Paradise!” they called out to the bird.
The parrot set its wings and began its incredible descent. Down and down, through the liquid atmosphere, the parrot dropped, wingfeathers like a green umbrella, a canopy, a tent so large, so vast, so green that it cast a green shade upon everyone seated in the room, especially Alice and the children, whose lives it changed forever, repaired all damage, and proved the magic of sudden and eternal transformations of the spirit.
To the children the bird was Alice, all i
n green, their love riding. To Alice the bird was the dead boy. It was Bobo—the magic of good and evil, both.
The parrot landed on Solon Gregg’s head. It dug its fine yoke-toed claws into his fire-scarred scalp. For one second it swayed like an eagle on a mountain crag, whipped by strong winds, and then it steadied itself and was firm there.
It shit down Solon’s back, great farting blobs of liquid white bird dooky. White! it seemed to say, White, white, white! It opened its beak as if it had forgotten that it knew no words, and so did not speak, though there was noise that issued forth, more human than animal, before it rang once with its cash register voice, ching-ching! and then spoke no more.
With the parrot still standing upon his head, Solon Gregg stood up from his chair and leaned forward upon the table in front of him as though he had no idea that the bird was in the courtroom, let alone upon his own head. The bird was like a strange turban on his head, its big red tail was like a cape down his neck and back.
The scream of villainy and old rage that Solon released from his troubled and violent guts spewed forth from him like spontaneous fires from deep in the Gehenna bowel-pits of the Arrow Catcher garbage dump, flames leaping out, unexpected and dangerous, into peaceful air.
He screamed, “You better not point your nigger mother-fucking finger at me, you nigger motherfucker nigger motherfucker motherfucker motherfucker motherfucker! Oh Christ, you goddamn nigger, you better not!”
Judge Swinger pounded his gavel many times.
He said, “Order, order!”
Uncle’s arm was no longer heavy, his hand was light as air, lighter, a peaceful, small, floating balloon.
Uncle pointed his finger straight in Solon Gregg’s face.
He said, “Thar he.”
Thar he, said the echo in Alice’s heart. Thar he. Thar she blows!
13
DAYS LATER, back at the Arrow Catcher schoolhouse, on a golden afternoon in late September, when the chalkboards were whistle-clean and every eraser was free of dust, and the oiled floors smelled like the perfume of fat jungle flowers after a tropical storm, and after all the witnesses had all testified down at the courthouse, and the trial was over, and Bobo’s murderers had been set free, as most folks spec ted they would be, without apology or logic or shame, well then, Alice asked her schoolchildren to take out their big sheets of white butcher paper that Mr. Grady down at the meat market had so generously donated to their project, and their paint brushes, and Prang watercolors and Magic Markers, and to draw pictures, each of them, of the murder trial, what they remembered most of this horrible travesty of justice, this momentous injustice of setting child-murderers free, this racial and human insult to each of them—so Alice said, in her customary way of speaking her outrage, and so when the children had labored a long time at their desks and at the art table in the back of the schoolroom, and were sweaty and paint-covered with exertion and memory and primary colors of paint and horror and the juices of creation and loss, Alice picked up the pages that they had bent over for so long and with such industry, and she sorted through them, one by one, and she discovered that each child had drawn a picture of a parrot.
THE DAYS inched on through the autumn, with long, pink sunsets, and then, at night, bright stars, a cooler breeze. Local schools kept their steady schedules, big yellow schoolbuses, study halls, homework, bells to mark beginnings and endings, arrow-catching and football, the marching band.
Fortunata came home from Kosiesko and got her job back as a teacher’s aide at the elementary school in Leflore, ten miles away, and so in this way she and Alice had small things to talk about.
Fortunata’s younger children were clingy and sweet and tended to cry easily. They followed Fortunata around the house until she had to fuss at them. They pretended to be too sick to go to school so Fortunata would stay home with them.
Alice knew she’d be finding a new place to live soon. She was welcome to stay, Fortunata assured her, but Alice thought there was no reason to stay, now that the children didn’t need her, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to keep her job at Arrow Catcher Elementary next year, anyway, or even next semester.
Something had changed for Alice, it was hard to say just what that was. She liked Mr. Archer and did not want to disappoint him, or let him down, but she didn’t think she could stay.
She felt responsible, somehow, for failures that were vague to her. In her mind she carried the image in the raindrop and wondered whether there was not more she could have done.
There was something, too, that seemed still unfinished with Dr. Dust, and again she was not sure what. She was still in love with him, of course, and she couldn’t live on that forever.
For a while, Runt kept his regular appointment at Red’s Goodlookin Bar and Gro., mornings and evenings, too, but something was not the same for him, either. Runt looked for his friend Gilbert Mecklin, the crazy housepainter, but Gilbert was making himself scarce these days.
Even before the trial, Rufus McKay quit singing songs from Hollywood musicals, and stopped sleeping in the shoeshine chair. Then he stopped coming to work altogether. Nobody knew what happened to Rufus McKay.
Somebody said he went to Chicago to find work, he had a sister there. The blues singers stopped showing up at Red’s, too, with their boxes and harpoons. All were friends of Rufus McKay’s, maybe that had something to do with it. Runt had to admit, he missed them. Their music kept on playing in his head.
One day, down at the Goodlookin Bar and Gro., Runt asked Red to call him Cyrus from now on.
Red thought it was a joke. He thought they were playing a game.
He said, “Okay, Cyrus, and you call me Lance.”
Runt said, “No, really.”
And so then Red saw that Runt was serious and, after that, he worked hard at calling him Cyrus, but he often slipped and called him Runt, it was going to take him a good while to get the hang of it.
Runt wished he’d followed up on his hunch and found a way out to Runnymede that day, to Uncle’s house, it might have changed things. He regretted he hadn’t tried harder to find the boy’s people.
Some other things happened, too, changes in routine that Runt didn’t much care for. A lot of younger men, boys, really, started drinking down at Red’s.
They were good customers, and there were a lot of them, as many as ten sometimes, and so Red couldn’t very well run them off, business being business and all.
But they were foul-mouthed and unruly and unpredictable and wild, and maybe dangerous. Runt thought so, anyway. Runt didn’t much like being around them. These boys didn’t seem to have been affected at all by the murder or the trial. It was unsettling to be around people who lived where this thing had happened and for them to seem not to have noticed. There was a little too much of Solon Gregg in every one of these new boys, young men, for Runt’s taste.
One time one of these new boys brought a new ax handle with him to Red’s Goodlookin Bar and Gro. and dragged a straight-back chair out in the cinder parking lot and stood up on it with the ax handle and said, “Anybody who wants to get hit over the head with an ax handle, line up out here.”
Well, hell, who in his right mind would want to get hit over the head with an ax handle, is all Runt wanted to know.
So Runt was pretty astonished when seven or eight of these boys went outside and got in line. This is the way they lived their lives, Runt guessed. Seemed like to Runt you couldn’t live this way in a town where this thing had happened.
So they lined up, these new boys. Each one took his turn. The boy on the chair hauled off and cracked each one over the head with the new ax handle, first one, and then the next.
It hurt, too. They seen stars. It like to knocked a couple of the smaller boys out, it hurt so bad. One boy went down on his knees, he couldn’t help it. Another one, Crack!—like to paralyzed him. He walked back around and got in line a second time. You figure it out.
Nobody might as well of died at all, no murderers might as well have got let
off, as far as these boys were concerned. That’s the way Runt looked at the whole situation. That’s why he didn’t like these boys. He didn’t trust a man who was not changed by local horror.
Gilbert Mecklin, the housepainter, slacked off in his attendance at Red’s Goodlookin Bar and Gro.
This drew some attention.
After a while, he stopped showing up altogether.
Somebody said, “We gone have to mark old Gilbert absent, ain’t we?”
Somebody said, “Look like he don’t remember his old friends.”
Somebody said maybe it was because his boy Sugar found that swole-up body in the spillway, maybe Gilbert couldn’t face his friends after that, maybe he was too ashamed and broke-up.
Somebody else said, Well, hail, that didn’t make no sense, what kind of sense did that make, it wont logical.
Somebody else said it wont Sugar that found the body no-how, it was Sweet Austin, Gilbert’s illegitimate boy with Rosemary Austin, down to the Legion Hut.
Somebody else said that boy wont Gilbert’s, Sweet Austin belonged to Morris Austin just sure as I’m standing here, look just like old Morris, and anyway, Gilbert’s a family man.
Somebody else said Morris Austin was impotent, that’s why Morris couldn’t be Sweet’s real daddy, that’s what they heard. They said they heard Morris Austin ain’t never had a hard-on in his life.
Somebody else said that wont nothing, they said they heard that Miss Alberta, down at the grade school, was born without a vagina.
Some people said, Well, I’ll be dog. Is that a fact? Miss Alberta ain’t got one? Well, shoot, Miss Alberta and Morris Austin, they ought to get together, go out to a pitcher show.
Somebody else said they heard Gilbert Mecklin had done stopped drinking. Completely quit.
Huh?
What’d you say?
Now wait a minute, let me get this straight. Gilbert Mecklin has done stopped drinking?
That’s what they said they heard.
Whoa. Hole up just one durn minute here.
