Pigeon Feathers: And Other Stories

by John Updike

  The smell of old straw scratched his sinuses. The red sofa, half hidden under its white-splotched tarpaulin, seemed assimilated into this smell, sunk in it, buried. The mouths of empty bins gaped like caves. Rusty oddments of farming—coils of baling wire, some spare tines for a harrow, a handleless shovel—hung on nails driven here and there in the thick wood. He stood stock-still a minute; it took a while to separate the cooing of the pigeons from the rustling in his ears. When he had focused on the cooing, it flooded the vast interior with its throaty, bubbling outpour: there seemed no other sound. They were up behind the beams. What light there was leaked through the shingles and the dirty glass windows at the far end and the small round holes, about as big as basketballs, high on the opposite stone side walls, under the ridge of the roof.

  A pigeon appeared in one of these holes, on the side toward the house. It flew in, with a battering of wings, from the outside, and waited there, silhouetted against its pinched bit of sky, preening and cooing in a throbbing, thrilled, tentative way. David tiptoed four steps to the side, rested his gun against the lowest rung of a ladder pegged between two upright beams, and lowered the gunsight into the bird’s tiny, jauntily cocked head. The slap of the report seemed to come off the stone wall behind him, and the pigeon did not fall. Neither did it fly. Instead it stuck in the round hole, pirouetting rapidly and nodding its head as if in frantic agreement. David shot the bolt back and forth and had aimed again before the spent cartridge had stopped jingling on the boards by his feet. He eased the tip of the sight a little lower, into the bird’s breast, and took care to squeeze the trigger with perfect evenness. The slow contraction of his hand abruptly sprang the bullet; for a half-second there was doubt, and then the pigeon fell like a handful of rags, skimming down the barn wall into the layer of straw that coated the floor of the mow on this side.

  Now others shook loose from the rafters, and whirled in the dim air with a great blurred hurtle of feathers and noise. They would go for the hole; he fixed his sight on the little moon of blue, and when a pigeon came to it, shot him as he was walking the twenty inches of stone that would have carried him into the open air. This pigeon lay down in that tunnel of stone, unable to fall either one way or the other, although he was alive enough to lift one wing and cloud the light. The wing would sink back, and he would suddenly lift it again, the feathers flaring. His body blocked that exit. David raced to the other side of the barn’s main aisle, where a similar ladder was symmetrically placed, and rested his gun on the same rung. Three birds came together to this hole; he got one, and two got through. The rest resettled in the rafters.

  There was a shallow triangular space behind the crossbeams supporting the roof. It was here they roosted and hid. But either the space was too small, or they were curious, for now that his eyes were at home in the dusty gloom David could see little dabs of gray popping in and out. The cooing was shriller now; its apprehensive tremolo made the whole volume of air seem liquid. He noticed one little smudge of a head that was especially persistent in peeking out; he marked the place, and fixed his gun on it, and when the head appeared again, had his finger tightened in advance on the trigger. A parcel of fluff slipped off the beam and fell the barn’s height onto a canvas covering some Olinger furniture, and where its head had peeked out there was a fresh prick of light in the shingles.

  Standing in the center of the floor, fully master now, disdaining to steady the barrel with anything but his arm, he killed two more that way. Out of the shadowy ragged infinity of the vast barn roof these impudent things dared to thrust their heads, presumed to dirty its starred silence with their filthy timorous life, and he cut them off, tucked them back neatly into the silence. He felt like a creator; these little smudges and flickers that he was clever to see and even cleverer to hit in the dim recesses of the rafters—out of each of them he was making a full bird. A tiny peek, probe, dab of life, when he hit it blossomed into a dead enemy, falling with good, final weight.

  The imperfection of the second pigeon he had shot, who was still lifting his wing now and then up in the round hole, nagged him. He put a new clip into the stock. Hugging the gun against his body, he climbed the ladder. The barrel sight scratched his ear; he had a sharp, garish vision, like a color slide, of shooting himself and being found tumbled on the barn floor among his prey. He locked his arm around the top rung—a fragile, gnawed rod braced between uprights—and shot into the bird’s body from a flat angle. The wing folded, but the impact did not, as he had hoped, push the bird out of the hole. He fired again, and again, and still the little body, lighter than air when alive, was too heavy to budge from its high grave. From up here he could see green trees and a brown corner of the house through the hole. Clammy with the cobwebs that gathered between the rungs, he pumped a full clip of eight bullets into the stubborn shadow, with no success. He climbed down, and was struck by the silence in the barn. The remaining pigeons must have escaped out the other hole. That was all right; he was tired of it.

  He stepped with his rifle into the light. His mother was coming to meet him, and it tickled him to see her shy away from the carelessly held gun. “You took a chip out of the house,” she said. “What were those last shots about?”

  “One of them died up in that little round hole and I was trying to shoot it down.”

  “Copper’s hiding behind the piano and won’t come out. I had to leave him.”

  “Well, don’t blame me. I didn’t want to shoot the poor devils.”

  “Don’t smirk. You look like your father. How many did you get?”

  “Six.”

  She went into the barn, and he followed. She listened to the silence. Her hair was scraggly, perhaps from tussling with the dog. “I don’t suppose the others will be back,” she said wearily. “Indeed, I don’t know why I let Mother talk me into it. Their cooing was such a comforting noise.” She began to gather up the dead pigeons. Though he didn’t want to touch them, David went into the mow and picked up by its tepid, horny, coral-colored feet the first bird he had killed. Its wings unfolded disconcertingly, as if the creature had been held together by threads that now were slit. It did not weigh much. He retrieved the one on the other side of the barn; his mother got the three in the middle and led the way across the road to the little south-facing slope of land that went down toward the foundations of the vanished tobacco shed. The ground was too steep to plant and mow; wild strawberries grew in the tangled grass. She put her burden down and said, “We’ll have to bury them. The dog will go wild.”

  He put his two down on her three; the slick feathers let the bodies slide liquidly on one another. David asked, “Shall I get you the shovel?”

  “Get it for yourself; you bury them. They’re your kill. And be sure to make the hole deep enough so Copper won’t dig them up.” While he went to the tool shed for the shovel, she went into the house. Unlike his usual mother, she did not look up, either at the orchard to the right of her or at the meadow on her left, but instead held her head rigidly, tilted a little, as if listening to the ground.

  He dug the hole, in a spot where there were no strawberry plants, before he studied the pigeons. He had never seen a bird this close before. The feathers were more wonderful than dog’s hair, for each filament was shaped within the shape of the feather, and the feathers in turn were trimmed to fit a pattern that flowed without error across the bird’s body. He lost himself in the geometrical tides as the feathers now broadened and stiffened to make an edge for flight, now softened and constricted to cup warmth around the mute flesh. And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him. Yet these birds bred in the millions and were exterminated as pests. Into the fragrant open earth he dropped one broadly banded in slate shades of blue, and on top of it another, mottled all over in rhythms of lilac and gray. The next was almost wholly white, but f
or a salmon glaze at its throat. As he fitted the last two, still pliant, on the top, and stood up, crusty coverings were lifted from him, and with a feminine, slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.

  Home

  FIRST, THE BOAT TRIP HOME: a downpour in Liverpool, and on the wharf two girls (harlots?) singing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” under a single raincoat held over their heads like a canopy, everyone else huddling beneath the eaves of the warehouses, but these girls coming right down to the edge of the concrete wharf, singing, in effect to the whole ocean liner but more particularly to some person or persons (a pair of sailor lovers?) under the tourist deck. And then Cobh in damp golden sunlight, and an American girl from Virginia coming out on the pilot boat in tight toreador pants and with the Modern Library Ulysses ostentatiously under her arm. And then the days of the flawless circular horizon: blackjack with the Rhodes Scholars, and deck tennis with the Fulbrights, and eleven-o’clock bouillon, and the waves folding under by the prow, and the wake wandering behind them like a lime-colored highway. Robert had determined to be not disappointed by the Statue of Liberty, to submit to her cliché, but she disappointed him by being genuinely awesome, in the morning mist of the harbor, with a catch in her green body as if she had just thought to raise the torch, or at least to raise it so high. His baby in her bunting wriggled on his shoulder, and the other young Americans crowded the rail, and he felt obstructed from absorbing a classic effect, the queen of insignia, the trademark supreme. So it was he, prepared to condescend, who was unequal to the occasion.

  And then America. Just the raggle-taggle of traffic and taxis that collects at the west end of the Forties when a liner comes in, but his, his fatherland. In the year past, the sight of one of these big grimacing cars shouldering its way through the Oxford lanes had been to him a breathing flag, a bugle blown across a field of grain, and here they were, enough of them to create a traffic jam, honking and glaring at each other in the tropical-seeming heat, bunched like grapes and as blatantly colored as birds of paradise. They were outrageous, but made sense; they fitted his eyes. Already England seemed a remote, gray apparition. It seemed three years and not three months since he had sat alone in the two-and-six seats of the American-style cinema in Oxford and cried. Joanne had just had the baby. She slept a tuppenny bus ride away, in a hospital bed, to whose foot was attached a basket containing Corinne. All the mothers in the ward seemed to have something wrong with them. They were Irish or American, unwed or unwell. One garrulous crone, tubercular, was frequently milked by a sputtering machine. In the bed beside Joanne, a young colleen wept all day long because her immigrating husband had not yet found work. In visiting hours he nested his snub face on the sheets beside her and they cried together. Joanne had cried when they told her that in this country healthy women were asked to have their babies at home; their home was a dank basement flat in which they leaped from one shin-roasting island of heat to another. She had burst into tears, right there at the head of the queue, and the welfare state had clasped her to its drab and ample bosom. They gave her coupons to trade for powdered orange juice. They wrapped the newborn baby in swaddling bands. All he could see of Corinne was her head, a bright-red ball, blazing with his blood. It was all very strange. At sunset a parson came into the ward and led an Anglican service that made the mothers weep. Then the husbands came, carrying little bags of fruit and candy bars. Bunched in the waiting room, they could see their wives primping in their cranked-up beds. Then the seven-o’clock bells rang, now here, now there, all over the city. When the eight-o’clock bells rang, Joanne gave Robert a passionate kiss, hard with panic yet soft with the wish to sleep. She slept, and a mile away he watched a Doris Day movie about that mythical Midwestern town that Hollywood keeps somewhere among its sets. The houses were white, the porches deep, the lawns green, the sidewalks swept, the maples dark and blowzy against the streetlights. Doris Day’s upper lip lifted in just that apprehensive but spunky small-town way; her voice cracked. Abruptly, right there in the midst of the rustling Kit Kat bars and stunted shopgirl doxies and young British toughs in their sinister liveries of black, he discovered himself, to his amazement and delight, crying, crying hot honest tears for his lost home.

  And then the gritty snarl of customs, and watching the baggage slide piece by piece down the roller ramp, and trying to soothe the fussy infant, who had never known such heat. The badged cherubim guarding the gate to the nation allowed him to pass through and give the child to the grandparents and great-aunts and cousins that waited on the other side. His mother rose and kissed him on the cheek, and with an averted glance his father shook his hand, and his parents-in-law mimicked them, and the other relatives made appropriate motions of affection, and then they all wandered about the dismal, echoing waiting room in the desperate little circles of delay. While he had been abroad, his mother’s letters—graceful, witty, informative, cheerful—had been his main link with home, but now that he saw his parents in the flesh, it was his father who interested him. There had been nothing like him in Europe. Old, sadly old—he had had all sixteen remaining teeth pulled while Robert was away, and his face seemed jaundiced with pain and his false teeth huge and square—he still stood perfectly erect, like a child that has just learned to stand, his hands held limply, forward from his body, at the level of his belt. Unwilling, or unable, to look long at his only son or his infant granddaughter, he explored the waiting room, studying the water fountain, and a poster for Manischewitz wine, and the buttons on the coat of a colored porter, as if each might contain the clue to something he had lost. Though for thirty years a public-school teacher, he still believed in education. Now he engaged the porter in conversation, gesturing sadly with his hands, asking questions, questions that Robert could not hear but that he knew from experience could be about anything—the tonnage of great ships, the popularity of Manischewitz wine, the mechanics of unloading luggage. The receipt of any information made his father for a brief moment less mournful. The porter looked up, puzzled and wary at first, and then, the way it usually went, became flattered and voluble. People in passing, for all their haste, turned their heads to stare at the strange duet of the tall, yellow-faced, stubbornly nodding man in rolled-up shirtsleeves and the dissertating little Negro. The porter fetched one of his colleagues over to confirm a point. There was much waving of hands, and their voices began to grow loud. Robert’s face smarted with the familiar prickles of embarrassment. His father was always so conspicuous. He was so tall that he had been chosen, on the occasion of another return from Europe, to be Uncle Sam and lead their town’s Victory Parade in the autumn of 1945.

  At last he rejoined the rest of the family and announced, “That was a very interesting man. He said these signs all around saying ‘No Tipping’ are strictly baloney. He said his union has been fighting for years to get them taken down.” He offered this news with a mild air of hope, forming the words hurriedly around his unaccustomed false teeth. Robert made an exasperated noise and turned his back. There. Not in the country one hour and already he had been rude to his father. He returned to the other side of the gate and completed the formalities.

  They maneuvered the baggage into the trunk of his father’s brown ’49 Plymouth. The little car looked dusty and vulnerable amid the vibrant taxis. A young blond cop came over to protest its illegal position at the curb and ended, so seductive was the appeal of his father’s stoic bewilderment, by helping them lift the huge old-fashioned trunk—Robert’s mother’s at college—into place among the broken jacks and knots of rope and unravelling wheels of basketball tickets his father carried around. The trunk stuck out over the bumper. They tied the door of the car trunk down with frayed ropes. His father asked the policeman how many taxicabs there were in Manhattan and if it was true, as he had read, that the drivers had been robbed so often t
hey wouldn’t go into Harlem at night any more. Their discussion continued throughout the farewells. Robert’s aunt, with a kiss that smelled of Kool cigarettes and starched linen, went off to catch the train to Stamford. His cousin, her son, walked away under the pillars of the West Side Highway; he lived on West Twelfth Street and worked as an animator for television commercials. His wife’s parents herded their little flock of kin toward the parking lot, redeemed their scarlet Volvo, and began the long haul to Boston. Mother got into the front seat of the Plymouth. Robert and Joanne and Corinne arranged themselves in the back. Minutes passed; then his father and the policeman parted, and his father got in behind the wheel. “That was very interesting,” he said. “He said ninety-nine out of a hundred Puerto Ricans are honest.” With a doleful thump of the clutch, they headed for Pennsylvania.

  Robert had a job teaching—his father’s harness, but a higher grade of leather—to ex-debutantes at a genteel college on the Hudson. It would begin in September. This was July. For the interval, he and Joanne were to sponge off their parents. His got them first. He had looked forward to this month; it would be the longest he would have been in Pennsylvania with his wife, and he had a memory of something he had wanted to describe, to explain, to her about his home. But exactly what that was, he had forgotten. His parents lived in a small town fifty miles west of Philadelphia, in a county settled by German immigrants a century and a half ago. His mother had been born in the county, on a farm, and felt involved with the land but estranged from its people. His father had come from Elizabeth, New Jersey, and groped after people, but saw no comfort in land. Whereas Robert, who had been born and raised in the small town, where people and land formed a patchwork, thought he loved both; yet, ever since he could remember, he had been planning to escape. The air had seemed too dense, too full of pollen and morality, and apt to choke him. He had made that escape. It had seemed necessary. But it had left him feeling hollow, fragile, transparent—a vial waiting to be filled with tears by the next Doris Day movie. Coming home filled him with strength, a thicker liquid. But each time less full; he sensed this. Both he and the land were altering. The container was narrowing; the thing contained was becoming diluted. In the year past, his mother’s letters had often seemed enigmatic and full of pale, foreign matter. So it was with a sense of guilty urgency that he silently willed the car forward, as if the heart of his homeland might give out before he reached it.