Winter Birds

by Jim Grimsley

  White Time

  In the afternoon darkness closes over the house, and the wind increases. High in the trees you hear a crying of many voices, a blended choir; almost, now and then, a sob.

  A car passes on the highway once, and later, a truck drives by and makes everybody’s breath catch, until you whisper from the window, “It’s not Papa.” Amy stands with her hand on the doorknob, ready to wake Mama at a moment’s notice. All of you pretend to watch television, but you yourself listen beyond that box of noises.

  Mama’s breathing becomes deep and regular.

  After a while you see some motion at the window and it makes you rise up in terror, you hurry to the glass expecting to see your Papa.

  But snowflakes have begun to beat soft down along the world. Your whispered, “It’s snowing,” is hardly needed, your brothers and Amy see what you see and crowd beside you at the window. “Oh my God,” says Amy Kay, “I can’t believe my eyes.”

  “Now the roads will get icy,” Duck whispers, but Amy shushes him. Everyone looks at everyone. Grove comes to the window too, propping his swollen elbow on the sill, holding the ice against the skin and watching the snow. The snow tumbles and spins, a wash of white, enormous motion across the fields, over the tops of the trees, blending sky and earth to complete whiteness like a fallen cloud. Duck presses his nose against the glass. His lips leave a print, from outside snowflakes brush against it. “I wonder if it will stick,” Allen whispers.

  “It’s plenty cold out there,” Grove says.

  “It’s cold enough in this old house for it to stick, if the snow could get inside,” Duck says.

  “We should listen to the weather report,” Amy says, peering up at the eaves. “I hope it makes great big icicles.”

  “Like the ones in a cave,” you say.

  Grove leans his forehead against the glass. “It’s all over the ground,” he says softly. “You can see it everywhere.”

  “Boy, even if there was school tomorrow, we wouldn’t have it,” Amy says.

  “Is it snow on the highway too?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  When you step back from the window they go on talking, and someone takes your place; no one notices you at the door. They chatter about schoolbuses sliding smack dab into ditches but you don’t join in. You watch them a moment. Then you turn the front doorknob and go.

  Outside the cold blast of air is a kind of fire, and hot tongues of wind lick your skin. The snow is collecting on the porch, laces of white over the gray concrete. Wind whirls the flakes and tones hollow notes in the trees. Everywhere the clouds have thickened, the sun is a patch of paleness, not even a distinct disk. You have stood there watching it with the front door open, but now you open the screen and step out, hearing Amy say, “That crazy fool is going to turn out every bit of heat in the house.”

  By then Grove has followed you. The two of you stand arm in arm in the cold. Out here you can see snowflakes miles away in the pale light, tumbling down across the whole world. In the yard the flakes hover atop the dry grass. You dream them shattering against each other, soft silent breaking all around you, though when you taste one, cold and furry on your tongue, you are glad they are too soft to break, you understand snowflakes can rest easy on each other, their touch is light.

  Grove says, “It’s so cold out here I don’t even need an ice pack on my arm.”

  “I never saw anything like this,” you say.

  “I wish I could fly around in it,” Grove says.

  “But even the birds don’t fly around in snow,” you answer.

  At the door Amy says, “What if Papa comes home now? How can we lock the door with you two fools standing on the porch?”

  “Papa won’t drive nowhere in this mess,” you say.

  “He might. You never know with Papa.”

  Grove says, “We don’t want to come inside. You can lock us out here if you want to.”

  She watches you, silent. You lift your hands to catch a snowflake that slowly melts in your palm, and then another, and then another, white dissolving to a tingle and a spot of water on your skin.

  “The snow makes my arm feel good,” Grove tells Amy.

  “The snow makes everybody feel good,” Amy answers.

  “Except Mama doesn’t like it much,” you say.

  “Well maybe she’ll like this one.” Amy steps onto the porch beside you, crossing her arms as the wind strikes her, making her squint and even drawing tears from her eyes. “It’s so cold,” she says, blinking, and Grove laughs, and you say, “What did you think it was going to be?” She sticks her tongue at you. Snowflakes strike her all over, washing her hands and arms, till at last she laughs.

  Across the yard you watch the crystal gathering, the whiteness spreading, and the snow falls now so thick and fast it makes you dizzy, as if the world is moving upward toward the snow and the clouds.

  Snow gleams in the forks of tree branches and along the roof of the house.

  Soon beyond the river somewhere the sun is setting unnoticed behind the solid clouds. Millions of flakes of crystal drink the light. Out in the woods the snow is drifting down in even sweeps across and between the trees, collecting on the last leaves and on the ground. Beside the river the snow settles on the bank, along the bed of honeysuckle, a white lace beside the dark water. You wish you were there. Turning your face upward to let the cold flakes fall on it, you can almost imagine you are walking through a whole world of gray tree trunks and white snow, in twilight with the river beside you and the clouds piled so thick that even when darkness comes you cannot see the stars. You like the whiteness most of all. You would like to lie face down in the snow; you would like to gaze into the whiteness.

  You shake your head at the cold, laughing, feeling the beats of your blood going off like a bomb, though you cannot even feel the hurt in your shoulder anymore.

  “I wish we could play in it,” Grove says.

  Over his hair he wears a white veil.

  “If you played outside in it you’d fall down and that would be the end of all of us,” Amy says. But smiling, she finishes, “It don’t hurt a thing to stand here and watch, though.”

  She leans far out over the porch edge, one arm encircling a post. She sticks her tongue straight into the air as far as it will reach, and closes her eyes and smiles. “Ash,” she says. Grove laughs. You say, “You’re the one who’s going to fall and break your neck, Amy Kay.”

  She ignores you, sticking out her tongue and cooing. “This is what I like to eat,” she says, “this is my favorite food. Nice cold snow falling straight down out of the sky.”

  “It doesn’t fall straight,” you say, “the wind blows it around for miles and miles.”

  “Mr. Know-it-all,” she says.

  The wind rises again, and cold soaks through every part of you. Amy says, “I’m so cold I can’t hardly move.” Grove shivers and hides behind you. The shivering hurts his arm. You see that on his face though he says nothing. “You ought to go inside,” you tell him, and Amy says, “We all ought to go inside, before we catch pee-new-monia.”

  “I’m staying out here,” you say.

  “You don’t have on enough warm clothes to stay out here,” Amy says.

  “It’s not that cold.”

  She has some smart answer to throw back at you, but the wind freezes it in her throat, smashing her skirt into a tangle and ripping through her hair, tossing bales of snow against the three of you. Grove edges toward the house holding his elbow, though there is still delight in his eyes. Amy stands square on the porch stroking snowflakes out of her dark hair. Shivering, she says, “Well you can do whatever you want to, crazy person, but we’re going inside and shut the door.”

  YOU WATCH the snow alone then, feeling easier in the silence. The snow drifts down from the clouds and piles against the earth, the gentleness of its drifting and piling giving you rest in some deep place. You take long breaths of the cold air, smelling the fresh, sharp smell of the evergreen at the side
of the porch. You hunch your shoulders forward and blow out breaths that blossom into white clouds.

  Finally descending the steps, slowly and carefully, hearing your Mama’s voice in your mind.

  But out in the full fall of it you don’t think about being careful any more. The snow is all around you, falling slowly, close so that you can see the fluttering of particular flakes spinning over and jerking back, or far away so that you can watch the thousands descending, one great mass.

  You trudge around the house, quiet under Mama’s windows but wondering, still, if maybe she lies a little easier under the blankets, facing the window so she can watch the snow; maybe it eases her the same as you.

  Above, clouds, and you imagine stars behind them, displeased to be kept from watching, maybe arguing with the clouds.

  The grass beneath the snow crunches when you walk on it. The snow cools your shoes and then your feet. You blow into your hands.

  Almost night. Almost dark. There, across the fields, over the gaunt line of pines, easing down against the house, vast fields full of the reflection of white, the snow settling to soothe the cracked earth, the broken cornstalks.

  You wish you could lie in a bed of snow, let your head fall back into it slowly and never come out of it. You wish you had fire to warm your hands. You wish the snow would never stop, you wish Papa would never come home, or you wish you were in the middle of that field, out in the open space where the snow could swoop down at you from every side, seeming more and more endless; you can almost see yourself, turning and turning in the widening fall of the snow, lifting your arms and then bringing them down, as if you and the snow are one creature. You wish you could find a field wide enough that if you stood in the middle of it you would never see another house, where you could watch the snow pile higher and breathe the cold air deeper and deeper till your insides are as cold as your outsides.

  You walk slowly across the open yard, you stare straight up into the falling flakes where you can see forever deeply into the one cloud. Almost dark now. Though you have seen the house and fields this close to night before, you have never seen anything like this, in motion, and you feel yourself rising with the same slow steadiness that the snow falls.

  Above the snow, though, a sound. A droning, a motor, the approach—you half turn toward it—of a truck, headlights blaring, and you run into the front yard, almost to the ditch bank, to see.

  Papa drives slowly past the house, honking his horn again and again, wipers beating away the snow.

  If he sees you he makes no sign. He drives past the house, honking the horn always on the same beat. At Mama’s windows the curtains stir, and a hand pauses at the glass. The red lights of the truck vanish down the road.

  The curtains settle into place again. The day becomes quiet night. You walk away from the empty road to the house, wondering when he will come back to stay. Round you snow drifts like ash stirred up by wind, cold ash from a cold fire, a slickness that you carefully travel across.

  Transpossession

  In the kitchen you stamp snow from your shoes onto a torn paper bag. Amy fusses in whispers that you must be a fool to run around in the yard like you don’t have the brains to know hot from cold. “Maybe you ain’t as smart as everybody thinks,” she tells you, gesturing with a spoon. “I think maybe you’re a moron. I’m fixing you a cup of hot coffee to thaw out your belly.”

  “Papa drove by the house,” you say softly. “Did you hear him?”

  After a moment, Amy nods. She lights the burner on the stove, careful of the flame. “I guess he’ll be coming home soon.”

  The house is mostly quiet. In the living room your brothers watch television with the sound turned low. The murmurs from the vague screen throw a hush over the room. Your brothers sit in a line on the couch. Once Grove asks if it’s still snowing and Allen answers yes, he can see it falling through a crack in the curtains. Duck says he hopes it snows a whole six feet, though Allen tells him not to be stupid since it don’t even snow that much at the top of a mountain. They keep their voices soft even when they disagree, and they watch the silent bedroom door. From Mama’s room you do not even hear the whisper of breath.

  Amy says quietly, “Pull off them wet shoes. This coffee water is almost hot.”

  “I don’t want to drink any coffee.”

  She shakes the spoon beneath your nose. “Don’t argue with me. You can put sugar in it.”

  “Even sugar don’t make it good.”

  “It ain’t supposed to be good. It’s supposed to heat up your gizzard.”

  You step out of your shoes and sit at the table. She spoons the instant coffee into two cups and pours the water over it. Steam rises. “I’m going to drink me some too,” she says, “sitting right at the kitchen table like I’m thirty-five years old. You can drink yours there too, and we can pretend like we’re too old for TV.”

  “Let me put the sugar in mine. You don’t ever put enough.”

  “You put in so much it might as well be syrup.”

  “Who’s drinking it, me or you?”

  “Don’t leave your wet shoes right in the middle of the floor either. You won’t raised in a barn.”

  You set the shoes in the corner and get canned milk from the refrigerator. Mama drinks her coffee black and Amy drinks it with sugar, so she can look like a grownup, but you like your coffee light brown. You watch the swirls of white in black, spinning and widening at the same time. Amy says, “Drink it before it gets cold.”

  “When I feel like drinking it, I’ll drink it.” You blow across the top. When Delia was here, she poured coffee from the cup into a saucer, and drank off the saucer like a cat. You sip your coffee from the cup like you’re supposed to. The hot makes you swallow fast. Today you like the taste. You like the quiet too, with the refrigerator humming and the gas heater hissing, its firebricks bright red and glowing hot. The lights are dim in the living room, and Amy has left the kitchen dark. Snowflakes tumble against the windows. “I bet Papa is miles away,” Amy says.

  “I don’t care how far away he is as long as he isn’t here,” you say. “Maybe he’ll stay gone a long time.”

  “He might,” Amy says mysteriously. The same impulse comes to both of you and you look at his empty chair. You don’t have to be afraid of the living room now. You could even sit in that chair if you wanted to. The thought of the snow outside comforts you too, along with the silence it has brought to the highway. Though maybe you listen a little too hard. Too many things can sound like the motor of a truck. Amy laughs softly, raising her arms over her head. “We could pile up all the snow for miles around and build a big old wall to keep Papa out of the house. Except he’d just pee on it and melt a hole so he could get in.”

  When you laugh she signs you to be quiet. But you smile at each other. You hold the warm cup in your hands. Amy is half done with her coffee, though you have sipped only a little of yours. “I’m going to fix me another cup,” she says. “Then I’ll stay awake all night long.”

  “You will anyway, whether you drink coffee or not.”

  “Then it won’t be different from last night, will it?”

  “I wish I could go to sleep and not wake up, no matter how loud he yells. Except then I’d be scared to wake up and see what he did when I was asleep.” You stir the coffee again, to make the sugar finish dissolving. Amy lights the burner on the stove and sets on more water to boil. She passes her hand through the steam. “You didn’t leave me enough sugar for a mouse,” she says, tilting the sugar dish for you to see that it’s almost empty. You drag a chair to the cabinet to get down the bag of sugar. When you lift it your shoulder gives you a sharp pain. You set the sugar on the cabinet, the white grains sticking to the tips of your fingers. Amy holds the sugar bowl close to the bag, pours the sugar and then puts the bag back where it belongs. By the time you sit down your coffee has cooled and you can drink it faster. “Is it still snowing?” Amy asks your brothers in the living room. Duck stands at the window, gripping the curtain i
n a fist. He says, “It ain’t falling as fast as it used to.”

  “If it don’t keep falling there won’t be enough of it left on the ground to keep us out of school Monday,” she says.

  “It’s piled up over everything,” Duck says.

  “One good sunny day will melt it all.”

  “It’s snowing for miles and miles,” Duck says. He presses his face to the glass. “It’s not ever going to stop, and Papa’s never coming home.”

  When Amy takes her coffee to the living room you wonder if you should follow. You hold your own cup and swirl the last of the coffee around and around the bottom. You drink it and set your cup on the sink. In the darkness you gaze at the velvet window, where one tumbling snowflake appears and whirls against the black glass. You wish it would stay this way, so peaceful and quiet, with Mama asleep in the bedroom and none of your brothers or sisters arguing. But Duck says, “Here comes a truck,” loud enough for you to hear, and you go to the living room and watch at the window with the others.

  The truck lights blaze on the falling snow. You can barely see the shape of the truck behind. But you know when you hear the horn that this is Papa driving slowly past. From the bedroom you hear muffled footsteps. Mama opens the door, a gray shadow. “Come away from the window,” she says softly, “you’re standing too close.”

  You let the curtains fall and follow the others to the center of the room. The fire in the gas heater shines. Mama slips to the window buttoning her house robe. Her dark hair tumbles over her shoulder. She stands to the side of the window and watches. “He’s not going to stop,” she says.

  “He came by here one time before,” Allen says.

  “I know. I wasn’t asleep.” Mama closes the curtains but still watches through the crack that remains. The truck’s red tail lights round a curve and vanish. The highway shimmers with snow. Mama sits in Papa’s chair, thumbnail between her teeth. She asks Amy Kay to bring her some Anacin. She rubs her forehead and takes a deep breath. The dark bruise glistens on her face. She takes the tablets from Amy’s white hand and swallows them and sets the water glass beside the chair. Amy offers to make her a cup of coffee and Mama says yes, thank you. You watch her clotted figure in the light from the window.