A Catalog of Birds

by Laura Harrington

  Their stated intent: to punish the Seneca and Iroquois for their loyalty to the British. The underlying strategy: to lay claim to the Northwest Frontier, as the Finger Lakes Region was called, thus opening the West to expansion.

  Expecting to find a primitive wilderness filled with savages, Sullivan and his men instead found open country, fields of corn, beans, squash, and vast orchards of apple, peach, and cherry. They called Geneva “Apple Town,” and were astonished by its hidden beauty. Rich deposits of soil crowned the long low hills carved out by glaciers. The lake’s deep waters tempered the climate and created the best fruit-growing land they had ever seen.

  They described the longhouses they found as castles, a sense of awe in their journals. They filled these dwellings with the Indians’ stores of food, including more than 200,000 bushels of corn, and burned them to the ground. They clear-cut the orchards, burning the trees as they fell.

  The Seneca melted away in front of the army’s advance hoping to return when the invaders had gone. They retreated to the British fort at Niagara where they perished by the thousands of hunger and cold.

  Cornell’s extensive land holdings, including the agricultural research station, is carved from Seneca land. The more Jack learns over the years, the more disturbed he feels. He knows that resurrecting apple trees and adapting Seneca practices will not restore their lands or make amends. Still, it’s the work he can do.

  Jack will graft while Billy plants comfrey seedlings around the base of each tree in the test orchard. Jack thinks this work can be done with one arm and an assist, but he’s not sure. If planting seedlings is impossible, he’ll do it himself and have Billy rake the composted wood chips around the trees for mulch.

  Billy watches his father, tamping down the impatience that’s already rising inside him. Jack’s methodical way of working drives Billy up the wall. Every single scion that his father will graft today is taped, labeled, numbered, and carefully recorded.

  God help me, Billy thinks.

  “So where do you want this stuff planted?”

  “Rows two, four, and six. Four plants per tree.”

  Billy stows a trowel in his back pocket, grabs a shovel, and moves to the end of the row where his father won’t be able to see him.

  He can make a cut into the soil with the blade of the shovel, loosen the dirt, but he can’t lift it out of the ground. He tries making the cut, then dragging the shovel out of the hole, but loses most of the dirt on the way and still can’t turn the shovel over. He has very little strength in his right hand, arm, and wrist. Turning, gripping, lifting are beyond him; the pain acute.

  He throws the shovel aside and gets down on his knees with the trowel. He can’t believe how difficult it is to use the trowel left-handed. This is not skilled work, but five minutes of ineffectual digging yields a hole hardly large enough for one comfrey seedling.

  When his father shouts for him to come and take a break his shirt is soaked through and he’s shaking from exhaustion. Three months in a hospital can just about destroy a man.

  Jack offers Billy hot tea and an orange, already peeled, and breaks open a chocolate bar.

  “Maybe that’s enough for your first day.”

  “Am I working here or not?”

  “I’m just saying . . . ”

  “Shut up, Dad. Just shut up.”

  Billy pushes past his father to return to the awkward trowel and two hundred seedlings and his dogged pursuit of an impossible task.

  Fifteen minutes later, he stands, shakes his arms out, then kneads his muscles, willing them back to life. And it suddenly occurs to him to ask not just if his doctors have been lying to him, but how much. He’d looked at those X-rays, listened to those specialists, all of it filtered through the disorientation of pain and youthful arrogance. Sure, I’m hurt, but I can get better. Sure, I’ve been badly burned; took shrapnel to my arm, wrist, hand, shoulder. But bones and tendons and ligaments and nerves can heal, scar tissue can be lived with. Right?

  He looks at his hands. Will he ever pick up a pencil again; pilot a plane? He tries to grab the trowel in his right hand, but his grip is still not strong enough. He had imagined snatching the trowel, shoving it into the ground, the searing clarity of pain. But he can’t even do that.

  He hears the wheelbarrow squeaking on its wheel and glances up to see Jack lumbering toward him with a load of mulch. Billy massages his arm while Jack takes in the discarded shovel and trowel, the piss-poor plantings.

  “Can’t use that arm much?”

  “Everybody’s in denial,” Billy says. “Including me, it seems.”

  “How about I dig and you plant?”

  In minutes Jack digs planting holes, evenly spaced. Billy finds he can kneel and plant the seedlings with one hand, using his right to assist as he covers the plants with soil. He can even keep up.

  They make steady progress down the row. The job that had been impossible an hour ago is getting done.

  “I’ve been working with Arne Briggs,” Jack says.

  “The chemist? I thought you two didn’t exactly see eye to eye.”

  “We’re doing a project together.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “This is it. We amend the soil, mulch to correct imbalances, and work with complementary plantings. Arne’s got a test orchard on the south side of the lake that’s all chemicals all the time. Fungicides, insecticides, miticides sprayed eight to fourteen times a season. Just like every other major apple grower in the nation.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Not many people are looking at the whole cycle. The run-off from chemical use, the water and soil contamination. Those are the things we can attempt to measure and test. But we can’t test the chemicals’ impact on the public. Because we are just spraying the hell out of apples. And grapes. And strawberries. The chemical companies tell us it’s safe. But I don’t believe them.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “They told us DDT was safe,” Jack says, “denied the research, the evidence. Think of the birth defects, the infertility; the near extinction of the bald eagle. And those are just the canaries in the coal mine.”

  Billy doesn’t want to think about the millions of tons of chemicals they are using in Vietnam, with their rainbow monikers, Agent Blue, White, Pink, Yellow, Orange, as if candy is raining down from the sky. He doesn’t want to think about the cancers he’s hearing about, babies born without limbs or worse, his own loss of taste and smell and hearing.

  He tries to shakes it off. He’s home, he’s outdoors with his father, the sun on his back; the world on the edge of spring. He grabs four more seedlings; moves to the next tree. Jack keeps ahead of him, digging holes. The work warms them. The clouds of the morning disperse and the day grows bright. They have found their rhythm.

  Walking up the hill to the Alsops’ the following Wednesday, Nell wants to turn around and go home. Twice she stops to look back over the lake. A strong April wind is gusting across the water, toppling clouds, the same wind that’s making her eyes tear up. She wipes her nose on her sleeve and keeps climbing.

  She finds the ponies in their stalls, halters on, saddles and bridles in a neat pile by the door, cleaned and oiled. She enters Lucky’s stall, currycomb in hand; leans into him, her face against his neck. Lindy kicks against the stall door, wanting in on the attention.

  She and Megan used to give them strawberry ice cream cones every Fourth of July. Where’d they dream that one up and who knew ponies liked ice cream? Every Christmas they decorated one of the pine trees in the pasture with peppermints and carrots and apples. Watching Lucky’s velvety muzzle peel back over his teeth when he got hold of a peppermint always made them laugh. Summers they rode bareback to the lake and swam with the ponies. There was nothing like that first moment when the ponies were floating, their legs driving hard in the water, grabbing their manes with both hands, gripping w
ith their knees. The girls napped in the sun, lying on the ponies’ broad backs, tickled and sometimes lashed by their tails.

  Asa used to talk about finding a two-pony sleigh, or making one. That would never happen now. She should have put up a fight, tried to buy the ponies herself, or come up with a scheme to teach lessons so Asa could keep them. If Megan were here this would never have happened.

  Maybe Megan’s disappearance has knocked the stuffing out of all of them. With Evan gone to his mother’s, Dash still recovering, and the ponies sold, the real life of the farm seems to be disappearing. You just can’t get that worked up over chickens and goats.

  Nell greets Mr. Walsh and his daughters. She opens Lindy’s stall door, clips a lead rope to her halter.

  “Lindy’s easy to load. And Lucky will follow her.”

  Lindy walks up to the truck, stops, head high, looking around. Nell puts her hand on the pony’s neck and waits. Lucky neighs at her, kicking his stall door.

  Nell strokes Lindy, gets her voice under control.

  “C’mon, girl.”

  Lindy looks Nell square in the eye, sighs, and walks into the trailer. Nell ties the lead to the hook in the wall and returns to the barn. Lucky doesn’t pause to take one last look around, but trots into the trailer, neck arched, inspecting Lindy as soon as he’s beside her again.

  The girls load the saddles and bridles into the cab of the pickup and Mr. Walsh hands Nell an envelope.

  “Would you be sure Mr. Alsop gets this?”

  “Be gentle,” Nell says. “They’re used to . . . ”

  “They’ll have a good home with us.”

  As they drive away the ponies neigh, haunting sounds that hang in the air. Those cries cut something out of Nell, carving up her childhood, Megan’s childhood. To distract herself, she looks inside the envelope. Fifteen crisp fifty-dollar bills.

  She heads into the house intending to put the envelope on the kitchen table and leave but instead finds herself drawn upstairs. She pushes open the door to Megan’s room.

  The bed is neatly made, the curtains pulled back, but the room is all wrong. It doesn’t even smell the same. The things Megan loved are gone, taken to her mother’s when she moved. The things she’s outgrown, like Nell herself, are here. Dolls and trolls and Marguerite Henry books; discarded bits of junk that had once been treasured.

  There’s a copy of the picture Nell found in Billy’s wallet stuck in a corner of the mirror. The four of them: boxes full of apples at their feet, the ladders behind them reaching into the trees. Sunburned, lit by the raking October light. Billy’s hand, Nell notices now, twined in Megan’s red hair.

  Taped next to Megan’s bed is Nell’s favorite snapshot. She pulls it off the wall, peels the tape away.

  Billy, ten years old, stands on the roof of the shed, wearing a pair of homemade wings. A hawk sails above him, tipping her wings in what looks to be invitation.

  How they had wanted to ride the thermals coming off the water, drift in the currents, creatures of the air. These were the visions that filled their dreams, waking and sleeping. Aloft without the encumbrance of harness and armature, a bird with a boy’s body and sight and consciousness, a girl with the skill to dive through the air, skim the surface of the lake, rise with a single wing beat, roll, and play in the sweet pine scent lifting off the trees.

  She slips the picture inside her shirt, takes Trevor’s yellow cup out of her pocket, sets it on the dresser. She doesn’t have the guts to give it to Asa directly, or leave it on the drain board with the other one. Maybe he’ll find it here among Megan’s things.

  She runs down the stairs to find Asa sitting at the kitchen table. She hadn’t heard his truck, hadn’t heard the back door open and close.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he says.

  “Done what?”

  “Gone into Megan’s room.”

  “I didn’t know . . . ”

  “Did you look inside? How much did you take?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The money.”

  “I didn’t take the money. I put it on the table.”

  “There’s fifty dollars missing.”

  “I didn’t take your money.”

  “Where is it, then?”

  “Where were you? Why didn’t I hear you drive up?”

  She moves toward the door. His chair scrapes back, blocking her way.

  “Get out of my way, Mr. Alsop. I have to go home.”

  His hands are shaking; she can see that now. And he smells of whiskey.

  “You want to join us for supper tonight?” Nell asks, trying to steady her voice. “My mother’s making pork chops. You’d be welcome.”

  He stands. Pushes his chair in. Runs a hand through his hair, looking down at the worn linoleum.

  “I’m making cornbread,” Nell says. “My grandma’s recipe. It’s good with honey.”

  He can’t look at her.

  “You tell your mother thank you. Some other time.”

  He heads out the door to the barn.

  Nell watches him go, sweat running cold down the small of her back.

  What Asa Alsop couldn’t bring himself to tell Nell Flynn was that the police had called. A girl had turned up near Tupper Lake. He drove three hours northeast to identify the body. The girl had been stripped and dragged through a stubbled cornfield, her neck broken.

  It was not Megan.

  Megan’s disappearance gets folded into the story of that winter and spring with the war dragging on, escalating student and civic violence, and, in Geneva itself, the closing of not one but two factories and the Army Depot. Geneva Cutlery shutters their building, following Sampson’s Wallpaper and Paste Company south to the Carolinas and cheaper wages. Burned-out street lamps go unrepaired, storefronts empty, their windows boarded shut.

  In late April the investigation goes quiet. The police are no longer a presence in and around the high school. The flyers the Alsops put up all over town are torn and faded, or wrecked by wind and rain and snow.

  Rob Chandler is sent to private school in Vermont. His parents put their house on the market and move to Syracuse.

  There are still no suspects; no one has been taken into custody. Even the rumors have quieted down. Three weeks earlier, a kid found Megan’s schoolbooks when the last of the snowbanks melted on Hamilton Street, her usual route home, too ruined to provide clues.

  Evan Alsop meets with a speech therapist twice a week. His stutter has grown worse. He avoids speaking as much as possible, hates his mother’s apartment in town; hates her for taking him away from the farm and his father and his dog. Lives for Friday nights when he can go home.

  Maeve Alsop dresses for work each morning, packs a lunch for Evan, walks him to the bus stop, before heading to work at the bank. She is frozen, sleepwalking through her days. She no longer answers the door when Father O’Rourke comes to call.

  Asa Alsop continues to hope for his daughter’s return, continues to leave offerings for Maeve and Evan, saves egg money to buy Evan a baseball mitt for his eleventh birthday. He turns his back on his church, on God, but keeps faith with his inner conviction that Megan has run away and one day will return.

  Asa grew up during the Depression; the War almost knocked him flat, and farm work is a daily struggle. He managed to hang on through Maeve leaving him, but without Megan and Evan under his roof, he’s dredging up reserves he didn’t know he had. He knows he’s a fool to wait for Maeve to come to her senses, but patience seems to be the last thing he has left.

  He avoids town. A furious energy spills around him wherever he goes. He works well past twilight every night, like a man possessed, plowing his fields with a feeling of sick dread. Hawks circle overhead, diving and feeding on the mice and moles and rabbits the plow makes homeless.

  In a month of Sundays, he clears four
more fields for hay and timothy. He has dairymen who will buy all the fodder he can grow. He will prove to Maeve that he can change with the times; he will save his father’s farm.

  Nell rides her bike to the garage first thing Saturday morning when she knows Billy won’t be there. Finds Harlow sitting at his desk drinking coffee, reading the sports section. She sits across from him, says no thanks when he offers coffee, trying to gauge his reaction to seeing her. Calm. Neutral. Not like the mess inside her stomach.

  She has her answer. But the way he looks . . . Shit. Just business today, she reminds herself. You’re nobody special.

  “What’s up?”

  “Billy’s nightmares are getting worse.”

  He folds the paper, waits.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she says.

  “Stay with him, when you can.”

  “It’s most nights.”

  “Yeah. I figured.”

  “Do you have nightmares?”

  “Nah.”

  “Don’t protect me.”

  “Why not?”

  “God, Harlow, how do I talk to you about this if you’re trying to keep me safe every minute?”

  “I’m supposed to know the answer to that?”

  “I don’t know where to begin, how to ask you—or Billy—and it feels damn strange to act like it never happened. I know it changed you. I know it about wrecked my father. And now Billy. I’m not blind.”

  He’s quiet for so long she wonders if he’s angry, if she has crossed the line into unforgivable territory. If so, too bad, she needs to know.

  “I’ve worked hard not to drag Vietnam home with me. You see that weight on Billy? Maybe I got off easy.”

  “But . . . ”

  “I’m not gonna unpack that bag for you, Nell. Not for anybody.”

  “How will I ever understand it then?”