Fall of the Birds

by Bradford Morrow

  We left early the next morning, under a salmon-and-puce-sunrise sky. Understandably, Cate was distressed by the idea of having to leave her unhappy family of finches behind, but Laurel’s memorial could not be postponed. During our long drive through Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and into Midcoast Maine we sighted no birds whatsoever. I was reminded of that first drive I took over to the Warwick Nursery last spring—a lifetime ago—when all I saw was a couple of scavenging crows. Now I would have given most everything I’ve got just to lay eyes on a pair of blue-black crows loitering over roadkill, strange as that is to confess. Nicole and Ben couldn’t have been kinder to us. We must have presented ourselves as quite a weary, saddened pair, Cate and I. Caitlin, in fact, fared better than her father. She at least managed to carry on a conversation with her aunt and uncle that first night at the dinner table. She asked how her cousin Emily was liking her sophomore year in college so far, and answered their questions about how she felt to be a senior in high school. I didn’t have the strength of mind or character to mask the troubled depths of what I was feeling, about Laurel and about the absence of the birds, and sat silent through most of the meal, too overwhelmed to feel self-conscious about my asocial behavior.

  Sitting with Ben on the porch afterward, sharing a glass of vintage port he uncorked especially for the occasion, he asked what my plans were when Caitlin graduated next year and trundled off to university.

  “No idea,” was all I could think to say.

  Ben knew that my parents had long since passed away and that being an only child meant I was, aside from Caitlin, quite alone in the world. He said, gently, “You know, you could always move up here to Camden, if you liked. I’m sure you could get a transfer, since your company’s national. Be nice for me and Nicole to have you near. And this bird thing that’s going on everywhere doesn’t seem to be quite as bad here, for some reason. Not yet, at least.”

  “Thanks, Ben,” I said, looking at his concerned, genial face. “I’ll give it some thought.”

  “Do,” he said. “Nicole and I’ve been talking about it ever since you were up here last. It’s a good place to live. I’m sure Laurel must have told you that a thousand times.”

  She had. It was only through inertia, you could say, that we never left the Hudson Valley. Her ex-husband, Charlie, worked in Poughkeepsie, and when they went their separate ways, she stayed on to spare Caitlin the disruption of moving away from her friends and school, on top of a messy divorce. The ex disappeared into the wallpaper—went out west, she’d heard, neither requesting visitation rights nor honoring the child support he was ordered to pay for his daughter’s welfare. Cate was nine when Laurel and I met and fell in love. Ten when we married. After Laurel sold their house and they moved into mine, Charlie was never spoken of again. Oh, sometimes when I was feeling paranoid, I imagined him showing up at our door unannounced. But it never happened. The point being that life went along nicely until Laurel got the diagnosis. We’d made a real home of my house adjacent to the woodland that Laurel and I so loved to hike. Any conversations about moving to Maine to be nearer to her sister and childhood haunts didn’t evolve into anything serious. Maybe we’d one day retire up there, we imagined—again, before the diagnosis and the death sentence it engendered.

  In the morning, after an unusually deep slumber, I came downstairs to find a big breakfast in the works. Pancakes with fresh-picked blueberries, bacon and eggs, strong black coffee. To one who didn’t know better, it might have looked like a celebration was getting under way rather than a small memorial service. After we ate, we dressed—Caitlin wore a necklace her mother had passed down to her, a great-grandmother’s pendant on a silver chain—and set out for the cemetery. There we were joined by the pastor who had presided over the funeral, as well as a smattering of folks who’d known Laurel before she moved away from Camden. Must have been a dozen or so of us gathered on what could not have been a more perfect late-summer day. The air was soft, with just a whisper of sea salt. The sky was an immaculate robin’s-egg blue. I couldn’t help but think how much Laurel would have loved to be standing here with us, breathing this flawless air, smelling the ocean breeze, gazing out over the village of the dead with its humble white stones, its mown lawn, its flowerbeds, and all the overarching trees planted generations ago to shelter this sacrosanct if far-too-silent place. What is a proper graveyard where birds, oblivious to human mortality, aren’t merrily singing away? If God’s eye is on the sparrow, then why is the sparrow mute?

  My eyes must have been tearing as the minister began his generic prayer for Laurel and all the departed who had ever lived. Certainly, the scape before me seemed to waver, liquidly and gentle-edged. Like the last time I stood here, all heads were bowed and eyes were closed except for mine, though of course I meant no disrespect to Laurel or the others. I stared at the rectangular patch of grass beneath which my wife lay and imagined her not as the bones and desiccated flesh she surely was, but rather as the vivacious, sharp-witted, wise-hearted woman I first met not quite a decade earlier.

  Then something caught my eye. From the periphery of my vision, not a dream but not fully real either, I glimpsed a small incandescent ball of light dancing about in the bushes. It was blindingly blue against the many hues of green. In the time it took my heart to skip a beat it revealed itself, airborne on spry, swift wings, and alighted on Laurel’s headstone.

  The indigo bunting again. The same bird who had made himself visible to me in June. Small-billed, stocky, terse-tailed. As before, he cocked his head and gave me a curious look, not indifferent but not burdened by human concerns, either. It was as if I was being viewed by someone from another consciousness and cosmos altogether. While the group around me continued to pray, I offered the bird a hesitant nod. A soft beam of light reflected off the wet surface of his jet-black eye. He blinked once, twice. Had we a language with which to communicate, I would have asked him Caitlin’s questions about the birds and their plight. I would have asked for news of Laurel—where was she truly? How was she faring? And I would have asked, What’s to become of our daughter? What are you here to tell me? He blinked a third time before spiriting off into the ancient trees, out of sight. I glanced at Caitlin, caught her staring at me with a complex, quizzical expression that reminded me of her mother. Deep and hidden in the heavy leaves, the bunting rustled. Both of us started when the bird cried a harsh, high-pitched farewell. I took a slow, deep breath and tried hard to reassure myself that some of the best parts of life leave us but are never fully lost. No, never fully.

  The author would like to thank Vint Virga, animal behaviorist extraordinare, Fred Baumgarten, one of the best birders I know, and Corey Everett, the most literary insurance adjuster out there, for their expert advice.

  A Biography of Bradford Morrow

  Bradford Morrow is the award-winning author of six novels and numerous short stories, essays, poetry collections, and children’s books, as well as the founding editor of the celebrated literary journal Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award, as well as other honors.

  Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1951, Morrow grew up outside Denver in Littleton, Colorado, where his parents had settled after growing up in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and Oak Creek, Colorado, respectively. Morrow’s maternal grandparents were farmers from Nebraska who eventually migrated to Colorado after losing their farm during the Depression, and his paternal grandfather was a doctor who came to Colorado to set up his practice on the frontier. His family instilled a spirit of adventure and curiosity in Morrow, traits that would be evident in his writing as well as his peripatetic travels and career choices.

  Morrow left home at fifteen, traveling first to Honduras to participate in a summer program sponsored by the American Medical Association, where he worked as a medical assistant helping to inoculate thousands of impoverished, rural Hondurans. He
then spent his senior year of high school as a foreign exchange student in Italy, earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Colorado, and spent time in Paris. For over a decade after setting off on his own, Morrow lived an itinerant life, moving back and forth from Europe to the States. He then spent five years in California, where he met the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and finally settled for good in New York City. Before becoming a fulltime writer and editor, Morrow worked as a bookseller, jazz musician, and translator, and attended graduate school at Yale. His first book-length work was a bibliography of Wyndham Lewis, published in 1978.

  In 1981, Morrow launched the literary journal Conjunctions. His taste, passion, and editorial savvy quickly attracted a diverse slate of contributing writers and editors, including Chinua Achebe, John Ashbery, and Joyce Carol Oates. The novelist Robert Coover has called the publication “without exception, America’s leading literary journal, one of the greatest such magazines in the literary history of the country.”

  After years of contributing to anthologies and supporting the work of others in his role as editor, Morrow published his first novel, Come Sunday, in 1988. Morrow’s debut set the tone for his later works with its rich historical allusion, globe-spanning plotlines, lyrical prose, and illuminating philosophical exploration. Morrow’s second novel, The Almanac Branch (1991), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and highlighted the author’s interest in the complex interior lives of his characters. The tone of his work is often Gothic, especially in Giovanni’s Gift (1997), which was partly inspired by the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  Morrow meticulously researches his fiction: For his diptych consisting of Trinity Fields (1995) and Ariel’s Crossing (2002), the author interviewed special ops veterans from the U.S. engagement in Laos, students involved in the Columbia University riots, and Manhattan Project scientists, among others. He even lived for a time near Los Alamos—where atomic weapons were first tested—to better understand the characters in his sweeping historical sagas of American life in the atomic age.

  Aside from his work as an editor and writer, Bradford Morrow has taught writing and literature throughout his career, which has included positions at Brown, Columbia, Princeton, and the Naropa Institute. He currently lives in New York and is a professor of literature at Bard College, which sponsors Conjunctions.

  “Lois Hoffman and Ernest Morrow, my parents-to-be, standing in front of the Luscombe my father flew them in on their first date in 1949. My father was a pilot and the owner of a Harley-Davidson that he regularly drove from Oak Creek, Colorado, over the continental divide to Denver, where Lois lived at the time, an all-day drive on his cycle.”

  “Age one, striking something of an authorial pose with the forefinger to the cheek. I remember those curtains, very Western in theme with the cattle and other cowboy imagery.”

  “Looking at this photograph, it’s really those narrative Western-themed curtains behind me that I find most interesting now. I remember staring at them and inventing stories in the drapery. This was in our house on Cove Way in Denver, Colorado.”

  “The H.M.S. Pinafore outfit that I wore on one of my two youthful outings as a thespian (the other being Gilbert & Sullivan’s other workhorse operetta, The Mikado). My mother made the costume from scratch, right down to the epaulettes and medals. I still have this outfit in a box somewhere and the bookcase, too. Littleton, Colorado.”

  “Me as a grinning Cub Scout in Littleton, Colorado. I would go on to become an Eagle Scout and must confess that the Boy Scouts at that time—in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains where we went camping, sometimes in the dead of winter, and hiking through difficult terrain, learning the flora and fauna, as well as all sorts of real survival skills—is a part of my youth I now cherish.

  “I’m standing here with a group of beautiful young children somewhere in the mountains south of Comayagua, Honduras, in 1966, when I was serving as a medical assistant for Amigos de las Américas. This Peace-Corps-like experience in the second-poorest country in the hemisphere (after Haiti, at the time) absolutely changed my life. When this photo was taken, I had just finished inoculating the entire school body of this little village against smallpox and other diseases.”

  “On the beach near Genoa, Italy, visiting the host family with whom I spent my senior year in high school when I was a foreign exchange student living in Cuneo, not far from there. I lived with the Delpiano family: Minu and Aldo, my host parents, and Dario, Andrea, and the youngest brother, Davide, who’s sitting here beside me, in 1970 or so.”

  “In Littleton, Colorado, visiting my parent’s house from the University of Colorado in Boulder. From the left: my beloved Grandfather Hoffman, who was a farmer in Red Cloud, Nebraska, until he lost everything in the Great Depression; my mother holding his hand; me in the middle with a pensive or else depressed look on my face (basically my mind must have been elsewhere); my equally beloved grandmother, Jenny Hoffman, to whom I attribute some of my storytelling skills; and my sister Deborah. Around 1972.”

  “In my early twenties, camping somewhere in the Colorado mountains.”

  “With the legendary James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions, at a reception at the Gotham Book Mart in New York. The first issue of Conjunctions was a festschrift in honor of Laughlin, who published everyone from Ezra Pound to Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas to John Hawkes, Ferlinghetti and Rexroth, Patchen and Bowles, William Carlos Williams, and so many important modernists and post-modernists. 1981.”

  “Bird-watching in the highlands of Scotland, on the North Sea. Late 1980s.”

  “This is the barn on my uncle Henry and aunt Helen Rehder’s ranch near Steamboat Springs. The ranch served as the setting for Giovanni’s Gift, and this photograph was taken by me when I went to visit them at the height of their being harassed in the middle of the night by people who were trying to get them to sell their ranch so that it could be developed. Mid-1990s.”

  “Me standing next to a low-rider car with an absolutely superb flame paintjob in the small village of Chimayó, New Mexico, where some of Trinity Fields and Ariel’s Crossing is set. With one of my trusty Boorum & Pease journals under my arm. Mid-1990s.”

  “Visiting the highly restricted site of the White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, where the world’s first nuclear bomb was detonated at 5:29:45 Mountain War Time, on July 16, 1945. The obelisk in the background stands on the precise spot where the world entered the nuclear age. Taken when I was working on Trinity Fields, 1994.”

  “I write my books sitting at the kitchen table of my rural farmhouse in upstate New York. This was a photograph taken of my worktable while completing the manuscript of Trinity Fields in 1994.”

  “Me in front of Franz Kafka’s house on Golden Lane in Prague. This was during my first research trip to the Czech Republic to work on my seventh novel, The Prague Sonata. Late 1990s.”

  “Some of my brilliant Conjunctions staff in the New York office, where the journal is edited: Eimear Ryan, Jessica Loudis, J. W. McCormack, and Jedediah Berry (whose first novel, The Manual of Detection, came out to widespread critical praise in the past couple of years). Sitting with us is my dear friend and hero, Barney Rosset, founder and editor of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review. Turtle, the Conjunctions cat, is wiggling out of my arm, meantime. Summer 2010.”

  “A photograph of me walking with my all-time favorite cat, Woody, on the second to last day of his life, at my place upstate. Woody was like no other being, animal or person, I have ever met. I honestly feel that in many ways he was my spiritual superior. He’s buried now in the garden along with Grace, another magisterial feline whom it was my honor to hang out with. November 2004.”

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into
any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 2011 by Bradford Morrow

  cover design by Andrea C. Uva

  978-1-4532-3933-9

  Published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY BRADFORD MORROW

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