The Absence of Sparrows

by Kurt Kirchmeier

  Organ music filled the room as I picked up a hymn book. It’s funny; whenever there’s a church scene in a movie or on a TV show, it’s always a little old lady playing the organ. Usually she’s got big Coke-bottle glasses on and is wearing a knit sweater of some kind, and she always looks like she belongs there, like the bench was made especially for her. Our church didn’t have a little old lady. Ours had a giant of a man with a long thick beard and huge Paul Bunyan hands. By rights he should have been out in the woods with an ax, felling trees like a plaid-wrapped tornado, but instead he was sporting slacks and a pale blue dress shirt, his meaty fingers gentle on the ivory keys. The bench looked comical beneath him, and the organ seemed strangely miniaturized, as if he’d sat down to bang away at Schroeder’s toy piano.

  The big man was Pastor Nolan’s son, Patrick, and though you never would have known it to see the two of them together (Pastor Nolan wasn’t very big himself), if you got up close and really looked, you’d see that their eyes were exactly the same hazel color and that their noses were a match as well. I’m pretty good at spotting distinguishing features like that. I think it’s probably because I draw a lot, and with drawing you have to get the proportions just right, otherwise nothing looks like it’s supposed to.

  Pastor Nolan’s son was an artist, too—not a drawer like me, but a painter, a really well-known painter. He mostly did nature-scapes, usually with animals like foxes or cougars or wolves. Especially wolves. There was an art gallery in Paulson that actually had one whole section devoted to Patrick’s work. We took a school trip there once to see it. Most of my classmates seemed bored by the exhibit, but I thought it was awesome. They even gave us all a free five-by-seven print at the end of the tour, of a lynx in a snowstorm. I got a cheap frame for mine and hung it up on the wall near my closet.

  Mom and Dad both said that if I kept at it, my art could end up in a gallery someday, too. I wasn’t so sure. As far as I could tell, they didn’t put pencil drawings up in galleries, and the only paintbrush I’d ever held was for a crappy watercolor I did way back in first grade.

  The hymn we were singing was one I’d sung before. I knew most of the words, so I only had to look down at the book occasionally. Mostly I was looking at everyone else, checking the pews for other kids I knew. Kyle Brewer and his parents weren’t there, so I guessed they either were “off-again” or had maybe packed up and left.

  I was glad to see that some of my classmates were still around. Claude Lafleur was two rows over, sitting with his mom, who was always one of the loudest (and best) singers in church. I waited for a moment until he looked my way, at which point we exchanged subtle salutes. That was kind of our thing, and had been since we were little on account of the mini green army battles we so often staged in Claude’s huge sandbox. Saluting was a show of respect from one general to another. Claude was a short kid and liked to speak French on the battlefield, which always made him sound sort of maniacal. All he needed was one of those crazy bicorne hats and he could have been a modern-day Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Sitting in the pew just in front of Claude was Jeremy Kaskill, who was known as the kid who would follow through on pretty much any dare, no matter how crazy or dangerous. He cracked three ribs once while bumper hitching our school bus just before Christmas break, which you would think might have made him reconsider his risk-taking ways, but it never did. A few months later he lost six teeth while attempting a backflip on his shiny new BMX. The ramp he’d been using was subsequently confiscated and burned by Constable Sheery. Jeremy and I got along just fine at school, but we didn’t hang out together or anything. That was pretty much the case with most of the kids I knew. I had friends; they just weren’t full-time friends.

  Stacia Pittman was at church as well. Stacia was in Pete’s grade, not mine, but everyone knew who she was because of her recent growth spurt. She’d gotten so used to boys staring at her that I think she’d developed sort of a Spidey-sense about it. She turned her head and caught me immediately.

  I quickly looked down, feeling my face redden with embarrassment. Then the whispers and gasps started.

  For a second I thought that I was the cause, that my wandering eyes had earned me the ire of not only Stacia Pittman but of every other girl and woman in the vicinity, which of course was ridiculous. There was no way more than a few of them could’ve noticed, and even if they had, why would they care? I was just a boy looking at a girl—nothing earth-shattering about that.

  The one thing that they definitely would have noticed, though—and cared about as well—was the sudden darkening of the church.

  “Uh-oh,” said Pete.

  I belatedly looked up through the church’s huge skylight windows, and into a now-familiar coal-smoke darkness.

  Some of the whispers grew to shouts then, but not before the loud and discordant plink of several misstruck organ keys momentarily silenced the room. The hymn ended just like that, on those last few unfortunate notes, completely out of tune, and even before I looked over at Patrick and the organ, I knew exactly why.

  The big man on his miniature bench had turned to glass.

  Chaos erupted through the whole room, which, due to the loss of power, was even darker now than it had been a moment before. People started yelling and screaming and running down the aisles. Not Mom, though. Mom just slowly sat back down, quiet as a mouse, as if stillness alone might keep her safe in the blackness. She’d been having such a good day.

  “Easy now,” said Mrs. Crandall to anyone close enough to hear her. “Let’s all stay calm now. Let’s all just breathe.” Maybe it was because she’d gone through this all before, or maybe it was just because she was used to the dark now that Mr. Crandall had returned and didn’t like the lights on, but for whatever reason, the old woman’s voice was as steady as a rock.

  I actually did hear Mom take a breath in response to her words, and then another one, but although her mind might be seeking the calm that Mrs. Crandall had asked for, her body had other ideas. The long deep breaths seemed to trigger a series of short and shallow ones. All at once Mom was hyperventilating.

  “Mom?” I said. “Mom, are you okay?”

  Her eyes were wide, her chest rising and falling too quickly.

  “C’mon,” said Mrs. Crandall, looking at Dad now. “Let’s get her downstairs, away from all this commotion.”

  Downstairs was where everyone always went after Sunday service was over. They would put out coffee and baked goods and everyone would just stand around chatting and laughing for a while before going home. We usually only stayed for fifteen minutes or so. I don’t think Dad ever really wanted to stay at all (the reason he went to church had more to do with faith than it did community) but felt like we should just for appearance’s sake. That, or he couldn’t resist the butter tarts, which had always been his favorite, and Pete’s favorite as well. My personal weakness was for the peanut butter and marshmallow squares.

  Together, Dad and Mrs. Crandall managed to get Mom out into the main aisle, and from there to the stairwell itself. Pete and I followed behind, or at least we started to. I only made it as far as the end of our pew before I glanced up at the skylight above, where a section of blue sky now competed for space with the darkness.

  I’d seen this all before, of course—sunlight returning as blackness moved off—but this time the illusion of safety was undone by the knowledge that even in the house of God, we weren’t really safe at all.

  I think Pastor Nolan might have come to the same conclusion himself, as he loosened his white-knuckled grip on his leather-bound Bible and simply let it fall to the floor, where it landed with the force of a brick, the cover closing with an eerie finality, like a hardening layer of snow in the wake of an avalanche.

  I looked down at it, that huge volume, and wondered about the colors of the page markers left within and what they meant. Had the pastor marked certain passages for certain people? Like maybe blue markers for Charlie Watts and orange for Uncle Dean? Would we ever know?

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nbsp; I stared at our white-robed minister and waited for him to say something, anything, but when he finally opened his mouth, only two words came out.

  “Oh, Patrick…” he said, as if his son were six years old and had just spilled milk on the kitchen floor. Patrick still had his hands over the keys, his shiny black fingers just brushing the brilliant white ivory.

  Pastor Nolan finally went over to him, and somehow found enough room on the little bench to sit down beside him.

  “What are you doing?” said Pete, who had come back to get me. He grabbed my arm and gave it a yank. “C’mon.”

  I allowed myself to be pulled, my eyes sweeping the room as I went. Patrick wasn’t alone, I realized. Poor Stacia was sobbing hysterically, her mom on one side of her and her dad on the other, both of them now as hard and immovable as the heavy wood pews beneath their glass bodies.

  “Come back!” she was saying, tears streaming down her face. “Come back! Come back!” She yanked at her father’s arm as if trying to force him to stand, and when that didn’t work, she grabbed her mom by the shoulders in a futile attempt to shake her back to reality. It was one of the saddest and strangest things I would ever see, and I was relieved when someone finally stepped in and pulled Stacia away, wrapping her up in a heartbreaking hug. It was her aunt, I think, or maybe a family friend.

  I couldn’t believe that both of her parents had been taken at once. It seemed cruel beyond all reason, and it forced me to face the possibility that the same thing could happen to me. I guess I’d already known that it could, but only in a distant way. Seeing it play out right in front of me made it all seem suddenly real. Too real.

  I had to look away. Only then did I notice that old Deiter Brooks, who coached high school football, had turned to glass as well. A young woman, who I knew by appearance but not by name, looked to be the fifth and final victim.

  Mom’s breathing was almost normal again by the time I got downstairs. Dad and Mrs. Crandall both looked relieved, and I guess Pete did, too, but he also seemed a bit annoyed, at me, maybe, for lagging behind, but maybe not. I couldn’t help but notice that there wasn’t a single butter tart to be had.

  TWENTY-SIX

  We left the church as soon as Mom felt up to it. Mrs. Crandall offered to drive us home in her nut-brown Lincoln Town Car, which was definitely the biggest car in town, and possibly the biggest I’d ever seen. We were just about to pile in when I saw that there were crows outside. A few flew off with strident caws as soon as I noticed them, but one remained, perched on the church’s slide-letter sign like a black-winged gargoyle—a very disheveled-looking gargoyle. There were feathers sticking out this way and that, and a few of them missing from its tail as well. It looked like it had flown through a hurricane, or had just returned from some perilous journey to who knows where.

  “Look,” I said to Mom, but her head was already turning. That’s how it is with longtime birders; they notice birds even when they’re not trying to. Their brains just become wired to seek out bird shapes in any environment. The crow stared back at us for a moment, then pumped its wings like a bellows and scolded us roundly before hopping to the end of the sign and launching itself into the air. It only made it about ten or twelve feet before falling back to the ground.

  Mom took a step toward it. “I think it’s hurt.”

  “C’mon, you two,” Dad told us.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “It’s only a crow,” Dad continued. “C’mon.”

  “We can’t just leave it if it’s hurt,” Mom replied. She seemed to have forgotten that just minutes before she’d been hyperventilating in a room full of panicked churchgoers.

  “For heaven’s sake, Jane!” said Dad. “I think we have bigger things to worry about right now.”

  “Its eyes aren’t blue,” Mom went on, ignoring him entirely, “so it’s definitely not a juvenile.”

  Unfledged juveniles can sometimes look scruffy, so that’s why she would’ve been looking at the bird’s eyes. Unfledged was just another way of saying “not ready to fly yet,” which this bird obviously should have been. The crow remained where it had landed a moment earlier, in the grass along a hedgerow. It continued to watch us warily.

  Mom tried to get closer but the bird seemed to be able to hop all right. It moved to the edge of the grass where the hedgerow met the sidewalk.

  “I’m sure it’s fine, dear,” said Mrs. Crandall. “It probably just doesn’t want to fly right now.”

  Mom still didn’t look convinced, so Dad took it upon himself to find out one way or another, and he ran at the bird and shouted while clapping his hands.

  “Go on!” he yelled. “Get!”

  The crow cawed and took an awkward running start down the sidewalk before flapping its shabby-looking wings and attempting liftoff for a second time. This time it succeeded in staying airborne, but only just. It looked like a bird that was trying to fly while carrying something too heavy, only there wasn’t anything in the crow’s talons at all. It was flying solo. I watched as it struggled to make it first over the church and then over the fence and the row of pine trees beyond, at which point it disappeared from view.

  Mom shot Dad a harsh glare. “I don’t think that was really necessary.”

  “Let’s go home” was Dad’s only reply.

  And so we did, the four of us piling into Mrs. Crandall’s car without another word. My thoughts kept going back and forth between the haggard crow and the image of Patrick on his bench. Crows were sometimes seen as bad omens, but they were also considered lucky. It all depended on where you looked or who you asked.

  That’s the thing with crows and ravens: The more you learn about them, the more you realize just how much there is to learn about them. It isn’t just facts and observations like it is with so many other birds; there are legends, too, and entire mythologies. I did a school report on them one time and it ended up being fifteen pages long even though our teacher said it only had to be five. There was just too much stuff that I felt like I couldn’t leave out.

  Native Americans had dozens of stories about ravens and crows, some of them making the birds out to be troublemakers, while others depicted them as saviors or symbols of strength and wisdom. There was one story about naughty kids being turned into crows (though I couldn’t remember why), and another about a rainbow- colored crow that brought fire to keep people warm, charring its own feathers black in the process.

  In Celtic and Irish mythology, gods and goddesses sometimes took on the form of a crow or raven (often on the battlefield), and in Norse mythology, the god Odin relied on his two pet ravens, Huginn and Muninn (the names meant “thought” and “desire”), to fly all over the world and bring him back important information.

  There were stories about the clever black birds from almost every place and culture around the world, but probably the most common legend I found was the one about crows and ravens carrying human souls from this world into the next one, as if the border that ran between realities was no more an obstacle to the feathered couriers than a fence between neighboring yards.

  Did old man Crandall’s soul hitch a ride with a crow? What about Patrick’s? I remembered Pete talking about the latest regressions and how someone said that crows were “feasting like kings” on the dead in fields. Was that their reward for bringing souls over? An endless buffet of corpses?

  Maybe the blurry figure in the photograph wasn’t able to steal souls directly, and so instead was simply reaching out to mark which ones to take and to prime the body through glassification. Maybe the soul would separate from the body then and drift free, like a boat cut loose from its moorings.

  Mrs. Crandall slowed to a stop at the end of our driveway. Mom said thanks and Dad told her if she ever needed anything, just to let him know. She promised she would, and then she drove off. I looked down at my good black shoes, scuffed now, just as Pete had predicted.

  “What about Uncle Dean?” I asked. “He didn’t get a proper funeral.” I was ignoring the fact
that he wouldn’t have gotten a proper funeral anyway, since Pastor Nolan had only planned to say a few words, not deliver a full-fledged eulogy. There wasn’t time for those anymore. Not here or anywhere else.

  “We’ll have a moment of silence for him later,” said Dad, “and remember how he made us all laugh and smile.”

  “And I’ll make shepherd’s pie when the power comes back on,” said Mom. “That was always his favorite.”

  “I’d like that,” said Dad.

  “Me too,” I added.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Here we are,” said Mom, putting her big glass casserole dish down on the dining room table, which she’d set with one extra placement in honor of Uncle Dean. We were also using the good utensils and had candles lit like we did on special occasions.

  “Should we say grace?” she asked. That was also something we usually reserved for Christmas and Easter and Thanksgiving.

  “What’s the point?” asked Pete. “Everyone was praying at church and look what happened there.” He was annoyed and had been since the moment we got home. He’d been told that it was a day for remembrance and that he could have his radio back tomorrow.

  Dad glared. “You know, your mother went to a lot of trouble to make this nice meal for us. The least you could do is not try to ruin it.”

  “It’s fine, Logan,” Mom said. She’d been doing a lot better since we got home from church, mostly, I think, because she’d been busy preparing and cooking.

  “The hell it is,” Dad disagreed.

  “I wasn’t trying to ruin anything,” Pete argued. “I was just saying—”

  “You’re always just saying something,” Dad replied. “But someday, son, you’re going to have to learn that it isn’t always in your best interest to open your mouth. There are times in our lives when we just have to bite our tongues, regardless of how mad or frustrated we might feel. That’s just the way it is. That’s reality.”