Winter Birds

by Jim Grimsley

Genres: Family Life; Sagas

Synopsis

Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. On a snowy Thanksgiving day in North Carolina, a dreamy eight-year-old is pushed headlong into the adult world by a violent quarrel between his parents. Jim Grimsley's brilliant first novel unfolds in a strikingly unconventional way--as the boy tells himself his own story. A shattering story of heartbreak, violence, and the endurance of the spirit. "Tell everyone."--Dorothy Allison, author of BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA.

Release date: February 13, 2012

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 224

Sample

Out past the clapboard house in the weeds by the riverbank your brothers are killing birds. By the river flocks of wrens, starlings and a few faded female cardinals have gathered to feed on the leavings in the cornfield, and your brothers lie hidden in the weeds with their shared gun, waiting to burst open bird skulls with their copper BBs. At every shot you can hear your brothers laughing.

You brush bits of powdered grass from your fingers. You dread going to the river while your brothers are there, so you wait till you see them walking home on the road that divides the fields, three small figures swaggering through the dirt. They handle the BB gun carelessly, trading it back and forth, each slinging the barrel over his shoulder like a hunter in a frontier television show. You walk toward them over furrows of earth littered with cornstalks made soft by rain. By the edge of the dirt road you meet them. They are shouting your name, asking if dinner is ready yet. Grove, the youngest and littlest, grabs the tail of your coat and turns you around. His swollen arm is still in the pressure bandage. Watching him, you are glad you have no hurt places on you today. The gladness makes you ashamed. Grove’s face, turned toward yours, is bright and happy in spite of his arm. “Will it snow today?” he asks. “I never saw snow before.”

“Maybe so,” you answer, watching the clouds overhead, hanging close over the treetops, heavy with a load of something waiting to fall. “The weatherman didn’t say for sure. He only said it was likely.”

Grove turns to Allen. “Tell Danny about the bird I killed. It was a little old wren wasn’t it, Allen Ray?”

“Maybe it was a wren.”

“I shot it right clean through the head, Danny!”

You do not smile but simply watch Allen, who shifts his feet. Before you can say anything, Allen flushes, as if he can already hear you scolding him. “You don’t need to give me that high-and-mighty look. It didn’t hurt Grove to shoot that gun. There ain’t enough kick to it to bruise a spider.”

“Does your arm hurt, Grove?”

“I don’t care about this stupid arm, I hit that teeny bird right in the head.”

“Probably it was a buzzard,” Duck says, scowling toward the river, where the birds are chattering. “It was so far away you couldn’t tell what it was. Probably it’s not even dead.”

“I saw it fall from way up in the air. I did too! You’re jealous because you ain’t killed one bird since we moved here, and you wasted a hundred-fifty BBs.”

You tell them to hush. From the house you hear the sound you have come to escape. Duck, angry, says, “Don’t tell me what to do, Mr. Big Shot.”

“I said hush and be still.”

He would go on arguing, you think, except he sees you are looking at the house across the field. They all fall quiet. Though their faces show no sign, you know how their bellies feel, the quick cool hollowness. The house is a square white box half hidden by trees. From it travels a flat thread of sound, and you feel yourself go empty listening to it. “It’s Papa,” you say. A raw edge to the wind’s flight over the fields, a sound like an animal would make. Allen frowns and says, “We can all hear it. You don’t have to tell us who it is.”

Grove says, “Boy is he ever loud today.”

“Don’t talk about it,” Allen says. “Act like it ain’t there.”

Duck clenches his fists against his ears. Grove says, “I bet Mama is scared already.”

You say, watching Allen’s hurt frown, “Be quiet Grove. We all know that.”

“I bet she’s walking the floors.”

“Shut up,” Duck says.

“I can’t hear it any more,” Allen says.

“It’ll start again in a minute,” you say.

“Quit acting like you’re somebody’s daddy—”

“Danny ain’t acting like Papa!” Grove shouts.

“I ain’t said he was acting like Papa,” Allen says, “I said he was acting like somebody’s daddy. It’s a big difference.” He steps on a cornstalk to make it crunch. Duck swings the BB gun across the stiff weeds. “Mama and Amy are alone with him,” he says.

“I was just there,” you answer. “He hasn’t tried to hurt anybody.”

“We should still go back there,” Allen says.

“I don’t want to go back there, I just came from there,” you say. “I want to walk by the river.”

“You go to that old river so much you ought to be a fish,” Duck says.

“If you stay gone long you know Mama will get worried,” Allen says. Grove laughs suddenly, clapping his hands. “Now who’s acting like the daddy?”

“Danny knows she will.”

You smell the hinted sweetness of the river water on the wind. You say, “I won’t stay long. I promise.”

Duck tosses the gun over his shoulder. “Danny can do what he wants to, who cares. But I ain’t standing here all day in the freezing cold waiting for him to make up his mind.”

“Well you better be careful with that gun,” Allen says. “Because I ain’t going to fix it any more if you break it.” He takes Grove’s hand and they begin to walk toward the house. “You don’t fall on nothing else to get it started bleeding either. That would be all Mama could stand.”

“Yes Papa Allen, yes Papa Allen,” Grove chants, and dances over the corn rows behind the others. They kick a path through the stalks, shouting at each other. You stand there listening until the low clouds and the distance shrink them and drink their noises. Beyond them, washed in filtered light, the house they walk toward huddles against the edges of the fields. You already feel it waiting for you to come back.

But you turn away, Danny the Lesser, and you ease toward the walls of pine whispering, “I will never go home, I will never go home.” You walk to the river to listen to the slow water drift between the banks, hoping you will find a place there to hide from this noise that begins again now, traveling low to the ground.

Today is Thanksgiving and you are freed from school. You can lie in your bed of honeysuckle vine and dream all day beside the river. Walking there, you hug yourself with thin arms, your dark hair blown by the wind. Overhead the branches sway back and forth. At night when you lie awake in your bed you can hear the wind sing in their tops, and the sound makes you believe a person lives in each tree.

As you walk you dread the things you have learned to dread: your Papa, your special blood, anything that shakes it. You place each step carefully so you do not fall.

Round a curve in the path Queenie sniffs this way and that in the grass, swinging her bony head. Maybe she is smelling to see where your brothers have gone. She sees you and runs to you with her tongue trailing in the grass. River smell clings to her fur. You hug her close, hearing her heartbeat, stroking her soft brown coat. When she lifts her wet nose to be scratched you scratch it.

Her distended belly sways back and forth, heavy with the puppies she waits to have. You scratch the taut skin of her belly lightly, half-expecting it to make the sound balloons make when you rub their sides. Delighted, she rolls on her back, tail thumping dirt. Her naked white belly is hairless and smooth, and you touch it gingerly. Puppies sleep under this warm skin. Queenie watches you as if she expects this is the beginning of some new game. You say, “Don’t worry, I won’t try to get them out before they’re done. I only wondered what colors they are.”

She settles her head in the dry grass. You touch her pink nipples, the stiff tips hot and moist. “Mama says she’s going to drown your babies in the river,” you tell her. “Grove says he won’t let her get your babies, he says he’ll hide them as soon as they’re born, but Mama will find them wherever they are. She says she don’t want stray dogs around her house eating up everything in sight. Not when she’s already feeding their stray mama.”

Queenie cocks her ear. Babies are easy to get, she says. I’m not scared of your Mama. I can make as many babies as I want to.

“You don’t even care about your babies, do you?”

They’re just babies, she says.

“But where do you get your babies from? And why do they feel so hot when I touch your belly?”

They’re about to burn right slam up inside me, she says, with her tongue trailing into the grass.

At school the girls say puppies come from the same place babies come from, they slide into their mama’s stomachs out of the sky, easy as snowflakes melting in your hand. Never mind what the nasty boys say. “But how do they get out of your stomach?”

She gives you an arrogant glance. Why they climb out, stupid. That’s how.

She touches your hand with a paw cold from being on the ground. She wishes you would rub her belly some more, but suddenly you are tired of this hungry look she gives you and you wonder if anybody could ever pet her enough to satisfy her. Mama would tell you to stop touching the dog this way. You say, “Go away stupid dog, I don’t want to rub on you any more.”

But she goes on waiting for your hand. You stand and push her with your shoe. “Get up from that ground you stupid thing. Go away from me, you don’t belong to my family and you never did and you never will either!”

When she still does not move you walk away from her. She simply watches you with her round black eyes, her pale belly pointing to the sky.

YOU THINK the pines must like the quiet, the same way God likes quiet in church, so you tiptoe through the underbrush. Under your breath you sing, “Shall we gather at the ri-i-ver—” breaking off the tip of a branch as you always do when you pass a low tree or bush—“the beautiful, beautiful ri-i-ver,” you sing, stripping the leaves off the stems, tearing them to pieces and dropping the pieces to the ground. You love the way the bits of leaves fall, the air under them so solid it knocks them from side to side.

But soon you stop your wandering and walk directly to the river, not caring how much noise your feet make in the beds of cold-stiffened leaves. You have a place you always go, a certain clearing beside a train trestle that you found the first day your family moved to this house. You like the place because the branches overhead are thin and sunlight, on a clear day, falls through them making nets of shadow on the ground. Today same as every other day something in you lifts as you enter the clearing. You jump over a fallen log imagining Mama warning you to be careful, don’t fall on something and get yourself hurt. You sing the song louder, “Shall we ga-ather at the ri-i-ver, the be-oo-tiful, be-oo-tiful ri-i-ver!”

To the nearest tree you say, “Tree, now you better warn me if my Papa comes, so I have plenty of time to hide.”

The wind off the cold river cuts through you and you squeeze your thin coat tight. You gaze at the surface of the river, leaves spinning downstream like music box dolls. Honeysuckle grows thick as a mattress on the riverbank, and you lie on it looking up at the sky.

This is what you came here for, to lie here like this, to watch the clouds for a while and then to count: one two three, shut things away: shut away the house and the flat fields, shut away Mama Papa Amy Kay Allen Duck Grove shut them away! You are an orphan, you live in these woods away from them all, away from the whole world, your family is dead shut them away …

You close your eyes. You have come to the river to dream, a dream whose shadows move against your lids.

YOU DREAM the River Man again: River Man comes out of the water to your honeysuckle mattress on the bank. He is broad as an oak tree and strong as a bear, tall and brown-skinned with shaggy black hair. He lives in the water or in the forest where you have wandered. He calls you his son. You know no one else in the world, only him. You have no other home, only his home. You see in his eyes every minute how he cares for you.

You live in a dark room, maybe a cave. When you picture the room, the walls are dark like packed earth, lit by torches. The light they give and the shadows they cast make the room seem warm and safe. The furs of large animals hang on the walls. In one corner of the room a fire burns, smoke drifting up a stone chimney. You have seen rooms like this on television, in movies about the jungle man and the boy he raises as his own child. When he is in the room with you, you can always hear the slow steady rhythm of his breathing.

The room has a secret entrance that only you and River Man know about, an underwater tunnel that you both swim through.

Lying here today you can remember a dozen adventures you have had with River Man—paddling a canoe down river with him, past crocodiles sliding off the slick banks, past submerged rocks that raise their heads and turn out to be hippopotamuses—walking with River Man through the ruins of a forgotten city, building after empty building—you alone another time, lost somewhere in the forest or along the river, anxious because River Man doesn’t know where you are. You try to find him, walking endlessly along the shore calling River Man, River Man …

Sometimes you dream of running through the forest, which you imagine to be infinite, you delighting in the motion of your running and in the fact that each step you take is as silent as the last, a mere whisper over the blades of grass.

Sometimes you see animals and stroke their soft hides: gazelle, antelope, small monkeys, baby lions, all calm at the touch of your hands, as if you are magical.

Sometimes you climb into the wide-branched trees, leaping light-footed from one tree to the next, a monkey or a squirrel yourself, running alone in the light and the solid masses of leaves.

Today you dream you sit beside River Man on the riverbank. You have raced him here. He laughed when you beat him like he always does. He says, You’re getting faster and faster, his voice warm and deep.

—You could have beat me if you wanted to. I know you could.

—How does your leg feel? He glances at your thigh. You shake your head and answer, It doesn’t hurt. None of the cuts came open.

—I shouldn’t have let you go so fast, I was afraid—He breaks off a leaf from a low reed and looks away, troubled. You say you feel fine, the leg is healing, and you look down at it yourself. But even though this is your dream that you are making even you aren’t prepared for what you see.

You dream the leg is pitted and scabbed. You picture it perfectly. Along one side of the thigh r. . .