Blue Aviary

CHAPTER ONEThe air is cool September mornings up on Trumpet Hill. Dampness settles in shadowy places. The early hour promises warmth. A sun-drenched day begins to reveal itself through the big hemlock that lays its lower branches just above the aviary hard deck. Pigeons race in an orbit around the Bowden farm. They test the limits of their trespass, flying just above neighboring fields and yards. I came early this morning to spring the flyway gate. In a frenzy of beating wings, twenty birds escape the aviary confines. I settle into a familiar hollow along the rock wall to watch the flock pass between me and a splash of orange morning sky. I am happy here these days, this little farm nestled deep within the Catskill Mountains watershed. Down below, Esopus Creek guards the eastern flank. It winds its way beside a two-lane road that mirrors it for a stretch, both of them cutting channels through the thick green forest of southeastern New York State. The creek rolls through hamlets buried quietly in the pines, past Kingston, the seat of Ulster County, all the while collecting the tithes of a hundred lesser tributaries trickling down from up above. Near Saugerties it pours its Appalachian ginger brew into the mighty Hudson River. Some mornings I ascend the mountain to an outcrop just beneath the clouds, where the Village of Saugerties appears as a loosely assembled clutch of chalky buildings, strewn up and down the Hudson’s west bank. But I must go early to catch first light, to see my world in its entirety from the top of Trumpet Hill. A sprawling patch of mountain green wraps the Bowden farm and extends for a mile or more in every direction. There are people. There are fallen-down barns and built-up barns, a milk cow, a fattened-up pig or two . . . all that is familiar to me. As far back as I remember, I have looked upon this swath of green and all that thrives within it to be my neighborhood . . . my nearby earth. The pigeons stall in flight with each pass above the aviary. They anticipate a breakfast of cracked corn and scraps from the kitchen. When no call comes, the flock continues on its way, lost in one moment behind the woodshed and the barn. The birds rise to clear the treetops that lend cover to a brook, and a teepee showing its age. It teeters on a dozen spindly legs. We played there, Zach and I, and almost daily the flight of the birds turns my head to that place. The tight flock swings south over Jolly’s pond. If rumors are to be believed, the pond is an abyss that harbors demons in its depths, demons that devour small children, toddlers eaten and just as quickly forgotten . . . because none truly went missing, none that I ever heard about. Even Ol’ Jolly himself, who dug the hole in the earth decades ago, scoffed at the rumors, calling them sensational and ridiculous. There will always be mornings that tempt me from my room with my notebook in hand. This day is one of them. I am Sydney Bowden, a woman of twenty, by now. I am a little tall and a little lean. I am smart, a little. I’ve been told I am a little pretty, but I don’t hear that often enough. Grandmother always said my hair was a little auburn. I get that from my father, who got it from her. I was precocious even as a toddler. But I was indeed a child then, and far too young to fathom the complexities of added burdens in my life. As I grew older, I was declared gifted, and assessments of my intellect were bandied in hushed tones. That might have been the extent of it. Cautious journeys were undertaken to measure my mental acuity. They continued for a time but failed to unearth the grail. It was my father, when I was seven, who made sense of it all in his own way. “Genius assumes great things, darling . . . postulating life on Neptune and a dependable way to get there by morning,” he said to me. “Gifted requires proficiency at the piano by age six.” I thought about it and said, “I don’t play piano, and I’m seven.” “Aye,” he offered in his best pirate’s voice. “It must be good to know you can do it if you choose.” But that was my father, and he often left me wondering if my shoes were on the wrong feet. Suffice it to say, I knew some things at seven. I knew postulating meant guessing, and I knew if I were proficient, that meant I would be good at something. So, my vocabulary alone might have been ahead of the game for my age. Perhaps to prove his point, a week later an old upright piano appeared against the wall opposite the front windows. Chronology, I’ve determined, is not always so easy for a child. In my world, even an eternity has to start someplace. I recall the very day I became a living, bleeding person, and it had little to do with genius. I was sitting in the front seat of Grandmother’s big car examining my knees for fresh skins and scrapes. Upon inspection, I discovered jagged circles of dried blood crusting like mud pies and lifting loose at the edges. Even at my earliest emergence into consciousness, I was counting my blessings. I cannot be certain why I was not forced into the kid seat in back. While Grandmother’s boat of a car bucked over potholes and broken pavement, I grappled to get hold of anything that might safely secure me aboard. We laughed all the way to the garden store at the top of the hill. A stick-figure rendering, done in blue crayon, preserves the occasion, depicting Grandmother, the tiny woman dangling from the helm like a shrunken boatswain. To this day the picture hangs on the wall above my bed. It was a day to remember, and I have done that—the two of us, Grandmother and me, hunting petunias for her garden. I adjust my position on the stone wall, remembering those days of my childhood when I sat in this very spot near the aviary, scribbling pieces of a story, waiting for the kitchen door to rattle open and then go quietly closed. It was the sound that signaled Beepah’s arrival. It was a familiar noise then, and remains a comfort all these years later. Beepah is how I knew him, the man fifty years my senior. He took care of the farm, the gardens and the birds, and brother Zach and me. Beepah was not a name ordained by a christening. That name was Benjamin Bowden. Beepah was the name I bestowed on him when I was but one or two. By challenging phonetic norms, or some such thing, Beepah is the name I gave to my father. I refused to be taken to task or corrected. Either way, it stuck, and all other names lost favor . . . at least with me. Every morning, Beepah raised his eyes skyward. The birds recognized Ben Bowden heading toward the kennel gate, swinging a scrap pail in one big hand. Their reaction was immediate. They’d adjust their flight and began descending to the aviary hard deck. Mass hysteria ensued when news leaked that breakfast was arriving. The birds would push and bump their way through the trap gate. Rare mornings might even deliver a stranger to the mix, a bird with unique plumage, nervous and uncertain, questioning the impulse to enter. I might have seen him and recognized him as an outlander, but I rarely inspected the coop like Beepah did. Outlanders were welcome in the aviary. Other times it was a weasel that stirred a calamity and put the flock on edge. I recall those mornings when a successful raid was evident by the c*****e confronting Beepah. Uneaten flesh lay stringing from disjointed bones. Bloody feathers lay in a matted tangle, stirred into the dirt floor where a sacrifice played out in the black of night. Beepah had an uncanny sense of when things were amiss. He would stand just inside the kennel gate peering upward through the hemlock branches until the chilly air above quieted. He’d pull at the coop door, step inside, and let the door slap shut. Those mornings the sun played on him through the grid of chicken wire. Part of him was in shadow and some of him in the coolest morning light. He studied the scattered bones and feathers and quietly calculated there were two carcasses ripped and torn apart. Those he would deliver to a common grave back of the barn when his chores in the coop were done. There would be no ceremony for them, but the task was filled with unpleasantness. It had to be done. Rotting flesh on the aviary floor would only attract more scavengers. Some mornings, and without a word, Beepah knew I was there, sitting in the shadows of the hemlock, or basking in the early sunshine that pushed fingers of light through the wrought iron kennel fence. I would watch him patiently and often in silence while he inspected the coop for interlopers and assassins. Beepah was tall, six feet and something. Sinewy might best describe his build. Some mornings were greeted with a smile, a broad one. He was good for that. The bloodbath in the coop denied his smile that day. He removed his baseball cap and scratched at his thinning hair. His eyes came up to me finally. “Morning, Syd,” he said. “Morning, Beep.” “What’cha writing?” I put a hand on my notebook and gave it a moment’s pause. Beepah was always respectful of my notebooks, encouraging me almost daily, ever playful in his inquisitions. Some days I revealed my literary endeavors. Other days I would clutch my notebook tight to my chest and Beep would laugh a little, acknowledging the deepest secrets I held. “I was thinking about Grandmother. We still talk some mornings.” “Yeah, I miss her,” he said, his eyes drooping again. “She’s been gone a long time. I’m surprised you remember her so clearly. She died when you were little.” “We planted flowers in her garden that last summer. I was writing about that day. I remember you told me she had to sleep in the cold building at the cemetery until the ground thawed enough to bury her. The school bus still stops near that awful place on its way. I thought about Grandmother lying in the cold in her blue dress. I must have cried every day until spring.” Beepah stabbed his toe against the kennel dirt. I could tell he instantly felt bad. The little gesture was enough of an apology for me after so many years, and him unaware of the sadness his words had stirred in me back then. We saw the world differently, Beep and me. I dare say, he might have even considered it a comfort for me to know where Grandmother passed the rest of that winter. Only now am I beginning to recognize the small differences between a hole in the ground and an icy bed above it. Cold places both. “We lost the Goochie Doll,” Beep identified one of the chickens, dead in the coop. The Goochie Doll was a good egg layer, but more spectacular for her name alone. Beepah was good for naming animals, just like our neighbor Ol’ Jolly. It seemed like half the time they were in competition. Chickens were included, and pigs and geese and goats. Even pigeons earned a moniker if they stayed long enough. Beep often reminded me that every creature deserves a name, and he kept busy imparting names on any new arrivals. Even counting the pigeons in the rafters, I could name most of the birds. I knew them, but deaths in the aviary rarely moved me to tears any longer. “I wasn’t sure who they got,” I admitted, offering a sad frown for the Goochie Doll. “I didn’t look at it for very long.” “Any stragglers?” “Jolly was out back tossing pellets by the pond,” I said. “He gets a few birds to drop by. Buddy and Beebo were noisy. Did you hear them?” “Crazy goats,” Beep grumbled. “That’s trouble, those two.” “The geese fight them for food,” I said. “Ol’ Jolly throws pellets on the water so the geese get their share. The goats won’t swim for them at least.” “What was Jolly thinking, bringing those bad seeds aboard? Noah himself would have kicked their asses off the ark,” Beep said with a smirk. “Anyways, Jolly’s pellets bloat the pigeons. They sit up in the rafters all day like they ate a box of rocks. I ask you, what good is a pigeon if he can’t fly for my amusement?” Beepah went to the coop door. He reached above it and took down the call can. He gave it a shake. The familiar rattle stirred the quiet morning air. Sure enough, seconds later three stragglers arrived on the hard deck acting indignant and confused. They pushed their way toward the wire entry trap, then the three, reluctant to join the flock inside the aviary, dropped to the churned earth inside the kennel to battle the chickens for food. He tucked the call can back above the door. “Goats,” he grumped. “I caught those two bad sores on the kitchen table a few days back because somebody left the backdoor open.” He gave me a punishing glare. “In they walk, the two of ’em, jump on the table and kick over the sugar bowl. They’re grazing in ambrosia when I come in. They’re lickin’ up sugar like they died and gone to billy goat heaven.” Right away it became clear to me, Beepah was inventing a new tale and trying it out on me before he took it on the road. “I swear, Syd, to top it off, the two of ’em had found the motherload on a chokecherry bush. Goat turds dropping out of their ass-ends like caviar on a biscuit,” he said. “Purple goat turds falling on the kitchen table right where you sit at dinnertime.” “No way!” “I swear,” he said again, this time throwing his right hand in the air to attest to the truthfulness of the tale. “Hey, I wiped the table off. It’s all good. I doubt you’ll even notice. It’s still a little purple though, but everything fades with time.” He enjoyed teasing me, leaning down as if to pass his eyes over the very spot on the table where the goat turds landed. “Those chokecherries stain like blood.” He gave a shrug. “If I’da had a gun, I’da shot those two scabs.” Beepah slung the scrap pail at arm’s length, scattering eggshells and moldy bread crusts and corn cobs from dinner the night before. He stepped back inside the coop and gave the feed bucket a few kicks until it popped open. He scooped cracked corn into the scrap pail, then tossed handfuls to the dirt floor. Pigeons descended from the rafters in a cloud of dust and pin feathers. Chickens were roused from nesting boxes along the back wall. They bounced down the pyramid of roosting poles like puffed up ballerinas. “I chased them goats off,” Beepah kept on, talking through the chicken wire. He stopped his corn dispensing long enough to chuck the two bloody chicken carcasses into a heap near the kennel gate. Then he cast a smirk in my direction. “I swear, Syd, what an outrage, those two. They jumped off the table and ran across the yard high on sugar. What a couple nitwits.” Beep shook his head and laughed at the thought of it, real or otherwise. I was left to believe it was only possibly true. But then, to challenge his recounting of the tale only meant he may relinquish a portion of it to absurdity and swear to the rest. I chose to let this one die on the vine, especially since it was clear he fingered me for leaving the door ajar, which would have been slanderous had he uttered it aloud. Beepah removed the blocks from the swing door. A half dozen laying hens strutted toward the scratch yard. Leading the way was a foul-tempered rooster who went by the name Cowboy, although he never answered to it. Ol’ Cowboy used his head like a battering ram. He hit the swing door at top speed and tumbled into the kennel scratch yard before his landing gear was fully deployed. Beepah referred to the maneuver as, “Cowboy’s ass over tea kettle three-point landing.” Beep said it was unique in the animal kingdom. Cowboy skidded to a stop in the loose earth. He stood in the sliver of light that sliced through the hemlock branches. His eyes went instantly into frantic search mode, seeking anything familiar. When he caught sight of me sitting on the rock wall, the orange feathers on his scrawny neck bristled. His eyes burgeoned indignation the moment he realized I had arrived in the scratch yard ahead of him. The old rooster had been a fixture in the aviary and the surrounding kennel almost as far back as my memory allowed. He arrived with the first brood of chicks, a dozen infant egg layers in a shoebox with head holes cut out. The yellow and orange noggins that poked through twisted with excitement and curiosity. Cowboy was among them, an interloper of the highest order, defying the gender-specific order for girl chickens only. The crotchety old bird had outlived several generations and had grown into the aviary’s crabbiest resident. He even chased me in his earlier years, pecking at my legs and hands while I battled to fend him off. Nowadays, he wakes me. Each morning at sunrise, his garbled baritone stirs me from sleep. Cowboy got his name because of his bravado and nothing more. At the very least, it was a name designed to shield me from Beep’s clumsy explanations about the bony chicken’s appetites, and we’re not talking cracked-corn casserole here. One morning, when I was small, I witnessed the crazy rooster riding a hen around the scratch yard. I was perplexed at the sight, all chickens being equal to me in those days. But this behavior was worth inquiry. So, I braved the question, “Beepah, what is he doing to her?” Beep’s eyes quickly located the scrawny rooster astride a little red hen. She was doing her best to toss the brute face first into the kennel mud. The crazy rooster only dug his spurs in deeper. Beep pushed his baseball cap high on his forehead and gave his tangle of hair a scratch. “He’s a cowboy all right,” was all he said. The name stuck. Early on, Beep discovered my willingness to rise with the sun. When I was four, he began taking me with him when he went out to work on chores before breakfast. I would often sit an hour or more in the quiet when the air was warming. Beep had a gift. He could lie about any number of things and swear to them. “There’s Neptune,” he once said, pointing at a star still twinkling low in the horizon to the west. “Neptune is really a planet, not a star. If you lay in the meadow after the sun goes down and look into a clear sky, you’ll see it. It’s blue.” It was some years later I learned that nobody has ever really seen Neptune, not with the naked eye anyway. Rather than dismiss Beep’s certainty in the matter as heretical, I simply developed a healthy dose of skepticism. By then, Beep’s brainwashing had established a foothold in me. It wields influence to this day. I still lay in the meadow looking up on clear nights. I harbor hopes that Neptune is there, that I will someday see its blueness shining down on me.