Quicker Than the Eye (14 page)

Fentriss sat up in his chair in the garden in the middle of a fine autumn and listened. The drink in his hand remained unsipped, his friend Black unspoken to, the fine house unnoticed, the very weather  itself neglected, for there was a veritable fountain of sound in the air above them.

"My God," he mid. "Do you 'hear?"

“What, the birds?" asked his friend Black, doing just the opposite, sipping his drink, noticing the weather, admiring the rich house, and neglecting the birds entirely until this moment.

"Great God in heaven, listen to them!" cried Fentriss.

Black listened. "Rather nice."

"clean out your ears!"

Black made a halfhearted gesture, symbolizing the cleaning out of ears. “Well?”

"Damn it, don't be funny. I mean really 
listen! 
They're singing a tune!”

"Birds usually do."

"No, they don't; birds paste together bits and pieces maybe, five or six notes, eight at the most. Mockingbirds have repertoires that change, but not entire melodies. 
These 
birds are different. Now shut up and give over!"

Both men sat, enchanted. Black's expression melted.

"I'll be damned," he said at last. "They 
do 
go on." He leaned forward and listened intently.

"Yes . . ." murmured Fentriss, eyes shut, nodding to the rhythms that sprang like fresh rain from the tree just above their heads. ". . . ohmigod . . . indeed."

Black rose as if to move under the tree and peer up. Fentriss protested with a fierce whisper:

“Don't spoil it. Sit. Be very still. Where's my pencil? Ah...”

Half peering around, he found a pencil and notepad, shut his eyes, and began to scribble blindly.

The birds sang.

"You're not 
actually 
writing down their song?" said Black.

"What does it look like? Quiet."

And with eyes now open, now shut, Fentriss drew scales and jammed in the notes.

"I didn't know you read music," said Black, astonished.

"I played the violin until my father broke it. Please! There. There. Yes!

"Slower," he whispered. "Wait for me."

As if hearing, the birds adjusted their lilt, moving toward 
piano 
instead of 
bravado.

A breeze stirred the leaves, like an invisible conductor, and the singing died.

Fentriss, perspiration beading his forehead, stopped scribbling and fell back.

"I'll be damned." Black gulped his drink. "What was 
that 
all about?"

"Writing a song." Fentriss stared at the scales he had dashed on paper. "Or a tone poem."

"Let me 
see 
that!"

"Wait." The tree shook itself gently, but produced no further notes. "I want to be sure they're done."

Silence.

Black seized the pages and let his eyes drift over the scales. "Jesus, Joseph, and Mary," he said, aghast. "It 
works." 
He glanced up at the thick green of the tree, where no throat warbled, no wing stirred. "What kind of birds 
are 
those?"

"The birds of forever, the small beasts of an Immaculate Musical Conception. Something," said Fentriss, "has made them with child and its name is song-"

"Hogwash!"

"Is 
it?! Something in the air, in the seeds they ate at dawn, some whim of climate and weather, God! But now they're mine, 
it's 
mine. A fine tune."

"It is'" said Black. "But 
can't 
be!"

"Never question the miraculous when it happens. Good grief, maybe those damned wonderful creatures have been throwing up incredible songs for months, years, but no one 
listened. 
Today, for the first time, someone 
did. 
Me! Now, what to 
do 
with the gift?"

"You don't seriously mean-?"

"I've been out of work for a year. I quit my computers, retired early, I'm only forty-nine, and have been threatening to knit macrame' to give friends to spoil their walls, day after day. Which shall it be, friend, macrame' or Mozart?"

"Are 
you 
Mozart?"

"Just his bastard son."

"Nonsense," cried Black, pointing his face like a blunderbuss at the trees as if he might blast the choir. "That tree, those birds, are a Rorschach test. Your subconscious is picking and choosing notes from pure chaos. There's no discernible tune, no special rhythm. You had me fooled, but I see and hear it now: you've had a repressed desire since childhood to compose. And you've let a clutch of idiot birds grab you by the ears. Put down that pen!"

"Nonsense right back at you." Fentriss laughed. "You're jealous that after twelve layabout years, thunderstruck with boredom, one of us has found an occupation. I shall follow it. Listen and write, write and listen. Sit down, you're obstructing the acoustics!"

"I'll sit," Black exclaimed, "but-" He clapped his hands over his ears.

"Fair enough," said Fentriss. "Escape fantastic reality while I change a few notes and finish out this unexpected birth."

Glancing up at the tree, he whispered:

"Wait for me."

The tree rustled its leaves and fell quiet.

"Crazy," muttered Black.

One, two, three hours later, entering the library quietly and then loudly, Black cried out:

"What 
are 
you doing?"

Bent over his desk, his hand moving furiously, Fentriss said:

"Finishing a symphony!"

"The same one you began in the garden?"

"No, the birds began, the birds!"

"The birds, then." Black edged closer to study the mad inscriptions. "How do you know 
what 
to do with that stuff?"

"They did most. I've added variations!"

"An arrogance the ornithologists will resent and attack. Have you composed before?"

"Not"-Fentriss let his fingers roam, loop, and scratch-"until today!"

"You realize, of course, you're plagiarizing those songbirds?"

"Borrowing, Black, borrowing. If a milkmaid, singing at dawn, can have her hum borrowed by Berlioz, 
well! 
Or if Dvorak, hearing a Dixie banjo plucker pluck 'Goin' Home,' steals the banjo to eke out his New World, why can't I weave a net to catch a tune? There! Finito. Done! Give us a title, Black!"

"I? Who sings off-key?"

"What about 'The Emperor's Nightingale'?"

"Stravinsky."

"'The Birds'?"

"Hitchcock."

"Damn. How's this: 'It's Only John Cage in a Gilded Bird'?"

"Brilliant. But no one knows who John Cage 
was."

''Well, then, I've 
got 
it!" And he wrote:

"'Forty-seven Magpies Baked in a Pie.'

"Blackbirds, 
you mean; go back to John Cage."

"Bosh!" Fentriss stabbed the phone. "Hello, Willie? Could you come over? Yes, a small job. Symphonic arrangement for a friend, or friends. What's your usual Philharmonic fee? Eh? Good enough. Tonight!"

Fentriss disconnected and turned to gaze at the tree with wonder in it.

"What 
next?" 
he murmured.

"Forty-seven Magpies," with title shortened, premiered at the Glendale Chamber Symphony a month later with standing ovations, incredible reviews.

Fentriss, outside his skin with joy, prepared to launch himself atop large, small, symphonic, operatic, whatever fell on his ears. He had listened to the strange choirs each day for weeks, but bad noted nothing, waiting to see if the "Magpie" experiment was to be repeated. When the applause rose in storms and the critics hopped when they weren't skipping, he knew he must strike again before the epilepsy ceased.

There followed: "Wings," "Flight," "Night Chorus," "The Fledgling Madrigals," and "Dawn Patrol," each greeted by new thunderstorms of acclamation and critics angry at excellence but forced to praise.

"By now," said Fentriss, "I should be unbearable to live with, but the birds caution modesty."

"Also,'' said Black, seated under the tree, waiting for a sprig of benison and the merest touch of symphonic manna, "shut up! If all those sly dimwit composers, who will soon be lurking in the bushes, cop your secret, you're a gone poacher."

"Poacher! By God, yes!" Fentriss laughed. "Poacher."

And damn if the first poacher didn't arrive!

Glancing out at tree in the morning, Fentriss witnessed a runty shadow stretching up, handheld tape recorder poised, warbling and whistling softly at the tree. when this failed, the half-seen poacher tried dove-coos and then orioles and roosters, half dancing in a circle.

"Damn it to hell!" Fentriss leaped out with a shotgun cry: "Is that Wolfgang Prouty poaching my garden? Out, Wolfgang! Go!"

Dropping his recorder, Prouty vaulted a bush, impaled himself on thorns, and vanished.

Fentriss, cursing, picked up an abandoned notepad.

"Nightsong," it read. On the tape recorder he found a lovely Satie-like bird-choir.

After that, more poachers arrived mid-night to depart at dawn. Their spawn, Fentriss realized, would soon throttle his creativity and still his voice. He loitered full-time in the garden now, not knowing what seed to give his beauties, and heavily watered the lawn to fetch up worms. Wearily he stood guard through sleepless nights, nodding off only to find Wolfgang Prouty's evil minions astride the wall, prompting arias, and one night, by God, perched in the tree itself, humming in hopes of sing-alongs.

A shotgun was the final answer. After its first fiery roar, the garden was empty for a week. That is, until-    Someone came very late indeed and committed mayhem.

As quietly as possible, he cut the branches and sawed the limbs.

"Oh, envious composers, dreadful murderers!" cried Fentriss.

And the birds were gone.

And the career of Amadeus Two with it.

"Black!" cried Fentriss.

"Yes, dear friend?" said Black, looking at the bleak sky where once green was.

"Is your car outside?"

"When last I looked."

"Drive!"

But driving in search didn't do it. It wasn't like calling in lost dogs or telephone-poled cats. They must find and cage an entire Mormon tabernacle team of soprano springtime-in-the-Rockies birdseed lovers to prove one in the hand is worth two in the bush.

But still they hastened from block to block, garden to garden, lurking and listening. Now their spirits soared with an echo of "Hallelujah Chorus" oriole warbling, only to sink in a drab sparrow twilight of despair.

Only when they had crossed and recrossed interminable mazes of asphalt and greens did one of them finally (Black) light his pipe and emit a theory.

"Did you ever think to wonder," he mused behind a smoke-cloud, "what 
season 
of the year this 
is?"

"Season of the year?" said Fentriss, exasperated.

"Well, coincidentally, wasn't the night the tree fell and the wee songsters blew town, was not that the first fall night of autumn?"

Fentriss clenched a fist and struck his brow.

"You 
mean?"

"Your friends have flown the coop. Their migration must be above San Miguel Allende just now."

"If they are migratory birds!"

"Do you 
doubt 
it?"

Another pained silence, another blow to the head.

''Shit!''

"Precisely," said Black.

"Friend," said Fentriss.

"Sir?"

"Drive home."

It was a long year, it was a short year, it was a year of anticipation, it was the burgeoning of despair, it was the revival of inspiration, but at its heart, Fentriss knew, just another Tale of Two Cities, but he did not know what the other city was!

How stupid of me, he thought, not to have guessed or imagined that my songsters we're wanderers who each autumn fled south and each springtime swarmed north in A Cappella choirs of sound.

"The waiting," he told Black, "is madness. The phone never stops-"

The phone rang. He picked it up and addressed it like a child. "Yes. Yes. Of course. Soon. When? Very soon." And put the phone down. "You see? That was Philadelphia. They want another Cantata as good as the first. At dawn today it was Boston. Yesterday the Vienna Philharmonic. 
Soon, 
I say. When? God knows. Lunacy! Where are those angels that once sang me to my rest?"

He threw down maps and weather charts of Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and the Argentines.

"How far south? Do I scour Buenos Aires or Rio, Mazatlan or Cuernavaca? And then? Wander about with a tin ear, standing under trees waiting for bird-drops like a spotted owl? Will the Argentine critics trot by scoffing to see me leaning on trees, eyes shut, waiting for the quasi-melody, the lost chord? I'd let no one know the cause of my journey, my search, otherwise pandemoniums of laughter. But in what city, under what kind of tree would I wander to stand? A tree like mine? Do they seek the same roosts? or will anything do in Ecuador or Peru? God, I could waste months guessing and come back with birdseed in my hair and bird bombs on my lapels. What to do, Black? 
Speak!"

"Well, for one thing"-Black stuffed and lit his pipe and exhaled his aromatic concepts-' 'you might clear off this stump and plant a new tree."

They had been circling the stump and kicking it for inspiration. Fentriss froze with one foot raised. "Say that 
again?!"

"I said-"

"Good grief, you genius! Let me kiss you!"

"Rather not. Hugs, maybe."

Fentriss hugged him, wildly. "Friend!"

"Always was."

"Let's get a shovel and spade."

"You get. I'll watch."

Fentriss ran back a minute later with a spade and pickax.

"Sure you won't join me?"

Black sucked his pipe, blew smoke. "Later."

"How much would a 
full-grown 
tree cost?"

"Too much."

"Yes, but if it were 
here 
and the birds 
did 
return?" Black let out more smoke. "Might be worth it. Opus Number Two: 'In the Beginning' by Charles Fentriss, stuff like that."

'In the Beginning,' or maybe 
'The Return.'‘”

"One of those."

"Or-" Fentriss struck the stump with the pickax. " 'Rebirth.' " He struck again. 
"'Ode to Joy.' 
" Another strike.