The Man Who Loved Birds (19 page)

“The county attorney has argued that he is a practical man and that putting me in jail is the practical solution to the problem that is me. The way I look at it he is the all-time dreamer in his rosy-eyed argument that the rich getting richer is magically going to make us poor get richer too. The rich get richer on the backs of the poor and their main way of getting richer is to wring more blood out of us turnips, and if we’re stupid enough to go along without a fight then we deserve to have our blood wrung.
The county attorney would have you believe that if each of us is as greedy as he wants then all of us are going to get rich. I ask you to think about what would happen among your family and friends if each of you set out to do your own thing and screw your brother and sister and father and mother and neighbor. And then I ask you to tell me just how the world is any different between strangers than it is between friends and family.

“What you are facing is a choice between what is legal and what is right. For most of human history slavery was legal, but that didn’t make it right. If you say what’s legal is what’s right then you’re allowing the legislature to make up your minds for you. And with apologies to the exceptions, the legislature is as big a bunch of nincompoops and sleazebags as anybody might assemble on the planet, almost all of them in my opinion in the pocket of big corporation types who are even bigger nincompoops and sleazebags. You might just as well look to the church.

“I want to suggest to you that you have a higher authority right at hand to consult to tell you what’s right.” Johnny Faye pointed to his heart. “Whose law is it that the county attorney is serving in asking you to put me in jail? Is it the law that binds mother and father to son and daughter, sister to sister, brother to brother, neighbor to neighbor, the law of love that binds us all to each other and to the stranger? Or is it the law that sets each of these against the other and makes us all slaves to rich people in the big city where the county attorney went to learn how to do just that? At one time that law forbid us to make whiskey, now it makes money from us doing that very thing. Now it forbids us from growing hemp and wants to throw us in jail until such time as it figures out how to make money off of that operation. As soon as it changes its mind on that point, it will figure out some other way to make criminals out of the poor.

“You all know I served this nation. I am not proud of what I did, but when duty called I gave my best. Now the lawyer calls me the enemy of the state and the people when all I want is to be left in
peace. I tend to my garden and to my mother and my friends, and I would give the shirt off my back to a stranger who needed it, and that is about as much of life as I can handle.

“You can put me in jail if you want. But you won’t be putting me in a room smaller than the one I already live in nor serving me food any plainer than what I already eat, and you caint make me poorer than I already am because my riches are not made of stuff. I appreciate your time and your service.”

The jury deliberated for the remainder of the afternoon. The judge let Johnny Faye take some air after making him swear on the Bible that he would return for the verdict. He stood outside the courthouse with JC as company, talking tobacco with the farmers. He located a patch of grass amid the cement and asphalt for JC to do his business, then came back and talked more tobacco. Vetch retired to his offices.

Late that afternoon they were recalled to the courtroom for the verdict. The county attorney entered with a jaunty step occasioned by the length of the deliberations but in fact the jury handed down a verdict of not guilty. The gallery erupted in applause. One of the spectators upstairs produced a pint of whiskey. The judge banged her gavel. Before dismissing Johnny Faye, the judge offered the observation that though the jury had determined he was not guilty, if she were planting a peach tree from which she planned to harvest peaches she would take some trouble to conceal it from the neighbors’ children, and would Mr. Johnny Faye please draw from that little story the simple lesson the judge wanted to convey?

The spectators poured down the tiny staircase from the gallery. Jerry Bee proposed a beer at the Miracle Inn but Johnny Faye said, “Thank you kindly but I got to step outside to check on JC,” and then he disappeared from their midst, leaving Harry Vetch alone at his desk and winter gathering in his heart.

Now Meena went to the blind many evenings. She sat on the fallen pine and scooted sideways until her feet dangled over the little hollow that had once writhed with snakes and remained there until she could barely distinguish the silhouette of the trees from the blue-black star-spangled sky. Then she drove back to her office in the old Electra.

One especially bright and perfect evening Johnny Faye stepped into her line of vision and stood still as the breathless trees. He stood in the green light watching and even so she gave no sign of noticing him but walked directly to her seat on the fallen pine. She stayed until the sun dropped below the horizon and the copse was lit only by the sky light that remained. On her way to her car she stopped at the statues.

She put her hand in her pocket and felt the small round stone, waiting since her visit to Rosalee Smith’s house. Meena gathered some wildflowers and arranged them in a circle and placed the stone in their center. Then she slipped behind a tree.

Johnny Faye came to the clearing as a deer comes to water, careful and alert. He picked up the stone, inspected it, pressed its smooth cool self to his forehead and cheeks. “Talk to me, angel ball. Tell me where you been and what you been up to.” He dropped it into his pocket. He searched through the bushes and scrub pines—for a long moment he disappeared, to return carrying
a bird’s elaborately woven nest. He placed this in the center of the ring of flowers.

Meena stepped into the clearing.

Johnny Faye jumped as if he had seen a ghost. “What the hell are you doing, sneaking up on a body like that.”

“I might as easily ask the same of you. Only evidently you are more of a coward.”

“You watch who you go calling a coward. Next thing I’ll be calling your bluff.”

“Then you will find no bluff to call.”

“Well all right, then.” He executed a complicated little leap. “Come with me for a walk. You might learn a thing or two.”

“I’m afraid it is my turn to invoke my mother, who forbade me to walk in the jungle with strange boys. And I am—was in the habit of obeying my mother. In addition to which I have difficulty imagining what you might have to teach that I would have interest in learning.”

“You’re just afraid to learn, like most folks.”

“So now who is calling whom a coward? When I was a child . . .”

“Go on, I’m interested.”

“Never mind. That was a very long time ago, half a world distant.”

“I’m glad to hear you were a kid, anyways, once upon a time. Nam made me into an old man but then I got back here and figured I’d try being a kid again. How about you?”

“Rubbish. My parents are long dead. And in my country you would be
harijan
, untouchable, though I thank your God, all the gods, for leaving all that behind.”

He bowed his head and scuffed at the dirt with one toe. “I’m sorry to hear of your loss, ma’am. A pretty young girl like you should have her mother at hand or at least near enough by that she can call on her for advice.”

“You may reserve your flattery for those genuinely young and
pretty girls who will no doubt be susceptible to it. I
aint
, as you would say, young, pretty, or a girl. I thank you for your sentiments but I am accustomed to making my way alone.”

“No brothers or sisters?”

“None.”

“Well, the way I look at it you can go back to your office and cry into your beer—”

“I do not drink beer.”

“Nor cry, neither, I have no doubt. Or we can have a nice little stroll in the beautiful woods that God in his wisdom has put here for us to enjoy.”

“
Mister
Johnny Faye. Why are you persisting in this madness?”

On this he crouched to his haunches and took up a twig and drew lines and circles in the dirt. “Because you’re smart. I like smart. And because you’re pretty, though I’m thinking somebody gave you the idea otherwise.” He was not looking at her but at his drawing, circles that went round and round. “And because for me you are all those people who died by my hand in a faraway place.”

She was looking down on him, on his stringy dirty sun-bleached hair sparse at its crown. Of their own accord her hands reached out to touch his shoulder and nothing in her life had prepared her for the ripple of energy that rose from his shoulder through her hands to lodge in her throat. Her hand jerked back as if she had touched a burning brand.

He stood abruptly and walked down a little trail paved with pine needles, talking all the while. “I will show you something sweet, and then I will see you safe back to your car. JC, you stay here. Here, now,
here
, you sit. We won’t be needing you on this little adventure.” Johnny Faye waved his walking stick in front of them. “Web catcher.”

Her feet led her after him, into the gloaming.

“You been married, I can tell.”

“And how can you tell that?”

He turned around and studied her. “Because if you hadn’t of been you’d of said so.”

“Mr. Johnny Faye. If it is your plan—”

“I aint got no plan. I give up on plans somewheres between the first man I shot and climbing on the plane that brung me back from that crazy place. Now hush, both of us.”

They stood still so long that only her determination to outlast him kept her standing. The emerald light dimmed, then grew brighter—dusk gave way to silver silence. A full moon was rising. No leaf stirred. Almost imperceptibly his arm rose—he might be one of the granite statues stirring to life. He was pointing at a tree limb close to the ground a few steps ahead. Nothing—then something. A mottled lump—the forest was too dark to discern color—stirred and ruffled.
Whip-poor-will! Whip-poor-will!
First hesitantly, then stronger and more decisive.

Time passed. The bird sang until they heard an answer from a distant ravine. The bird redoubled his call.

Finally Johnny Faye lowered his hand as slowly as he had raised it, a millimeter a moment. They turned to go.

Some steps down the path he spoke. “My grandma told me whippoorwills was a witch bird—that they would suck a goat or even a cow dry in the middle of the night. Funny thing is, they don’t care for civilization but they’re fine with particular people, which might be why I like ’em so much. People say they’re shy, but the fact is that you treat ’em with respect and they will let you stand right on top of ’em, all but tame. You just got to make yourself known in the right way, I mean
their
way, not our way. You got to be still. You’re good at being still. Aint too many people I can say that about. There’s plenty that’s heard a whippoorwill but I would guess no more’n two people in this county has ever laid eyes on one. Me and now you.”

“You are an expert on birds.”

“I like to think I’m a expert on something other than making trouble. You ever heard how the birds got their names?”

“No, I have not.”

They walked on for a moment.

“You may tell me if you wish.”

“I will tell you when
you
wish.”

The path led them back, sometimes moonlit and silver and fast, sometimes in shadow so dark that her feet lost their sureness. At such times she allowed him to take her hand, though where the trees parted and the path brightened she took it back. Then they were in the clearing in front of the statues. She bent and took up the nest, centered in its ring of wilted flowers, and said, “Come here.”

He stepped closer. She stuck her hand in his pocket. “Hey!”

She pulled the stone from his pocket and replaced it from where he had taken it up. “My father—who was a collector of stories, have I mentioned that?—and whom I was in the habit of obeying, would place a stone in memory of the god or goddess who once lived in this clearing. The statues are here because the place is sacred, or so he would have believed—not the other way around, as a Christian might think. In any case I hold with neither superstition. I place it here in memory of him.”

“You found yourself a angel ball.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He pointed at the stone she had placed at the center of the ring of flowers. “A angel ball. It’s hollow, you crack it open and it’s filled with crystals. One of those finds its way into your hands, you been singled out for something special. Not something easy—something hard, as a matter of fact. But special. Particular. Pay attention. Watch out. You done anything for that boy? Rosalee Smith’s boy?”

“
Mister
Johnny Faye. I am committed to confidentiality regarding my patients.”

“Well, at least he’s still your patient. The question is what you do from here.”

She hung the nest in the bushes and walked down the path.

The clouds departed and the skies became hot and blue. The grass crackled underfoot and the river shrank. Attendance at the monastery services skyrocketed. Most of the farmers and many of the monks subscribed to an ancient understanding of the rituals:
We pray to You; You give us rain
. The abbot did not like to encourage this kind of tit-for-tat approach to prayer but eventually he yielded, raising his arms at Sunday mass and intoning, “Let us pray for rain.” The congregation’s collective response was a tangible thing, a swell of hope as tall and wide and deep as the abbey church . . . and still there was no rain.

“‘The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone.’” Flavian was sitting in the sycamore throne, reading aloud from a children’s Bible. Johnny Faye sat on the branch at his side. On this hot blue day the forest was airless and still, its silence underwritten by the gurgle of the creek and the breathing of JC, panting at their feet.

Earlier that afternoon Flavian had walked from the monastery and stood at the lip of the creek and pretended he was a mourning dove,
Ooo-ah, ooo, ooo, ooo
, all the while feeling like an idiot, a sentiment he found preferable to feeling like a criminal. On Johnny Faye’s response the cedars parted and he climbed down the bank, to be put to work tying dental floss around the tops of
the plants. Johnny Faye showed him how to knot the floss and then loop its other end around stakes that he had pounded into the dirt around the perimeter of the patch. Flavian made a lame joke about helping nature reduce cavities to which Johnny Faye responded with a patient explanation.