Read an Excerpt
Five days later he was in the barnyard barebacking their mule Spook, shouting orders to the goats, marshalling them from one side of the pen to the other. The older ones soon wised to his game and bunched up in one corner, refusing to move, leaving the kids at the mercy of the young tyrant’s switch. His father’s old hat flopped, lopsided, against his brow. Its weave was darkened with sweat and the crown was caved in, the straw frayed and torn.
When the first wave of cacklers swept in low, just above the pines on the western edge of the field, he leant his head back and the hat fell to the ground. Spook snatched it up and chewed on it but the act was lost to the boy, marvelling as he was at this flurry of coal-black birds. A second wave soon overwhelmed the stragglers chasing the first. It was followed by a third and a fourth, and on and on until their passings were beyond measure — thousands of birds moving in gusts like the wind given form.
The thresh of their wings was soon lost to a shrill chatter. Such a noise the boy had never heard before. He could feel it in his teeth. A piercing whine absorbing every other sound that dared protest against it — the nervous bleating of the goats and Spook’s fearful braying and his own thoughts, shrieking against the abomination. The hair hackled on his arms and his mother’s voice pierced the din.
The corn! she cried. She was flailing through the gate, Belle by her side. They’s afta the corn!
In one hand she wielded her large kitchen knife and it scissored ahead of her stride, reaping at the goldenrod that had overcome the field with its brazen hue.
The boy slid off the mule. He squeezed between the pen’s cedar rails and chased after her. She had already made the path leading through the Jack pines yet was standing there still when the boy caught up with her. Birds were perched along the branches on either side of the path, as plentiful as leaves. The cackling here was so loud that it forced the boy’s hands to his ears. Through the gap, the cornfield was a seething mass of utter dark. Nothing could be seen beyond it.
Grabbing the boy’s arm, his mother pulled him along the path behind her. The boy stumbled along the hardened valleys wagon wheels had made on either side, gazing up at the hordes around him. He could see now that not all of them were black. Some had red crowns and others deep blue collars and there were starlings too, and sparrows and chickadees. When the smaller birds landed, the larger ones pecked at them and beat their wings, and the smaller birds flitted away. Everywhere the boy looked he found the same so that it appeared to him one vast struggle: the small against the large, the light against the dark, the weak against the strong.
The forest path broke then upon the field and the boy felt his mother’s hand slip from his.
Stay here! she yelled, wading towards the corn patch, swinging the blade in her hand as a scythe, Belle charging ahead of her.
The birds at the edge of the corn rows scattered with the billow of ashes windswept from a fire as his mother hacked at the stalks, slicing them at their base with blow upon blow until a dozen lay felled. Even these the birds assaulted. She cleaved at them, catching one in midflight and severing its wing. It flopped on the ground and she bent to the harvested stalks, bundling them together and dragging them towards the boy, Belle trailing after her, snapping at her winged pursuers.
When she dropped the cornstalks at her son’s feet, the dog turned tail and stood guard while her mistress scavenged the treeline. She wrenched a fallen branch from among the bracken. She broke it in two over her knee then strode back to the boy with the thicker piece and pressed it into his hand. It was near as long as he was tall and there were three prongs at its end. The bark was scaled and loose. It crumbled under his grip.
Ya gotta protect the seed, she said.
The boy nodded and she turned, storming back into the fray.
Birds, five or six of them, swooped past the boy’s shoulder. They landed on the pile of seed corn — little brown swallows dodging among the larger blacks. The boy swung his club. A prong caught one of the blue-collared birds in its breast, making it stick. He knocked it off against the ground, swung again and hit another, startling it to flight before it realized that it was already dead. It dropped like a stone.
He swung again and again and again until he was ringed by their mangled, twitching forms.
He tried to raise his club to strike once more but his arms were as rope and it drooped. His throat was too parched to swallow. He ran his tongue over his lips and watched his mother labouring back from the field, towing another load. Beneath the delirious frizz of her hair, blood from a dozen cuts and scrapes painted her cheeks and dribbled in trails down her neck. When she reached her son, she heaved the bundle on top of the others, the birds ravaging the seed taking flight then settling again as she turned back to the rows. The flock there had become as a waterfall, black and foul, pouring from the trees and flooding the cornfield, its mist coal-speckled against the clear blue sky, the clamour of their feast foaming against the roar of their chatter.
Such was the world beyond where his mother stood, her arms limp at her side, her hair as wild as thorn bushes. She craned her neck and looked back at her son, her eyes wide, astonished and fearful. He watched the knife slip from her hand and stick into the sun-parched earth.
Ma! he called out.
Her legs buckled. She teetered sideways and slumped to the ground. He dropped his stick and ran to her screaming, Ma! Ma! When he reached her, he knelt and wiped away the hair lathered to her cheeks with sweat and blood. She lifted her hand towards his face but it faded. The boy clutched at it and she smiled, wan and desperate. A tremor coursed through her and she screamed, jerking her hand away and clutching it tight to her belly. Her eyelids pressed into seamless pits and her teeth mashed against her lips. Then all at a sudden the tension fled her and she went limp against the ground. The boy took her hand again and pressed the back of it against his cheek, its fingers twitching like the legs of some dying thing.
He heard Belle bark and turned. There was a crow pecking at the eyes of the bird he’d impaled with his stick. Belle pounced at it. It took flight and the boy watched it striving for the forest before it was lost to the sun’s harsh glare. He felt for his father’s hat to guard against the bright but it was gone, he couldn’t remember where. Cursing himself for losing it, he looked to his mother’s crumpled form. The hem of her skirt was mired in blood, the shadow at her back as thin as a wheat stalk, the air around her miasmic. The cackling seemed to be coming from the other side of the world, its rabid shrill dulled by his exhaustion, and he heard his father’s voice raging against its fury.
Git her out of the heat, boy, it said. It’ll kill her.
He circled to her front and bent to her ear.
Ma, he said. Ya gotta git out of the heat. Ma!
She groaned and her eyelids shuddered. He waited for her to rouse. When she would not he wrapped an errant strand of her hair around his finger and gave it a sharp jerk, snapping it off at the root. Still she did not stir and he stood and tried to think of what his father’d do in his stead. He saw him lifting her from the ground and turning towards the path. In his mind it didn’t take him more than a half-dozen strides to get her through the pines and not a single step more before he made it to the pasture gate.
He scanned the forest, following its line until it gave way to the beaver dam on the far side of the field, then looked back to his mother and saw her knife stuck upright in the dirt. Its handle was made from a piece of maple worn smooth and its blade of a grey metal that reflected only a world cast in shadow. He pried it loose from the soil and skulked along the treeline until he came to a lone cedar among the pines. He hacked at a low branch. After the third swipe it fell to his feet. He hacked at another and severed it in two. Laying one on top of the other, he dragged them back to his mother. He draped the webbed bough of one over her face and then softened a hole in the soil with the knife. He used his hand to dig it down to the depth of his elbow and took up the other bough. He trimmed the infant branches from the stem of it and stuck it in the hole, leaning it over his mother’s face and packing its base with dirt.
The shade fell where he’d wanted it but the sun still punctured the gaps, alighting islands on her cheeks and forehead. He dug another hole behind the first and stuck the other bough in, tweaking it until her face was covered by its shade. Returning to the cedar, he harvested another six of its branches, the last as thick as his leg and taking ten swipes to hack loose. He trundled them back in two trips and hedged them between his mother and the sun.
When he was done he was dizzy and had a terrible urge to lie down beside her but was saved from this by his thirst.
Belle had since retreated to within the hedge’s cover. When the boy turned towards the path leading into the forest, she stood on wobbled legs and barked feebly at him.
I’ma fetch us some water, the boy said. You stay with Ma.
The dog sat on her haunches and watched the boy set off, dubious it seemed of his slow plod and the way he stumbled over the wagon trail’s scored ridges.
The trees were all but emptied along the path. Only a few of the lesser birds skittered amongst the branches. A crow cawed at him from behind, hastening him through the breech and into the pasture. Meadowlarks twittered and dragonflies flitted. Thistles stung his legs and the tall grass tangled his feet. He tripped and fell then rose and drove his legs forward in a staggered line towards the barn.
Spook was at the yard’s fence, shaking her head and braying mercilessly. He marched past her, sneaking between the cedar rails and hurrying to the well. He pumped the lever and drank from the flow then pumped again and dunked his head under, wetting his hair.
A splash of cold water like that’d shore do Ma a world a good, he thought, wiping the wet off his face.
As he strode towards the house he tried to think of how he could get more than a potful out to the corn patch.
If ya could carry it, there’s that ol milk cask in the shed.
He thought of his father’s wheelbarrow, how it was too heavy for him to lift even empty. And of Spook, only a few weeks ago harnessed to a tree felled for winter wood, his father lashing her backside into ribbons to get her to lug it across the pasture. And then he recalled how two summers’ past his father had
