One Came Home (2 page)

I remembered the day I’d seen the kiss. That kiss had led to the end of everything. I was glancing out the window in Grandfather Bolte’s study as I worked on the daily accounts when I saw it. At the time, my sister was keeping company with Mr. Olmstead, so I gaped as Billy’s hand reached for Agatha’s chin, guiding her close enough so that his lips touched hers. They drew apart. Agatha said something. She squeezed Billy’s forearm, and then she left the sight line of my window. Billy smiled for a moment. Then he put a fist in the air and whooped. And as he left, he whistled. Everything about the way Billy McCabe moved—the way he stuck his hands in his pockets, the little dance step in his feet—told me he’d gained something significant. He’d won either half the world or Agatha’s heart. Since Agatha didn’t have half the world to give, she’d given her heart.

I told Mr. Olmstead, thinking he had a right to know.

At the funeral, I looked at each suitor, comparing the two of them. Mr. Olmstead owned the Olmstead Hotel. He had thirty-five years of living behind him and silk lapels crisp enough to cut butter. But Billy McCabe was considered the good-looking one. I granted Billy this: he stood half a head taller than Mr. Olmstead. As he’d aged into his nineteen years, his chest and arms had thickened so much I couldn’t call him Beanstalk anymore, and his hair had changed from corn-silk white to the color of wet sand. But those characteristics didn’t seem enough to warrant the way his grin caused chaos with every idiot girl I’d ever met.

Today tears ran down Billy’s face. What I wanted to know was this: Did he grieve because my sister was dead? Or did he grieve because something he’d been
promised
could no longer occur? He had walked off
whistling
.

Polly Barfod, a girl with thick blond braids wrapped around her head, kept her place beside Billy. She was determined to marry him, then. People described her as “sturdy.” I stared at her ankles, noted the way the laces stretched tight between shoe leather that did not touch, and thought of the way tree trunks come straight up out of the ground.

But who cared? This entire funeral was lunacy! Within a period of two weeks, Agatha had run off, a body was found, and a funeral was held. Does this strike you as reasonable? I refused to believe it.

I tried to calm myself by focusing my eyes and thoughts on the Wisconsin River, a ribbon of which was visible beyond
Reverend Leland. I noted the location of all that I knew to be there: the sandstone that lined the banks and piled yellow, tan, and red, like giant pancake stacks; the cave that summer visitors carved their names into; the teapot islands with pine-tree lids; and the spires that balanced rocks at their points.

Reverend Leland paused from his sermonizing to read a psalm:

Psalm 19. My sister’s favorite. Reading it was going one too far, given the circumstances. To the psalm’s meter, I kicked a trough in the dirt.

Finally, Reverend Leland stopped his eulogy, men returned hats to their heads, and the shoveling began. One by one, the mourners wrapped their hands around the shovel’s handle, stuck it into dirt, and dropped the dirt into that six-foot hole. Then they passed the shovel back and came to give their condolences to the family.

Grandfather Bolte spoke with the men, patted a back, and even, at times, laughed. The women headed for Ma. Ma nodded, took a hand. I slid out of arm’s reach and listened to
that dirt falling into the hole. At first, the rocks had skidded on top of hard wood, but now all I heard was hollow thumps.

When I finally looked up, I saw Ma’s left thumb and forefinger circling on that scrap of blue-green fabric: circle, circle, stop to talk, circle, circle, circle, stop to talk, circle …

It reminded me of
that
day.…

Agatha spinning
. I couldn’t help but think it, seeing Ma’s thumb and forefinger working in circles on that blue-green scrap.

Hold it
, I thought. I did not want to think about
that
—not here, not now. In front of all these people? I felt their funeral eyes on me, waiting to see how I took my grief. I looked again beyond Reverend Leland at the winding Wisconsin River below and hoped for distraction.

But all that sky between bluff and river did not help. How
empty
the Psalm 19 firmament appeared! Only a couple of weeks earlier, someone standing in this spot would have seen flocks of wild pigeons flashing through the blue sky like schools of fish. Those pigeons were gone. They’d left
their nesting for good—the nesting had broke—right before Agatha ran off.

Suddenly I was remembering that day whether I wanted to or not.

That was the day the world darkened under wild pigeons. It was the end of March. Mrs. Finister had rushed into our store all out of breath.

“Pigeons,” she said to Ma, throwing herself against the counter. “They’re coming. I never saw so many.”

Ma raced out back to gather laundry hanging on the line. Agatha bolted upstairs. Mrs. Finister stepped toward the plate glass window. I pushed past Mrs. Finister out onto the front porch.

People from Wisconsin know wild pigeons. Pigeons come every year, but because 1871 was an odd-numbered year, we were expecting greater numbers: pigeons adore black-oak acorns, and black oaks drop acorns every
other
year. So to put it plainly, Mrs. Finister’s agitation must have meant she’d seen something unusual.

But outside, from my position on the porch, Placid, Wisconsin, looked as it always did: There was Main Street (bakery, blacksmith, three inns, tailor, photographic studio, courthouse, church, and train depot). The March sky held its place above, with melting snow and mud below.

Something didn’t seem right, though. I figured it out—there was a sound on the air, a shushing. The wind was brisk, so at first I thought it was the wind. But wind lets up—it’s
not constant—and there was no letup to this sound. It was like a teakettle when the water boils and steam plumes out the spout. Then the shushing grew louder—more like a steamboat powering itself upstream. No—make it two or three steamboats and a couple of trains headed right for me.

Fear took me. My knees began to knock—and I mean that literally. My body soon followed suit. Then my ears stopped up and all I heard was the shushing, shushing, shushing. This convinced me of oncoming catastrophe: somehow I was sure that a wall of water rushed at the porch I stood on. I gripped the railing, unable to move my feet from where they’d anchored. I swear I was Noah awaiting his flood.

I saw them then—pigeons, not water. But whatever relief I felt at seeing birds, it dissipated when that winged mass drew a shade on the sun. I tell you, it was night at three o’clock in the afternoon. My world snapped into a box. The air staled. A kind of sleet (the birds’ dung) fell from that winged ceiling.

Birds, birds, birds—a wing, an eye, a beak—they flew so fast I couldn’t pick out one bird. The sky was a feathered fabric weaving itself in and out, unraveling before my eyes. I felt dizzy. I could barely breathe.

Out on the street, people dropped to the ground, arms thrown over their heads. If they screamed, I wouldn’t have known, because all I could hear was the sound of those beating wings. Horses reared up and yanked at their hitches. Dogs flattened their ears, put their heads down, and scooted under buggies and porches.

Then Agatha brushed my elbow, startling me. She had
changed into her oldest dress and covered it with her work apron. Oddly, she carried Ma’s tattered parasol.

She winked at me, popped open the parasol, and stepped off the porch.

I reached out to stop her because I thought she’d get hurt, but Agatha was already beyond my grasp. Wild pigeons are as big as crows. They fly fast and with much strength. They’ll knock you off your feet and cause all sorts of damage.

Agatha, though, seemed to feel no fear. A current of pigeons flew low in the street before veering up over the roof of our store. Agatha ran toward this winged river, stopping short of collision by mere inches. Then she crouched down and edged underneath it.

Bit by bit, Agatha lifted the parasol, forcing the rush of pigeons to adjust. Finally, she stood upright under a flood of birds that surged over and around, without stop, repeatedly and repeatedly, again and again, to infinity (it seemed). Agatha beamed at me and pointed.

But even that triumph was not enough for Agatha, because then she spun. At first, she spun slowly, carefully. But soon she turned quicker, more swiftly still, until the fringe on the parasol shot out parallel to the ground. The pigeons pivoted, point-turning near Agatha’s right cheek—one after another after another. Locks of Agatha’s auburn hair came undone and lifted off her shoulders.

Have you ever seen how iron filings circle a magnet? That was what this looked like. Except it wasn’t still and
dead like iron; it was rushing, pulsing, and made of feathers, pumping hearts, and lungfuls of air. I could barely make out the pigeons, but I could see the center: my sister turning and laughing under that parasol. My fear slipped to the wayside, and I felt something like what I feel when I hear bells on horses, or streams running during the first spring thaw. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Agatha—sister, friend, guide to life, and the eighth wonder of my world.

As if she heard my thoughts, Agatha stopped and pointed at me. “Come,” she mouthed. Her free hand gestured me closer. She nodded encouragingly.

I wanted to. I did. I tried to pull my fingers from that railing, to instruct my feet to lift and step. But those images of bells and streams dissolved, and all I saw was a wind stirred by the evil winged creatures from Pandora’s box. I stayed.

At the funeral, it was the memory of my refusal that made me cry. My arms pressed to my sides, the fabric of that borrowed black dress ripping under my armpits, the sound so loud I’m sure people heard it above the shoveling.

When Grandfather Bolte put his large hand on my shoulder, I shoved him away and ran down the long hill from Mount Zion Cemetery.

I ended up sitting in my oldest clothes down by the river, shooting gin bottles to pieces with the Springfield single-shot. Gin shacks had sprouted along the river with the influx of the pigeoners that followed wild pigeons. Now that the people had left, bottles littered the bank. I found those bottles convenient. Shooting settled me. I did not miss one bottle. I never do.

Feathers flew up with each breaking bottle. Pigeon feathers that spring were like fallen leaves in the autumn—they were everywhere,
in
everything. But there’s a difference between feathers and leaves. Feathers claw their way back into the sky, whereas leaves, after flying once, are content to rest on the earth. Agatha? She was a feather. She pushed higher,
farther always. I suspected my constitution was more leaf than feather. I hoped I was wrong about that, though, because I wanted to be like Agatha.

Wherever she was. And I
would
find her.

I lifted the rifle, took aim, and shot another bottle to smithereens.

The blank side of a used store receipt lay beside me (weighted down with an old brick). I’d written “For Journey” at the top and underlined it. But my mind was elsewhere. Memories pressed in on me, so I had set the pencil down and picked up the Springfield rifle.

The first thing I remembered was the fight in November. I heard Agatha’s raised voice, and then Grandfather Bolte’s coming from the proximity of his study. By this time I was in our bedroom, tucked in bed and, because of the cold, eagerly awaiting Agatha’s warm body beside me.

Though I tried to hear, I couldn’t make out a word of the fight. Ma stepped into the hallway, knocked on the study door, and called their names. Hinges creaked. Ma and Agatha spoke. “Ask
him
,” I heard Agatha say. Next thing I knew, Agatha was in our room and closing the door behind her.