Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (38 page)

The owl isn’t my pet, although I’d like her to be. She won’t come when I call, perch on my finger, or accept stew meat from my hand, as she does with my mother, uncle and brother. It’s not that I’m afraid. It’s more that she’s too beautiful to touch. When I get nervous, she flies away.

One afternoon, while I’m doing homework, Tirzah flutters down to the dining room table.

“Hi, pretty girl,” says my mother, who sits beside me sewing a blouse. “Are you thirsty?”

Tirzah waddles up to me, ignoring the water bowl my mother slides forward.

I tap the pencil eraser on my teeth.

“Go ahead,” my mother says. “Pet her. She won’t bite.”

“I know. She just doesn’t like me.”

“That’s not true. Scratch her head. She loves that. Rub in little circles.”

I extend the pencil. Tirzah flinches, eyes wide, preparing to fly.

“See!”

“Just wait. Try again. Slower this time.”

I inch the eraser forward until it touches the owl’s head. Tirzah squints, but stays put.

“Good,” my mother says. “Use your finger. See how funny it feels? Like a ping pong ball?”

Tirzah closes her eyes and leans into the pressure. The more she relaxes, the more I relax.

After a few minutes, the owl curls her toes and rolls onto her side, asleep.

My grandfather visits us sometimes on the way home from his evening shift as a university security guard. At 65, after raising eight children, picking fruit and paving highways, he insists on holding a job. He nods hello, settles into a corner rocker, hangs his gray fedora on his bony knee, and nurses a cold Coors long-neck. My grandfather doesn’t talk much. He prefers to watch, listen and absorb the warmth of a family life he never had as a boy. His father died when he was eight. When his mother remarried, she sent him to a boarding school in Santa Fe. He ran away soon afterward, walking a hundred miles through the Rio Puerco badlands to the mining village of Marquez, where he eventually found work. He slept in barns on those nights, bedding down with horses, alfalfa and streaks of moonlight. Owls watched him from the rafters.

On one of his visits to our house, Tirzah flutters over to his armrest. My grandfather extends a finger and she hops on. He raises her to his nose, and smiles.

Each winter, our house fills with the sweet scent of piñon. We have no fireplace or wood-burning stove, so my mother sprinkles trading post incense over the steel grate of our living room floor furnace. It reminds her of childhood, she says of the smell, crumbling sawdust sticks between her fingers, then standing back while orange sparks swirl before her eyes. As a girl, she stoked the potbelly stove in her grandmother’s kitchen. Piñon reminds her of black coffee in tin cups, thick cotton quilts and crackling orno flames. Piñon takes her back, she tells me, all the way back.

I take my mother’s place when she leaves to prepare supper, standing in the hot current until my blue jeans burn my legs. As Tirzah glides through the room, white smoke curling from her wings, I imagine I’m soaring through the clouds beside her, or drifting like an apparition above the polished tables, brass lamps and Navajo rugs, haunting this room forever.

On nights before art show openings at the state fair, I sleep to the hiss of my uncle’s propane torch and the click of his sculptor’s tools. He’s my mother’s youngest brother, fourteen years her junior. He moved in with us four years after my father died because my mother didn’t feel safe alone with five children on the ragged edge of northwest Albuquerque. She also wanted a male role model for my brother and me, although my uncle was barely out of his teens at the time. He likes The Doors, Jimi Hendrix and Country Joe and the Fish. He favors a beard and long hair, too, and walks barefoot everywhere, even in the mountains. I think he looks like George Harrison stepping onto the crosswalk of my mother’s favorite album,
Abbey Road
. My grandmother thinks he looks like Jesus. She wants him to be a priest, to help atone for her sins, but instead he becomes an artist. With needle-nose pliers and rods of Pyrex glass, he creates intricate figurines of Hopi eagle dancers, Mexican
vaqueros
and Navajo shepherds, then mounts them on driftwood, sandstone and volcanic rock. I watch him from my pillow with his wild hair and welder’s glasses spinning solid into liquid into solid again, crafting icy figures from fire. Tirzah perches above his worktable, drawn as I am to his clear blue flame.

My mother wants to bless our pets. Although she left the Catholic Church after my father died, she wants divine protection for our strays. So, on a warm Sunday in February, we load the ducks, geese, peacock, goat and owl into our Comet, and attend the outdoor ceremony.

We stand in line behind a dozen puppies, kitties, gerbils and bunnies. The priest chuckles from the gazebo as he sprinkles holy water. When our turn arrives, he stops mid-motion and appraises us from behind silver-rimmed eyeglasses. My brother slouches before the dais, arms folded, Tirzah on his shoulder. I kneel beside the black Nubian goat, which suckles nosily from its baby bottle. My oldest sister cradles the peacock; the two other girls hold ducks and geese. Our mother lingers on the steps with her eyes hidden behind Jackie O. sunglasses. We’re long-haired, tie-dyed and proud of it, in full bloom eight years after my father died, surrounded by the animals who brought new life into our home. Parishioners scowl. A poodle yaps. A news photographer snaps our portrait. After a long pause, the priest mumbles a prayer. The next day, we make the front page.

Tirzah surprises us. When one of the dogs slinks through the house, she contracts her feathers, squints, and becomes as thin as a dry branch, camouflaged completely against the gray aspen plank. She changes direction in mid-flight, too, hovering like a helicopter, swiveling her head, and returning silently the way she came. She’s also a hunter. When we place a chunk of stew meat before her, she puffs to twice her normal size, dilates her pupils, and pounces. She thumps the meat hard against the perch then flings it to the floor. Talons scratching hardwood, yellow eyes blazing, she stalks her meal. Finding it, she stretches her beak wide and swallows it whole.

During the day, the sun is too bright for the owl’s eyes, so she seeks dark corners to sleep. One morning, when the temperature hits 85, one of my sisters reaches into the hall closet to flick on the swamp cooler, but leaves the door ajar. The chain is broken on the overhead bulb, and the closet is always pitch black. Tirzah, gazing toward the opening from her living room perch, flutters atop the closet door. I hold my breath. My sister calls our mother. Normally, the closet is off limits to us kids. We’re not supposed to disturb the relics inside, the old photos, packaged artwork, and mothballed uniforms, dusty pharmaceutical journals and broken ham radio gear once belonging to our father. We try to shoo Tirzah away, but she won’t budge. She will only stare into the cool abyss. After a moment, she lowers her head and hops inside. From then on, the hall closet becomes her sanctuary. To fetch her, I must reach into the darkness, brushing my father’s things.

My brother finds another stray, a baby meadowlark that had fallen from a cottonwood into an alfalfa field near his school. He can’t find the nest, so he tucks the orphan under his arm and carries it home. Our mother swaddles the chick in a washcloth, fetches some old newspapers and phones the ornithologist. I watch her fill an eyedropper with water and hold it to the bird’s beak. She adores meadowlarks, she says after hanging up. As a girl, while staying with her grandparents in Corrales, she often woke to the song of meadowlarks in the apple orchards across the road.

“It was so beautiful,” she tells me, puckering her lips to whistle. “But sad, too.”

She retrieves an extra birdcage from the back porch, places the chick inside and covers the wire dome with a bed sheet, as the ornithologist instructed. Standing on her tiptoes, she sets the bundle atop the pottery case, away from the cats. Tirzah watches from her living room.

The next morning, I hear my mother scream. In the dining room, I find her holding the birdcage. In the center lies the meadowlark, wet with blood.

“Poor little thing,” she cries, swatting a tabby off the table. “See what you did!”

My uncle steps inside from the back yard, examines the bird, and concludes that its skull has been crushed. He checks the cage for damage. Finding none, he snatches up the cat and holds its paw to the wire bars, but its arm is too thick to fit through. Stumped, he searches the house for clues. On the aspen plank, he discovers bits of wet gray fuzz. After retrieving Tirzah from the closet, he holds her tightly with one hand, then uses the other to extend one of her long bony legs, which slips neatly into the cage, within easy reach of where the meadowlark had slept.

“You dirty rat!” my uncle says, holding the owl to his face. “Did you kill that poor bird?”

Tirzah bites his thumb, wriggles away, and flutters to the living room.

She scowls at us the rest of the day. She won’t even come to my mother.

I have no bed and no room. I sleep on an aluminum cot beside the antique church pew in our living room. My mother buys me Peanuts sheets to make me feel better but I hate that cot, sliding it down the hallway each night. The foam rubber mattress smells like dirty socks. The joints pinch my pajamas. Be patient, my mother tells me. For my tenth birthday, she’ll restore one of the iron headboards on the back porch. Soon, I’ll be able to join my uncle and brother in the boys’ room.

When she switches off the floor lamp and the ten o’clock news, I’m alone. I lie back under the silver glow of the curb side street light with the clicks from the vintage clock and the creaks of old walls. From the haze of half sleep, I sense Tirzah awaken. I hear scratching. Feel the weight of eyes. Breathe in the aroma of mothballs and dust. I snap awake and sit up, but there’s only a whisper, an echo, a slight disturbance of air.

The longer she stays with us, the more stir-crazy Tirzah becomes. Every few weeks or so, she flies into the broad living room window, unable to see the glass, confused when she can’t pass through. My mother draws the curtains, then replaces the drapes with bamboo shades, but whenever a sparrow darts by outside, Tirzah chases after it, straight into the glass. My uncle, fearing the owl will crack her skull or break the window, nails a row of Russian olive branches to the outside of the frame. Tirzah settles on a chair back, gazing through the bars.

One afternoon, the owl goes missing. She’s not on her perch, in the closet, or in the back rooms. I search under the beds, behind the bookshelves, inside cabinets. I search with my siblings for nearly an hour, but we can’t find her. My mother sits in her rocker, jaw muscle flexing.

“She’s gone,” she mutters. “I know she is. One of you brats must have left the front door open again. How many times have I told you to close that damn door?”

My uncle thumps across the hardwood floor checking behind chairs and tables. When one of the dogs slinks by, he kicks it. “Where’s the flashlight? Who took the flashlight?”

I stand with my sisters in the dining room. I didn’t leave the door open. I didn’t do anything. But I feel like I did, like I always do when one of the pets is in trouble, like something that happened a long time ago is about to happen again.

“Don’t just stand there,” my mother says. “Look under the table again.”

My little sister starts to cry.

Above the scrape and knock of old wooden chairs, we hear a muffled sound.

“Hoo.”

“Hush!” my mother says. “Listen….”

“Hoo.”

We turn toward the pottery case, to a Zuni water bowl on a back shelf. Inside it, glaring at us over the rim, is Tirzah. She’d settled inside to sleep, but woke during our commotion.

“There you are!” My mother rushes forward. “My Tirzah….”

My sisters gather around her. My uncle snaps a photo.

I hesitate before joining them. I don’t like what I see in the owl’s eyes. She appears wary, guarded, disapproving, as if she’s seeing my family for the first time.

We’re late returning home from an outing up north. The horizon burns magenta as we race blue shadows home. We arrive in darkness. My uncle flicks on the house lights while my mother fires the floor furnace. Tirzah, who hasn’t eaten since morning, hoots from her perch. My mother squeaks open the refrigerator, scans the shelves, but finds no stew meat, only breakfast steak. She checks the clock. Safeway has just closed. The breakfast steak is fresh, so she chops it for the owl.

The next day, Tirzah won’t eat or drink. She barely flies. The ornithologist asks my mother to read the steak label to him over the phone. She does, her voice barely a whisper. The breakfast steak has a chemical protein that stew meat does not, he informs her. Tirzah was poisoned.