The Writer 03.2020

YOU CAN’T FIND THIS IN PRINT.

1.

BIRDS, AGAIN

ashwell, massachusetts, 1871

Wonders, wonders!

—miles pearson,

the darkening glass (p. 4)

T

he first of the birds Caroline
mistook for her own mind’s
work. When the streak of red
crossed the kitchen windowpane, fast,
disastrous-bright, she thought it was
some bloody piece come loose inside
herself.
Then her father appeared from the
study and held the doorframe, leaning
in. “Caroline! Did you see?”
They found it in the yard, real after
all: high in their birch tree, pecking
judiciously at the bark. The size of a
dove, the shape of a crow, and a bra-
zen crimson tip to tail feathers, the

shade a cardinal might bloom to if

dipped in wine. It had a crestless head,

all sharp planes. As the Hoods

watched, it took a choosy bird-step

forward, then craned neck over back

to root around in its wing. “No ques-

tion at all,” Samuel Hood said. His

hand on Caroline’s arm felt slight.

This shock had dislodged his usual

serenity, and in his face she saw old

age, the way his features would fold in

on themselves. To brace them both

she gripped his fingers. “Trilling

hearts. Who’d have believed?”

“A trilling heart,” Caroline said.

She had just one hazy red-tinged

memory of the trilling hearts’ only

prior appearance in Ashwell, twenty-

five years earlier. Standing barefoot in

the grass of the front garden, four years

old and afraid to go down the path

because of the bird that stood guard

there, chopping up a worm with its

brutal beak. Snip, snip, snip, worm bits

on the gravel. On the steps behind her,

sewing in the sun, her mother.

“What can this mean?” her father

asked. “That there’s a red bird in our

tree.”

Samuel put a hand to his shirtfront.

When he was a boy, his appendix had

almost burst before the surgeon man-

aged to remove it, and in moments of

great excitement a heat-and-pain

phantom seemed to revisit him.

Sometimes Caroline found him with

his fingers pressed there while he

wrote and knew he was imagining

readers, roomfuls of them, schools of

hands turning reams of his pages.

“There is some significance,” he

said.

The immensities of God’s creation

often whittled themselves down to

make a message for her father. But

this—in this wouldn’t anyone read

meaning? The red flash, the answering

thrum. “You know it was your mother

who named them,” Samuel said, as if

speaking about a person who’d stepped

into another room. Caroline tried

again to turn her four-year-old head,

to leave off staring at the bird and

catch sight of her mother’s face.

“You never told me,” she said.

“I must have. Well. When we first

saw them—a group of us out walking

in the afternoon, just happening upon

them in the fields, you can’t imagine—

she said they put her in mind of

hearts, scooped right out of chests.

Disembodied, trilling hearts, she said.”

The bird’s shape was wrong for this

description, but its feel was right. The

trilling heart looked like something

safer left hidden. “Do you think David

will be here in time to see?” Samuel

said. As always, David’s name sounded

EXCERPT From The Illness Lesson by Clare Beams.