The Accidentals Page 2

Whose? Whose? Whose? That’s the dove.

  Peace, peace, peace. That’s my song.

  2

  June

  THE YEAR MY MOTHER WENT AND DID WHAT SHE DID, I was ten and my sister, Grace McAlister, was twelve. We lived in a little clunker of a town in south Mississippi called Opelika, where my father, Holly McAlister, worked as an accountant at the local lumber mill.

  I fault myself. I should have seen it, the disaster that was about to befall us. I can make excuses, I can say I was just a girl. But I should have been able to stop it. I should have tried to stop it. Over the course of my short life, I’d become a finely tuned gauge of my mother’s many and varied moods. I could tell by the way she crunched her Rice Krispies in the morning what kind of day lay ahead. A toss of her head could make my heart leap in my throat. So that night at the traveling rendition of Madame Butterfly, when she flinched at the peculiar way the cherry blossoms fell, I knew that trouble lay coiled in the wings, ready to strike.

  The blossoms were hard plastic so they came down hard, as if descending from some terrible calamity at a great height, hitting the gym floor with a splat and a clatter rather than gently troubling the air the way real cherry blossoms would have. When they started to fall, in clumps, not individually as they ought to have, my mother began to cry.

  I should have comforted her, patted her hand. I should have told her to listen to the music and not worry about the stupid blossoms.

  Instead, I told her to buck up. Just what kind of performance was she expecting from a flea-bag opera company that set up shop in a high school gym stinking of wet sneakers? And why in heaven’s name had she dragged a defenseless ten-year-old with a tendency toward bronchitis out in a bone-chilling February rain to witness this shambles of a show, this disaster?

  All of which made her cry harder.

  I knew the answer to the second question. I was the last port in my mother’s stormy life. Olivia LaMonde McAlister had no friends whatsoever. It’s 1957, mind you, and here’s a woman who doesn’t go to sewing circles or potluck suppers. She doesn’t belong to the DAR, Junior League, or Ladies’ Hospital Auxiliary. She doesn’t play bridge or shop for recreational pleasure or wear a girdle or eat egg and olive salad with her girlfriends at K & T Drugstore. She doesn’t even take Christmas hams to the poor. She thinks women who engage in such activities are brainless nincompoops. “Idiots, every one of them!” she tells my father when he tries to get her out and about, tells her she’s stuck up. She says birds have more brains.

  But the number one reason she and I are crouched on a bleacher watching fake cherry blossoms being catapulted to the gym floor is that my mother loves the sound of sound. When I was younger, I found this mildly entertaining, the way she lost herself in Glenn Miller and bird calls and the whistle of the teakettle, the way she glued herself to sound, composed her life across its chords and cadences. As the years went by, though, and she began to twitter and coo and sing full-throatedly, I became deeply afraid. I came to fear that she’d never find her way out of the maze of sound and return to the world of seeing and clarity, of you come and you go, a world I had chosen without a second thought from day one.

  In and of itself, there was nothing earth-shattering about my mother’s crying. She was what people in those days called tenderhearted, which meant she had the annoying tendency of bursting into tears at the drop of a hat. That night at the opera, I could see she was revving up when she opened her mouth and started to pant. She once told me this was her way of trying not to cry in public. To this end, she’d open her eyes as wide as they would go and pant like a winded dog, which made her look like she was watching a murder in progress. While engaging in these episodes of bug-eyed staring and breathing in fits and starts, she’d count any available objects within her line of vision, tilting her head back and gazing heavenward, which kept the tears from cascading down her cheeks and becoming noticeable. In this prayerful pose, counting under her breath—tiles, beams, clouds, stars, you name it—she’d pause to tell me to wipe that worried look off my face; some people were just sad, period. It was their nature.

  Worst were the mishaps to her birds. Summer before last it had been the mother bluebird, who’d been messily dispatched by a house sparrow in the nest box Mama had prepared. After slaughtering the mother, whose offspring had just emerged from their eggs, the sparrow had pecked the nestlings to death too. It had then built its own sloppy home atop their bloodied bodies. When Mama came home from grocery shopping that afternoon, she spotted its dark sparrow head sticking out of the birdhouse as if it owned the place, as if it had lived there a million years. She shooed it out and unhinged the front of the nest box, only to be met with the scene of bloody mayhem.

  Her shriek jolted Grace and me out of my multiplication tables, which Grace was drilling me on since I hadn’t done especially well in arithmetic over the past school year. We threw down the cards she’d made for me and ran outside and planted ourselves on either side of our sobbing mother, who stood on tiptoe, steadying herself by placing her hands on our small sturdy shoulders and peering into the box. Then, still sobbing, she lifted each of us up to survey the carnage, as though she couldn’t bear the burden of having witnessed it alone. The bluebird mother had defended her offspring to the death. She’d been pecked so badly that she appeared to have been decapitated, her rose breast flecked in blood. On the bottom of the nest, the mutilated bodies of the four little ones were sprawled about, wings and necks twisted at unnatural angles. Featherless, bony, and raw. Bits of twigs and pine needles piled atop their corpses.

  Mama poked at what was left of the mother bluebird and sobbed on. She prized her bluebirds for their way of flying—their lightning flutter, the shocking flash of blue—but she especially thrilled to the male’s spring mating call, which she thought sounded like where, where, where are you, which she said made perfect sense. She kept the nest box in full view of the bay window next to the kitchen table and waited for the birds to arrive each spring, first the male scouting the nest. She’d murmur indignantly that he should know by now that she kept a good clean box. Tight too, and on a pole nothing on earth could climb. Still, he would flit in and out, peering into the hole, weighing his alternatives, making up his mind. “Why’s he dithering so?” she’d say. “He couldn’t ask for a better home.”

  The night of the massacre, her face red and swollen from crying, she read up on house sparrows. They were an imported menace that pecked others of their species to death, the bird book said, and stole what the industrious first comers, the songbirds, had so carefully built. Left unchecked, they would decimate the North American bluebird population; euthanasia was required.

  Euthanasia. A pretty-sounding word. I raised my eyebrows at Grace to signal I didn’t know what it meant. She scowled at me and made a slicing motion across her throat.

  Mama pored over the bird book a good long time. Grace and I read over her shoulder, wanting her to feel our concern. She reached behind her and touched our forearms, and we drew close. (Our mother loved us, really she did!) Judging by the way she read and reread one page, we discerned that she had decided on the book’s second method of euthanasia, to trap the sparrow in a mesh bag and then whap it up against some hard surface. The book said it might be necessary to do this two or three times to achieve the desired results. The bird would expire with little or no blood. (There was also the method of cervical dislocation, which involved breaking the bird’s neck.) We were instructed by the book that the bird’s death should be arrived at humanely, though humane, the book said, is a somewhat subjective term.

  It was August, and this had been the bluebirds’ third set of babies, a record for our mother’s nest box. The last of the blossoms on the gnarled mimosa in the backyard cloaked the tree in a pink fur. The heat had wilted everything else in the yard. The next morning Mama walked out and down the street, heading for Lafitte’s Market. A while later she returned home carrying a mesh bag. It sat on the kitchen counter for several more days. Finally, on the
fourth night, our father put it away in a drawer before he went to bed. “It’s nature, you can’t change nature, survival of the fittest and all that.” He spoke in what he must have imagined to be a soothing tone. Our mother was sitting at the kitchen table, having just finished filling a salt shaker from the Morton’s salt box when he made this pronouncement. She carefully opened the spigot on the salt box and began pouring salt on the floor. The box was almost full, so it piled up in little white ant hills around her chair. “I guess that’s what you’d say if you came home and found us all hacked to pieces by barbarians,” she said. “I guess that’d just be nature too. I guess that’d just be hunky-dory.” Then she got up and headed back to her room and slammed the door, leaving our father standing in the middle of the kitchen rubbing his mouth and Grace running for the broom.

  Meanwhile, the house sparrow and its mate busied themselves fixing up the bluebird box, bringing in bits of leaves and more pine needles. The next morning, a Saturday, our mother, her eyes ringed in red, planted herself at the kitchen table, pulled out her binoculars, and began to keep watch over the murderers.

  Then, after our father had taken off to get a tune-up for his Nash Rambler and Grace and I were just finishing our Rice Krispies, Mama put down the binoculars, tucked in her lips, rummaged through the drawer, and pulled out the mesh bag. She headed out the back door, walked around to the back of the nest box, and began to move stealthily toward it, the mesh bag held open with both hands. One of the house sparrows was at home, savoring the morning air, its dark head thrust from the box’s entry hole. Settled and placid, pleased as punch with its new home.

  Grace and I watched from the kitchen window. I reached for her hand. “Do you think she’s really going to do it?” I asked my sister. Neither of us could imagine our mother killing a bird. Just as she closed in, the sparrow saw her and disappeared into the depths of the box. Coming around from behind, Mama moved like a thief in the night, slowly sliding the mesh bag over the box’s hole. She held the bag in place with one hand and then whapped the back of the box with the other so that the startled sparrow, trying to escape, bolted from the box directly into the bag.

  The sparrow was larger than expected. It fought hard, flapping and pecking, furious and brave. I found myself rooting for it. Holding the bag at arm’s length, Mama began to tighten the drawstring while the panicked bird worked itself into a frenzy of wings and beak. Then a quick jerk of the string and she had it.

  The arm is swung in a wide circular, windmill motion, one or two revolutions, then rapidly swung into a concrete step/brick wall/tree trunk/flat rock. Despite these explicit instructions, Mama’s face went blank, as if she couldn’t think where she might find such hard surfaces, even though she was standing next to the sturdy trunk of the old mimosa, the blossoms fanning around her so that she herself appeared to have grown feathers and a crest.

  In the bag, the sparrow seemed more uncertain. It quieted, its black eyes flashing gold in the morning light, breast heaving, feet curved around the mesh of the bag, shifting its weight from side to side to keep from turning upside down. Mama looked down at it; then her eyes met ours through the window. She made a shooing motion at us.

  I abandoned my post at the window, threw back the sliding glass door, and ran out into the yard, waving my hands. “Don’t do it!”

  Grace was right behind me. “Don’t you dare go killing that bird!” Of the two of us, Grace was the more easily upset by our mother’s shenanigans; that Mama would actually murder a helpless bird was beyond the pale.

  “Let’s take it somewhere in the car. Let’s relocate it.” I had read in the book that relocation was an option, though not a recommended one.

  A lock of our mother’s hair had fallen over one eye. “It’ll just come back.”

  “Let’s at least try it,” I said.

  Just then our father drove up into the carport.

  “Look, Mama, Dad’s home,” I said. “We can take it out in the country, let it loose. I’ll hold it while you drive. We’ll take it so far it’ll never come back.”

  “It will reproduce,” Mama said. “There will be more of them and they’ll kill all the bluebirds. It’s the right thing to do, the only thing to do.” Her tone was calm, but when she shook her hair off her face, her gray eyes, dull as old blacktop on the road, bulged alarmingly. She looked flat-out crazy.

  As if sensing our support, the bird began to struggle again, throw itself this way and that.

  Grace began to shriek and I began to sob. We were unaccustomed to murder and mayhem. We didn’t want to be the daughters of a bug-eyed woman who killed birds, no matter what kind. We demanded a sane solution, one that didn’t involve blood or brokenness.

  Our father rounded the corner of the backyard and took one look at Mama and the sparrow, which was now hanging on one side of the mesh bag, its mouth open wide as if silently screaming.

  “Olivia, what the hell are you doing with that bird?” He came toward her, his hand outstretched. “Give me that thing.”

  For a long moment, Mama looked at him and us and the sparrow. “We’re relocating this horrid bird,” she said finally, with a nasty look in my direction. “Holly, you drive.”

  So here we went, the four of us. Grace got in the back seat and commenced chewing her nails. Our mother tied up the bag and put it on the floorboard between her feet. Dad drove to the outskirts of town and turned onto Highway 90. When we got outside of Waveland into the tree farms, he slowed the car and began to pull over on the shoulder.

  “Drive farther,” Mama commanded.

  I looked over at my sister, who was staring out the window and chewing ferociously on her left thumbnail. Every so often the sparrow fluttered and flailed about, but mostly it was quiet. We continued on for several more miles, through old farmland, the second crop of cotton coming along, green and hopeful, the crepe myrtles and calla lilies splashing the yards of dilapidated homesteads with pink and red. There’d been some weather, and the road was wet. Someone had mowed down a field of corn stalks, which poked up at odd angles from the upturned ground.

  We crossed a one-lane bridge over the swamp, then another. When Dad pulled to the side of the road a second time, we were surrounded by marsh grass. Grace and I got out with our mother. The sparrow had become a trembling mass of brown feathers, its head tucked under, but not in a natural way. A part of one of its wings stuck out from the bag at an odd angle, reminding me of a feather pasted atop a lady’s hat.

  When our mother opened the sack, the bird hesitated, as if fearful of being further entrapped. Then, after a moment, it shuddered and lifted off, a brown whir of motion over the marsh, soon gone.

  Grace and I cheered. Mama watched it fly away, something in her face laid bare.

  On the way home, Dad turned on the radio and lit a cigarette. The news was about North and South, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Red Tide of Communism sweeping through Asia. They’d just pulled a boy from Chicago, a black boy, out of the Tallahatchie River up near Money. He was all torn up, as dead as dead could be. He’d been tied to a wheel.

  Mama slammed her hand down onto the dash, then covered her face. “Damn those peckerwoods in sheets,” she said. “Damn them to hell.” Dad sighed and changed the channel to baseball.

  When we pulled into the carport, Mama got out and headed for the backyard. Grace and I trooped after her. She opened the nest box, picked up a stick, and scraped out the nest, dead bluebirds and all. The sparrow had laid eggs; Mama scooped them out and stomped them on the ground. Then she went to the shed in the carport and got some electric tape and taped the box’s hole shut. She wept as she went about her tasks, but later on she fixed us grilled cheese sandwiches and put a roast in the oven for supper before going to her room and turning on the radio.

  Grace, meanwhile, decided the bluebird mother and hatchlings deserved a decent burial. She dug a hole, then ordered me to gather mimosa puffs to cover the grave. “They died a terrible death,” she said. “They need something pretty.” It wa
s dusk by that time. The heat pressed down like a hot hand. When I reached up for the mimosa leaves, they shrank from my touch. In my hands, the blossoms seemed to come alive like tiny creatures, sticky and willing. I pushed the stems into the ground around the edges of the grave my sister had made.

  We stood together, my sister and I, looking down at the upturned dirt. Grace waved her hand over the grave. “Nothing goes away forever,” she murmured. “Everything comes back. Amen.”

  All this time the sparrow’s mate sat on a high outer branch of the mimosa, eyeing us. Then it began to make its way down, branch by branch, toward the box. I went inside to go to the bathroom and when I came back out, Mama’s tape was fraying and had holes in it. The sparrow sat on top of the box grooming itself, its feathers splayed. Dad was trimming his hedges in the front yard, the steady chop of his clippers playing backup to the evening song of a thrush. We ran to tell him about the sparrow’s mate.

  He threw down his clippers. “What next?”

  He stormed over to the shed where he kept his lawn mower and came out with a couple of boards and a hammer. He’d stuck some nails in his mouth. Grace and I held the boards while he nailed them over the nest box hole. The sparrow’s mate had retreated to the top of the mimosa, but then it made another end run for the nest box, dive-bombing us, chittering and flapping its wings. Grace screamed, I ducked, and Dad swatted at it.

  “Damn thing,” Dad said.

  “It’s after its eggs, poor thing,” said my sister.

  Dad slapped at the bird and it retreated again. Then night came on and it melted into the dark.

  While Dad put up his yard tools, I gathered more mimosa blooms and took them into the house. I floated them in a glass bowl and put them on the kitchen table, hoping to cheer Mama up. By the time she came out of her room, they’d begun to turn at the edges and stain the water reddish brown. Their scent, though, filled the house, over even the smell of the roast. She sat down at the table and picked one up and twirled it under her nose. Then she got up and opened the sliding glass door and called out to Grace, who was putting the final touches on the bluebirds’ grave, and to our father, gathering the last of his things. She called out, Supper’s ready, and her voice rinsed the air like rain.