take the pen from his hand, meaning to resist, but the tip presses itself to the white sheet. I tell myself it is a name, a silly name, Charlie White, but in the wind I can hear it fall and see it break into dust and scatter and lose itself among the trees.
Perhaps less guiltily than I later thought he should have, my father began to leave a book about the house, face down to mark his place, a book with a green baize library binding plainly imprinted in white and a straightforward title like Managing the Squab Farm, full of line drawings of various pigeon breeds and poor-quality photos exhibiting the layouts of sheds.
All this seemed to go from print to reality like the swift turning of a movie page. We moved from our little bungalow into a bigger one on a rather bald and dusty road, oddly named Fair Oaks Drive. The house itself seemed clattery and somewhat the worse for wear, but it had a pebbled horseshoe driveway in the front, bordered with great, green, shaggy rhododendrons and oleanders that lent it a sheltered look, and in the back, shading the barn and two long rows of tin-roofed pigeon sheds, a majestic phalanx of cottonwood and eucalyptus trees.
Soon enough we children learned of the miracle of bird and egg and how they did increase and multiply, and how suddenly and ruthlessly they died, got plucked, and on the third day were sent off to be eaten. And then it wasn’t long before the pigeons were joined by ducks and chickens and turkeys, making an only slightly profitable enterprise slightly more profitable. And since, unlike the pigeons, these forlorn creatures wandered about the yard pecking at the gravel and playfully attacking us, and were as often accused of misdemeanors as we were, we inevitably endeared them with names and made them our friends.
But it was not a playful business. Squab farming was hard and dirty and demanding, and Lou and Carlo were soon recruited into the feeding and cleanup when they were not at school. Eventually the slaughter, too. At first they may have thought it a perverse adventure. But it was brutal work to break the necks of baby birds, and it didn’t take long for the ugliness to spread itself, dreary and awful, on their souls. I am amazed to remember how the fall of a single infant sparrow from its nest in the porch roof was a catastrophe the four of us rushed to like a battle-field medical-surgical unit, how we would take turns wrapping it in warmed towels and nursing it with an eyedropper, and when it died, which it always did, bury it in the garden with a little Popsicle-stick cross, every one of us weeping, my brothers no less than my sister and me. But this childish reparation could not lift the stone of guilt from off their daily little murders. Denial soon passed into sullen resistance, and when this roused my father’s anger to sterner discipline, the two boys began to scheme how they might run away.
I would not have known this except that I had taken refuge one afternoon in a favorite spot of mine for reading, a comfortable crotch in a branch of a great cottonwood tree at the back of the yard. Like some Nancy Drew storybook heroine, I simply overheard them, hunkered down together behind one of the pigeon sheds, conspiring. Their plans seemed already far advanced. They’d built small wagons out of old wooden crates and discarded baby-carriage wheels, crammed them with cereals and tins of soup and beans, and hidden them behind the barn. They even had rifles and gunpowder-makings (my genius brother Lou having researched the formula), and a supply of .22-caliber bullets, though they swore later they would not have killed a rabbit unless they were starving. Lou had talked a friend into joining them, Billy, a neighborhood kid who shared his dogeared Zane Grey novels and seemed to have a natural hormonal reservoir of thirteen-year-old discontent. The three of them were wild when they realized I knew what they were up to. I cried desperately, not out of fear, but at the thought of their going forever. I swore I would never give them away, not even under torture, and I meant it.
But my honor was never put to the test, my father never dreaming I could be part of such a heinous plot. I lay in my bed on the screened porch, listening to the caravan creakily depart in the dark before dawn with my heart pounding so loud in my chest I thought it could wake the house. But the boys were miles away before my father missed them, and they were miles farther on before he understood what it meant. My mother begged him to be calm, but she was no match for his bellowing rage. She herself was caught between fear of his wrath and the plain, crushing truth that her sons had also left her. Billy’s father was drawn into the search. They headed the old pickup into the Catalinas along the route he and the boys had taken the previous Christmas, when they’d braved snow to cut trees to sell on city street corners, guessing now that this was the familiar road the boys would trust. And sure enough, by nightfall they found them, huddling around their campfire high in the mountains, some twenty miles away.
Lou was thirteen, his voice just beginning to break, Carlo only ten, shy, undergrown, with a sickliness that left him still a kind of baby. I could hear the small, uneven duet of their strangled sobs even as the truck crunched into the drive in the deep of the night, and my father pushed them out into the yard and into the barn. Then their howls of pain, punctuated by his choking staccato monotone of rage. He whipped Carlo first and sent him into the house, then tied Lou to a post and flogged him again and again, until the sun rose and lay full and plain over the desert and all one heard at last was the silence, even of the birds.
I had lain through the night in a stupor of disbelief, struggling to understand. How could he inflict a pain of which he seemed never to get enough? How could he bear it? How could my mother, who would flinch at the sight of a splinter in the palms of our hands? She must have drugged herself, stoned herself to death with prayer, devised some lie of the mind, some mercifully self-annihilating belief that this was happening to her, that she was merely surrendering blindly to her own punishment. How did I bear it? You could not drive the sobbing sound out of your head, no matter how much noise you made crying into the pillow, no matter how you stopped your ears with the sheets. It was as if I were there with them in that dim-lit barn, had seen it happening. It wasn’t possible, he would never have let me, and yet I think I still see them there where we were not allowed to go, not even to bring them water. I see her, whispering into her rosary, her throat tight and dry with exhausted grief, the crystal beads wedged between her thumbs, and her heart a lump of volcanic ash still too hot for the tears she wept to be wet.
When you are a child, when you are told to step over and around the corpse on the carpet, you do it. The corpse in this case was not just my father’s cruelty but his misery, the livid bestial frustration and selfish panic at who knows what world lost, darkened still more by my mother’s complex of self-sacrifice and guilt at somehow having dealt him this fate. The moral bearings of all these things escaped me. I needed to love my parents. I needed to forgive them. I began faintly to grasp at a solacing if still bewildering truth that there was a link between our family’s lives, which had in earlier days seemed for all their tumult so much our own, and that mysterious, dim other universe of wars and national hatreds. This world, which came at us in wonderful alliterative warnings like “loose lips sink ships” and bloodthirsty jingles about Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo blithely sung in the school playground, in hearty exhortations to do your part for the war effort—which we kids translated into fishing through dirt heaps for scrap metal and turning in our brown copper pennies for white ones—had just that airy false optimism and dark undertow I still connect with the comic radio of Jack Benny and Fibber McGee. We didn’t know enough to call it history, but whatever its name was, we knew we lived in it. It did not forgive. It did not explain. But it said, You don’t understand, my dear little girl, because there is so much, so much, to understand.
And it seemed to speak sometimes in the nasally voice of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for even if he had not replied to my father’s letter in his own person, there appeared the sudden fact that something in the war had changed, Italy had joined the Allies, and that the same Italians who’d been scorned on Wednesday were back on Thursday in the good graces of the American government. If with equal suddenness a place for Mario’s fine Italian hand was found on the defense equipment finishing line in a plant just outside of Tucson, it did not seem so entirely amazing or far-fetched to think the president had personally interceded. Mario, vindicated, took his place painting insignias on warplanes, spending much of his day on his back or squirming around on elbows
