’em in fear.” His fingers drummed a partridge roll on the table. He shouted at the photograph of the girl, continuing an unfinished argument. “The old pig ought to have had nails pounded into his eyes and a blunt fence post hammered up his asshole!” Banger’s voice choked.
I did not see him for nearly a month after that dinner.
The dark fox trotted behind the screen of chokecherries along the highway, undisturbed by the swishing roar of vehicles twenty feet away. This was the extreme southern border of his range and he new crossed this road. The corpse of a less-wise raven lay beneath a bush like a patch of melted tar. The fox rolled in the carrion, grinding his shoulders into it. He got up, shook himself and continued his tour, a black feather in the fur of his shoulder like a dart placed by a picador.
As swiftly as though she were pulling grass Noreen plucked the second bird. The other lay on the white enamel drainboard, a dusky purple color.
“Oh, I don’t mind doin’ it. I done hundreds of ’em. There was one or two years when I was a kid, things were real bad up here, no jobs, no money. We lived on pats and fish – trout, suckers, anything. I used to clean the birds.” Her fingers leaped from the small body in her left hand to the pile of feathers in the sink and back again.
“My brother Raymon’ done the fish. He never liked the smell of a bird’s guts, but it don’t bother me. He can skin out or clean any other kind of animal just as fast and good, but not birds. I don’t mind ’em.”
There were five of six dull pocks as she yanked the difficult wing tip feathers. “Okay, there you are.” They lay side by side, dark cavities between their rigidly upthrust legs. Noreen leaned against the sink, dove-grey twilight washing up around her like rising water. Her russet hair was twisted into curls and there was a downy feather on her cheek. She sang a few words that sounded like “won’t lay down with Cowboy Joe.” The hell with Cowboy Joe, I thought, what about me?
It wasn’t the first time I’ve been in a bed that turned into a confessional afterwards.
“You married?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, me too. I knew you were.” The vixen face was pale in the thickening dusk.
“My brother,” she said. “My brother Raymon’, you know?”
“Yes.”
“He ain’t my full brother, see, he’s only my half brother.” Her voice was a child’s, telling secrets. “See, Ma had him before she met my dad, and Dad give him his name.” The bed was a fox’s den, rank fox smell, the smell of earth. She whispered. “I done it with Raymon’.”
“When?”
“Long ago, the first time, see? He’s only my half brother. That was the only time.” She looked at me. “Now you.”
“Now me what?”
“Now you got to tell something bad you done.”
It stopped being a game. Unbidden, to my mind came childhood crimes and adult cruelties. I was furious to feel prickling tears.
“Tell me about Raymond,” I said.
“See, she was goin’ with this guy, he come from a family that used to live around here—the Stones, they don’t live here now—and Raymon’ was on the way, but before they could get married there was some bad trouble so Raymon’ didn’t have a father. It was real love and she almost went crazy. But she met my father, he was cuttin’ wood over here, workin’ for St. Regis. He come from a town up in Quebec.”
“So Raymond is really a Stone?”
“Yeah. Well, he never used the name, but that’s his blood. That’s half his blood.”
I thought of Stone City, the broken shacks, the blue door with its peeling paint, the iron axles, the outlaw hideout.
“Which one of the Stones was he?”, thinking of what Banger said about the old man.
She got up and began to dress in the faded evening. She smoothed back her hair with both hands. “This is between you and I,” she whispered solemnly. “Floyd. He was the one that got the electric chair.”
It became a regular thing. Every Friday night was confession night. I heard who killed the kitten, who stole a coveted blouse from a girlfriend. She was absorbed in family relationships. Most of all I heard about young Raymie’s troubles with his old man, Raymon’ the Half-Stone, as I thought of him.
“Raymie got another beatin’ last night. See, he’s got to run that trapline every twenty-four hours, and he’s suppose to do it real early in the mornin’ before he goes down to the hardware. Well, he forgot and you shoulda heard the way Raymon’ tore that kid up. He’s got a real violent temper. Raymie, he hates trappin’. He wants to get out of here, go to New York, be a rock singer. You ought to hear him.”
There were only a few weeks left in the season. I did not let my new interest in the confessional break the pattern of birds. I went out every few days, sometimes only for an hour, sometimes until the end of the light. I did not go to Stone City, tinged with Banger’s dark and private hatred. The first staying snows fell; the air hardened and crystallized to winter temper.
One morning, with the damp smell of coming snow hollowing my nostrils, I found Banger’s and Lady’s fresh tracks in the strip of hardwoods behind my house, bearing south. I took the deliberate trail as an invitation, thinking that perhaps it was the closest Banger could get to asking me to come along.
He had a good start. It was past noon by the time I reached Stone City. I’d traveled parallel to Banger’s trail, but higher up the mountainside, thinking his earlier passage would have sent the birds sweeping and scuttling up the slope into hiding from storm and man.
I did well, flushing half a dozen in my slow hunt, for it was not a day when the birds moved easily. I brought one down, a reflex shot through a thick stand of young fir, as thin and crowded as bamboo, despite my cold-numbed thumb that could barely nudge the safety off. It grew increasingly colder and the snow began, serious snow.
Stone City was a desolate ruin, but Banger had a fire going in the shelter of a crumbled stone foundation wall and was boiling coffee in a small pot. The blue door was covered with snow. The flakes spit as they hit the flames. Banger threw on another silvered board from the collapsed house.
“Get anything?”
I held up the bird and described the shot. Banger spread the tail into a lady’s fan, counted the feathers, flicking the two unbarred ones, gave me a look of reproach when he saw I had not opened the crop and did so himself.
“Beechnuts. All mornin’ they been gettin’ ’em before the snow covers ’em all up. Every one a these”—he pointed at the four birds lying in a neat row—“was full up with beechnuts. Beechnut birds has got the best flavor.”
I
