The Tender Birds, page 20
Sad, perhaps, that he no longer was.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, he walked along the shore, pondering the conversation he’d had with his superior.
“You wanted to work with the homeless. Why?”
“I felt I was one of them. Weak and beholden to God.”
“You were too weak, Matt. You developed a drinking problem.
“Yes.” He paused. “I have no excuses. I place myself in God’s hands.”
“You are also a humble man,” said his superior. “In your time here, you’ve come to see yourself as you are.”
Matt did not mention Alison, the harm he’d done her by failing to act.
He walked on the beach, under the stars, remembering how it used to feel, the warmth that seized his limbs when he drank. It would take him over, breaking him down into his dissolute human parts, until he believed that he would crumble into dust, return to some primitive, particulate state of being, and having suffered the end of arrogance, he would be re-formed, made again of finer clay, thrown by the potter’s hand, fired in the kiln, shaped into a pot with emptiness and silence at its core. He felt this happening now, a peculiar numbness, as if parts of his body were fading into sleep.
As he looked up to the sky, he saw the stars dissolve into smudges of brilliant light. A blur.
He could not remember where he was. How he had come to the sea.
Walking over to a dune, he was aware that the tide was coming in. He lowered himself to the ground, leaning into the sandy slope, the tangle of beach grass and goldenrod, and, closer now, the gentle shush-shushing of the waves.
Dizzy. It will pass.
He closed his eyes, and then he heard a man’s voice. His superior was sitting beside him.
“There’s more to your story,” the man said.
“I have a parishioner who is fostering an injured peregrine falcon,” Matt began. “The bird cannot fly. She sees it as a child of God, a delight. I used to think this woman was a flake. Now I believe that in this bird’s silence, she hears the laughter of God.”
The man looked at him. “And you’ve drawn this conclusion, how?”
“By spending time with the falcon. Birds have remarkable gifts. Ever since I missed that fatal flight, they have lifted me out of despondency. I have come to see that my parishioner has a special calling, to attend to the lowliest of God’s creation.”
“And what about you?” asked the man.
Matt closed his eyes, heard the prayer of Alison’s father, heard the roaring of the sea inside his head.
“I am a transient being, homeless, and God is my shelter.”
“I will lift up a falcon, a fiery torch to light the way home.”
He said nothing. He could not articulate his thoughts.
He knew the words, but his tongue refused to speak.
Ruddy Turnstones
FATHER MATTHEW REILLY WAS FOUND DEAD, his body washed up on Marconi Beach, adjacent to Highway Six; the closest beach to Our Lady of Mercy Church at Shorehaven’s south end. A coroner’s inquest determined that he had suffered a stroke, that the incoming tide had taken away his body, then returned it to the shore.
“I saw him just that afternoon,” said Alison. “He blessed Daisy. He wanted to hold her and then he asked if he could bless her.” She spoke as if this deed should have protected him from death. She told this to Natalie, then to Elias, then to Father Ron who felt it would comfort her to have something to remember him by. He gave her the photo of Matt on his ordination day, his youthful face alight, and she brought it with her to the funeral Mass, placing it on his draped coffin.
The service took place at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Boston. The funeral was its last major function before closing, and it attracted a large crowd of colleagues, parishioners, and friends. Cameron Byrne drove up from New York. Natalie and Elias joined Alison, who sat in a secluded corner so that fierce-looking Daisy would not distress mourners and first-time visitors to the parish. In his homily, Father Ron noted the breath of vision that Matt had brought to the parish, especially his acceptance of a parishioner’s injured falcon, a creature that had won the hearts and inspired the faith of many younger congregants.
At the end of the service, Alison retrieved the photo of Father Matt, said goodbye to Cam, put Daisy back in her cage, and drove to Elias’ and Natalie’s home for lunch. Once having eaten, they’d planned to share stories and memories of Matt to relieve their sombre mood.
“Can’t guarantee a lot of laughs,” said Natalie. She joked about Matt’s first blank look at the hawk poop on the church roof.
“We met on the plane to Toronto,” said Elias. “He told me he’d gone birding with this ‘woman theologian. Red hair.’”
Alison mentioned the catastrophic animal blessing on the feast of St. Francis.
“Daisy made a leap for the white mice. Then, I distracted her with a dead rat, and she shucked its little ears and toes all over the driveway. It was gross.”
Natalie laughed. “I would’ve loved to have seen Matt’s face.”
“At least he didn’t ban Daisy from the parish. He made friends with her.”
Natalie paused. “He had an open mind, didn’t he?”
She mentioned the Easter Sunday brunch when she and Elias announced their engagement, when she’d told Matt that she’d learned to cook from her Uncle James who was gay.
“Some priests are intolerant,” she said. “But not Matt.”
Alison agreed; she’d never known Matt to be doctrinaire. Yet her attention wandered as she found herself staring at a group of photos on the bookcase. She could not explain why she found them unnerving. One showed a young girl smiling at a red-haired man.
“Is that you?” she asked Natalie.
“Taken while Uncle James was teaching me how to make crêpes.”
“And next to it? Who’s that?”
“That’s my uncle with his partner, Andre.”
Something shivered at the back of Alison’s neck, the breath of an unknown creature pushing its way through the sod of darkness and into the light of the known, the understood. She scrutinized the photo of the two men, then reached into her backpack, pulled out the framed photo of Father Matt and set it alongside the picture.
“What do you see?” she asked
Natalie gazed at it in silence. “Andre looks like Father Matt,” she said at last. “Same expression.”
“Andre’s his double,” said Alison.
“Andre had a famous dad,” said Natalie. “He was adopted by a guy named Gerard Lefèvre. He’s a French TV host in Canada. Andre’s mom was pregnant before she got married, but her boyfriend ran off to Vietnam, and she fell in love on the rebound. Poor Gerard and Valerie. They still miss their son.”
His son is asking to be recognized. He’s here with us. Lefèvre. Andre Lefèvre.
Alison hesitated. “Maybe it’s none of my business,” she began. “But did Andre die on 9/11?”
“Yes,” said Natalie. “And my uncle, too.”
Alison showed them the prayer card that had slipped out under the door of Matt’s office. “Read what’s on the other side,” she said.
In Loving Memory of Andre J. Lefèvre
18 February 1971 – 11 September 2001
“This card was Father Matt’s,” she said.
The room was silent. Alison imagined them as birds, ruddy turnstones by the shore, flipping over shells in search of a clam, a mussel, a creature to digest. In a moment, their minds had become a single, delicate organism, incessant in its movements, turning thoughts over, prying them loose from the hard shells of all that they could not imagine.
Elias remembered that first flight to Toronto, how he’d glanced over at Matt reading his breviary, how he saw the card then, how he glimpsed the name Andre before Matt’s abrupt gesture hid it away.
Until now, he was the only one who’d seen it.
“He told me he went to Vietnam,” said Alison.
Everyone stared at the photo of young Andre, who looked like Matt.
“He told me on the day he died,” she said. “He asked if he could hold Daisy, and then he told me.”
Silence.
“Poor Matt kept his secret,” said Elias.
“All those years,” said Natalie.
The man who looked through me, thought Alison. She thought about Andre’s mother, the woman Matt abandoned. She wondered how long it took her to forgive him.
“My mom told me that Andre was a good soul,” said Natalie. “And how much those two men loved each other.”
Alison felt the dead clay of fear that trapped her body, then relief as it began to crack. Father Matt died in a prison of loneliness. She would not make that same mistake.
She could hear Cam’s voice. “In the end, we will be judged by love.”
She took Daisy out of her cage. The peregrine falcon stood tall on her gloved fist, wings spread, as if she could imagine flying.
Epilogue
@AlisonPeregrine Fr. Matt Reilly blessed Daisy on the day he died. She was the last living creature that he touched.
#PrayingWithYourFalcon.
Acknowledgements
My heartfelt thanks to Inanna Publications and my publisher Luciana Ricciutelli for her warmth and friendship and for her generous response to my work. Thanks also to Val Fullard for her elegant cover design, and to publicist and marketing manager, Renée Knapp.
Thank you, Irene Guilford and Brian Gibson for your thoughtful reading of early drafts that helped me give shape to this manuscript. And Brian — kind-hearted birder and friend of the natural world — thank you for sharing your knowledge and for helping to weave the tender nest where this novel was born and took flight.
A shout-out to Ontario’s Wye Marsh Wildlife Centre for providing me with a wonderful opportunity to “walk the hawk” and get hands-on practice in the care and feeding of raptors. It was an inspiring and eye-opening adventure. Thank you for your hospitality.
For three years, I took part in a chat room (which I still occasionally visit) sponsored by New York University to promote a nesting pair of red-tailed hawks that had taken up residence on campus. With a webcam, it was my first close-up experience of nesting birds, and witnessing their life cycle from egg-laying to first flight was a life-changing experience. Many thanks to all participants for sharing your affection for the hawks, and especially to falconer John Blakeman for detailed answers to all questions about raptors.
The beautiful campus of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto provided much inspiration for this novel. I’m a St. Mike’s grad, and hopefully, some of the wisdom gleaned from studying theology in later years has found a home in the writing of this book. Thank you.
Photo: Jorjas Photography
Carole Giangrande is the award-winning author of ten books, including the novella A Gardener on the Moon (winner of the 2010 Ken Klonsky Award) and the novel All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (2018 Independent Publishers Gold Medal for Literary Fiction). The Tender Birds is her fourth novel. She’s worked as a broadcast journalist for CBC Radio, and her fiction, poetry, articles and reviews have appeared in literary journals and in Canada’s major newspapers. In her spare time, she loves birding with her partner Brian, photographing birds and trying to improve her French.
Carole Giangrande, The Tender Birds
