The Tender Birds, page 7
God forgives, but humans plant IEDs by the roadside. One day, they explode. It’s the ambush of old age, the revenge of sins that lie in wait. Life does not let you get away with anything. It’s life that punishes us, not God. A loneliness we bring upon ourselves.
God may forgive, but life sets things in motion. Evil things. I missed the plane that killed my son. Life granted me the seed of a wish I planted long ago.
He had found a calling, good work for his soul. Even so.
It was too shameful a tale to tell, how he abandoned his lover and his son. “God found you, isn’t that enough?” asked his superior.
Typical priest-talk.
No, it wasn’t.
God may have found you first, but it was life that found you in the end, tackled you and pinned you down with a knockout punch. He could hear the count of the referee, the clang of the final bell, the crowds cheering, but not for him.
He’d be alone for the rest of his life.
Prayerful Bird
IN JUNE 2010 — LESS THAN A YEAR before he fell ill — Matt returned to Boston, to weekday Mass at St. Bartholomew’s Church. Vested and in the sacristy, he viewed ten or so parishioners, hesitant as they made their way to their seats, life slowing most of them down with canes and walkers. He needed to find someone able to carry the bread and wine to the altar. Alison. She’ll be here for sure.
He waited, and in a few moments, Alison arrived.
He stared at her.
Daisy, the falcon, was riding on her gloved fist. Alison walked to a pew at the rear, genuflected with a dancer’s grace, then took her seat. She was as serene as a lake at dawn. Yet Matt could not have known that this practice began when Alison first took Daisy to Mass to pray in thanksgiving for her Raptor Educator’s Licence. So well-behaved was the little falcon that her keeper decided to continue the practise. She had felt certain that in a half-empty church, there would not be enough people to object to Daisy or to make her fuss. Tethered, she would perch on Alison’s glove, remaining unruffled throughout the Mass, confining her activity to the occasional deposit on the garbage bag that Alison had spread on the pew beside her.
As she pondered this, Alison saw Father Matt coming out of the sacristy, down the aisle, approaching her. He looked fretful.
“And this is…?”
“Daisy. My little one.”
“We’ve never had a falcon in church.”
Alison could tell that he felt ridiculous, saying this. “I believe that Daisy is a prayerful creature,” she said.
“And you take her to Mass?”
“She is never more quiet, more attentive. And no one seems to mind.”
And no one sits next to you, either, Matt thought.
Matt found someone else to bring the gifts to the altar.
Daisy was well-behaved and did not fuss.
I’m just filling in at St. Bart’s, Matt thought. It’s not my responsibility.
The Mass proceeded and at Communion time, Alison approached the altar with Daisy on her arm, enfolded in a calm, mysterious elation, a luminous beauty that Matt almost never saw in the frazzled distractedness of typical communicants. She seemed to claim a sense of rightness about the world. She opened her free hand to receive the bread from Father Matt.
“Will you bless Daisy?” she asked him.
It is highly irregular, he thought. Blessings were reserved for children or for adults preparing to receive the sacrament. There was nothing in canon law that allowed a bird to be blessed during Communion.
Yet his hand wanted to bless. He held it over the bird’s head. “Bless you,” he whispered.
He hoped no one would complain.
After Mass, he returned to the sacristy, a bit unnerved but also amused by the fact that a handicapped falcon had found a way around his rational faculties. He’d never intended to bless that bird. He wondered about Alison, her unearthly air, the way she’d opened a space for herself and her feathered companion, as if she were Moses, parting seas to find a path to safety. Only what did that make him? Not quite part of Pharaoh’s army, in pursuit of renegades and drowned in the flood. Nothing that dire. Just a perplexed observer; that was all.
He saw Alison standing at the back of the church, as if she knew he wanted to speak to her. “Father Matt, I’m sorry if I embarrassed you,” she said. “I should have asked beforehand.”
“We aren’t supposed to bless birds at Communion.”
He thought his own statement so ridiculous that he was afraid he might laugh.
“I understand,” said Alison. “I won’t ask again. Besides, it’s only a sign. God has already blessed Daisy.”
“Even if I had refused,” he said.
“God blessed her with another chance at life.”
I shouldn’t even allow that bird in church, he thought. This thought leapt, involuntarily, to his mind, as if he were reading from a script. In truth, he did not see a problem with Daisy, beyond the one that Alison managed with a garbage bag.
“And she is grateful,” Alison continued. “She responds as a prayerful bird.”
Matt didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure how to react to a comment like that. Instead, he informed her that there would be a proper animal blessing in October, on the feast of St. Francis.
Oddballs
ALISON CONTINUED ATTENDING DAILY MASS whenever she could, and she began to bring Daisy (and her garbage bag) to the ten a.m. Sunday liturgy. While no one was unfriendly, she would always end up with most of the pew to herself. Gentle Daisy had a fearsome profile and the falcon’s cruel reputation. Parishioners, there for an hour of tranquillity, could not help but notice her curved beak, her sharp talons, her fierce raptor’s eyes.
Aware of this, Alison wrote an article for the online parish bulletin, called, “A Word About Daisy.” She told the story of the falcon’s near-death and miraculous recovery, including a link to the South Boston Animal Shelter website. After that, a few young, eco-friendly parishioners stopped to talk to her and Daisy after Mass, albeit with a certain amount of caution. The more devout, older folk believed that Daisy was a sign of God’s love made manifest in creation. Almost everyone thought Alison strange, but there were plenty of oddballs in the parish, street people who talked to themselves and shouted incoherent statements during the Mass. Yet the pastor wanted his parishioners to be inclusive, diverse and what-all, so they put up with the falcon and her keeper, and left it at that.
Hashtag
MATT KNEW A LOT ABOUT DAISY from the chat room in Toronto, and he’d concluded that Alison was a bit strange. Home again in Boston, faced with his own distress and the barrenness of his life, he thought again. He regretted the way he had dismissed the kind of free-range spirituality that clucked over every New-Age seed and crumb in the barnyard, untutored as it was in the nourishment of formal theology. He was too exhausted for those old cerebral gymnastics. Alison was strange but happy. She had a genuine apprehension of grace, he knew that.
He’d thought at first that Alison might have a calling to religious life, one to which he might direct her, once she got tired of Daisy.
Then, she sent him a link to her Twitter feed.
@AlisonPeregrine
#PrayingWithYourFalcon.
31,285 followers.
She was tweeting short, bird-based prayers all over cyberspace.
@AlisonPeregrine Bless the falcon, whose eyes see more than ours. A creature made in the image of God.
#PrayingWithYourFalcon.
Well, okay. She was touching people’s souls, getting into musty crevices of the psyche that he could never reach. His old world was over. Books, lectures, interviews, even pastoral psychology couldn’t quite do that. He had to believe that the sacraments still could.
Social media was for sociable people. It wasn’t quite his thing.
He realized that he missed Elias and Natalie. Their new life, I’m sure, is going well. They’ll have a child by the end of the year. I should email them. Find out how the fledglings are doing. Carr and Teefy.
At this distance, the whole bird-nest caper felt dreamlike, as if it had never happened. Daisy’s appearance at Mass seemed like a weird spinoff, a bit of viral dandruff that Alison picked up in the chat room. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to forbid the falcon’s presence in church. Daisy’s life had been saved, just as his had been.
Your life is worth more than many sparrows.
Scraps and Bones
HE, TOO, HAD ALMOST LOST HIS LIFE, and so he felt some compassion for the poor, injured bird that Alison loved.
After he had missed his plane on that dreadful September morning, a retreat director told him that he must take heart, that his life was embraced by God; that just as Matt loved the birds of the air, so did God love him. None of this explained why so many innocent lives had been lost; why his, with all its scars and wounds, should have been saved more than once. Even so, he could sense the mystery of a benign presence in a wretched world, of loving kindness sifting down through the cracks in broken lives like sunlight through a dense layering of trees, touching the dark wooded places of the psyche. He could not ridicule Alison and her falcon when gracious life had taken him in hand, had saved him, more than once.
He decided to walk in Boston’s Public Garden, becoming lost in the dazzle of midday June, its lush and florid vegetation, light shimmering on the tips of sword-like fronds, bayonets, a jungle war, the one he joined to avenge his father. The man was a World War Two vet, a dazed ex-POW who’d sold bric-a-brac at a junkshop called Victory Hardware, who tinkered with bizarre clocks and unproven systems of time. A man who stared at his son, when shown his draft notice, heartbreak and terror etched on his aging face like a worn map of the path life had taken him to nowhere.
“Rip it up,” said his dad.
“Right. And get thrown in jail.”
“Jail’s better than going to war. Go to Canada.”
“Canada’s for chickenshits. You guys were brave. But you didn’t get to finish the job.”
“That ‘job’ will never be finished,” said his dad.
He thought his dad was tired, unable to defend his reasoning. “I want to do what you couldn’t do,” he told him.
“Matt…” his father hesitated. “There are better ways to serve your country.”
Only Matt had lived his life with a father in profound despair, a man who’d been held prisoner and who no longer knew how to fight back. So grieved was he by the man’s suffering, so lonely in the presence of his emptiness that his sorrow calcified into a silent fury at the world and its injustice. He wanted to redeem his father’s anguish, the hot iron brand that had scarred his soul.
He went to Vietnam. One month into his tour of duty, he got word of his father’s death.
Truth was, he was terrified of fatherhood. He didn’t know how to be a father. He had to flee Valerie and his unborn child so he went to war, lit up his veins with drugs until he saw the shattered galaxies of night, the enemy’s face enormous and pale as the moon, until he found himself screaming, “Kill him, kill him.” A buddy. An innocent soldier. After this, his war was over. He was sent home to a mother who wondered whose son this was.
Alone and distraught, he snorted speed, floating away from the torment of memory until the drug gripped him, chained his body to the habit. No longer floating free, he took too much, found himself nervous, jumpy, terrified, until one evening he sped along the Tappan Zee Bridge that spanned the Hudson River. Then, just as quickly, he pulled over, the waters below inviting him in. One leg went over the bridge, then another, his outstretched arms gripping the spandrels, and he heard a voice saying, “You don’t have to die, buddy, it’s already been taken care of,” and then he felt the grip of arms and hands, of cops grabbing him, pulling him away from his lost soul.
He ended up in a psychiatric ward, his parish priest the only friend he had until he got well, until he was free of his addiction. Then, he was restless. Restored to life after killing an innocent man, he wanted to give something back to the world he’d injured. He began to think about the priesthood.
Yet he could still feel Valerie’s presence, smell the fragrance of her lavender perfume. Valerie was married now. He told the priest about her. He prayed to be relieved of longing.
“What were the words you heard that night on the bridge?” asked the vocations director when he went to see him.
“You don’t have to die, buddy, it’s already been taken care of.”
“God was trying to tell you something,” the man said. “That you have been saved by his Son.”
“I was on drugs,” said Matt.
“God works with whatever scraps and bones he can. He saved your life.”
You Don’t Get Out Enough
THE FALCON WOULD TEACH HIM HUMILITY, he thought. Daisy’s life had also been saved — and, in fact, the life of her entire species, once endangered, their eggshells thinned by DDT. It had not been God’s plan, he thought, that either Daisy or her kind should perish, and no doubt Alison was meant to do her small share of providential work.
And what about him? Perhaps less worthy than Daisy — whose catastrophic fall was accidental — was a man who had tried to leap to his death. Yet worthiness did not seem to matter. Man and bird had been restored to life; man and bird had been given the same extraordinary gift.
As a priest, he’d come to understand that he had no privileged insight, no special claim on wisdom. Yet it troubled him to realize that he could not grasp the meaning of his own existence, the fate he shared with the likes of Daisy.
Although he loved birds, Matt found that the periods of spring and fall migrations were crowded with marking papers and committee work, and so he seldom found time for excursions, for viewing the arrivals and departures of warblers, the spiralling of hawks and eagles. Now at Mass, he was faced with a wild creature in the care of a young woman, her serene yet haunted face confronting him with the absence of calm in his life, with a fear of the wilderness inside him.
At Mass, he could feel both the falcon and her keeper, their luminous eyes tracking him across the altar, scanning him in wonder. In their presence, he began to feel insubstantial, like a phantom of the computer — an image formed of colour and light, pixels easily deleted.
Because it was summer, he had some down time. Alone in his office, he read.
A Rage for Falcons got jammed with sticky notes, and Falconry Basics: A Handbook for Beginners (already battered by a previous owner) ended up with loose pages and a cracked spine. This was followed by Understanding the Bird of Prey, which he filled with marginalia. For relief from his academic habits, he went online and watched raptor videos from Cornell, then discovered a Facebook Hawkaholics page, which, among other things, posted memorials in incorrect Latin to fledgling “hawklets” killed on their maiden voyages.
He went back to his reading. Only he was too restless to concentrate.
You don’t get out enough, he thought.
He wanted to be blessed by strange golden eyes, by the feel of a cape of feathers and a beating heart. He was afraid to let anyone know this.
Turning again to his computer, he googled, “raptor displays, Massachusetts.”
The Number of Things Beyond Him
MATT DONNED CIVVIES AND TOOK an afternoon off, travelling by bus to central Massachusetts. He was headed for the Green Valley Falconry Centre, where he hoped to get acquainted with a creature much like Daisy.
He’d set up the meeting in advance with a guide, a trained falconer named Pete who briefed him on what to expect, then introduced him to Clipper, a male lanner falcon, a breed much like the peregrine, but somewhat larger in size. Pete showed him how to handle the tethers and how to balance the falcon on his glove. Walking him past the bird enclosures, Pete brought Matt into the supply room where he opened the fridge and removed a small plastic bag containing dead white mice.
“I’ll let you carry these,” he said. “Give you the real feel.”
Of what? Matt wondered.
“Clipper enjoys these treats,” Pete said.
The chilled mice appeared compact, uniform in size, small and rectangular. Matt thought of white chocolate. Dubious, he hesitated only for a moment before tucking the zip-lock bag into his pocket. I bet Alison carries these everywhere. He cringed at the thought that she might be feeding chewy little white mice to Daisy at the back of the church.
Why do you think Daisy’s so calm?
With some trepidation, Matt bore the falcon on his arm and walked with Pete along a wooded path. The creature was light, almost featherweight. “Hollow-boned,” the guide explained, “for ease of flying.” Matt gazed at its small face as he had never gazed at Daisy, and he saw the intensity of its blue-black eyes and their golden rings, noting a dazed perfection in the creature’s bearing, its slate-grey feathers, creamy throat, striated breast. It was as if, still in its youth, the young raptor did not grasp the enormity of its being. In awe, he watched it, knowing he could never comprehend this creature nor could any human on this earth. It belonged to God alone, to God’s purpose and intent for it.
At that moment, as if to concur, Clipper raised his elegant wings, stretched his golden talons, fanned his tail, and Matt made the slight movement of his forearm needed to help balance the creature and settle it down.
“Well done,” said Pete.
Yet at that moment, he felt inadequate, out of his depth.
“Lanner falcons take well to the glove,” the man continued. “Maybe you’d like to feed him.”
That beak, Matt thought. He could bite my finger off.
He should have thought of that sooner. He would have a terrible time celebrating the Eucharist if he suffered a falcon amputation.
