The Tender Birds, page 8
He dug into his pocket, pulled out one of the mice by the tail and held it out to Clipper. The falcon snapped it up and swallowed it whole.
“Good boy,” Matt said.
But this is not a dog, Matt thought. Maybe this is just plain beyond me.
Yet it was not beyond Alison. Nor was it beyond Pete the falconer, licenced to keep these raptors in good health, to attend to their needs. Both Pete and Alison brought these simple creatures happiness, in whatever way God gave falcons to understand that state of mind.
He was surprised at the number of things that were beyond him.
Matt asked Pete if he knew Alison, and yes, he’d met her. He thought she was an excellent raptor educator, and when Pete asked how he knew her, Matt was somewhat embarrassed to admit the truth: that he was a priest in her parish, that Alison brought Daisy to Mass with her, and he needed to be better informed about the falcon and her needs.
“We live in that kind of a world now,” said Pete. “Animals are people, too.” And he laughed.
On the bus back to Boston, Matt felt unsettled. He should pray in thanksgiving, he thought — even if Clipper’s spirit was beyond his grasp. He should thank God anyway.
Matt pulled out his smart phone. As if I knew God’s email address, he thought. He had email from Twitter, the popular posts in his network. Alison’s was first.
@AlisonPeregrine My father wrote: All of it mystery, all of it a gift. Shelter me, God of tender wings. I nest in You.
#PrayingWithYourFalcon.
When Matt put the phone back in his pocket, he felt the bag of mice treats, still there.
Old Soul
ON HIS WAY TO ST. BART’S for Sunday Mass, Matt saw Alison crossing the Common. He had expected to see her, and so he remembered to bring the packet of mice, chilled and ready for Daisy. How spectral the young woman looked — an ancient apparition of nobility, her hair woven into a crown of braids, a falcon resting on her fist. Queens, he recalled, were allowed to train specific birds for falconry, although he could not remember which ones. Not that it mattered. What troubled him was Alison’s ghostly appearance, as if she had somehow loosened the bonds of time, as if by looking at her, he was gazing into the past. Or perhaps this was the falcon’s doing, some special dispensation he could not fathom.
Alison seemed absorbed in thought as he approached her. He said hello.
“I wanted to tell you,” he began, “that I spent a day at the Green Valley Falconry Centre.”
“You met Pete?”
“Yes, and he’s very knowledgeable. Excellent,” said Matt. “And Clipper is a remarkable bird.”
Alison paused. “Clipper has a very old soul,” she said at last. “I think he was present at the Creation.”
“You mean in the Garden of Eden?”
Alison looked confused for a moment by Matt’s joke.
“I don’t know,” she said at last, her voice sad.
By way of reassurance, Matt told her that Clipper was a special bird. He offered her the bag of mice for Daisy. Then he told her that he’d just received an email from Cameron Reilly, a.k.a. Cameraman, who’d be giving a talk at Harvard.
“From our chat room?” Her eyes widened. “Daisy and I are reading his book.”
“He’ll enjoy meeting both of you,” said Matt.
They would never let Daisy in the door, she thought.
“I’d like to invite him to speak at the church,” said Matt.
Alison looked relieved. “Daisy,” she whispered. “Cam wants to meet you.”
At that moment, Matt felt as if she had drawn a translucent veil around herself and her falcon, vanishing into a place of safety, far from him. She whispered something to Daisy, but Matt did not hear it. He felt as if she were about to disappear.
Matt watched Alison as she slipped through the trees like a needle threading an imagined world through the fabric of the real. Drifting over to a park bench, she sat down beside an unshaven, derelict man, a bundle buggy beside him and a cup for the spare change of passersby. God knows what he’s spending it on, Matt thought. Booze and drugs. And then he felt ashamed of his tendency to harsh judgment, because Alison reached down and put money in that cup. Alison needs protection from her innocence, he thought. She had begun a conversation with the man, showing off Daisy who lifted her wings, and he thought that one or both of them might be angelic, beloved of God, unsuited to live in this terrible world.
Alison
From Alison’s Journal
I TOOK ON DAISY IN MEMORY of my father, who loved raptors, while I was a child and afraid of them. Many years later, Providence sent me a wounded falcon to heal and to love. She is wild. She belongs to no human, only to God.
I sense that in her own way, Daisy is a meditative creature.
I believe she is capable of love.
Yes, I know that sounds ridiculous. It is not always easy to match my sense of things to language. I am trying to convey some of the joy that Daisy brings me. She encourages detachment. She lives inside the mystery of her own life.
I guess I upset Fr. Matt, bringing her to church, then asking him to bless her. Yet I don’t intend to leave her at home. She is holy, the breath and wind of God. She belongs in church, if only to confront its stone doors, bolted shut against the living world.
Soon
ALISON SAID GOODBYE TO THE MAN in the park and continued walking. “That poor fellow’s having a hard time, Daisy. He needs a friend.” Daisy was fussing in the hot weather, straining against the jesses, the soft, ribbon-like tethers less of a problem than the humidity. Alison stroked her chest with the back of her hand. “Soon, you’ll meet Cameron,” she said to the restless creature. “You must be kind to him. He is also in need of consolation, I could sense this in the chat room.” Daisy settled down as if to absorb this, but Alison was startled by her own thoughts, even afraid of them — unaware until that very moment that while online, she’d allowed herself to feel for the soul of a man she’d never met.
Daisy
CAGED, DAISY RESTED IN THE EASY COMFORT of the night, eyes on her keeper, light feathering her body. The woman held up something large. Daisy eyed it.
“I’m reading a book by Cameron Byrne,” she said. “At Work in the Fields of the New Cosmology.”
Puzzled, Daisy turned her head in the direction of the voice.
Her keeper smiled. “You know I’m talking to you. You are so smart.”
Daisy felt kindness, the warmth of it like sunlight. From her perch, she stood tall and flapped her wings.
“Happy?”
A gloved hand, then the cage door opening.
“Up, up, Daisy.”
Daisy leapt to her glove, felt the gentle touch of a hand against her head.
“Happy Daisy. There’s a good girl.”
Her keeper lifted a small black object. “Look this way, sweetheart.” Daisy did, saw the light flash.
Alison sat with her in the warm lamplight. Daisy could not think happy, only feel the gentle weight of human language as it shaped the air around her, its tender softness lighting on her body. She raised her eyes to her keeper and met her kindly gaze until the woman kissed her tufted head, then placed her back in her cage. “Sleep well, Daisy.”
She lowered the curtain. Darkness fell.
@AlisonPeregrine Daisy watches me read on the New Cosmology. A silent, meditative creature. Beautiful book by Cameron Byrne.
#PrayingWithYourFalcon
@AlisonPeregrine Daisy lifts her wings in praise. Compassionate God, brooding on the world, hide us in the shelter of your wing. #PrayingWithYourFalcon
Sleepless
IN NEW YORK, CAMERON BYRNE felt drenched by the humid night. He got up, checked his email, then Facebook and Twitter. His eyes widened. Alison, from the chat room. “Peregrine.”
He texted her.
Alison’s phone pinged. At this hour?
2 nite owls. Glad U R enjoying the book. Luv yer prayers. May God bless Daisy. Be in Boston soon. Cam
“Daisy,” she whispered. “Someone has sent you a blessing.”
The following morning, Alison received the email announcement of Cam’s upcoming lecture at Harvard. She recalled a man from the chat room who from time to time let slip some poignant detail about his past. A body humming with sorrow; she could feel it then. She stared at his photo on the email poster. Sun glinting on caramel hair, blue eyes behind rimless glasses. Something wrong, something unsteady in his look, like the flicker and dimming of electric lights before the system crashes.
Cameraman
HE HUNG OUT IN CENTRAL PARK, Washington and Tompkins Squares, one of those who photograph New York’s red-tailed hawks and spreads the word online. Downtown from Fordham University he came, lugging his videocam, having told his class, “Don’t just panic about fracking, climate change, nuclear leaks, decimation of the polar bear. Start by falling in love with the world. Keep dropping your jaw until it aches with wonder. You need hope, for Chrissakes.”
Only, he’s a theologian, so he doesn’t cuss. He teaches ecotheology, the green shoot from the tree of the Cross. The sacred cosmos: sacrificial, bloodied and resurrected. He doesn’t understand any of it, just knows it to be true. “The Mystery of Faith,” they used to call it. But life is beyond him in its beauty and its cruelty. He’s seen too much of it. He loathes the word “healing,” calls it dime-store nonsense from the card rack at Walgreens. At this stage in life, the heart’s a damn fist of scars. God knows what keeps the little sucker slamming in his chest.
He misses the loopy chat room up in Toronto. Great Speckled Bird, a.k.a. Father Matt; Skywatcher signing in from Afghanistan, and Alison (Peregrine) who talked about Daisy, her educational bird with asymmetrical wings. Just about all of his students followed Alison@AlisonPeregrine on Twitter. Nutty, bite-sized nibbles of faith is how he thinks of those tweets: Daisy is a prayerful bird. God broods upon the world.
He shows his class a DVD about the New Cosmology: all the great eco-theologians telling earth’s story from the huge eruption in light that has never ended; the computer simulations of the world made new; the terrible wonder of star formation; asteroids smashing into molten Planet Earth. Colliding galaxies exploding into the devastation of “bombs bursting in air” somewhere near Fallujah, a roadside IED that tore apart an armoured vehicle, grated skin, bone shards, flesh of his flesh, his only son Tom. Six years ago, it happened. After this, his beloved wife Elaine, who’d been diagnosed with leukemia, realized she could not endure, and didn’t.
Even after all this time, he sees a shrink.
Never mind. His photo blog had two thousand followers. People knew him, came up and said hello. He was never alone for long.
Cam goes to one of his three favourite parks, sets up his camera, checks his settings, trains his telephoto lens on the classical pediment of an old apartment building, a perch for the elegant spread of a red tail, one adult hawk in a state of contemplation, the other on the wing, returning with a squirrel in its talons, food to cache for their fledgling young. Gorgeous shots, fearful beauty, born to devour “this flesh for the life of my young,” and he realizes that he’s not up to nature’s power, not today. He’s spent, like the bones of Ezekiel’s vision, dry and shaken by wind. Shall these bones live? Exhausted, he sits on the park bench, head in his hands.
He dozes off, dreams of a woman bearing a falcon.
Sitting up again, he opens his eyes, feels consoled as he packs up his camera and goes home.
It Just Happened This Way, Really
PONDERING ALISON’S TWEETS from the night before, Cam went to his office and opened an email from guess who, Great Speckled Bird, a.k.a. Father Matt Reilly in Boston, asking if he might have time to give a talk while in town, with a focus on photo-blogging and ecotheology.
“Your theological insight is much admired in our parish and elsewhere,” said the priest. “In particular, one of our parishioners may be familiar to you from our chat room last spring. Alison is a licensed Raptor Educator and will probably bring her tame and tethered falcon to the event.”
Cameron blinked, read it again.
He banged out an answer. “Yesyesyesyesyesyesyes.” He deleted it, took a deep breath and began again: “I would be delighted to accept your invitation.”
The Sky Inside
MATT WORRIED ABOUT ALISON. He felt that there was something not quite right with her, alone with only a bird for company. Now and again, he remembered the unwanted attention she’d received in the chat room from a troll who claimed to know her. It hadn’t crossed his mind before now that there might have been some unpleasant sexual incident in Alison’s past, one that had frightened her away from the chat room for a time, making her shy and reclusive around men. Yet whatever the case, she held down a responsible job, loved the sick and injured animals that came to the shelter, gave much of her spare time to the parish. She was innocent and kindly, yet perplexing and, he felt, quite sad. She needs friends, he thought. When Cameron arrived at the church, Matt promised to introduce him to Alison. He sensed that Cam had become like a brother to her, and judging from his memory of the chat room, she seemed at ease with him. “An unusual person,” he said to Cam. “I’d like to know your impressions.”
On the evening of Cam’s lecture, Matt greeted Alison as she walked into the church with Daisy on her gloved fist. Indifferent to startled looks, she said hello, eyed an empty pew in back, and spread a garbage bag to her left, positioning it under Daisy.
“Talk about planning ahead,” said a man’s voice.
She looked up, surprised. His eyes were crinkled up with laughter and when he opened them wide, they were blue and full of sky. Their depths startled her. “Cameron Byrne,” he said, and he shook her free hand. She introduced herself.
“So, this is Daisy,”
“Yes. She’s my little one.”
“I hope she’ll enjoy the talk.”
“She will. She’s very intelligent. She won’t fuss.”
He said he hoped to talk to her afterwards.
Alison did not want to converse with him. The reality of his presence reminded her that she was not one for company. She had nothing to offer but emptiness: a locked room, a place she would neither visit nor describe.
But you talk to Father Matt, she told herself.
Not about anything much.
The space within had been filled by God with the silence of the falcon, its haunted, far-seeing eyes.
I’ve got nothing but the sky inside of me.
An open window.
See for yourself.
Her Father
CAMERON’S PHOTOS: MAGNIFICENT red-tailed hawks in flight, sunlight gleaming on their wings; the colourful brilliance of warblers; endangered piping plovers scraping out nests in the damp sand.
Alison watched, listened, feeling as if she were seeing on the screen the wonderful pictures that her mother had taken and brought home to her father, and then she heard the rhythmic incantation of her father’s voice. “Before we were born, the great hawks came. Before we could speak, there was the silent language of the goshawk’s flight, the terrible power of the falcon’s speed, the elegant fanning of the red-tailed hawk. All of it a mystery, all of it a gift. Blessed be God, who broods upon the world. We nest in God.”
Only she did not know whose voice she was hearing, could not recall if her father had said this or if she’d come upon it in his writings. The man who stood before her was not like her reserved and gentle father. It was as if Cameron were plugged into a hidden power source, a high-voltage current that lit up his words and maybe even frizzed his golden honeycomb of hair. He wore rimless glasses that kept tilting sideways and slipping down his nose, as if, absorbed in some exciting speculation, he might have gone and crashed into a building.
Like my poor Daisy, Alison thought. Her first flight was her last.
Long ago, my father was a falconer. I miss him still. He used to say that falcons know when one is in need of solace. Even with her injury, Daisy has a gift for us.
Daisy turned her gaze to Alison.
She understands me.
From the back of the room, she could feel Cam’s eyes on her.
I don’t want him to see me. She did not think these words. That feeling was in her skin.
When the lecture and question period were over, she got up, took Daisy in hand, and slipped out the door.
“I don’t know where she went,” said Matt.
“Odd,” said Cam. “I told her I wanted to talk with her.”
“It could be the heat,” said Matt. “She had a fainting spell not long ago.”
It wasn’t true. Matt felt an urge to protect her, so he made that up. He had no idea why she’d run.
To: cameraman@fordhamu.edu
From: FrMatt@bu.edu
Re: Alison
Date: July 14, 2010
Cam, you might catch Alison tomorrow. She’s at the Boston Nature Center all this week in the afternoon. Click on bostonnaturecenter.com/directions.
Matt
On the other hand, Matt thought later, if he had meant to protect her privacy, why was he passing this information on to Cam?
Because something about her nags at me, he thought. Trained in psychology and I can’t make sense of her.
Either that, or I’m afraid to.
That thought had not occurred to him before.
Solace
ALISON SAT WITH DAISY, at the centre of an outdoor gathering under the trees, leaves edged with sunlight, teenage counsellors, and squirming day-campers gathered around her, and she felt quite young, as young as her charges, as if she were seated in a child’s chair at school, surrounded by big blocks and plush toys, a poor fit for the world of adulthood. It wasn’t the first time she’d felt she’d gotten lost on the way to growing up, a waif with an injured falcon for a friend.
