The Dark Bird

My writing background tells me that when dealing in highly charged symbols like fire, owls, houses, kudzu (if you’re southern), lakes, storm and the like, one must tread lightly. These symbols mean something. You’re supposed to know what. It isn’t that the house must always be the soul of the family, but it commonly is. In your story, if it isn’t, you better know why and how exactly you’re playing with the unexpected.

I’m writing about crows, the fifty or so that settle in our yard to nest several nights a week. It’s comforting but disturbing. It can even be annoying; they’re loud. They’ll show up in the day, too, love to torment the dog, so often that she now jumps out the back door already barking. It’s comic and a little sad when they’re not there. She checks every corner, feet planted, head turning, huffing and trotting, tail up, disappointed. I don’t really  know what these birds symbolize.

It’s Christmas, you see, which means the end of the year, the bottom of the glass, the last bite of the meal. Murkiness abounds. Shadows and dim truth. The long slant of early afternoon and the quick slide into dusk, which lasts over an hour. Impossible to make out what you’re seeing, who you’re talking to, what you feel, what you want. Restive. A perfect word because it’s misleading; you’d assume it meant restful—it’s got the word rest in it for crying out loud. But no, it’s synonymous with “nervous” and “unquiet.” A “restive horse” is one that balks and jigs, won’t go forward.

My office is on the second story and because, like most writers, I spend a lot of time staring out the window, I’ve become an expert on my backyard. Writers are the ultimate Neighborhood Watch, especially those of us unburdened by a day job. Along with dogs and mothers-of-young-children, we man the houses. We see the garbage truck make its rounds up and down the alleys, we hear the mail pushed in the box, the recycling guy sort the bin, the street crews lowering cables underground, the phone guy messing with the electricity pole. There is often a random man wearing head phones, carrying a latte to-go cup, in saggy jeans and fingerless gloves walking down the sidewalk. A woman in heels clicks through the shallow snow, a lonely sound, the worst! The world after a nuclear detonation!

No, no. This is just the neighborhood, emptied of those who work.

And there are birds. The little ones don’t come unless it’s really cold. On sunny, mild days, they’re either out in the woods where they belong, or at some other boss back yard, with the greatest seed mix ever. Gray days, when it doesn’t get above twenty, there’s activity out there. I have to pull the blinds if I want to get any work done because I could watch for hours, the way they stack the branches like a staircase, looping down to the feeder in some kind of order.

On certain days, impossible to predict, I’ll be working with the blinds down and a sound distracts me. Moving branches. My window puts me even with the middle of our apple tree, so I know when they’ve arrived. I lift the blind and see that the gang is here. I look up; even from the naked branches of my neighbor’s massive elms they perch, twenty feet higher than our house. On our garage, on the telephone pole in the alley. Even the power lines hold one or two, and the naked trees in the yards across the alley. Crows, cawing at each other, turning their heads, fluffing their feathers, for all the world like hunching their shoulders. If they could, crows would chain smoke. They fit this season perfectly for me, for they evoke something about dissatisfaction. Restive. Their call has something to do with it, that piercing, annoying Caw Caw. It’s whine-y and loud, and they all get going together. Brutes. Unhappy brutes. They’re the opposite of self-satisfied. They’re all about what has not turned out. They complain. Would it be going too far to suggest longing? They seem too crass for the delicate emotions.

I look straight out my window and see a crow balanced on an unsteady branch next to a leftover apple. Our tree is stubborn; still has most of its leaves and a quarter of its fruit, which has frozen and thawed. The apples are the color and consistency of ripe persimmons, but bigger. The yard is a mess with them, but many still cling to the branches, a tasty snack for the wayward bird.  Again and again this crow bows his head and pecks it with his shiny beak, a muscular, vulgar motion, to jab at fruit like that. Yet that apple does not fall. If we so much as sneeze near that tree, five of them drop. Which means that this bird is stabbing the fruit with utmost delicacy. He’s taking the tiniest bite possible; I can see his beak moving. Nibbling. This astounds me, that the roadhouse scavenger, the brazen complainer, the gang-banger, might actually have a good bit of the black-turtlenecked poet in him.

As soon as I think this, I swear the birds picks up his head and looks right at me, blinking, as if to say, How could you think otherwise?