Bird Burning
BY SPENCER NITKEY
The first night we burned the bird, my mother was inside. It was just the four of us, really. Dad, Regina, me, and Mom. There were others, extended family, but they weren’t real to me. Cancer of the jaw, and we were going to burn her body. Why a bird? Because I’d killed mine the day Mom died. I didn’t mean to. It was December and my fingers were white in the cold when Dad struck a match and Regina started crying. How’d the bird die? Reginold, which Regina told me was a shitty thing to name a pet, was a parakeet I’d had for three years. When mom died, it was like the power got cut. We walked down the empty dark halls of the house with gas lamps and flashlights. We cooked TV dinners in box ovens in the yard and fried eggs on propane camping stoves in the living room. Dad put cigarettes, which he hadn’t smoked in decades, out, half-finished, on the brown leather couch. We had always been analog, but her death was a real cauterization from the rest of the world. It wasn’t the bird’s fault, and it wasn’t mine. She was dead. I tore all my books from their shelves and threw them across the room. They thudded into the wall, and if hit spine first, they wedged like throwing stars into the drywall. I hit the cage. The thin metal bars split and the bird was dead before I realized what I’d done. The bird’s dead body burned inside the wooden effigy, too. There were two bodies. One killed by God, the other by my grief. I insisted they leave together.
Because I cried over the bird and my mother, and because she did not want to be buried, we took her body and surrounded her with wood. We started with the firewood Dad kept in a pile near the orchard. When that was gone, we coppiced the trees, even the fruit-bearing ones, until there were only stumps. Then we tore down the shed and the greenhouse. We ripped away the cellar doors and used them, too. Regina even used the couch legs. What did we need any of it for if not her? Inside the colossal wreck lay our mother and a dead bird. Dad didn’t want her going up in senseless flames, so he made a shape of our mourning. A bird, like the one I’d buried. Huge, elegant, and flammable. It was six feet tall.
It was December. My fingers were white with cold, and my Mother was dead. Family, mostly close, and friends, only a few, gathered in a circle around the bird, but there were only the four of us, really. My aunt, her sister, sang a Celtic dirge until my uncle, her brother, asked her to stop. It was silent as my father lit the bird. It burned from the inside first. Crackles of hay and flesh and feather burned red and yellow through the shell. She was gone, char, bone, and ash by the time the bird fully caught in a dance of violent orange. We watched as she left us. Ash fell and burned small holes in our parkas and jackets.
Everyone went home. Dad, Regina, and I huddled by the idling generator in our basement wrapped in blankets until it was too cold to take. We turned it on and electricity flowed back into our lives. We didn’t know what to do with all that light, so we turned almost everything off except a few appliances. Even those hummed in our ears at night so loud we could hardly sleep. It was two weeks before Regina turned on her bedside table light and started reading again.
“I’m starting with someone else’s life,” she said.
Next week I turned on the bathroom lights when I dropped my toothbrush and couldn’t find it in the dark. I left it on. Dad warmed us hot pockets in the microwave. I started turning the hallway lights on in the morning. Eventually, in the humid spring, our window AC units hummed, TVs blared, and we had power again. We never trusted it.
#
It was April before I began to see the bird again—the one I killed. The one that died. I was asleep and I heard wings beating against my closet door. A strange feathered scrape then thud, scrape then thud. I flung the door open and a rush of green feathers exploded across my face. I spun and the room was empty. Quiet.
I didn’t see it again for weeks. I had started riding the bus to school. Dad tried to pick our homeschooling back up with Mom gone, but he was too sad and loved us too much to be a good teacher. Regina did fine in school: She found her people, then her person, and her and Athena walked the hallways perpetually looking like one of them had just finished telling a story. I observed everything as if it was happening in a fishbowl placed in front of me and illuminated from the bottom. I was always a little outside my body.
I finished a test in math class about variables and watched as my dead parakeet flew into the window closest to me over and over and over again. Each time it bounced off the glass it took a longer backswing then dove again. I kept looking around to see if anyone else saw or heard it. Everyone’s heads were down looking at their paper. When the bell rang and I left, it followed me to my next class, pounding against the window again as we took turns reading Hamlet. I stuttered through half a monologue, trying to ignore the pounding. Ms. Anders asked if I wanted someone else to read and I said yes. The bird broke its neck on the window and fell to the ground.
By July I saw it once a week.
By September, every day.
No one knew. My distractibility didn’t concern anyone. I was a kid whose mother had died and whose family had burned her inside a giant wooden bird. There was almost nothing I could do that would concern them. They were always concerned.
Every day the bird would fling its vacant body toward me. Every day I would ignore it until I couldn’t, then I would cry. I woke with feathers from nowhere resting across my face.
In November, Dad started piling wood in the backyard again, and I couldn’t believe it had already been a year. The trees that survived the previous winter’s coppice hadn’t grown enough, so he brought piles of wood back in his pickup, and Regina and I didn’t ask where they’d come from, but he was covered in mud and sweat and his hands were bleeding. Regina and her so-called best friend Athena, who both Dad and I knew was more than her friend, started picking up broken furniture left on the street. They’d go on long walks together, and when they saw a discarded desk with its drawers missing or chairs with their green upholstery peeling, Athena would call our home phone.
Dad refused to have a cell phone. We asked him why once a month, and he always said the same thing. “I’m not putting those radio waves up against my body at all hours of the day. I’ve got precious cargo.” When he finished, he’d look to his left, for Mom, and he wouldn’t find her, and his face would fall for a moment and Regina and I could see how close he was to falling apart, his skin peeling off, his eyes leaping out, his tongue crawling away. He always caught himself, though, and we watched him slowly stitch the pieces back together before laughing, then joking that he’s always home, what’d he need it for anyway? The home phone rang with brassy insistence when Athena called, and he and I would drive the pickup, load the furniture into the back, and then leave them to their walk. I was jealous she had friends and jealous that she had more than friends. When I missed my mother and the bird shook my closet and dove at my window and left feathers on my sleeping head, I went out to the pile of wood and furniture with an axe and hacked at it until my arms fell like noodles to my side. None of us talked about it, but we all agreed.
If the bird haunted me, I wondered what haunted them.
Dad started building the bird again. Two great, clawed feet dug into the ground. It was a different bird this year, but it housed our mother just the same. I smashed furniture to pieces and Dad made wings as wide as his truck was long. Jagged and splintered and up. He stuffed the inside with hay.
When it was done, my ghost perched atop its beak. It bothered me less. It stopped following me to school and I did better on finals than I did on any test I had taken that school year.
When it was time to burn it again, we kept the date the same, seared now. This time more family members came. They brought more with them, too. Husbands, children, close friends. There had been 50 people the first time we burned the bird. This time, there were closer to a hundred. Our grief was surrounded by bodies. As the bird burned, some people cried, others shouted, and still others laughed and kissed their wives. The haunting stood on the beak as the fire crackled from the inside out. Leaks of dark red veined the cracks of wood until the shell took fire, too. Smoke met flame met night, and despite the cold, a wave of burning warmth crashed over us. The haunting did not move. I turned and everyone’s faces were red with sudden heat.
One long crack screamed and the bird collapsed. Even the criers shouted then. I noticed a strange jubilation, shared like a whisper, jumping from person to person. Amongst the hundred, my father, my sister, and I did not feel it. My mother was still inside, and she was still dead, and none of us had moved on.
The pile of ash smoldered as my father stood watch, making sure the fire did not spread. I peered out at him from my window, overlooking the once-orchard backyard. He sat in a lawn chair wrapped in a hundred layers.
The bird did not return to me that night. Or the night or day after. I was free.
I fell asleep while my father stood over the coals and cooling ash. My sister didn’t even have to sneak out. I heard her leave through the front door. He swept the ash away at dawn, and I watched him crouch and whisper to it. He tucked some in a pocket and walked back inside.
#
With the bird gone for a while, I made friends. Two, Rosaline and Magnus, who both played lacrosse and wrote poetry, and had known each other since the third grade. I met them during a mass shooting drill in the library during independent study. We were the three closest to the door, and the librarian had us wrap a rope around the door handle, and tie it off on a bookshelf so no one could pull the door open. If there had been anyone. The librarian reminded us it was just a drill over and over again like she was talking to herself.
We hid under a desk together in the pretend dark. They both talked about what they’d text their parents if this was real, and I realized I couldn’t text my dad anything. I thought about dying and wondered if my father and Regina would burn my body or bury it. Magnus saw I was sad, thought I was scared, and we talked about caribou instead. Both male and female caribou grow antlers.
We walked from that class to our next, dropping Magnus off in the C wing, then walking together to E wing where I left Rosaline. They both asked for my number and I told them I didn’t have a phone yet, but I’d be getting one soon, so they wrote their numbers on an index card.
I asked my father for a cellphone like Regina’s that night and he drove me to a strip mall and bought me one without argument. He smiled as he handed it to me, told me to be safe, and asked if I wanted to help him shovel snow.
Our breaths fogged like steam engines as we cut squares through the white. My father seemed too fine. It concerned me. He wore his heartbreak on his face, always looking sad, but he moved like a griefless man. He shoveled and cooked and chopped wood and repaired the leaking roof like someone who had finished mourning, assured, strong, and certain. When we got back inside, and I went to do homework, my friends had both texted me back, surprised I’d already gotten a phone. I smiled in the LED light from the screen and fell asleep.
When I woke the next morning, ten minutes before my alarm, there was a feather on my eyelid. It faded as it fell from my face, entirely gone by the time it hit the floor.
I looked for it all day but didn’t find it. Magnus said I seemed edgy. I said I wasn’t, which made Regina certain something was wrong. She asked why there were burn holes in my Gortex. I looked at my sleeves and she was right. Embers from the giant bird we burn in effigy to my mother, of course. Cool. Every year? I hope so. I heard the flapping of wings against the clouds but didn’t see anything. If you have it again can we come? Yes. The thought of them with me next December makes the embers burn hot again. It was not unpleasant.
#
The bird. The spring. The bird. The summer. My friends. The bird. My mother. Father.
My sister was home less and less. She was with Athena more and more and we both knew she was in love. She hummed while washing dishes and was never hungry and read all night and was gone all day. One day she’d leave us, permanently. It was like watching a helicopter take off, the blades sweeping faster and faster until. Until. Until. Until.
My father and I both knew this so we treasured the time we had with her. Soon, very soon, she’d be our sister on phone calls once a week, and at Christmas and Thanksgiving every other year.
The bird was back in my closet and crawling its way out of the dirt and squeezing between the floorboards. It had found its way inside as the summer turned to fall. It squawked and learned Latin. I was taking Latin in high school instead of a useful language because I only wanted to talk to the dead. I wondered all the time if I was going crazy. But it was only the bird. Multiple ghosts are cause for concern, but one, that’s just a haunting.
I joined the wrestling team because they practiced in a box beneath the bleachers and there was no way for the bird to get in. I learned that my body could be pushed and could push. I began exerting myself and saw that I had an effect on the world. I pinned someone for the first time after losing my first four matches and when my opponent, a brunette kid with raccoon eyes, cried at the loss, I looked for my father in the crowd. He was there, with Regina and Magnus, and Rosaline, and he smiled at me and nodded. I was happy, I think. Then I noticed my happiness and heard the kid’s soft sobs, and it all kind of collapsed. My coach patted me on the back with his oven mitt hands and I went to the bench to watch the rest of the matches. I ground my teeth and waited for the bird. When I wanted it, it never came.
In November we started to collect wood again. This time, people from town helped. Magnus’s father worked for a shipping company and brought piles of broken wood pallets to add to the pile. Regina and Athena became avid furniture purveyors once more. The pile grew and my father built. More and more I wondered what he did all year before he began to build the bird. Our orchard was no longer. He worked the fields and fixed the hot water heater but he was more and more a mystery to me.
He built the bird taller than ever. When it was finished I’d come home from school and see my ghost there, atop the bird.
This year, when we burned the bird, there was a crowd of strangers in our backyard. Family had brought friends, friends had brought family, and suddenly it was an event. My mother had been dead for more than two years and I still didn’t know what my grief was beyond a haunting flash of feathers and a memory of snapped bones. I hadn’t even started missing my mom, not really. Missing her meant looking at her closely, and I couldn’t just couldn’t yet. I missed my mom as an idea, as an ear that listened to me describe the mating habits of insects or a hand that held mine as my father ripped off the duct tape with which I had, over-literally, ‘bandaged’ my skinned knee. I hadn’t even started grieving the person she was, only the person she was to me. A whole person, gone, up in smoke as strangers ooo-ed, polite enough to bow their heads even though they wanted to yawp. Regina let a yell loose and the whole crowd cheered. Magnus and Rosaline were next to me, but they weren’t, really.
I couldn’t hold enough inside me to mourn a whole person. A whole person whose mind I had only just started accessing as something separate from its concerns about me, who liked agave more than honey even though we made our own honey. That’s why we burned the bird. I mourned her loss, but not her. Not yet.
My father stood close to the flames as they swallowed the wooden frame. My bird cawed in the smoke until the head collapsed into the body. My father’s face shone a zit-bright red as the heat bullied his exposed skin. As the wood smoldered and ashed, fine splinters of red crackled through the gray and black char. In the aftermath, as people left, and Magnus and Rosaline stayed, I remembered their presence. My father would watch the wood all night, and most of tomorrow. At first to make sure it did not spread, then until whatever burned in him, so different from the fire than burned in me, had died out, too.
Rosaline brought an entire game console in her backpack. When we went inside, we plugged it into the living room TV and fought each other as small cartoons. Neither asked me how I was, just laughed and hugged me. Athena and Regina left through the front door. And the bird was gone, for a while.
#
The perennials poked their heads above the dirt. My father and Regina had tended the garden together this year, so it mattered when they survived the winter. I started eating lunch with the wrestlers, a habit I picked up when we started cutting weight. It’s easier to starve yourself with company. The bird returned with the bulbs, like an ancient pathogen fleeing from melting permafrost.
Regina finally took off. Athena drove her to Chicago to live in a warehouse with visual artists and drug dealers. Regina told us this in a letter she left my father and a voicemail she left me.
We missed her. I caught my father staring at the compost and the deep brown summer soil and smiling, and I knew he was thinking of her. We had planned for this. The house got very quiet.
Without Regina around, I began to worry about my father acutely. His wife had died. His son was strange. His daughter left. What was he doing with all his grief? He was putting it somewhere. I observed him carefully for a month, shoeing the bird away as I traced him through the dark house. Without Regina, most of the house was blanketed in darkness. I became obsessed, and told no one, about making sure he was well.
I bought a hidden camera second-hand from a pawn shop and hid it around the house. I traced the motion of his days, terrified but also hoping that I would find some horrible outlet for all the grief and pain I knew must live inside him. He woke early, so I started waking up early too. I watched him on grainy, CTV-quality video as he woke and did 50 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, and 100 squats each morning. He pulled a laptop I didn’t know he had from beneath his bed and spent twenty minutes scrolling. I thought it might be memories of mom, so when he left to go walk the property, I snuck into his room and checked his browsing history. He was researching different apple and chestnut tree species and providers. He did this every morning. He started to regrow the orchard. It’d be years before it produced any fruit or nuts, but he wasn’t hurried. I waited, and for every bit of normalcy I saw, my concern grew.
Finally, at the end of the month, I caught him. I hid my camera in the shed where he kept the tools and watched. Each night, after making me dinner if I was home, he poured the waste into the compost outside. He walked into the tool shed and stood at the door. He reached into a shelf and I held my breath. He picked up three mason jars filled with something and sat them on a lawn chair, then sat down on a chair himself. In the dark, he spoke to jars, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, sometimes not talking at all but just sitting and breathing. I watched this for a week. When he finished, he kissed each jar, then placed them away. He either wiped tears from his cheeks or composed his laughing face into its resting mask, then left. After a week I went into the shed myself. I found the jars. They were filled with ash and each had a date sharpied onto a piece of tape that labeled them. Each date was a year apart. Each date marked the day the bird burned. My bird smashed against the shed window so hard I thought it would break the glass, but it didn’t. I wanted to smash them, the jars. I almost did, but I remembered my father and stopped myself. It wasn’t anger, not really. It was shame. It was jealousy. He was mourning her. Her. The actual person she was. I cried, then.
I didn’t hear my father come in, the haunting thrum of the bird against the window was too loud, but I felt his hand on my shoulder and fell into him. He let me cry. He let me miss wrestling practice, let me off with a warning about skipping school, and took me back inside with the three mason jars under his arms. He sat them on the table and sat me down and asked how I was.
“Tell me something about her.”
“She loved you—”
“No. About her. Not me or you or Regina or being a mom. Something about her.”
“Well.” He thought for a long time. The bird thrashed up from the kitchen sink, rising from the drain and pluming into the air. It careened around the cabinets and knocked over glasses, but my father didn’t even turn. I watched the glass shatter and sparkle on the wood floor, wedging between the cracks in the floorboards. I grabbed my father’s arm and it all disappeared except for the bird, which landed on my father’s head and quieted.
“She had a tattoo.” The bird had never been so still. “I don’t think you ever saw it except for maybe when you were a baby and she bathed with you. Right here (he pointed to his upper, inner thigh. She got it before she met me, even, while driving around the country with her friend, a boy she broke up with in the Midwest, and a golden retriever. It looked like this.”
He took a napkin and a pen and drew six feathers that formed a peace sign. The images of her young, like Regina, and reckless, sitting patiently while someone inked her skin all folded into me like herbs kneaded into bread dough. I tried to picture her, driving with the windows down, smelling vaguely unbathed, listening to talk radio and laughing at their accents and retrograde politics and she was so alive for a moment I thought I might be able to talk to her. I tried to open my mouth and the bird launched off my father’s head and flew into my throat. I choked on it, then on tears.
I let myself be held by my father for the first time since she died. When I was done, he called the wrestling coach from the home phone and told him I couldn’t make it. The next day, I stayed after practice and ran sprints until I vomited.
My father asked if I wanted to help him build the bird this year and I said yes. We drove around late at night looking for furniture and hoped Regina was ok. I texted her to ask if she would come home for the burning. Neither of us had seen her since she left. I saw her typing, then the three-dot symbol disappeared and no message came through. I didn’t check again that night.
After each night of building, we returned the tools to the shed. My father brought in a third lawn chair and we sat, the ashes, my father, and I. We talked most of the time. Sometimes we sat in tired quiet. Sometimes my father and I argued about my grades.
On the day of the burning, he left a mason jar, a roll of white tape, and a marker on the kitchen table. I wrote the date and pressed it onto the mason jar. I kept it in my jacket pocket, uncomfortable on my side for the rest of the day.
Hours before people began to crowd our yard, I walked into the shed and locked the door behind me.
Once, I had come downstairs in the middle of the night to steal cookies a week before Christmas. When I got to the kitchen, I saw my mother, leaning over the sink, with a mouth filled to its limits with snickerdoodles. She swallowed hard, smiled a smile I had only ever seen on her when she thought she was alone and drank milk straight from the carton.
Now, I sat across the filled jars and placed my empty one beside it. I opened the window before the bird could crash against it. I inhaled. The bird’s ghost flew in through the open window. My grief, my guilt, perched on my shoulder.
Then, I told my mother the truth. I didn’t kill the bird by accident. There was no book or broken cage. No. I wrapped my hands around its fragile neck and snapped. I was angry and it kept saying her name. “Carolina, Carolina, Carolina.”. We had no power, I was thirteen, and my mother had died. “Carolina, Carolina, Carolina.” I put him in the closet, lined the door with blankets, and tried to drown out his voice. “Carolina, Carolina, Carolina.” I buried myself in a mountain of pillows and still, his squeaking voice. My mom was dead, the oceans had dried up, the drywall was hollow and fungi had blanketed the orchards. “Carolina. Carolina. Carolina.” I screamed and he only shouted her name louder. I did throw a book, but it bounced off the closet door. “Carolina. Carolina. Carolina.” I threw the closet door open and unlatched his cage. It was not a single moment of grief that killed him. It was dozens of decisions. I took him into my hands. I had so many chances to stop myself. “Carolina. Carolina. Carolina.” I didn’t. My mother was dead and I had just learned that she hated dirty jokes unless the punchline involved shit. I would never learn anything about her again. “Carolina. Carolina. Carolina.” She was gone and the bird was here and I wanted everything to be as broken as I was. I pressed into its neck with my hands and snapped. Its spine popped like bubble wrap and went so limp it slipped out of my hands and thudded to the ground. I killed him.
My mother didn’t forgive me. She couldn’t. She listened, though. Outside, the wooden bird waited for its fire as people filtered in from everywhere, town, out of town, the nearby city. Their voices smeared together in a low vibration. I wouldn’t watch the bird burn that night. I’d let it sit on my shoulder and stare at the ashes of my mother and grieve. In the morning, I’d fill a mason jar with ash and add it to the shelf. I listened to the crackle as the bird went up. Regina texted me a picture of a small campfire on a beach with toes painted red and the ocean behind it. “I’m sorry,” I said, unsure whether I was talking to the bird or my mother. Neither answered, but a cheer sounded from the crowd. I added my voice to the mass of it. We all rose together, the smoke, our voices, the ghost of the bird I’d killed. We screamed until our throats gave out, until the fire smoldered. Next year, she’d still be dead, I’d still have killed the bird, and so we’d do it all again. Until. Until. Until.