Just a bird guide. Forget it.
A puddle of something soft draped over the book, and a lump of gold hung against the edges of its pages. The bird harness, the egg locket.
I drew the book toward me and gathered the loops of silk rope and the egg locket with the other.
The book fit my hand perfectly—that sort of book is designed exactly for fitting hands. Still, I felt an excitement kindling inside me that I could neither explain nor resist. A jolt. A blast. It was the way I felt when I heard Haydn for the first time, or Little Richard.
I remembered: I put the book there, when I moved into my crooked little room. I didn’t need it. I had other, more recent guides. Mama, someone, might notice that it was stolen, that my uncle Robert Junior’s name was written on the flyleaf.
But I had not hidden the other books that I had taken from Ramparts, and, in fact, Mama had never looked into any of them. Every book that I owned had somebody else’s name written on the flyleaf.
Listen to the book.
My heart felt as if it were on one of those pull chains with the white knob at the end. Something yanked that chain, and my whole being seemed to light up inside me. One of my fingertips stung as if burned. The one with the scar on it.
And dreams that were memories opened like a book in my mind.
A long time ago, the ghost of my great-grandmama Cosima spoke to me, preparing me to meet a ghost named Tallulah Jordan, who vanished before anyone else saw her. And Tallulah Jordan had instructed me to listen to the book. The burning of my fingertip had identified the book as this one, my very first own bird guide, that was stolen goods from a dead uncle.
The cold gold egg locket in my palm had my name inside it, opposite a picture of a woman I thought must be my great-grandmama. She was dead before I was born. Why had she written my name inside the egg locket?
The household was only just beginning to stir. Mrs. Mank’s Benz sportster was parked next to Miz Verlow’s Lincoln on the kitchen side of the house. She had been expected; I’d helped Roger and Cleonie arrange her suite, and then heard her arrive shortly after I had gone to bed. I left the house barefoot, with the legs of my coveralls rolled up to my knees and pinned there. My hat in a pocket of my coveralls. I needed some light, some sun, and even the thin light of dawn was freshening. As I had done habitually since a little girl, I ran barefoot through the swash, northward, away from Merrymeeting.
The birds were about their business, and so were the critters that lived in the sand, damp or dry, and the ones in the vegetation beyond the first dune. The beach mice were snugging up to sleep away the day. No other human beings were visible on the great swathe of white sand.
The bump of the book in my overall pocket intensified the faster I ran, until it was spanking me, as if I were a horse that needed urging in some furious race. The other horses in the race were invisible to me, though, and I could not see a finish line. I slowed to a trot and then a stroll, veering across the beach toward the dunes. The finish line, it appeared, was my nest in the high grass, and there it was.
Still breathing deeply from my run, I took the book from my pocket and sank into panic grass and sea oats, to the patch my bottom had long since shaped for me. The coarse tall grasses made space for two when Grady was with me, but when I was alone it seemed to fill in cozily around me.
The bird guide was familiar to my hands. Thick for a small book, the paper of its pages as thin as the print on each page was tiny. Most of the dust had shaken off the book while it was in my pocket but the cover was still slightly dust-dull. I rubbed the book, back and front, and then the spine, on the thighs of my overalls.
With the spine up, my vision blurred as if I had gotten dust in my eye. I blinked rapidly to clear my eyes, and felt a few quick automatic tears leak. They sparkled in my lashes as I blinked, and were gone.
On the spine of the book, where the legend should have been, were the words
Once more, I tried to clear my vision with rapid blinking, but the legend remained the same. The absurdity of it made me laugh. I had no memory of altering it, and did not see how it could have been done. It took an effort to turn the spine away into the palm of my left hand, to look at the blank front. Then I flipped the book and looked at the spine again, as if to catch it changing back to what it should have been. It remained
I paged a leaf at a time: first blank page, the thin second blank page, the flyleaf, and instead of Bobby Carroll, the inscription was
And the title leaf read
When new, the guides are so firmly bound that they never just fell open, but the binding of this one, in the dry dusty space above the closet, had become loose. It fell open to the colored illustrations. Looking up at me was a cartoon of a loony woodpecker—loony not just in its expression, but its coloration, as it was all black-and-white as the common male loon is, and it sported a red crest (not that loons have crests, but woodpeckers do). Like many birds, the eyes of loons are red. The loony woodpecker clung to a cartoon tree trunk. It was identified as
Ivory Bill, the Woodpecker!
woodpeckerus nearextinctus
The loony woodpecker winked at me, double-drummed the trunk of the tree, and then cackled
Haha—hahaha! Haha—hahaha!
I dropped the book as if it were afire. The woodpecker’s cackle ended abruptly in an offended squawk. The sounds were very like those of Woody Woodpecker, but harsher and more mournful.
Listen to the book.
Cautiously, I picked it up again and let it flop open.
A cartoon parakeet looked up from the page. The cartoonist had turned the yellow feathers of the parakeet’s crown into a handkerchief wrapped around its head, and patched one eye piratically. The fluffy green feathers on its legs billowed into voluminous pirate’s pants, tied about the waist with a string. It was identified as
Papaw Parakeet
conuropsis nocanfindus
The parrot screamed
Kee-ho! Keck-keck-kee!
I slammed the book closed between my palms. As with the woodpecker, the bird’s call ended in an insulted squawk, in a much higher pitch.
I was listening to the book, but it was so bizarre, I could hardly give thought to what I was hearing.
I let it fall open a third time. It was a pigeon cartooned this time, in a threadbare morning coat with tails and a hobo’s bindle under its wing. Its name was given as
Nestor Pigeon
ectopistes gonebyebye
The bird did not so much sing as fret
Wherewherewherewhere?
I stuck my tongue out at the cartoon pigeon. It pursed its beak—a cartoon bird can do that—and gave me a raspberry.
I closed the book and then opened it quickly, as if to catch the contents on the change.
The cartoon that looked up at me was of a Scarlet Macaw. It wore the traces of a harness.
Calley the Scarlet Macaw
ara macao calliope