“But should you listen to the bad birds that are always flying about you, and refuse to remove, I have directed the commanding officer to remove you by force.”
Few mainlanders know that the Seminole Wars lasted longer than any other U.S. conflict, longer than the Vietnam War and the American Revolution. By the time Colonel Loomis declared the end of the Third Seminole War in 1858, thousands of Seminoles had been slaughtered or “removed” to the western territories. My sister was named for the Seminoles’ famous warrior and freedom fighter, War Chief Osceola, who, legend has it, said, at a time when General Jesup was upon them, and all seemed lost:
“If the Great Spirit will show me how, I will make the white man red with blood; and then blacken him in the sun and rain … and the buzzard live upon his flesh.”
Ossie said the spirits of Seminole babies killed by Major Francis L. Dade’s men still haunted the swamp, as did the ghosts of hundreds of army regulars who were murdered out here. So our home was actually a very crowded place.
These Seminoles, the “real” Indians that the Chief envied in a filial and loving way, were in fact the descendants of many displaced tribes from the Creek Confederacy. This swamp was not their ancestral home either, not by any stretch — they had been pushed further and further into the swamp by President Jackson’s Tennessee boys and a company of scarecrows from Atlanta, a militia that was starved and half-crazed. We Bigtrees were an “indigenous species” of swamp dweller, according to the Chief and our catalogs, but it turned out that every human in the Ten Thousand Islands was a recent arrival. The Calusa, the shell builders — they were Paleo-Indians, the closest thing our swamp had to an indigenous people. But the Calusa vanished from all maps hundreds of years ago, and it was not until the late 1800s that our swamp was recolonized by freed slaves and by fugitive Indians and, decades later, by the shocked, drenched white pioneers shaking out wet deeds, true sitting ducks, the patsies of the land barons who had sold these gullible snowbirds farms that were six feet underwater. And then by “eccentrics” like the Bird Man and my parents.
Florida itself was a newcomer to these parts, you could argue. Kiwi did — he said that Florida was the “suture” between Africa and North America three hundred million years ago, when all the continents were fused. According to the geologic clock, our state was an infant. Our soils contained the fossils of endemic African species — my brother said these feathery stencils of the past in our bedrock sort of gave the lie to the Chief’s ideas about the purity of our isolation.
“So, is your sister like the war chief Osceola?”
“Oh, no! She wears barrettes and stuff. She’s a real girl-girl. She’s not like us.” I paused. “Hey, Bird Man?” I watched a bead of sweat travel down his neck and disappear below his collar of feathers. “Why do you always wear that coat?”
“This old thing?” The Bird Man smiled and ruffled a sleeve as if he’d never really considered it, fanned his grimy leather glove at me with a funny coquetry. I didn’t laugh — I didn’t know if I was supposed to — and his face soured.
“Oh, habit, I guess. I’ve been wearing it for so long that I feel naked without it.”
“Okay, wait, I have another one. Where did you get your, ah … that?” I pointed at his black whistle. We were two days into our journey and the Bird Man had yet to use it.
“My birdcall?” He picked it up and held it between his lips, took a long suck of air; for a moment I felt my own belly muscles contract. Then he spit it out and laughed.
“It’s just a whistle, kid. I made it.”
“When?”
“I was even younger than you when I started up with the birdcalls. Ten, eleven.”
I tried to picture the Bird Man as a child — just some runty kid whistling into the leaves. Already odd enough at eleven to give women misgivings.
“When did the song change so that you heard it as words?”
“I don’t hear birdsong as words.”
I had pictured the birds’ strident calls trembling through the air and dying, and then all of a sudden those same cries taking on a coloring — red, black, blue — until what had previously been an empty hissing splintered into a hundred separate dramas: males squabbling over carrion, a lover’s quarrel, a chick and its four siblings protesting their hunger.
“That’s beautiful,” the Bird Man said. “I wish it had been that way.” He sounded tired. All the dark storyteller’s charisma in his voice had vanished, and now his eyes had the absent sheen of my dolls’ eyes. “Really, kid, I couldn’t tell you. It’s still birdsong. One day I heard patterns, that’s all. I’d row out to Black Gum Rookery and I could hear a logic under all that shrieking. Peaks and valleys. Once I could use their calls to get them out of trees, I started to tour the swamp.”
“So you don’t—”
“No.”
“But do you—”
“No more questions for a while, Ava.”
We ate the rest of lunch in silence: tinned ham and little pinkie-length fishes packed in oil, most of which I fed to the red Seth. Our food was running low now. We had, what? Cooler 1 contained six hard-boiled eggs. Crackers, we still had two greasy brown tubes of those. At the bottom of the dry-foods box I found a jar of blackberry jam that had been left for Mom by the Pick Up Club, the little green ribbon still tied to it. Some lady had used scissors to curlicue the ends.
(Q: Why did those good Christian women volunteer to ornament a loss? With their terrible pity, a glittery pity, as if Death were a holiday like Christmas? We kids got a load of gifts and sweets from the neighbor women, all wrapped up in paper and bows. My brother told me that he was only “intermittently certain” that their intentions were good …)
“I’ll pass,” I said, but the Bird Man wanted some jam. With his coat on, and hunched over the tin jar lid like that, the Bird Man looked like a huge crow intelligently attacking a piece of metal.
“You should try some,” he said, extending a black spoonful. “It’s sweet. Tasty.”
Stands of pond-apple trees were adorned with long nets of golden moss and shadowed a kind of briary sapling I didn’t recognize. Air plants hung like hairy stars. We poled through forests. Twinkling lakes. Estuaries, where freshwater and salt water mixed and you could sometimes spot small dolphins. A rotten-egg smell rose off the pools of water that collected beneath the mangroves’ stilted roots. If Osceola was out here, even with the ghost helping her, I thought she must be so tired by now — she would be thirsty, and very hungry, blood-sucked by all the chizzywinks and mosquitoes, she’d be aching, she’d be wondering why she ever left our island in the first place …
“Can we take another break, Bird Man?”
“Not a chance,” he said with his grave cheer. “No more breaks, my friend. Not if you want to come to a rescue.”
All day the horizon was inches from our noses. We’d been poling the leafy catacombs of the mangrove tunnels for hours. Any changes — palings of the sun that dropped the temperature a degree or two, or a brilliant lizard hugging the bark — felt like progress. More than once I’d think a tunnel was truly impenetrable. We’d pole into a green cone of water lapping at the trees’ wickery roots: the end of our journey! I’d think. And then we’d slide through a stew of crimson propagules, duck through a wishbonelike mangrove root, pop out. At one point an osprey’s nest crashed onto the poor red Seth’s carrier, knocked loose by our boat; that time we had to pole out stern first.
The Bird Man could always find us a way through. Often it took several tries: a tunnel would appear to be plumb shut and he would lift a branch, pull the skiff into sudden darkness, and slingshot us forward into the undergrowth. Blossoms dropped in a delicate static around us. The mosquitoes hid in wait for us, even in these shadows.