I thought he was going to start throwing, but instead he walked away, shoulders hunched, head down, and his hands shoved in the pockets of his letterman’s jacket. The next day he was back to normal, grinning and offering sarcastic comments.
Doyle was a moody kid. He was ashamed of his family — everyone in town looked down on them, and whenever I went to pick him up I’d find him waiting at the end of the driveway, as if hoping I wouldn’t notice the meager particulars of his life: a dilapidated house with a tar paper roof; a pack of dogs running free across the untended property; one or another of his sisters pregnant by persons unknown; an old man whose breath reeked of fortified wine. I assumed that his defeatist attitude reflected this circumstance, but I didn’t realize how deep it cut, how important trivial victories were to him.
The big news in Culliver County that fall had to do with the disappearance of a three-week-old infant, Sally Carlysle. The police arrested the mother, Amy, for murder because the story she told made no sense — she claimed that grackles had carried off her child while she was hanging out the wash to dry, but she had also been reported as having said that she hadn’t wanted the baby. People shook their heads and blamed post-partum depression and said things like Amy had always been flighty and she should never have had kids in the first place and weren’t her two older kids lucky to survive? I saw her picture in the paper — a drab, pudgy little woman, handcuffed and shackled — but I couldn’t recall ever having seen her before, even though she lived a couple of miles outside of town.
During the following week, grackle stories of another sort surfaced. A Crescent Creek man told of seeing an enormous flock crossing the morning sky, taking four or five minutes to pass overhead; three teenage girls said grackles had surrounded their car, blanketing it so thickly that they’d been forced to use a flashlight to see each other.
There were other stories put forward by more unreliable witnesses, the most spectacular and unreliable of them being the testimony of a drunk who’d been sleeping it off in a ditch near Edenburg. He passed out near an old roofless barn, and when he woke, he discovered the barn had miraculously acquired a roof of shiny black shingles. As he scratched his head over this development, the roof disintegrated and went flapping up, separating into thousands upon thousands of black birds, with more coming all the time — the entire volume of the barn must have been filled with them, he said. They formed into a column, thick and dark as a tornado, that ascended into the sky and vanished. The farmer who owned the property testified to finding dozens of dead birds inside the barn, and some appeared to have been crushed; but he sneered at the notion that thousands of grackles had been packed into it. This made me think of the sofa at Warnoch’s Pond, but I dismissed what I had seen as the product of too much beer and dope. Other people, however, continued to speculate.
In our corner of South Carolina, grackles were called the Devil’s Bird, and not simply because they were nest robbers. They were large birds, about a foot long, with glossy purplish black feathers, lemon-colored eyes, and cruel beaks, and were often mistaken at a distance for crows. A mighty flock was rumored to shelter on one of the Barrier Islands, biding their time until called to do the devil’s bidding, and it was said that they had been attracted to the region by Blackbeard and his pirates. According to the legend, Blackbeard himself, Satan’s earthly emissary, had controlled the flock, and when he died, they had been each infused with a scrap of his immortal spirit and thus embodied in diluted form his malicious ways. No longer under his direction, the mischief they did was erratic, appearing to follow no rational pattern of cause and effect.
Some claimed they had poison beaks and could imitate human speech and do even more arcane imitations. A librarian sent a letter to the paper citing an eighteenth-century account that spoke of a traveler who had come upon an ancient mill where none had stood before and watched it erode and disappear, dissolving into a flock of grackles that somehow “had contrived its likeness from the resource of their myriad bodies, as though shaped and given the hue of weathered wood by a Great Sculptor.” Her account was debunked by a college professor who presented evidence that the author of the piece had been a notorious opium addict.
Jason Coombs’s daddy — Jason was our strong-side tackle, a huge African-American kid almost as imposing as the Taunton linemen — preached at the stomp-and-shout church over near Nellie’s West Side Café, and each year he delivered a sermon using the Devil’s Bird as a metaphor, punctuating it with whoops and grunts, saying that evil was always lurking, waiting for its opportunity to strike, to swoop down like an avenging host and punish the innocent for the failures of the weak, suggesting that evil was a by-product of society’s moral laxity, a stratagem frequently employed by evangelists but given an inadvertent Marxist spin by the Reverend Coombs, who halfway through the sermon took to substituting the word “comrade” for “brother” and “sister.” He had a field day with the Carlysle murder. Jason broke us up after practice one afternoon with an imitation of his old man (“Satan’s got his flock, huh, and Jesus got his angels! Praise Jesus!”), an entertainment that caused Coach Tuttle, a gung-ho Christian fitness freak in his thirties, to rebuke us sharply for making fun of a God-fearing man such as the Reverend. He ordered us to run extra laps and generally worked us like mules thereafter.
“You boys better flush everything out of your heads but football,” he told us. “This team has a chance to achieve great things and I’m prepared to kick your tails six ways from Sunday to see that you get the job done.”
I wasn’t fool enough to believe that we could achieve great things, but it was a heady time for Pirate football. We were assured of having our first winning season in four years. Our record was 6–2 going into the Crescent Creek game, and if we won that, our game with Taunton would actually mean something: win that one and we’d play in the regionals up in Charleston.
I did my best to focus on football, but I was experiencing my first real dose of woman trouble. My girlfriend, Carol Ann Bechtol, was making me crazy, saying that she didn’t know anymore if we had a future and, to put it delicately, was withholding her affections. She wanted more of a commitment from me. I envied those city kids who had friends with benefits, who could hang out and have sex and stay commitment free, because in Edenburg we still did things the old-fashioned way — we dated, we went steady, we got all messed up over one girl or one boy. Mama warned me not to let myself get trapped.
“You know that’s what Carol Ann’s doing,” she said. “She knows you’ll be off to college next year, and she wants to catch onto your coattails and go with you.”
“That’s not such a bad thing,” I said.
“No, not if you love her. Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
She sighed. “You can’t tell anybody what to do, and I’m not going to try and tell you. You have to work it out on your own. But you should ask yourself how Carol Ann is going to fare away from Edenburg, and whether she’s going to be a burden or a partner. Will she try and pull you back home or will she be glad to put this sorry place behind her?”
I knew the answers to her questions but kept silent, not wanting to hear myself speak them. We were sitting at the kitchen table. A steady rain fell and the lights were on and the radio played quietly and I felt distant from the gray light and the barren town outside.
“She’s a sweet girl,” Mama said. “She loves you, and that’s why she’s manipulating you. It’s not just a matter of desperation. She’s convinced you’ll be better off here in the long run. Maybe she’s right. But you’re bound to try your wings and you have to decide if you can get off the ground with Carol Ann along.”