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Syl Ponder

I was yet cold, spite my shawl black as a fire poker, my jonquil wooly scarf. We was walking on the wagon road nobody would trouble this time of night. Painters, folks told me, scream like a woman in birthing, a shadow, a yowl, then you’re gone, but Ransom Hagy wasn’t afeared, so I said I’d not fright easy myself, killer cat or no. Folks always want to spook you back into your kitchen, your safe places, back into your cigar box with fading love notes, blue ribbon and a wishbone.

We was darish, our fingers all twined, voices dovey. I’d walked out with the Keaton boy and with Harper Burns, but they didn’t rouse me. I was getting on, full twenty, but they didn’t rouse me none.

It was lightning past midnight, me hoping nobody had discovered the bundle under my covers was just a puppet. Lord, they might think a changeling had been left, all made of scraps and drabs, me whisked off to cook and fuss for some woodspirit thing. They could think what they pleased, if they even troubled to peep.

Ransom was saying how he’d seen a lit-up city with fine folks in carriages and boys on bicycles with ringing bells. We might eat roast meat at a fine dinery and drink cherry wine, he said. He said I was the most lovely gal in all Valle Crucis, and he wished to make an appointment to steal a kiss. I played bashful and said they’d be plenty time for that. I was weighing everything out careful as the drugstore man with his balances and fine powders or the farmer with ant-sized seed. I was biding my time.

It was still lightning, which never worried me, as when you see it, well, it would be too late anyway. Thunder never harmed a soul.

Then come up a wind of birds, a flock big as the sky, their wings smacking together like a picture show audience. I never saw the like, the way they flew hither-thither like notes in a music that circles but you can’t write down. They was flying into themselves and of a sudden they was tumbling, floating slapping through the trees, thumping on the ground about us like a Bible plague. We run up under a big hemlock and clung to the trunk to have the shelter of its thick limbs.

It was maybe five minutes but seemed longer than a homecoming sermon, then it was passed, but for the ones down. They were redwings, we could see then, and silky to the touch, their red and yellow flame markings, all still and not one sound after the fall.

I started to say something, but he put his finger on my lips like hush, then brushed my cheek like a wing, which is how I knowed he was the one.