A Wolfe
The knees of nightingales reside high in the leg, tucked close to the underside where we cannot see. Mother shooed the girls out to play when the winds had ceased to swell and now only rose dully to lift a small tuft of hair from the forehead. Only moments before, they had heard the thrilled and unexpected tap of hail on the porch like dropping clicks of the telephone receiver. It was spring, and Father had been away since the time of cold slush.
The girls approached a body, a bird intact, lifeless but legless. They thought of the mallards in the small pond behind the house, how those birds floated across the moss and how shocked they were when the ducks sprouted their flippered feet for dry-land pedestrianism. They had tugged on mother’s skirt while she cooed to the small squirrels with her bread pellets rolled up and squished to look like laundered pocket lint. Mother had glanced at the ducks stretching their legs and shaking dry and said, “What do you want me to see?”
The younger girl flopped to her knees and lifted the bird. It felt like dough in her hand. She gave it a squeeze and the beak edged open, revealing a thick tube-like tongue. The older girl put a hand on her sister’s head like patting a dog. She took the bird in her own hand and turned it upside down. They peered into two small divots where legs had been.
“We’ll find the legs,” the older said.
They searched the yard, which was littered with patchy grass and unkempt flowerbeds. It occurred to them that they might not know what a bird leg resembled until they saw it. It might look like a twig, or maybe a sun-dried worm. Would it be stiff? Would it be rigid with bones, or finger-soft pudgy?
They were tired, their curiosity grown lethargic in the density of the air. They wandered to the pond and sat with quaint crossed ankles on the bent base of Mother’s weeping willow. A stray pellet of hail clipped the younger on the nose. She looked heavenward and saw only the tangled thread of branches above her. She thought for a moment how nice it would be to live in this tree.
The girls scaled the tree on opposite sides, meeting once at the hand when jutting footholds became scarce at the top. Mother did not like them climbing the willow, said they looked like squirrels more than girls, but this only appealed to them positively. The younger swung a tennied foot above the lowest load-bearing branch and tugged her sister to her side. It was chilly in the shady harbor of the tree. The two of them bent at the knee, folding their legs into themselves for warmth. The flexibility of youth.
The older took her sister’s hand and pulled her further out on their branch. She paused, the slender bark lines imprinting her shins, and pointed a finger to the branch above them.
“I’ll lift you,” she said.
The younger straddled her legs round the neck of the older while she rose and unfurled her body, thrusting the younger a few feet higher to a darker thistle-canopied branch. The older stood firm while the younger elbowed her way to leveled safety.
“What do you see?” she said.
The younger looked down for a moment to her sister, whose face was muddied on the left cheek, then peered down the sloping lines of her branch. There was nothing but small twiggy offshoots. She shook her head to her sister.
“Go further,” the older replied.
The younger set her forearms onto the branch and crawled a few paces out. She looked down, past her sister and to the twisted roots at the base of the tree so far below.
“Don’t look down,” she said. “Just keep going.”
The younger reached one forearm out, then another, and soon she was inching down the heavy slope. Just as she was to quit the game, something blade-like sliced through her arm. She pushed her body up to sit on her butt and reached a hand out to the offending twig. She grasped the thing and wrenched it back and forth, but it would not break. At the base, she fingered a mound. A clenched claw, firmly planted in a home so exposed to the elemental winds.
The body was as they left it. The younger held a single stiff leg and fitted its hip joint into the bird. The girls stared down at it while the winds ruffled their stained cotton blouses. Mother had not called them in, though the storm was coming again. The younger knelt by the bird and removed the leg again. They took both pieces to the pond and washed them clean, but hard as they tried, the bird’s feathers only ruffled and puffed and could not lie flat against her form. The leg too was difficult. In the water, the callused flesh unbandaged itself from the hollowed bones. There was less of it now than when they had found it.
The girls slumped the bird at the base of the willow. The younger, unable to reattach the trophied leg, nestled the spindly thing in the cup of the bird’s wing so that she was holding it now like a scepter. That bird, royal, in command of oneself, and all. The girls gave one last look before taking leave to the house.
Mother had been bathing and soaking her body in the tub. She hadn’t heard the winds pick up again, nor had she thought of the girls. Soon after this, Mother would cut down the tree. She would dream of intense practices of deforestation while the children lie tidy and twinned on the lawn.