Blackbird House (22 page)

Katherine hadn’t been thinking much about Walker.
 
Nobody had, as a matter of fact, until he started to talk about the blackbird. Katherine had quit her job at the library when Emma was first diagnosed.
 
Sam was a lawyer, and had to go back to town after the holiday.
 
Right away, Katherine fell into a schedule of spending all her time with Emma.
 
They pretended their life on the farm was an opera.
 
Though Katherine was known for her off-key voice, and Emma wasn’t much better, they sang every request: Pass the peas!
 
Look at the mockingbird!
 
Do you want bubbles in your bath!

“You guys are crazy,” Walker had muttered.
 
And then, pointedly, to Katherine, “Everyone knows you can’t sing a note.”

Walker had laid claim to a shed in the field, which he’d turned into a fort.
 
He had very little patience with his mother and sister, and very little time to waste on them.
 
Soon enough, he’d learned to pull ticks off without any help and burn them till they popped.
 
He became adept at avoiding burrs and poison ivy.
 
He was sunburned and rangy and hungry all the time.
 
It was as if his body was preparing for a growth spurt to come; as if Walker, too, was preparing to become someone new.

It wasn’t until the middle of July that Katherine noticed that her son had become secretive.
 
He had lost some tender quality of childishness, overnight, it seemed.
 
When Emma, always a rescuer, found a toad in their garden and made a house in a hole near the porch, Walker asked her why she was bothering with what was nothing more than a good meal for the owl that lived in their woods.

“Toad a la mode,” he had said, and Emma, so busy saving any creature she came across, had cried at the notion that her toad was nothing more than a mouthful, a meal.

“Do you have to behave so miserably?”
 
Katherine had said.

“What do you care?”
 
Walker had stalked away, back to the field where the grass grew so tall it was indeed possible to disappear from sight.

Talk of the blackbird began that same week.
 
When a peach pie was found smashed to bits on the kitchen floor, with crust scattered everywhere, Walker insisted a huge bird had flown in through the window.
 
When the laundry out on the line was found strewn about on the ground, Walker declared this same bird had picked the clothespins from the line one by one.

“Well, tell that bird I’m going to pluck his feathers if I catch him.

Tell him to stop being so troublesome.”

That day, Walker disappeared for the entire afternoon.
 
When Katherine couldn’t find him on her own, and the sun was beginning to go down, she frantically phoned the local police department.
 
An officer came to the house to take down a description of Walker: ten and a half, fair hair, sunburned, skinny, angrier than most boys his age, probably wearing a bathing suit and sneakers.

As it turned out, Walker came back soon after the police car left.
 
By then Katherine was so frantic she’d phoned Sam twice and had bitten her nails to the quick.
 
Twice, she’d searched the woods, and had mistakenly walked through a patch of nettles.
 
She’d been in a panic, and now here was Walker, sauntering up the drive in the fading light.

“Where were you?”
 
Katherine cried.
 
She grabbed him by the shoulders, too fierce, too harsh.

“I walked to the beach.
 
I left you a note on the door.”
 
Walker pulled away.
 
Lately, he couldn’t stand to be touched.
 
They went to the door and there was indeed a silver thumbtack on the ground.
 
But no note.
 
“The blackbird must have taken it.
 
He’s a practical joker.”

“Right.”
 
Katherine’s tone was clipped.
 
She’d been imagining horrible things as she’d searched through the woods.
 
She knew she should be relieved, but instead she was angry now, too.

“It was him,” Walker insisted.

Later in the week, when Katherine and Emma were clearing out brambles from around the blueberry bushes, Katherine asked if Emma had ever seen the bird Walker blamed for everything that went wrong.

“I know the blackbird thinks it’s funny to steal things.”

“How do you know?”

Emma looked at Katherine with a serious expression.
 
“Walker said so.”

They’d met their closest neighbor recently, Josephine Brooks, who had lived her whole life in the house next door.
 
They’d already promised Miss Brooks their extra fruit.
 
It seemed there’d be plenty: the berries had already turned from green to a dull gray-blue.
 
It was time to throw nets over the bushes, to protect them from birds.

“And he’s different from other blackbirds,” Emma added as she worked.

“He’s white.”

“I see.”

Miss Brooks had told them that Walker’s fort was used as a summer kitchen in times past.
 
Most of their neighbors remembered the smell of sugar rising in the air whenever jam was simmered.
 
There were wonderful preserves back then, made from beach plums and apricots and peaches and these same blueberries that had always grown wild.

Sure enough, when Katherine checked, she found there was a fireplace in the shed, with two metal posts that could hold a large pot.
 
She noticed that Walker had taken the broom from the house and had swept the summer kitchen clean.
 
But there was something else that she saw: a secret kept, an old bow and a set of arrows, the sort of thing Katherine had always forbidden as too dangerous.
 
She felt as though she was well within her rights when she took the bow and arrows and set them in the trash.

But in the morning, when she got ready to go to the dump, the bow and arrows were gone.
 
Not only that, the vegetable garden she and Emma had worked so hard to fill with tomatoes and cucumbers and peas had been dug up haphazardly, so that the vines were draped in the dirt and the new tomatoes had been shaken off, then smashed into worthless pulp.

Katherine went up to Walker’s bedroom, angrier than she wanted to be.
 
He looked younger when he was asleep, dirt-streaked, his scalp showing through his clipped hair.
 
Last year, when she told him Emma had been diagnosed with leukemia, he’d been straight-faced; nothing showed through.

No she hasn’t, he’d said to Katherine.
 
You’re a liar.

Now she woke him and asked what had happened to the garden.
 
Walker shrugged, hazy with sleep.

“It must have been the blackbird.”

“I see.
 
You had nothing to do with it.
 
And did this bird give you the bow and arrows, too?”

“I found them.
 
Under the floor of the fort.”

This might in fact be true.
 
Miss Brooks had told Katherine that there had been a teen-aged boy who’d last lived here, and he might easily have fooled around with bows and arrows.

“Well, you should have told me.
 
Now I feel that I can’t trust you.”

“That’s fine.”
 
Walker got out of bed.
 
He let the quilt drop on the floor.
 
He looked taller than he had the day before.
 
“That makes us equal.”

Later, Katherine followed at a distance when Walker and Emma went into the woods.
 
He had set up a target far past the field, where the coyotes whose young they heard yapping at night must live.
 
The target was a bale of hay, most likely taken from the neighbor down the road, who had a corral and two ponies.

“Let’s pretend I’m the Gypsy queen.”
 
Emma quickly made herself comfortable on a fallen log covered with moss.
 
In woods so dark, her hair didn’t look quite so black.
 
“You have to do everything I say and win a prize that you present to me.”

“I’ll be a knight,” Walker agreed.
 
“No one’s ever beaten me at my own game.
 
Not in all the land.”

He sounded so young that Katherine felt like crying.
 
She felt as though she were the evil queen, the one who sent the hero to a terrible fate, who asked him to collect golden apples, though he might meet an untimely death when attempting such an impossible task, when he might be lost forevermore.

“What were you and Walker doing in the woods today?”
 
Katherine asked later, after Emma had taken her bath and they were saying good night.

“Nothing.”
 
And when she realized that wasn’t enough, Emma added, “Playing queens and knights.”

No mention of the bow and arrows or the target made out of hay.

“And did you see the blackbird?”

Emma shook her head.
 
“But Walker said it would try to steal my hair clips, so I put them in my pocket.
 
He’s white, you know, like snow.”

“Emma, you know there’s no such thing.”

These days, there was still sunlight at bedtime, and now flashes of drowsy light slipped around the window shade.
 
Josephine Brooks’ lawn had been mowed earlier in the day, and there was the scent of cut grass.
 
Katherine had taken to talking to Sam late at night; she’d bring the phone into bed with her, where she could whisper about her concerns.

“They both insist it’s real,” Katherine told Sam.
 
“At least they agree.”

The next day was jam day.
 
The blueberries had all been picked, the

twigs and leaves cleaned away.
 
Katherine and Emma went into town for

jam jars, and afterward

Katherine made a stop at Town Hall.
 
Miss Brooks had been pruning the old lilacs in the morning, and before they left for town, Katherine told her about the renegade bird that was supposedly doing so much damage; Josephine didn’t seem surprised.
 
In fact, she was the one who suggested the stop at Town Hall.

“Your boy’s not the first to have seen the bird.
 
Supposedly it was the pet of the sailor boy who lived in your house.
 
The poor boy went off to sea with his father and he never came back.
 
But the blackbird did.
 
Or at least, that’s what people say.”

“Well, it’s nonsense.”
 
Katherine laughed.

“A storm came up, if I remember correctly.”

She had, Katherine soon discovered.
 
The sailor who had built their house and his ten-year-old son had disappeared into the center of a huge, unexpected nor’easter.
 
The boy’s name had been Isaac, and right away Katherine wished she didn’t know that fact.
 
It made him seem realer, a boy who had run down the twisted steps from the second floor every morning, who swept out the summer kitchen on hot days, who could catch a bluefish in seconds flat.

“It’s dusty here,” Emma said.
 
She looked at the book of records Katherine had pulled down from the shelf.
 
“Who are you reading about?”

“A little sailor boy who disappeared in a storm.
 
Isaac Hadley.
 
He was only ten.”

“That was young to die.”

“It was.”

Sunlight was pouring in through the dusty window, and more dust rose when Katherine closed the book.

“You’re the ones who live in the sailor’s house,” the clerk said when Katherine returned the record book.
 
“You know what they say, put out salt if you want to chase that old blackbird away.
 
Or is it that salt will bring a sailor home from the sea?”

“We don’t want to get rid of him,” Emma said.
 
They went out to the car, which was hot as blazes.
 
“I’ll bet Isaac was scared in that storm,” Emma said thoughtfully.
 
“Everything he saw was dark.
 
Black ocean.
 
Black sky.
 
Only the blackbird was white.
 
Blackbirds aren’t supposed to be that color, but this one was.
 
You know what would have made it better for Isaac?”
 
Emma added.
 
“If someone had been there with him, the way you were always there with me in the hospital.”

“You know this is all just pretend, right?”
 
Emma looked so healthy now; there were streaks of sun in her dark hair.
 
She was long past her seventh birthday, a touchstone date, a step into the future.
 
“There are no such things as ghosts, if that’s what you’re thinking.
 
Not of boys and not of birds.
 
There’s only the here and now, Emma.”

“And the once was and the soon is going to be,” Emma insisted.

Katherine laughed and joined in.
 
“And the should be and the could be and the would be.”

They sang all the way home.
 
Then they boiled the jam jars and carried the ingredients to the summer kitchen.
 
As it turned out, it was the hottest day of the year, ninety-six in the shade, and much hotter once they got the fire going in the shed’s fireplace.
 
They used old peach wood and oak branches and kindling Emma collected in a wicker basket.
 
Walker saw the smoke billowing from the chimney, and came running. When he realized they were using his fort as a kitchen, he was furious.