A Memory of Bluebirds
. . . . He eats quickly – as quickly as one can with no teeth. The soft food is uninteresting but it doesn’t matter. He sits alone at a small table in the dining room at the Veteran’s Home. Occasionally, some other resident tries to start a conversation, “What’s your rank, brother? What branch?” But he ignores them and they soon give up. He does not need a friend, does not want the burden of conversation. When he has eaten about half of everything he gets up, feeling uncomfortably full.
. . . . But for the small canister of oxygen, he would not need a walker. He pushes it expediently back down the hall to his room, keeping his eyes straight ahead. He ignores the man who always parks his wheelchair in front of the nurse’s station, calling out to everyone who passes: “What pills do you take? I’m a pharmacist. I make pills. What pills do you take?” He ignores the woman who inches along, pushing the wheelchair backwards with her feet. She reaches out to him, pleading “Where am I? Please, where am I?” The desperation sickens him.
. . . . The room at the end of the corridor dimly welcomes him. Entering, he stops to scrutinize a calendar that hangs on the wall. He forces his blurry eye to focus. Finally, he can see the month. July; he doesn’t know what day it is; the nurses forget to mark them off for him. They know he likes to keep track.
. . . . “Damned incompetents,” he mumbles as he makes his way in to park the walker next to his room-mate’s wheelchair, which sits abandoned. The roommate, whose name Eugene does not know, has not left his bed for weeks, now lies facing the wall, fed through a tube.
. . . . Before returning to bed, he stands over the toilet, willing urination, eventually succeeding in summoning a feeble stream which does not flow in a straight line. It misses the toilet and hits his left shoe no matter how hard he tries to aim.
. . . . At last he is in bed, exhausted from the futile effort of intake and output. What a relief to stretch out and breathe, through his nose, the oxygen rich air from the nasal cannula. Closing his eyes, he is transported to the cabin on the lake, where he lives with his young wife and their two children. Here, patchy sun enters the valley mid-morning and warms the dew-bathed air. Here, his urine flows forcefully, without effort. He eats chewy beefsteak with ketchup, and crisp bacon sandwiches, his taste buds dancing.
. . . . Ruth fries bitch bread the way he taught her – the way his mother made it for him and his brothers and sisters. It was the food he had longed for while he was in the army. Ruth has promised to make sauerkraut with spareribs and new red potatoes tonight. They will dig potatoes now, while the children play on the tire that swings out over the lake, making happy summer noises. Later, they will take the children to pick the wild raspberries that grow at the edge of the woods. It will be Billy’s fourth birthday tomorrow and he has requested shortcake. The child just can’t get enough raspberries.
. . . . His wife is a small, hard working girl with sun-streaked hair and a spattering of freckles. “Eugene, can we go see the new Audie Murphy movie? Please?” she implores. She fell in love with Eugene when he returned from the war because she thought he looked like Murphy, the most decorated U.S. soldier in the War. Eugene had actually only got in on the tail end of the war, after his older brother had already been killed at Anzio. He had gone over there wanting to raise hell with the Germans, only to find himself freezing his ass off on the Aleutian Islands. If Ruth thinks he looks like Murphy its fine with him.
. . . . His daughter is a chatty, five year old redhead who loves to help. Her mother named her Rosaland, after some movie star. They call her Rosie. Ruth entered her in a beautiful baby contest when she was two years old. She won second place and they showed her picture on the screen at the Bijou after the newsreel. Ruth still talks about it. She thinks Rosie will be a Hollywood actress when she grows up. Ruth seems to think Hollywood is right around the corner. She doesn’t know how big this world is, or how many people are in it.
. . . . “Can I wash the little potatoes?” Rosie asks.
. . . . “Of course you can,” Ruth says. She stands Rosie on the sideboard next to the sink. Rosie primes the pump with all her might, until the water is flowing, then she sits with her dirty little feet in the sink with the potatoes, scrubbing with a worn vegetable brush, scrubbing the red peel right off. Every night, after Ruth washes the supper dishes, Rosie sits on the sideboard and dries the silverware, wearing a look of proud concentration.
. . . . Mornings, Eugene and Ruth sit on the steps and drink coffee while the children play – war coffee, boiled strong, black with no sugar. Through the window, they can hear the radio in the house playing My Blue Heaven. Ruth never turns off the radio.
. . . . A family of bluebirds lives in the yard. One of them is a youth, nervous about standing on the narrow clothesline. He keeps flying back to the tree where his nest is and the footing is surer. His anxious twe-aht can be discerned from his parents’ encouraging tweat. He ventures out of his leafy refuge to try the clothesline again, then flies to the feeding post where he awaits his mother. He quivers in anticipation. His mother swoops to the ground, then up to the flat top of the wooden post where her child waits, open mouthed. She pounds a worm vigorously on the post. As her head bobs up and down to prepare the food for her child, Eugene and Ruth can see, in the slant of the morning sun, the worm juices fly. When it is pulverized, she deposits it into the open mouth. The beautiful iridescent blue of their feathers is hard to see in the bright light, but worth the effort when they finally catch a glimpse as the birds fly off to one side or the other.
. . . . A woman from Iowa comes with her husband to visit him. They bring candy and slippers, and ask about relatives he has not seen in years. She claims to be Rosie and talks about Bill and Ruth and Ruth’s husband, her eyes like a mirror looking into Eugene’s eye. But can this middle aged woman be the lanky child he last saw before Ruth ran off to join her sister in Des Moines? Standing, because there are no chairs in the room, she sways as though to music, but soon her eyes begin to dart around the room. Bobbed chestnut hair swings out from her head until her eyes light on the wheelchair and she pulls it to the front of his bed and sits on it. Words tumble out of her like water over rocks, impetuous as her fluttering hands but soothing and incomprehensible as a lullaby. Her husband speaks more loudly, enunciating as though to a foreigner. He asks Eugene what he did in the army, how he injured his eye, what types of work he has done. They talk about sawmills, chain saws, Indian tribes. Before they leave she pushes the wheelchair back against the wall and then she hugs him and calls him Dad.
. . . . “I don’t know what the hell they want,” he mutters to himself after they leave.
. . . . A social worker visits him and insists that he make his final arrangements. A plump young woman with tight, immodest clothes and frizzy-curly hair held up in back by some kind of clamp, she smiles tightly and speaks only in questions. He stares at the polished tile floor as she talks. Without looking at her he signs papers for a funeral home and a request to be buried at Fort Snelling.
. . . . “Why don’t they just leave me alone,” he says as she walks out the door.
. . . . A hawk has moved into his yard and now the rest of the birds are gone. High up in the stand of trees that lead into the woods, she has a nest with at least one baby in it. They can hear it squawking when she’s out hunting. They miss the bluebirds. Now Eugene sits with his shotgun on his lap as they drink their morning coffee on the steps. When the hawk flies over he shoots at her but always misses. His anger at the hawk makes him want to drink, but when he looks around he sees no car. It is too far to town to walk. His anger grows.
. . . . He’d come to this valley after the war, claustrophobic with the chaotic pace of Minneapolis, compared to the quiet emptiness of the Aleutians. But now he remembers his prewar home: a room in his sister’s house, a short walk to his job at the sawmill and closer still to the corner tavern. He longs to go there now.
. . . . The woman who calls him Dad comes with her husband again. The husband talks too loud and laughs at his own jokes. They insist on taking him outside in a wheelchair, and then they want to talk about his soul. They ask if he’s going to Heaven, if he believes in Jesus, if they can pray with him. They tell him to pray every day and quit cussing. At last they return him to his bed.
. . . . “Who the hell do they think they are?” he mumbles after they leave.
. . . . A chaplain visits. A young man, out of uniform. He stands with his hands clasped at his waist and talks about the war. But Eugene is confused, which war? This man was in some other war. Which one are they talking about? Eugene tells him he was in artillery but mostly he remembers playing cards and drinking beer in a mess hall, smoky from army ration cigarettes. The chaplain opens a book that had been clamped under his arm and reads something familiar to Eugene. Before leaving he shakes Eugene’s hand before grasping it in both of his.
. . . . “Is it okay if I come back and see you again?” the chaplain asks, bending to look into his eye. When Eugene blinks he turns away.
. . . . “You can do whatever you want, can’t you?” Eugene says as the chaplain walks away.
. . . . Ruth has begun to irritate him. She plays the radio too loud and allows the children to make too much noise. She makes demands on him: we need money, we need groceries, we need a car. When she nags about food, he goes to the garden and pulls up a whole row of onions. He brings them into the house and throws them on the table. The onions slide across the table and onto the floor, leaving black dirt in their wake. Ruth and the children begin to cry. He turns away and gives the woodstove an angry kick. The stack falls off, sending black soot everywhere. He can still hear them sobbing as he walks down the road.
. . . . The road seems endless. He walks until exhaustion overtakes him but still he can’t see the town. When he turns around the road back looks identical to the road before him. He lies down beside the road to wait until his strength returns. When he closes his eyes he sees a hospital room where an old man with a patch over one eye lies motionless. The man appears to be sinking into the mattress, becoming one with the bed. As he watches, Eugene feels a warmth spreading over his body, comforting like the first big gulp of moonshine, and the firm ground beneath him embraces him like a featherbed.
Deanna Northrup earned her MFA at Spalding University and leads creative writing workshops in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Her novel Trail of Crumbs was a top 100 finalist for the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and her poetry and reviews can be found in the current issues of Copperfield Review and Kennesaw Review.
