Black Feathers

3



On a Saturday morning near the end of October, when Gordon was two weeks old, the Black family were all outside in the rugged back garden. The scent of wild roses from the last blossoms lingered in the air. Aside from the snow flurries and gales of a fortnight earlier – events no one mentioned – it had felt like an endless summer. Mornings and afternoons were chill by now but it was still bright enough that none of them wanted to be indoors at the weekend.

Sophie sat in a deckchair reading a thriller. A wide-brimmed, floppy white hat kept the sun out of her eyes. Behind her on the terrace, well-insulated in his pram, Gordon slept. Angela was reading a magazine on a blanket on the grass and Judith was alternately running, skipping and dancing or stopping and losing herself for long moments in the tiny details of the life of the garden. For a full fifteen minutes she had been on her stomach watching wasps eat their way through a fallen pear. Each of them wore a skin-tight yellow and black uniform and walked with an agitated mechanical twitch. Their black antennae wavered unceasingly and their yellow mandibles cut through bite after bite of pear flesh.

Louis, walking past with a wheelbarrow full of hedge trimmings and fallen leaves, saw what she was doing.

“You be careful, Jude.”

She looked up at him.

“They’re like soldiers, Daddy. Look how pretty.”

“They’re not so pretty when they sting you. Don’t get so close.”

Mesmerised by the wasps and their work, she rested her chin on the backs of her hands.

“Judith.”

“What, Daddy?”

“Back away from them a little, would you?”

Not looking up, she scooted backwards, somehow keeping her head on her hands. Her skirt rucked up, exposing the backs of her smooth thighs and white knickers. As young as she was he could already see her mother’s shape in her. As he walked on towards the compost heap the wheelbarrow bumped up and down over the uneven grass, eliciting tinny rumbles. He wondered if Judith would still be so unselfconscious in ten years and dreaded the complexities that time would no doubt bring.

When he’d dumped the load, he abandoned the wheelbarrow and walked over to Angela’s blanket. She too was lying on her front, bending one leg up until the heel of her sandal touched her backside and then letting the leg straighten until the toe bounced off the grass. Louis squatted beside her and glanced at the article she was reading.

“Sports day diets?” He struggled to register the implications. “I’m sure we’ve got some Bunty annuals in the loft. Mighty Mo and Watson the Wonder Dog were great.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad.”

“Wholesome children’s books, Angela. Instead of pre-teen Cosmopolitan.”

“It’s not like that.”

“How would you know?”

Angela tutted.

“It’s just a magazine, Dad. I’m not turning anorexic.”

When she said nothing else, Louis stood up.

“Fine.”

He wandered over to Sophie’s deckchair and sat down beside her on the grass. She didn’t acknowledge his arrival.

“You still love me, don’t you, Soph?”

He waited a long time for the reply.

“Hmm?”

“I asked you if, out of all the females in this family, you were the one who still loved me.”

After a few moments, Sophie managed to turn her head from the seductive pages of her book.

“Female family what?”

“Forget it.”

Rising, he walked the last few paces to the terrace where Gordon was warmly swaddled. He wanted to look into the lodestones of his eyes but the boy was deeply asleep, one tiny fist held beside his head in a baby power-salute. Louis smiled.

“I’m glad you’re here, mate. Balances things up a bit. One day, we’ll be able to discuss rugger and you can come home from school knowing there’s a safe haven in your old man’s study.”

Louis thought about the suggestion. Half joking, he added:

“Don’t take that too literally, by the way. I may be working and not able to stop straight away. And you must always knock – everyone has to. But once you’re in, well, then you’ll be in the safe haven.”

Suddenly content, Louis backed quietly towards the rear wall of the house and took in the scene; everyone who mattered in his life was arranged in this perfect landscape. He wished he could have had a painting, not a photograph but a unique painting, some rendering of his perspective that would seal in the satisfaction he felt in this moment of pre-autumnal perfection. Here was his family, his land and his life in silent rapture under a cerulean October sky.

Scanning the blue, he saw the tops of the trees and noticed one in particular, the horse chestnut that rose up to his left. It was the nearest tree to the house and had taken its share of damage over the years. Each winter it looked like it was dead and each spring the leaves came back leaving more and more branches bare. As he looked now, he caught sight of a large black bird sitting on the topmost barren branch. His satisfaction turned to ire and disgust. A haughty black crow was looking down on his son. A filthy carrion-eater.

An English vulture.

The crow hopped down to a lower branch, fixing Louis with a single obsidian eye. Louis frowned. Bold and unheeding of the presence of humans, the bird dropped from its perch and flapped to the lowest branch of the horse chestnut. The branch reached directly over Gordon’s pram.

“Sophie.”

When she didn’t answer Louis didn’t let the pause draw out.

“SOPHIE!” he shouted.

All of them turned around when they heard the command in his tone. Gordon woke up. Sophie struggled out from the sagging canvas of her deckchair.

Louis pointed.

“Have you seen this?”

“What? What is it?”

“It’s a bloody enormous crow. They’re evil. Have you seen them around here before? It’s acting like it owns the place.”

“I… I don’t know. I suppose so. I think they’re always around.”

The crow floated down onto the edge of the pram like a kite of black silk rags, its talons curling over the navy-blue, waterproof fabric. For a moment, no one moved. Unconcerned, it regarded each of them without expression. Only when it lowered its head to test Gordon’s blankets with its sharp beak did Louis rush at it, flailing his arms and screaming.

“Get away. Get out of it, you f*cking vermin!”

The crow bated at the air but didn’t take off until Louis was less than a couple of paces away. Finally it let go of the pram’s rim and flew up. Gaining height fast, it rose once more to the topmost branch. There it perched, cool and untouchable, its tiny black eyes fixed not on Louis but on Gordon.

“Don’t tell me you’ve left him out here alone, Sophie. Don’t tell me you’ve just popped into the kitchen to put the kettle on and left him out here on his own for even a moment.”

“I don’t remember doing that. I might have, but only–”

“Don’t say any more.” Louis tried to hold on to his anger. His face was sick and grey. Gordon was crying now: a wail of fear and shock. It moved Sophie to run to him but Louis didn’t even hear it. “You don’t have any idea, do you?”

“Any idea of what, Louis? It’s only a bird.”

In the garden, both the girls had returned from the reveries that had so recently allowed them to ignore their father. They lay still in the places where they had been, but now they were jack-knifed on their sides and silent for other reasons than simple absorption. They shrank into themselves, hoping that their father wouldn’t notice them and make them the target for his anger. Louis Black’s rage was a rare thing but that didn’t make it easy to forget. They watched as his eyes drove spikes into their mother, a figure who could usually ward off any of Louis’s moods. He approached her and pointed again into the top of the horse chestnut tree as she knelt beside Gordon, trying to placate him. He spoke quietly and clearly, containing his fury.

“That ‘bird’ is a killer. At the very least, it is a maimer of the defenceless. Crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, magpies – all of them – are carnivorous opportunists. They peck the eyes from the heads of newborn lambs given half a chance. And ravens are hunters; they’ll attack and kill small animals. And yet you let our child, our only son, lie out here unprotected, with one of them just waiting for us to turn our backs.”

“Oh, come on, Louis. I’m sure it wouldn’t–”

“Sure?” he screamed. “You’re sure? What the hell would you know? You may enjoy the countryside, but you don’t understand the first thing about it. I grew up on a farm and I’ve seen newborn lambs wandering blind with blood pouring from their empty eye sockets. Lambs with crows still sitting on their backs, waiting for another peck of flesh. Don’t tell me what you’re bloody sure of, right?”

Sophie was crying now, dismayed by his ire and terrified by the images. Angela and Judith cried their tears as silently as they could, fearing what might come next and not moving in case they caught his attention. The shouting didn’t stop.

“Take the baby in the house right now and don’t you ever leave him unattended in the garden. Never. Understand?”

“But Louis, I never knew–”

“I don’t want to hear it, Sophie. You’ve risked my boy’s life.”

“He’s my boy too,” she half sobbed, half screamed at him.

Louis advanced.

“Get him in the bloody house now.” He turned and caught sight of the girls. “You two. Inside. Go to your rooms until I say you can come out.”

Sophie carried Gordon to the living room. He was screaming as loud as his tiny lungs would allow, barely drawing breath between each cry. She held him against her chest and bounced her knees, gently patting and stroking his back all the while.

“It’s OK, honey, it’s OK. Daddy was afraid for you and sometimes when he’s afraid he gets angry. But it’s OK, it’s OK. Come on now, Mummy’s going to keep you safe. You’ll always be safe and we’ll always take care of you. Oh yes, we’ll always take care. Always, always, always. Settle down, my baby boy, settle down. Mummy loves you, we all love you and soon all the anger will go away, I promise.”

On and on her soothing words went and it was the tone, perhaps, more than the content that slowly calmed Gordon down. The girls, each silent and pale in their own rooms, heard their father stomp along the corridor to his study. They heard the clicking of the key in the glass-fronted cabinet and the sound of him breaking, loading and snapping shut his shotgun. Determined footsteps sounded back along the upper hallway and down the stairs at a trot. They ran to their windows and saw him emerge into the garden.

Sophie, too, saw him as he stalked from the terrace onto the grass not far from where she’d been sitting. She watched him raise the shotgun and take aim and she glanced up at the tree where the crow still perched, looking unconcerned. The girls at their windows also saw the crow. It wasn’t looking down at their father or his gun. It didn’t appear to sense any danger at all. Instead it seemed to be watching them. At the final moment, it looked earthward, but not at Louis. Sophie was certain it peered down through the living room window at her and Gordon. It opened its wings but not to fly; it looked as if it was settling itself into a more comfortable position.

When the shot came it was as though they’d all forgotten what happened after a loaded weapon is pointed at a target, had never heard the sound of Louis firing his shotgun at the rabbits and wood pigeons they sometimes ate. Sophie jumped back from the window, and Gordon, who had been near to sleep, snapped his eyes open to his second shock of the day. Upstairs, Angela and Judith started back too. All of them saw the puff of black feathers and splintered dead wood spray upwards from the crow. All of them saw it fall slowly from its perch, gathering speed until it thumped to the grass, bouncing once before coming to rest.

Louis approached the dead bird and saw how the tiny seeds of scorching lead had shredded one of its wings, torn a hole through the upper portion of its chest and taken half of its beak off. Ruby beads dappled its silky, coal-black feathers. He let the shotgun droop downwards and everyone jumped a second time as he released the projectiles from the second barrel into the fallen crow. Its body was spread out and flattened by the blast. More feathers flew into the air, some settling, others levitating on a soft breeze that had sprung up.

For the rest of that day, Gordon cried. Not the screams of shock he’d first made, but mournful wails that frightened Sophie and made her worry he was sick. Louis retreated to his study to clean his gun and be away from the people he’d hurt with his anger. He left the crow’s body where it had fallen as a warning to other winged opportunists and also to his family. As was the way on the occasions when Louis Black lost his temper, it was Sophie who fetched the girls from their rooms because he’d forgotten about them. Louis drank whisky from the Dimple bottle in his study cabinet and spent the night on the small leather couch in the bay window, having swept all his files and papers onto the floor.

I do know the land, he had told himself again and again, I know the behaviour of carrion eaters. But he was afraid they would all think he’d over-reacted. It was strange that the crow had been so bold, not flying away even when it had seen the gun. He tried not to think about it, but the memory of it sitting there as if he did not exist wouldn’t leave him until he collapsed half-drunk onto the couch and slept.