Bird’s Eye View

By Anita Lahey

Due to recent events this isn’t your usual
Bird ’s Eye report. To my mind
it does provide a glimpse into the
behaviour of birds in crisis.

Lucy Mountain of Wadden’s Lane reports
the cawing turned her head: a telltale
silhouette atop a spruce in the ditch.
The tree was one of a few still standing
that far up the road, branches burnt to nubs,
bark black as crow. The bird’s teardrop shape
on that distant branch Lucy took as a sign
the fire was out this time for real. But mercy,
the racket. And that charred, lonesome
spruce. Like a ghost, she said. A ribbon
of cinders. She couldn’t help hearing those
caw-caw-caws as a soul calling out. Anguish
is a word she used. Alarm, alarm, alarm.

The barn swallows huddled in the eaves
at Elias Gallant’s have welcomed
- refugees: the flapping
and rustling have increased tenfold. You wouldn’t
believe the commotion up there, Elias writes.
The cheeping commences at 4 a.m. When
Elias leaves for the wharf they attack
from the lintel, chureee! Bombs
away. Elias believes the birds are trying
to put out the fire. They make him
think of water bombs, which he wishes
had tumbled by the dozen out of helicopters
that awful Sunday. No one can fathom
the ministry’s reasoning. Main-a-dieu wasn’t worth
saving, we suppose. That burnt smell
that singes your nose with every breath
has the swallows on high alert. The very air
is infused with disaster. Anything
in motion is a threat.

Flossy Hart takes comfort
in the yellow-rumped warbler
frequenting the windowsill of the government-issue
trailer she and her husband and the three
children still home have moved into since
their own house smoked and roared and collapsed
in a fury out of all proportion with the quiet
lives contained within. It was only two rooms,
how much drama can one family fit
in a kitchen with a bed shoved in the corner?
The albums were destroyed but Flossy
was never one to sit sulking. She’s embarked
on a new collection: Polaroids of the chip-chipping
bird. (The camera was donated. She won it
in the draw.) “I swear it poses,” Flossy writes.
“Cocks its little head, gives me the eye. Even
Ambrose says that bird has a mind
to cheer us up.” Bird’s Eye View
wishes the warbler luck.

Murdock Flyn can’t sleep. He’s taken
to walking Sandy Beach, picking his way
around the kitchen tables and televisions
people hauled through beach grass, hoping
the flames would steer clear. But who
wants a TV set with no house? That terrible
image of Murdock watching it burn, the place
he built himself, on page one of the Cape Breton Post,
hands at his sides like clumps of newspaper,
glowing before the heat. His son,
you’ve all heard by now, was in the woods
with that Gallant boy in the hours before
the fire came to life. Snaring rabbits,
they said. Take heart in the thought
of Murdock (you may know him as Horse)
striding the shore, loose jacket flapping—
those fists shall follow me to my grave—
where black-backed gulls, Murdock reports,
in the night that maws before the dawn,
comb the shoreline with unusual intensity,
driving away the herring gulls for no infraction
he can fathom. The plovers, normally
so timid, pay him no mind. They streak
along the tideline like sparks. Harmless
sparks. Murdock emphasizes the adjective.

Father Edgar Dolhanty crept into the cemetery
to inspect the safe, which he’d shoved and rolled
out the church door and down the hill just in time
to save the records: nearly a hundred years
of births, marriages and deaths. The weight
of that safe! And the state of old Father Edgar! A true
case of adrenaline transforming into power a man
didn’t know he had. Father E insists it was God’s
grace come down upon him, and I suppose
that comes into play. Could they be one and the same,
adrenaline and grace? In the cemetery, a young
bald eagle, still speckled brown, was perched
atop the lock on the safe, enjoying his midday
meal. A good-sized crab, shell bits ying. Father
paused with a hand on Eliza Campbell’s
tombstone, the one that leans left toward
that chipped statue of Mary like a girl whispering
to her sister in the pew. That majestic bird
eyed the priest with a fierceness that sent him
right back in to dress for evening mass—what
mass we can manage in the musty hall, with no
chairs or hymnals. It was only two o’clock
- but the heavy
fabric enfolding his arms and waist calmed him.
- He was so
grateful to Esther Gallant. She saw those flames
gunning for the church, ran in and grabbed
all she could. She stuffed a massive armload of chalices
and vestments in the trunk of her car. Father’s robes
are rumpled now, even torn here and there, but
so what? A servant of the Lord, that one,
a bona de Mary Magdelene.

Katie Gallant, 5,
of Main-a-dieu Road, asked
her mother Esther to write in about
the shags. She saw twelve
in a row on the back of Nanny’s
flower-embroidered couch on the beach, hanging
their oily wings out to dry. Katie
asks, Do those shags think
Nan’s couch is a rock? I doubt it,
Katie, dear. If it’s convenient and dry,
it’s all the same to a shag.

Ambrose Hart nearly had his head
taken off by a great blue heron
coming in for a landing in that frog pond
down in front of Ambrose & Flossy’s.
What was Ambrose & Flossy’s. Flossy
didn’t call this one in herself: she isn’t
sure Ambrose saw what he says
he saw. He was in none too good shape
the morning before the fire nor
the next day by the smouldering pit
refusing to move, though Flossy’s sure
his supply of rum must’ve vanished
with everything else. That’s how fast
the fire moved through. Poof! It turned
her world to dust. No, it weren’t Flossy.
Ambrose called me himself. In a clear voice,
clear enough, anyway, he told me he felt
the breeze in his scalp as the heron
swept past. A claw brushed his
thick black hair. It’s not unusual for herons
to swoop low over Ambrose’s house and alight
in that pond to hunt bullfrogs and muskrats,
tiptoeing like they can’t stand getting
their feet wet, looking like some grim creature
come down to us from before fire or light
was invented. Ambrose guesses the bird
flew lower this time. With the house gone,
it maybe didn’t see him, or with
his dark, unwashed hair it thought
he was another blackened stump.

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