Love Birds

Prentice knelt over her bed, her rote prayers slipping from her mind like little sparrows flitting out a window. She stared intently at the twisting folds in the soft blanket of her unmade bed, noticing a curve that looked like a supple bottom lip. With careful fingers, she formed another curve above it until it resembled a full mouth. Prentice bent reverently and kissed the soft blanket lips with the barest touch, her entire body swelling with an orchestra of delight borne through the dreamlike image in her mind of her classmate, Isaac Henry. She smushed her face fully into the rumpled blanket, stifling her love-crazed laughter, then sprang from the bedside, full of vinegar as her mother said, and rushed down the stairs and outside.

“Prentice!” her father yelled as the door banged behind her.

She ignored his chiding tone and the twinge that followed. Come what may, nothing was as necessary at that moment as staying swept up in this wild joyful tide. She fled into the field for space to run and spin and spread her arms until she fell backward into the tall grasses and sweet clover. Isaac Henry’s face still floated in her mind as she sighed at the bright sky. She closed her brown eyes to see his blue ones more vividly.

He’d looked into her eyes only once, the day she’d seen him walking far off across the neighbor’s sheep pasture and followed him down to the river. She’d watched him from behind a bush until he fell asleep on his back, his dip net propped in the water. He seemed a sweet beacon of peacefulness as he laid there surrounded by waving foxtail and tiny white asters, so she’d crept close on her hands and knees to stare down over his face. She studied his fair eyelashes, the golden freckles sprinkled across his pale cheekbones, and the curve of his slightly parted lips. The hanging tip of her braid brushed his forehead and those sky blue eyes flew open in surprise to see her upside down face hovering above his. The depth of those shocked pools of blue stirred an impetuous desire to kiss him, but he stared back at her with the wide-eyed terror one regards the insane. She gave him her sanest smile to reassure him, but he’d hopped up, snatched his net from the water, and hurried away without a word. She’d been thinking of nothing but him ever since.

Yesterday, the schoolteacher had called on him, the name Isaac Henry halting her heart on the brink of the next beat. As he walked slowly from the back of the classroom, she felt the heat of his presence as he passed her seat at the front. He stood quietly and uncertain at the board. She whispered the answer to him, but the schoolmaster had heard and both of them, side by side with bowed heads, had received the blistering sting of his pointer across their palms, ten times each for cheating. Prentice had hoped a bond was building between them through proximity and pain, but he refused to look at her no matter how often she glanced back at him for the rest of the day. The teacher’s stick snapped across her desk more than once, and in the mere moments it had taken her to gather her books and bag at dismissal time, he’d disappeared from the schoolhouse. The more he ran though, the more determined she was to catch him; she the hound and he the fox, she imagined with a thrill. Tomorrow was Sunday; she would look for him by the river in case he went fishing again.

Still lying in the fragrant clover with her eyes closed, she felt the brief coolness of a shadow cross her, and then she was grabbed roughly by the wrist. Her tight-lipped father was dragging her onto her feet and back toward the house.

“Fool-headed girl.” She tripped along, trying to keep up with him and her arm attached. She saw the willow switch in his other hand, slicing through the tall yellow grass. As they left the field, he veered from the farmhouse toward the barn and she imagined that he was avoiding the saintly ghost of her Irish mother in order to expound his wretchedness by thrashing his daughter in the shadows of the barn. The birds shrieked and circled wildly in her mind. Who was she to belong to both of them? Her mother had taught her how to catch butterflies in the late morning, fireflies in the late spring, and the names of every flower on the farm. She’d shown her how to plant the little succulents called Hen and Chicks on the roof to protect their home from lightning and dark magic, and how to cut open a leaf and apply it to small cuts and burns. Her father had taught her how to avoid grief and to hide both his bottle and herself in the root cellar on bad nights.

After the near silent whipping in the barn, for she refused to make any plaintive sound in his presence, she lay on her still unmade bed and fell into deep despair. Her back and legs were burning from her father’s switch, her hands still sore from the schoolteacher’s stick, and her heart was stone heavy from Isaac Henry’s rejection of her openhearted adoration. She imagined her mother coming quietly into her room and sitting on her bed, her round arms reaching for her and saying, “C’mere me luv, yer alrite. Menfolk are all eedjits.” Prentice’s tears poured into her pillow and her ribs shook with sobs until the tide of feeling slowed and she could breathe again. “Thar’s nuthin’ a gud crie kent cure,” rang in her memory. Tomorrow was Sunday, and she would give that eedjit Isaac Henry one more chance she thought, as the worry birds of her mind tucked their beaks beneath their wings and she fell asleep.

She performed her prayers and morning chores in a blur and then cut across the sheep pasture on the way to the river. By the time her father caught a glimpse of her fleeing figure from the porch, his call was so distant it seemed meaningless. When she arrived at the river bank, there was no sign of Isaac Henry, of course. Despite her near constant flights into fantasy, she knew how her world went, that he would not be there, that he would not return to the scene of their interlude when their eyes met. What else was there for her to fasten her passions and aches upon? Her chores or lonely home, her unstable father or friendless school? She carried all her melancholy as she climbed slowly up a riverbirch slanting over the water. She lay on her belly on the branch with her cheek to the side and watched the sparkling surface of the water rolling past, lovelorn as poor Ophelia.

A deep eddy roiled slowly and circularly below her and the suffering sparrows of her mind began to quiet again, her gaze becoming transfixed on the spinning water until she saw deeper than she could, fathoming a shadowy human figure moving in motion with the water. Around and around it swam, strangely comforting, and when the face of the shadow neared the surface, she was not surprised to see the pale lips of her mother’s ghost smiling kindly, the dark cloth of her dress rippling through the water, those familiar round arms awaiting her, and nothing felt as simple as letting go and falling into their soothing embrace.

The water was cool as she slipped under, but not enough to alarm her nor wake her worry birds. She continued to let go, clouded in effervescence as she sank. Those moments went slowly, before she would take that painful fatal fluid breath and cross over to her mum. A rough hand grabbed her wrist again, ferocious in its strength, and knowing it was her father pulling her back to share a life of misery, she struggled against him, violently expelling the last of her air. The water surged into her lungs like a million shards of glass and like a sudden blow to her entire body, everything went black.

The next thing she knew, she was on hard ground with a face pressed against hers and she was choking water out of both her nose and mouth, the water still sharp and stinging her airways. She curled on her side until she finished coughing, then rolled on her back to regain her breath. Above her, two large blue eyes stared down in earnest concern, two lips slightly parted and panting, but all fire and desire were dissolved in her pain and bewilderment.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice raspy as he continued to hover.

“Are you alright? You’re cold.” He lifted her and pulled her close, and began rubbing her arms firmly. “I saw you cross the sheep pasture on my way here and followed you.” As warmth slowly returned, from his body to hers, the nearness of his well-formed freckled face and wet golden hair reignited an ember of delight; the birds’ sudden chaotic flutter in her mind accelerated her heartbeat. “I wanted to make an apology, but you looked so sad.” He paused before asking, “Why did you go into the water like that?”

“I was playing Ophelia.” She did not tell him about her mother, or her father, but deflected, “Why have you been ignoring me?” then blurted, “Don’t you know how much I like you?” It was as though she were standing tiptoe on the edge of a cliff; his next words would catch her or let her fall again.

“I don’t know,” he looked away with a sheepish smile. “In truth, you frighten me.”

His smile made her remember the blanket lips she'd made, and she laughed. She would soon kiss Isaac Henry. The hound had caught the fox. Her world was not what she had thought, and for a moment all the birds flew in the same direction, a swaying swirling murmur of possibility.