A LANGUAGE NOT FORGOTTEN
Frances Wells shivered in the darkness. It was nearly midnight, and a cradle-rocker half-moon floated in the clear sky, illuminating the pale white shale cliff above her. She had been waiting more than an hour watching the ranch yard below, and Wilkins’s place was finally quiet. The kitchen light and the flickering TV were off, and nothing stirred now except a few cattle groaning in the pens behind the house.
In the pole light the ranch yard looked ordinary enough. A defunct harrow and some rolls of chicken wire littered the area near the barn, and Wilkins’s old Chevy, purple in the phosphorescence, was parked beside the flowing irrigation ditch, along with a dumptruck and a backhoe under repair. A lone cottonwood just within the circle of the arc light cast a ragged shadow on the ground.
But for Frances the yard was not ordinary. Her senses, sharpened by the cold moving air, took measure of every detail. The scent of pinon and juniper flowed around her. The breeze evaporated the sweat on her forehead. She gauged the surrounding country with its scattered lights and cars moving along the highway in the distance and wondered what a man like Wilkins hoped for with his broken-down equipment and his few acres of sagebrush and irrigated pasture. He overwatered during the melt and overgrazed when the land was dry. He worked sporadically with the backhoe, drank in bars, wished for women who would never speak to him.
Yet there she was above his yard.
No one knew where she was. By now Darryl would have been by the True Grit where she waited tables. He’d have searched for her in Trail Town and Ouray and telephoned her friends. He’d have called her mother, too, saying he was worried about her. “It’s not like her,” he’d say. “Why isn’t she home?”
But it wasn’t worry. Darryl wanted to know everything she did, everywhere she went, whom she talked to. If she were five minutes late getting home, he got furious and cross-examined her until she was ready to tell him whatever he wanted to hear.
The darkness favored her. Her bluejeans and red plaid jacket hid her as effectively as silence. She wrapped and unwrapped around her fingers the leather drawstring of her sack and listened to a coyote sing from the cliff above her. From a quarter mile away, the Sutters’ German shepherd barked shrilly in answer. Then the dog stopped barking, and the silence made the night more lonely and colder than before.
Frances inched forward from the rock where she’d hidden. She didn’t mind the darkness: it was the light she was afraid of, the way the moon shone on the cliff and the arc light exposed the yard and made the feed buckets on the side of the barn shine like silver dollars. It was not the hour to pay Wilkins a social call.
Whenever Wilkins came into the Grit he muttered to her under his breath things she’d never have told Darryl about—what Wilkins said he’d like to do with her, wouldn’t she like to. . . ? And Wilkins tried to touch her. He smiled like beer and ditch mud and grease, and he was filthy from running his backhoe all day. “Come here,” he’d say to her. Then one night, almost in conspiracy, he’d told her about the eagles. “I heard you could sell the feathers,” he said, “so I trapped two of them up on Log Hill above my house.”
When she was little, her father had shot eagles. She couldn’t recall how many—eight or ten—but she remembered the rifle shots. She could still see her father kneeling at the corral fence as if he were praying, steadying the rifle on the rail. Boom. Boom. The sound was so loud it obliterated all colors, the heat of the day, all her thoughts. The rifle fire echoed from the porch. She saw the eagle jerk in mid-air, lose its smooth momentum from sky to cloud, fall in an arc of loose feathers and useless wings.
Once her father had wounded one. It had fluttered down like a huge black butterfly, and she had run ahead to it before her father could shoot it again. Its bloody wing lay limply in the dust, and she’d approached it slowly with her hand outstretched, as if to give it her scent.
The bird had glared at her. Cree, scree.
The eagle had scrabbled away, but she’d stayed between her father and the bird, moving cautiously until she was only a few feet from it. The bird closed its eyes, bleeding still, and cowered. She thought it was dead, and she reached down to touch it. The eagle lunged suddenly, ripped with its beak the flesh of her forearm nearly to the bone. Then it had danced away, flapping its good wing. Her father had sworn at her and shot the eagle three more times.
To protect her father, she’d had to lie to the doctor about the wound. “I cut myself on barbed wire,” she said.
“Looks like a knife cut,” the doctor said. “But we’ll make it perfect with some stitches.”
On the way home, her father had yelled at her, slapped her. How could she be so stupid? An eagle was a vicious creature. On and on. And that night she had pulled apart the doctor’s stitches and opened the wound to make certain it wouldn’t heal.
She descended the hill above Wilkins’s house tree to tree, clutching her sack. The sack was awkward to carry, but not heavy. It had in it leather gloves, two sections of six-inch plastic pipe, a knife, a small crowbar, and bits and pieces of meat in a sandwich bag. All she wanted was to let the eagles go, but if Wilkins had clipped their wings, she’d steal them. She’d brought the gloves to protect her hands, and the sections of plastic pipe to put them in to keep their wings tight so they couldn’t hurt themselves. She loved eagles. They were lovely, beautiful birds.
She slipped through the gate at the edge of the driveway and crossed to the blind side of the garage. From close in, the yard looked different. A welter of tread marks and shadowed ruts crisscrossed the ground, and the light was brighter than she’d imagined. Insects whirled through the air, and now and then a solitary bat scuttled into and out of the halo of light.
The coyote mourned again from lower in the rocks, and the Sutters’ dog answered in a voice not its own, as if there were over eons a language between them not forgotten. Frances waited until the dog stopped yipping and all she could hear was the cattle stirring in the pens.
She didn’t know where Wilkins kept the eagles. To find them was the first problem. He’d have to keep them somewhere the sheriff couldn’t see them from the road. It was illegal to harbor eagles, or trap them, or shoot them. Or had Wilkins lied? Maybe there weren’t any eagles. Wilkins had only told her that to lure her there.
That thought gave her pause. Her father had lied, too. He’d told her eagles killed his calves, that he loved her mother, that everything would be all right someday.
She shouldered her sack and eased from the protection of the garage. Across the yard by the barn was a hay hoist with a dangling cable, and she made a dash for it. She ran into the light, across the open serrated ground, her sack swinging wildly on her shoulder. She tripped in a rut, pitched forward, broke her fall with her free hand. Pain shot up her arm, and the sack rattled to the ground. But she was up again in an instant, grasping toward the darkness.
She slid down by the hay hoist out of breath. No light came on in Wilkins’s house. She lay in the cool grass for a moment and listened, but there was nothing except the wind whining though the loose boards of the barn.
It had taken all her courage to leave work early and not go home to Darryl. What could she tell Darryl now? She’d say she’d driven out the gravel road and parked by the cottonwoods along the river. She’d climbed the hill above Wilkins’s place and had waited till he’d gone to bed. Then she’d set free the eagles. That was the truth, but not a truth Darryl would believe. He’d say she’d been with someone else, some construction worker or truck driver or tourist. He’d have already cut off from her every source of a reasonable lie—all her friends, even her mother. She couldn’t have been alone. He’d accuse her, and she’d defend herself, but no matter what she said, it wouldn’t be right.
She and Darryl had been married right out of high school, the day he’d signed a baseball contract to pitch in the Class A Southern League. They’d rented a small apartment in Savannah, Georgia. It was a start, and she knew they’d end up in a dazzling city somewhere—Chicago, or Atlanta, or Seattle. But Darryl hadn’t liked the humidity or the bus rides or the moss hanging from the branches of the trees. One muggy night after he’d given up seven runs in three innings, he’d loaded the car and they’d headed back to Colorado.
After that it wasn’t the same anymore. The gentleness she’d thought Darryl had promised her disappeared. He drank more beer, watched television till late at night. He was content, he said, to work his whole life repairing asphalt on Highway 62 and driving a snow plow as long as she’d be there.
As long as she’d be there. He made it sound like a threat.
The smell of sage was heavier near the hay hoist, a sweetness mixed with the odor of manure. The wind ebbed in the lee of the barn. When she’d caught her breath, she crawled the few yards to the dark plane of the side of the barn where neither the arc light nor the moon reached. She stood up in the darkness and edged to the far corner, away from the house, where the wind took hold again and the moon yielded up a stark slope barren of trees.
Sage and rabbit brush grew scattered across the rocky hill, but what gave her pause was the stench of rot. A deer carcass many days old was propped on the tire of an abandoned tractor. The deer’s head had been severed and lay eyeless on the ground. She knew right away the deer’s purpose: Wilkins poached deer to feed the eagles.
Farther on, beyond the tractor, she saw the cage—a box built up on stilts and attached to the side of the barn. She approached slowly, tilted her head into the wind and away from the rotting deer. One step, two. She held the sack tightly in one hand and shaded her eyes from the moon with the other.
One bird was on a ledge at the back of the cage, the other on a perch. They looked cramped, but no cage, she knew, was large enough for a bird whose domain was hundreds of square miles. She made out silhouettes: broad bodies, tapered wings. There were lovely birds, beautiful birds.
When she was fifteen she had climbed the shale cliffs to watch the eagles at the nest. The fledglings were lumps of cotton with razor beaks eager for meat. But it was the adults she admired. One of them was always nearby, sailing along the cliff face, its golden head and epaulets gleaming in the vivid air. Where did it hunt its prey? What must it see? She wished she could have leaped on its back and soared with it to those places only it knew.
The cage was not what she’d expected, not a wooden frame with chicken wire she could cut, though when she considered it now, such a cage would never have held an eagle. Rather, the cage was a frame of iron pipes with bars of thick cables stretched tightly and clamped in a grid. There was no door. It had never occurred to her the cage might have no opening. To get the birds out, she’d have had to unclamp the cables, and she’d brought no tools for that.
She grasped the pipe frame and peered into the cage. One of the eagles woke and flapped its wings, rousing the other. Scree. But she could do nothing. She felt the tears well up in her without sound, and she stepped back from the cage and pulled up the sleeve of her jacket.
Her skin shone white in the moonlight. “You did this to me,” she whispered. She tilted her arm so the jagged scar was visible. “Look at me.”
The eagles did not look at her. They defied her as she knew they would, as she defied Darryl. What excuse could she give him now?
She opened her sack, found in it the sandwich bag with the bits of meat, and took out several pieces. “Come on, now,” she said. “Here.” She pressed her face against the cables and pushed her hand through. “Come on.”
The eagle nearer tilted its head away. Its fierce eye caught the moonlight, and she called to that eye, softly, “Cree, scree.”
She held the scrap of meat closer. The bird jostled nearer on its perch, stretched.
“Here, baby,” she said.
The offer deceived. When the bird lowered its head to take the bit of meat, she pinned it with all her strength against the thick cables. She held it for a minute more tightly than in love, felt it her cold hands the warmth of its body under the feathers. She squeezed its neck, stared into the bird’s glittery eye until its body trembled.
When the trembling stopped, she let the dead bird fall and turned to the other. “Scree,” she called to it. “Scree.”
The bird stayed on the ledge, beak agape, silent. She took the crowbar from her sack and poked it through the cables, nudging the eagle to the corner. She drew back the weapon and flailed hard at the bird’s head. She struck it, stunned it, struck again, bloodied its feathers. Then she went around the outside of the cage and twisted the eagle’s neck until the bone snapped.
Frances stood back and gripped the iron frame of the cage with both hands.
“Turn around,” Wilkins said. “Real slow.”
She was not surprised by the voice. She pushed away gently from the frame and edged around toward Wilkins. She couldn’t see his face clearly—he had on a cowboy hat with the brim down—but she saw the rifle.
“Dead?”
Frances nodded.
Wilkins came forward, holding the rifle sideways in front of him, and looked into the cage. Then he turned around. For a moment she saw his thin, ghostlike face and the faint smile. A terrible exhaustion came over her, a feeling which erased kindness and patience and bitterness. She was not afraid of Wilkins. He could do nothing to her, and she held her arms and bloody hands straight out into the dark air like wings.