One Came Home Read Free

their heads. If they screamed, I wouldn’t have known, because all I could hear was the sound of those beating wings. Horses reared up and yanked at their hitches. Dogs flattened their ears, put their heads down, and scooted under buggies and porches.
    Then Agatha brushed my elbow, startling me. She hadchanged into her oldest dress and covered it with her work apron. Oddly, she carried Ma’s tattered parasol.
    She winked at me, popped open the parasol, and stepped off the porch.
    I reached out to stop her because I thought she’d get hurt, but Agatha was already beyond my grasp. Wild pigeons are as big as crows. They fly fast and with much strength. They’ll knock you off your feet and cause all sorts of damage.
    Agatha, though, seemed to feel no fear. A current of pigeons flew low in the street before veering up over the roof of our store. Agatha ran toward this winged river, stopping short of collision by mere inches. Then she crouched down and edged underneath it.
    Bit by bit, Agatha lifted the parasol, forcing the rush of pigeons to adjust. Finally, she stood upright under a flood of birds that surged over and around, without stop, repeatedly and repeatedly, again and again, to infinity (it seemed). Agatha beamed at me and pointed.
    But even that triumph was not enough for Agatha, because then she spun. At first, she spun slowly, carefully. But soon she turned quicker, more swiftly still, until the fringe on the parasol shot out parallel to the ground. The pigeons pivoted, point-turning near Agatha’s right cheek—one after another after another. Locks of Agatha’s auburn hair came undone and lifted off her shoulders.
    Have you ever seen how iron filings circle a magnet? That was what this looked like. Except it wasn’t still anddead like iron; it was rushing, pulsing, and made of feathers, pumping hearts, and lungfuls of air. I could barely make out the pigeons, but I could see the center: my sister turning and laughing under that parasol. My fear slipped to the wayside, and I felt something like what I feel when I hear bells on horses, or streams running during the first spring thaw. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Agatha—sister, friend, guide to life, and the eighth wonder of my world.
    As if she heard my thoughts, Agatha stopped and pointed at me. “Come,” she mouthed. Her free hand gestured me closer. She nodded encouragingly.
    I wanted to. I did. I tried to pull my fingers from that railing, to instruct my feet to lift and step. But those images of bells and streams dissolved, and all I saw was a wind stirred by the evil winged creatures from Pandora’s box. I stayed.
    At the funeral, it was the memory of my refusal that made me cry. My arms pressed to my sides, the fabric of that borrowed black dress ripping under my armpits, the sound so loud I’m sure people heard it above the shoveling.
    When Grandfather Bolte put his large hand on my shoulder, I shoved him away and ran down the long hill from Mount Zion Cemetery.

I ended up sitting in my oldest clothes down by the river, shooting gin bottles to pieces with the Springfield single-shot. Gin shacks had sprouted along the river with the influx of the pigeoners that followed wild pigeons. Now that the people had left, bottles littered the bank. I found those bottles convenient. Shooting settled me. I did not miss one bottle. I never do.
    Feathers flew up with each breaking bottle. Pigeon feathers that spring were like fallen leaves in the autumn—they were everywhere,
in
everything. But there’s a difference between feathers and leaves. Feathers claw their way back into the sky, whereas leaves, after flying once, are content to rest on the earth. Agatha? She was a feather. She pushed higher,farther always. I suspected my constitution was more leaf than feather. I hoped I was wrong about that, though, because I wanted to be like Agatha.
    Wherever she was. And I
would
find her.
    I lifted the rifle, took aim, and shot another bottle to