St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves Read Free

filthy clothes back on.
    But I just nod. “Yes, sir,” I say politely. I’m lonely, and I want to have a secret with somebody. I picture Ossie coming home to my empty cot, and get a terrible jolt of pleasure.
    When you are a kid, you do things for dumb reasons. The Bird Man tells me that he likes my freckles.
    “Listen to this, Ava.”
    I inch forward until I am standing at the edge of the pier.
    The Bird Man leans towards me, tilting the airboat so that its hull scrapes against the dock, his thin fingers curled around the rail. The rising sun turns the canal between us a brilliant red. White clouds rinse downriver. The Bird Man locks eyes with me again, that agate, unnervingly fixed stare, and purses his lips.
    The first four sounds he makes are familiar. The green-backed heron, the feral peacock, a bevy of coots. Then he makes another noise, keener, as close to an alligator bellow as I have heard a human make, but not quite that, exactly. A braided sound, a rainbow sound. I step closer, and closer still, in spite of myself. I try to imagine what species of bird could make a sound like that. A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like my art class charcoal of Icarus falling. It is sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. It goes on and on, until my own lungs are burning.
    “What bird are you calling?” I ask, finally, when I can’t stand it any longer.
    The Bird Man stops whistling. He grins, so that I can see all his pebbly teeth. He holds out a hand to me over the broth-thin water.
    “You.”
             
    Much later, I slink into the empty house, feeling skunked and lousy. Ossie is nowhere to be found. Her Ouija board is still sitting out on the kitchen table.
    “Mom,” I say, “I did a pretty bad thing.”
    The house is silent except for the neon buzz of the mosquito lamp. I put my hands on the Ouija pointer and squinch my eyes shut. Mom’s face swims before me, the way she used to look whenever I told lies or tracked coon shit into the house, her beautiful scowl. I make the pointer spell out what I deem to be an appropriate punishment: “You’re in big trouble, missy. I am very…d-i-s-s”
    I pause, my fingers hovering over the pointer. I can’t remember if “disappointed” is spelled with one
s
or two. “Go to your room,” I spell instead, “and think about what you did.”
    “Yes, ma’am.” I lie down on the cot in the silent bungalow, and think about what I’ve done. I close my eyes. I discover that even with my eyes shut, I can still see the black swope of the ceiling fan, the steady scything of the blades, just by listening to the air. The jolly mosquitoes drone on and on. The heat rises like a hand clamped over my mouth.
    Sometime around sundown, I manage to get up, and go feed the gators. It occurs to me, in a fuzzy, directionless way, that it is Thursday. When Mom was alive, Thursdays used to be synonymous with Live Chicken Thursday, one of the few Bigtree rituals that I refuse to perform. You have to tie twelve hens to a clotheswire by their hoary talons, so that they’re hanging upside down. Then you hoist them over the Gator Pit and stand back. The Seths jump clear out of the water, seven or eight feet high, and snatch at them. Squawking, thrashing, feathers, blood—and then silence, the naked hooks glinting on the line. It’s easy to tune out the caged noises if you are a spectator, but the squalling becomes newly horrible when you are its conductor. Usually I stop halfway, overwhelmed by a mercy born of my own cowardice. The Chief used to tease me for being such a little girl about it.
    “It’s
natural.
It’s the food chain, Ava,” he’d laugh. “These chickens are
happy
”—he had to yell, over the squawked protests of the chickens—“to be fulfilling their chicken destiny.”
    If the Chief’s not around to do it, I usually just thaw out a bucket of frozen baitfish. I’m nervous around the rooster, and too squeamish to tie the knots.