Passengers
R. T. Smith
It’s hard times, yes. Mr. Hoover said it again last night on the wireless. Hard times all around, and on this storm peak where I roost it’s always been so, though today I feel my personal bones more aguey than usual and fear you’re right I’ll soon have to remove my life to town. You see, it’s hand-to-mouth for me, just like these pet pigeons, and I have to keep my fingers warm and working, the scissors a-snip, the needle and thimbles in a silver rhythm. If I don’t rouse myself to get some batting up and gather scraps from the valley neighbors, there’s nothing to frame and piece, and no quilts means no groceries. That kind of hard.
I know you must look on me and wonder what a poor woman does keeping so many toy birds that wouldn’t make a snack, but these are my show pigeons I’ve been breeding for years. What set me to it was, I reckon, that day when I was a girl and saw everybody I knew working at a business that would bring nobody God’s blessing.
This here is Rhody, my best American Parlor Tumbler, a long-time favorite, and I got her primed to dive and tipple by crossbreeding a long-spinning cock with a short-spinning hen. You don’t get a cote of pretty plungers by accident, you know, and flying these birds is my best pleasure. They are pure poetry in the summer air. Let me toss one up for you to witness.
See there. Up and away. Look yonder. Yessir. A right sweet sight, the way she can pitch and plummet, and when I’m all a-flutter over watching her graceful acrobaticals, times don’t seem so hard.
This willow cage here holds my oldest kit of tumblers—two Recessive Reds—and over there you’ve got your Almonds, Turbot Turks and one Runt Turner. I lost the hen of that brace to a hawk last month before the late frost would let the leaf cover come back. But the bird kingdom is its own world with rules we can’t know. If a red-tail snatches one, it’s just nature’s course. I don’t weep but hold myself steady and love what I have that much harder.
I have not spoken to the Holy Ghost since when I saw the passenger pigeon massacre and set aside childish things, but I try to work out my salvation with as little fear and trembling as I can. To serve the birds and show them comfort, this is a duty I have come to adore in my later years. I fashioned those wisteria vine runs and cages myself, sawed the roosts and stitched the night tarpaulins. Will you look at that banty Red strut. “Bricky” I call him, on account of his colors. For their preening pools I cut down lard cans. I use everything I can.
It’s my life’s only story, why I keep them, even when I’m so hungry I have to partake of their corn, even when the snow flies and I have to share my roof, and it’s the same reason I live up here, folkshy and ponderful. Wisdom has it I’m touched and twisted and birdy, but it all goes back to that day of the passenger flock. Merciful Jesus, I can see it still.
We lived on Spruce Mountain near Red Camp on the west side of yonder Black Valley, and my daddy was something of a scratch-ankle farmer, Mama a quilter from her own girl years. Daddy also brought in the skins and meat, and those was dire times, painters still lurking up in the craggies, big rattlers under the windfalls, the influenza and smallpox drifting on evening winds. Hard times, stone-hard, but we somehow thrived. Daddy worked down to the turpentine camp till it shut, and being a fair shot, he brought in bear hams and venison, turkeys and grouse birds to go with our squashes and spuds, creasy greens and berries from the free woods. And corn? Lordy at the corn. A dark-eyed man, he could also tree a possum or wicker-snare a trout, and he always sniffed out where to find gunstock walnut, wild ginger and sweet bees. Myself, I was long a stay-in, on account of my bent feet, which means I can’t travel fast for a human. I kept to the hearth and learned needlework by coal oil and fat candles. Even as a tyke I was Mama’s helper, taking to the bobbins and shuttle, the wheel and sapling loom. Quick hands can make up for twisted feet. That’s what I was taught.
All I knew of birds was six clucky yard chickens and what passed overhead hunting or singing, a turkey on the table now and then, but I could near about remember from hearing Mama’s story when the blue pigeons first crossed our valley. I was a lap baby then, and Mama toted me to the stoop and pointed up. We only saw the hem-edge of their multitude, she said over and over years later, but they curtained out the sun like an omen eclipse. Lordy at the roar, she said, but the birds were sky magic, sure enough, a long bolt of cloth rolling over the earth, and you knew they’d have to light sometimes, some far, some near. We had more than one pigeon pie hot from the oven, but I figured it was the soldier eye and the Springfield rifle gun my daddy brought home from the war. I thought you had to be a sharp shot and didn’t know yet about matters of easy slaughter. That was going on miles away north. It hadn’t happened here. That was back when Mama and Daddy were acting like a good match, laughing and hugging and dandling us chaps when he wasn’t roving the woods or staring the fire to ashes on the dreg-end of night.
Daddy would not deign say much about his war fighting, but he never would push west on account of Indians. He said enough killing of men had been done with his mortal hands when he marched for Fitz Lee. What Mama whispered to me was in a battle worse than Jericho he stood behind a rock fence and killed Federals for hours, the boys in back ranks ramrodding and passing rifles up and him shooting without hardly so much as an aim. He told her before I was born and never spoke it again. The hind ranks poured spring water from gourds onto the barrels to cool them while Gordon’s boys up front kept spilling blood, their faces black from cartridge powder and streaky with tears. They were Christian reared, and such wild smiting about didn’t set easy. The horror stayed with him all his life, and Mama said it made him prone to difference and secrets.
But animals were a different feature in his book, so he shot squirrel and rabbit, flag deer, bobcat, even bob-white quail. We kept our coop hens for eggs long as there was game about, and Mama and me stitched swap quilts when we had enough family covers. My brother Frederick went to the fields by the time he was eight, but after the winter Freddy fell on the rock shelf, I had to limp out and help Daddy, who took deeper into darkish moods. Freddy lingered on his back till spring, when Jesus called to lift him from misery. I missed him so, and it was his going that turned me in the silent direction. I expect it pushed Daddy past his limits, too. This evening, in fact, is nigh on the most words I’ve aimed straight at a human person in over a year.
Now Daddy, he was tender with me, always bringing home a bead of amber, arrowheads or some shed feather. He’d carve dollies and pretty mares from softwood, but soon he figured what I wanted was scraps to dream up coverlet and quilt designs. My own veins was like blue thread, Mama said, and I would nearabout prick my own thumb to color up a stitch. I was a natural. “Rilla,” Daddy’d say, “here’s a shirt swapped off of Crawford who needed a deer flank. Reckon you can find a place for its blue in your next spread?” He smoked his long pipe and read Bible when he was home, plowed and hoed and studied weather a lot. After Freddy fell, he was bad for traipsing and might walk all night, but he always came back safe as an angel. At the morning table, he’d wear a weary face, and if I asked Mama later, she’d say with that pepper in her voice, “The war, child, he’s gone back over to his war.” His night striding became a botheration to her, and I would ask the Holy Ghost to make everything bright between them. Seemed like Our Lord didn’t care to hear.
Heck Quincy from Brushy Fork came up the path one evening when the half moon was a white leaf in the east, said the telegraph in Harpers Ferry was lively with news. Some pigeon migration the Almanac knew how to predict was aiming our way this time, the watchers were guessing, and if the birds saw fit to roost, we’d all prosper. Heck was an old-time fowler, and he showed Daddy and the others the way to bait a field and string a monstrous web they could spring of a sudden. Seems like near every soul in the county from Red Camp to Hook was soon set to helping, and they spent the better share of two days with axe, reaphook and saw clearing a coppice, setting the snare saplings and sewing up the eyelids of what they called stool pigeons. They wanted me to help with that, but I wouldn’t even consent to thread their needles. It was cruel.
Mama held herself back, too, and spoke with briars in her voice about what she named “the almighty stupid plan.” It was monstrous, she said, taking those tame birds Heck had saved and fed, spoke with and savored from years back. He allowed how this was what he’d been patient for, the great swoop of passengers, and the stool pigeons to lure them were his disciples. Look back now, it’s hard to hate the man, but then, Lord a-mighty, I wished him harm.
Mama locked herself indoors and wouldn’t raise a hand. I could hear her singing doleful through the walls.
Ice was how I helped. The Holy Ghost said it would be alright, for I had followed the banks of Blister Creek looking for manroot and low-billy till I’d come on shade waters where the slide ice white as the inside of a radish wouldn’t melt off till after April. When I showed the menfolk where the cold prospered and clung, they tousled my top-knot and praised me for woodcraft, then set me to chopping moss to pack the chunks they sledged up. Daddy said they would need the coldness to keep the birds from ruin while they were railroaded off to fancy eateries in Philadelphia and Washington, even Baltimore, and it felt good at first to hum my songs working among the men with their chests bare and cords bulging. I saw a boy named Amos whose crow hair and strong form sent shivers up me, that’s a fact. He had a wide face and a voice like Georgia sorghum, calling for the barrow and hefting straps, and on the spot I conjured plans to spark him. He’d laugh when the chips slipped down his trousers, and he winked when he caught me gawking, but I never even made it to the celebration dance, after I saw what I saw.
We were busy as ants in a sand hill next day along the clearing. Coopers rang the air hooping staves for portage, and axles got greased, stakes cut, stick blinds raised as people I had never seen spoke my name and said “Captain Ben Lorel’s daughter” in their laughter. I had never heard my daddy’s name on the lips of strangers before. “Captain Ben.” It felt peculiar, as I watched them knotting the big webs and listened to Daddy and Mr. Quincy barking orders. You could see they took to it like cows to clover.
“Ice over here,” he’d say with a tone I didn’t recollect. “You three whittle limbs for extra cages. John Sampson, where’s your whet file? Bring that scatter rifle over here, Timmons.” He was waving his arms and shouting loud as a deacon. Two days, I never saw him talk to Mama once, and I could see the whole affair soured her with scorn.
“Rilla,” she said to me, “girl, you watch the ways mankind falls to folly. See what wickedness they’ll plan out just for money.” She swore she’d not cast her lot with men acting akin to demons.
Even with the shelters going up against night chill and stew fires blazing, all the talk and work like a bee for canning, slabbing wood or plain-quilting, I couldn’t yet feature what was coming on swift as the weaver’s shuttle. I couldn’t guess of the shadow passing, slipping back on itself, then swirling down to settle and what would follow. Even if I was leaving girlhood behind forever, my heart would not give me the picture.
This was the lamb end of March, if I recollect right, of seventy-six, long before one soul guessed the passengers would leave this vale of tears forever, hunted and trapped down to nothing but ghosts. Since we were not a portion of the commonwealth anymore but a new separate state, we didn’t suffer that much from army law in Reconstruction, and even the men who fought Rebel were allowed to follow their needs without much interference. Still, it’s been the same in these hills for ages: hard times. We keep to ourselves, and they allow it. We strive. Mama had said it was like we didn’t lose a war ourselves, only the low country people who fancied slaves, but all I knew of prosperity was cloth and thread a-plenty, and we didn’t go hungry. Besides, me and my mama had a surfeit of songs to soothe us.
A message on the wires said the swarm was getting close, following the ridge line west of the mountains, and people got divvied up into netters and knockers. Mama and me was given sticks, but she cast hers in the bramble straight off, and when I cried to hear my chore was killing, Daddy said it would put the poor birds from misery. He said a bird don’t think nor feel more than a tater bug. When I tried to beg out, he reminded me what ribbons and gingham and sweet flavor real money could buy. Oh, even a child can be won for a spell with mammon. Mama said nothing but looked him deadly with the squint eye, then spat between his feet and stomped off.
That night I picked up the scraps of grown-up talk by the fires, how the birds was a menace, a plague on the country like locusts, but they came in abundance to us poor like the manna to Moses’ tribes. They just wanted beech nuts, chestnuts and acorns, the same mast a deer will relish, and when they saw the cap oaks bordering on our trap patch and watched the decoy birds flap up on fetters, they’d swirl and settle. Some neighbors even had dead birds they’d shot to prop up and look comely. Then all we had to do was wait.
Daddy made me swing my stick for practice and said, “That’s my Rilla girl,” which is why I live up here, nobody to do for me, no kin or helper. I never took the step to marry. What I saw people do that day, what I did myself, it made me dirty. It put the shed blood deep into my skin. I was tainted.
Now Heck’s wife Cinda, who went mental and ended out sleeping in a cage herself, back when she saw me in the birth water, she crazed and raved about my bent feet being the Beast Mark. Cinda told my Mama to beware bewitchment, said there was a curse on the house. Nobody trusted it, though. They all testify I was a sweet child, agreeable, always quick to smile and stay busy with my play-pretties. I took to the patchwork right merry and made my own patterns. I was thirteen in the pigeon year and had already been let to invent on my own. You know Wedding Ring and Three Trees, the Double Diamond and Heartvine? They were facile to me. I had already seen new patterns when I was dreaming and gone beyond what passed from hand to hand. Corn Harvest was too easy to hold my attention. And Crow Field. I made up Bee in Clover, Joseph’s Coat, Upshedaisy, Pig in the Chapel and Orchid Storm. I was a fanciful child, but like I said after Freddy was gone, a right silent one. I just spoke to the Ghost who lived in the Bible and minded my own business. I didn’t want to think up a quilt you’d have to call Pigeon Spirits Rise.
By dawn Daddy was out on the summit with a captain’s glass. The last rider said they’d arrive with the morning star still silver. I don’t know how anybody could say, but it wasn’t far off. All the people – must have been forty by then or fifty, crossed the field tossing salt, and then they crouched in the outside circle. Even Preacher Felton was there, even the goat granny and a Harpers Ferry blacksmith with his dark servant and the Methodist preacher Brother Wevern. Everybody was like a cocked rifle. Myself, I was still rubbing sleep from my eyes and tasting the sippy of honey I took from the jug we kept in the cradle because I was too young for coffee. I kept watching Mama’s face as she stared into the muslin blue, and even with everybody else all honed with excitation, she looked like a woman whose spirit had already strayed.
“What is it, Mama?” I asked, but she never broke her muse.
Then some bass-voiced man uphill cried, “There. Yonder,” and when I turned my head, I could already hear them, a choir of squeaks piercing through the thunder which was wingbeats. You couldn’t see the morning star, and in a trice, you couldn’t see the sun, itself. It could of been the Doomsday storm, but when Mama said, “Oh no,” I thought I heard, “Behold.”
I don’t have the words to give it justice. You know how sparrows or grackles can fill your eye with their flocking? It’s nothing. What I saw was out of the Bible, it was “hosts” and nothing less. It went darker than when we were sleeping, but you could see seams in the darkness and needles of light blinking through to vanish. Then the snow fell, or so I thought it. Grimed white flecks that was bird dung filling the air like a flurry, and the sound turned to roaring as they wheeled.
The men were shaking their saplings with stool pigeons laced to them, and some tossed up tame birds they’d held in a cage. I was thinking, “No, y’all. Go on someplace else. Pass us over,” and not just because I hated the thought of so much killing, but I was terrorized they would fall like a great cloak and crush us all. I closed my eyes for the Holy Ghost and prayed, “Send them to some other country. Save them. Send them to the moon.”
It was awful and beautiful and God-like. You want to talk bewitchment. Have you seen the light of a full moon on the meadow and thought you were in another world? That was how I felt myself shiver as the whole loft of blue pigeons dropped for the salt, all thrumming like the sky was riven.
From their perches the stool pigeons must of called warning, but those fool multitudes took it for summons as they swept low at a mile a minute, swerving and banking and spilling in a great swirl like the body of a Revelation dragon. I was awe-stung, and couldn’t hardly catch a breath as the great mass swung in acrobat formation. They looked more a portent or omen than a natural fact, and I heard Mama gasp and say again, “No,” so I echoed it out loud, “Dear Holy Ghost, no.”
But they touched down like a shawl of sky, and I could see some close enough, the lilac and gray colors, the shine-casting neck feathers, the slate blues and the male’s scarlet marking, soft twill and quiet opal-blue of the hen.
“See” was what their voices all together said in a high pitch: “See” and “See” and “See.”
That was when the traps sprung, the twine swishing over acres and acres, all the cord in the world like the web of Hell’s worst spider, and then the gunners ringing the trap field went to work on birds that were not snared but just flapping aimless and scared. Pigeons gave their terror chirp and jostled, but their startle just tangled them tighter, and soon it was a bedlam, the survivors rising up in the chaos and not knowing which direction was safe. Over and over they waved and circled as the gunners fired and loaded. You could hear the shot birds fall and the knockers now out in the net with their hickories, many of them carved fancy, others just smooth handles, and I went out with them, moving among the damaged birds, not knowing what else to do, desperate to kill them free of their misery. Men duck-waddled about, twisting the necks with their fingers, and the stink of blood was sharp like rust on a razor. I could smell whiskey from the sopped bait grain, and the air was full of fluff feathers so bad everybody sneezed over and over.
All day we sweated and moved like demon creatures up to our shins in birds, and tiny girl children stumbling over the dead would tote water for us while we murdered. The blood was stiff on my frock, and my arms stingy with scratches from the beaks and claws of those that could yet struggle. All day I knew Heaven would curse us for it, that this was a ribbon day for the snake that got us tossed from the Genesis garden, and when I thought the horror could get no worse, some woman across the field commenced to sing. I didn’t know the words, but her tune was joyful, and others joined in, some laughing, the whole field shaking under our feet still as men with scoop shovels worked from the uphill edge inward, filling the wheelbarrows. When I couldn’t stand it another minute, I stepped high like crossing a stream and found a catalpa to sit under, its buds not yet showing the popcorn blossoms that would be spattered inside by Easter with the blood of Jesus. I knew they would not open again for love or money.
Even after dark, the harvesters kept at their work by torchlight, and I heard some bearded gaffer all bent over with his labor say you could get thirty dozen in a barrel and the first wagons were already headed down to the station at Harpers Ferry where the train would rush off with food for the city markets. The rim hunters were back in the death field now killing by hand, the sky empty and too dark anymore for shooting. They’d brag of their kill numbers and spoke of squirting their personal water on the gun barrels to cool them. I overheard how professional pigeoners used pincers to break the necks and snip the wings. Some others more sanguiney would bite the necks when their hands grew weak, and they would bite till their teeth hurt, but no professional hunter working the prairie ever had such harvest as ours. They reckoned up the profit, but it sounded to me like outlaws boasting plunder.
And I was one, Lordy Lord. It was a wicked mesh we’d all been part of. I went down to the red rock where I like to be secret and told the Holy Ghost I was done with His sorry ways, and I was.
Two days later the feather gleaners had picked up what they could portage and gone off, for each pound of sacked bedding the quills from fifty pigeons, and the whole sloped landscape gave off the stench of spoil, which just went worse when Crow Hamilton herded over his army of gray hogs to feed on the rotting bodies. At night as the moon swelled like a pod, you could hear their grunts and slobbering and the crunch of bones. Every wind brought the news that pig stench added to the general ugliness. That was a hard time for me, too, as the day after the great captivity I took to the bed with my first menses and the end of girlhood. Mama said it was due to the shock of what I had witnessed, and I could hear her at night arguing at Daddy about everything from my curse flow to his emptiness of heart. He didn’t speak so much as a word.
Two days later, maybe three, I was laying up in a bough house under the red rock by the spring when I heard him scream off in the distance. Time I got to the house he was on the ground, clawing at his eyes with blood streaming down his cheeks and into his whiskers. He couldn’t make a word, and I thought he had ripped his sight out.
“What happened? What happened?” I was screaming myself, running like a headless chicken, but his noises were pure torment that could not sponsor words. In the house, frantic like, I yelled and yelled for Mama, but she was nowhere about, so I brought clean sacking, whiskey and a pitcher of water hoping to help, desperate to soothe.
When he got settled down enough to say, I was struck past belief.
“The witch,” he spat. “The witch your mother. Delilah. She was trimming my hair and beard with the sewing shears. It was all calm and relaxing, her singing one of her ballad songs and drawing her fingers through my hair. Then all sudden-like, she stabbed – first this one, then the other. She cut out my eyes. She called me a murder monster and run off.”
And he was right about her running off, but not before opening all the cages Daddy had made to keep pigeons for cooking up later. She smashed the ribs and gates and chased the birds in every which direction. I don’t know how long she’d been planning, but her duffel was gone, along with her wedding picture and crochet kit, her hat and personals and the leathered Bible.
So you see why I never myself married. I cared for Daddy best I could with poultice and serums and what the doctor showed me. People from all about offered their sympathetics and brought us soups and griddle cakes and such, but I was too frail to put in a crop, so I started my offering the quilts up for auction. With Freddy and Mama gone, we didn’t need many, and I could forget any thought of a dowry. Different ones would offer two days’ labor with our mule Homer for a quilt or mending, and I learned how to string rows and sow.
My big surprise was he would toss in a fever and say how it was his own fault, that blindness was a gift to men who’d looked on evil sights. I don’t know the physic of it, but even without the jellies, he could weep, and nights I’d hear him in the settle bed sobbing so hard he’d near about choke. It would start his sockets to bleeding again, and I’d have to fetch ice to staunch them. Poor Daddy didn’t last out but two summers, and that second it was hot as Hell’s handles. He suffered so. I’m sure he was glad to leave this world of woe, he was in such a misery of dark stillness who had loved traipsing and looking hard at the world.
When Miss Maisie Shankle passed on, I sold the plank house Daddy hewed and raised so I could buy this cabin she’d owned here on the hogback. You can see by the sunset why a body would hanker to be here. Times were steady hard, of course, but I learned the ways of March peas and cushaw, of rabbits and stream fish and birds while I put my life into quilts. You know, I never again saw a mighty flock of passenger birds, and soon folks said no mortal eye had. They’d been all hunted down, pulled out of the sky in hungry human mischief. I guess that’s why a few years back I traded for my first carrier birds and learned what they could perform to add some charm to the world. They offer comfort, but you know, it’s always a sadness in it. Not them nor the rock doves cooing in the eave at evening can match the silky look of blue pigeons. I’ve heard, even now, there’s them that holds shoots and puts bred birds on a string to let some man pelt them down with a gun. I think of all the blood and feathers and wonder when the Lord will raise His fist to such broken souls. We live in shame.
What I’m thinking for supper tonight, if you’d care to set down with me, is fritters, sorrel and poke with vinegar, hock and hominy with some butter-fried mushrooms and crooknecks. Maybe a muskmelon slice to crown it. Not much in the way of meat, but I’m talking fine provender for these hard times. Then when the evening star is just up, I thought I’d fly the Almonds I call Virg and Frederick to watch the way they soar after a roll and tumble right there in our precious moment, the hour between the hawk and the owl. It’s what I do now instead of prayer. I’d be honored if you’d join me, if your automobile lanterns can show the way home through the dark.