We Are All in Pieces
Jaimee Wriston Colbert
In 1875 the largest plague of locusts ever recorded in American history descended upon the Great Plains, a swarm about 1,800 miles long from Canada to Texas. They were the Rocky Mountain locusts, crawling out of river valleys, gnawing their way across the entire country. A humongous black cloud, glowing around the edges where a million lacy wings caught the glint of the sun, they fell like a blizzard, blanketing everything a foot deep: trees hunkering down under their weight, branches cracking, a howling like a hurricane as they devoured every piece of vegetation in their path.
I read about this in one of Jagger’s nature books. Normally locusts live in a “solitary phase,” the book said, but if breeding conditions cause more young to hatch, resulting in overcrowding and not enough food, they become agitated, gather in large numbers and evolve into a single migrating plague. It talked about a “Malthusian Trap,” populations of living organisms being controlled by their available food source. The Rocky Mountain locust is believed to now be extinct, it said.
*
My mother is driving me to the abortion clinic, though she won’t use that word. “Procedure,” she calls it, like we’re off to get plastic surgery, mother-daughter Botox injections, a bite of lunch, shopping—a girls’ day out. Last week we went to the clinic for the interview where they ask you if you’re sure. We sat surrounded by the sort of feminine décor my mother, who is a real-estate agent, might point out to her clientele in an “updated” bathroom, let’s say, a stencil of flowers near the ceiling, and the walls a watermelon pink. “Spacious cabinets,” she’d emphasize, “cherry wood”; though in an abortion clinic what’s inside those cabinets I, for one, did not want to know.
“Of course we’re sure!” my mother snapped. She’s taken this thing to heart, a project. Amanda Wing likes a good project, an A-to-Z contract with a definitive ending.
The weather is suspicious today, mid-summer, steamy yet cool, the kind of day my mother proclaimed impossible to dress for, though she’s dressed up anyway, her spaghetti strap top with a linen jacket, denim skirt and high-heeled sandals. “I see no reason to look like a slob,” she’ll tell you. I figure we cancel each other out, me in my genuine faded and torn jeans—as in I would never buy them off the rack this way, with some designer’s label stitched on to make simulated-worn-out a coveted thing—and an oversized t-shirt that belonged to Jagger. I like to wear my brother’s clothes, what I managed to salvage before Amanda schlepped the rest to Goodwill. I begged her not to get rid of his books, and she agreed. “Goodwill has no use for books,” she said. When I wear his shirt, I like to imagine sometimes it’s his skin brushing up against mine.
The ride feels endless—not exactly an abortion clinic on every corner in upstate New York. I shut my eyes and remember another car ride, how long ago? Jagger’s still with us, a child in fact, which would have made me pretty little for this memory. But I can see it, my brother in the front seat and our mother explaining to him why she won’t let him join the Cub Scouts. “They discriminate against gay people,” she told him, tapping her immaculate hand and manicured fingernails against the steering wheel for emphasis, and Jagger asked if we are gay. Amanda stared at him, that perplexed look of hers, that “Where did you come from, surely not from me!” withering glare. That’s what our father called it, before he too was gone, searching for Jagger in every city this side of the Mississippi River, keeling over one day in one of them: Beware of your mother’s withering glare.
“What’s that have to do with the price of milk?” she said.
Earlier this morning I told her, in fact, I wasn’t so sure. “Nonsense!” my mother said, “You don’t even know who the father is.” I pointed out the odds weren’t bad, a 50/50 shot, and anyway they both looked alike. Generic, I was thinking; that was the type who went for me, and the baby too would look like nothing special.
My mother frowned. “What’s that have to do with the price of milk?”
“You know, Sadie,” she starts now, and I jolt awake, the hum of the Pontiac’s engine an ocean tide, accelerate, decelerate, accelerate, decelerate—Amanda Wing’s unique way of keeping to the speed limit. I wasn’t asleep but I yawn and scowl at her for the startle. She sighs, oblivious. She says, “If I could do things over again, maybe I wouldn’t have teased your brother about it, but the fact is he was at our wedding, and probably there wouldn’t have been a wedding but for him being there, the size of a bean inside me. Do you get what I’m saying to you, Sadie?”
“The point is…,” she pauses, torching a cigarette with the plug-in car lighter, a habit she took up after Jagger was gone, “you just can’t know, so you better be 100 percent sure, you hear me? One hundred percent sure, because God only knows the anguish he will cause you. One day your life is one way, and the next it’s forever something else.” She exhales hard, spiraling her second-hand smoke into the car.
“I’m not supposed to breathe that gunk,” I tell her, sniffing for emphasis. Being pregnant and all—but I keep that part to myself.
*
Most of the Hawai’ian honeycreeper birds are also extinct, along with ivory-billed woodpeckers and the Carolina parakeets that John James Audubon drew to appear exuberant, sentient, alive. Audubon, known as “the Prince of American Ornithology,” killed birds to sketch them, even endangered birds; so he’d get them right. So they would look alive. Audubon’s talent with a gun was legend. If he didn’t kill at least 100 birds between sun-up and sun-down he considered it a waste of a day. Now some scientists estimate 100 different species each day go extinct.
*
The day Jagger went missing started out with the sound of gunshots down at the river, hunting season for water fowl and every year it’s the same man—we have imagined him old, snarly faced, failed in some inexplicable way. Standing on the island in the middle of the Susquehanna River, between one bank that is one town and the other another, over and over he fires his shotgun into the cloud of squawking ducks. Our mother called the police, complaining about how the shooting began at dawn and continued all morning long. “Kids play down there!” she emphasized. They said there was nothing they could do because the island was in the middle—neither their jurisdiction nor the other town’s. Amanda marched into his room then, noting that the sheets were rumpled like maybe he had slept, or at least lay down, and probably she poked about his dresser (she doesn’t tell this part), wanting to find the incriminating works but dreading it, such that, in the end, she ferreted out a pack of cigarettes from his socks drawer, took them to the kitchen table and, while sipping the dregs of her morning coffee, snipped the filters off each cigarette with her coupon cutting scissors, diced the pack into bite-size pieces with her paring knife, then chucked the whole mess into the trash. The night before she had dreamt of a mountain lion, she said, and the lion’s teeth were stained with blood.
*
I read this on the Internet about mountain lions: Starving females will eat their kittens, and older males will kill younger males just to keep them from hunting in their territory. They control their own populations that way.
*
When my name is called, my mother asks if she can come too, and the nurse says yes, and I say no, and we stare at each other until my mother, rolling her perfectly made-up eyes, mutters, “Fine,” and sits back down. “I’ll be right here,” she emphasizes, those beer-bottle green eyes a warning, the color of a storm. What does she think I’m going to do, escape mid-“procedure,” hurl myself out a window and flee?
As I turn to follow the nurse my mother leaps up, grabs my hand and smacks a kiss on my cheek. I’m startled by the normally reserved Amanda Wing and I yank my arm away, even though I know she meant it to be nice. But really, what is this? The kiss of Judas? I rub the oily mark her lipstick made. Though I can’t see it, I know it is scarlet.
*
A few months after Jagger disappeared, the police quit looking, and at the age of just 18, he became yet another face on The Missing Adults Website. Amanda Wing froze up. “Like a computer,” my father said, “only there’s no ‘Force Quit’ on this one.” “Grieve, Amanda, goddamnit!” he shouted one night at dinner. She gazed thoughtfully at her plate, then lifted her fork and shuttled her untouched peas from one side to the other. Our doctor said, “Perhaps this is how Amanda grieves.” Then my father too was gone.
*
Naked underneath a gown, a blush of rose buds all over it—to coordinate with the color of the walls?—I’m ushered to a holding room with two other girls and a woman around my mother’s age. We don’t look at each other. The time for any camaraderie in this thing has passed. We will bear our separate grief. Outside in the parking lot, protestors rag us about killing our babies, their voices all outrage and hate, drifting in through a cracked window on a breeze that’s not cool, not warm, but strangely damp, clammy—like it’s carrying wet laundry, lines of it, shirts, towels, underwear wrung out; the sky through the window is an odd, insistent green. Maybe a storm really is brewing.
I don’t let myself think about the baby much, because really it isn’t one yet, more like a miniscule guppy. And what would I do, a mom at 17? Be one of those girls you see at the mall, eyes like empty plates, schlepping a stroller, popping her gum, a toddler clinging to her hip like a behemoth growth of some sort? That’s what a lack of information will do to you. It’s one of the reasons I like to read about nature, things that have happened or could happen, “the science of being alive,” Jagger called it. He liked it too, back when he was still reading. Got us thinking about things. Besides, I don’t even like one of the could-be fathers, and the other was just a friend; “friends with benefits” they call this, having sex with a friend. But let’s get real here; it’s not exactly a spontaneous game of pickup or a jaunt together to Starbucks for a latte. Afterwards, he told me he would’ve settled for a blow-job.
I tilt my head back against the waiting-room chair, pink as the insides of an ear, and think about my brother. The needles began about a year before he disappeared. I found him on the floor of his bedroom one night when our parents were out and I’m still young enough to imagine he’s hurt, sick, he’s giving himself a shot. “Beat it little sister!” he roared, and I fled. Later I woke to him sitting at the foot of my bed, his shoulders in the yellow light from the hall slumped and shivering. A raw sound snuck out from between his clenched lips, and I pretended I was asleep, figuring he wouldn’t want to know that I saw it, his despair.
After he was gone I had a dream about finding him in the field beyond our house, where we used to chase Pansy, his Chocolate Lab, as she swam through the high grass, jumping over it like she’s dodging ocean waves, submerging so that all you could see was the tip of her wagging, chestnut-colored tail.
In the dream I’m in this field, air swollen with the scent of rain even though it’s dry as a stick and the sky the color of bleached bone, and I’m parting the long grass like Pansy did, like a deer might, poking my head and neck through, shoulders pressed against the fringy tassels. I come upon him suddenly, crouching down between the blades like he’s trying to shield himself from the wind that whistles through, to light a cigarette maybe. Only it’s a needle—the silver glint as he punches it in between the webbing of his toes, pushes down then releases, rolling his eyes, his head lolling back. When he sees me standing there, he grins, that slow sweet smile, tugs at my hand, pulling me down in the dirt beside him. “Little sister,” he calls me. Still holding my hand he rolls my arm over, places his other hand in the crook where my upper arm meets my lower and tap, tap, taps. “Great veins, little sister!” he tells me.
Jake was always attracted to risk, our father used to say. Even as a kid, an eight-year-old, he climbed up on our two-story roof and jumped, just to see what it was like. Marijuana, beer, the usual teenage pastimes—how could those have been enough? Even his name, Jake, became tame; he began insisting we call him Jagger instead.
*
Passenger pigeons are also extinct. They used to fly in clouds, darkening the sky, their droppings so massive branches would crack and break like they were coated with ice. Their extinction was the result of one of the largest slaughters in history. In just one year, more than 7 million were killed in Michigan alone, sent east as a cheap source of food. The last survivor of a species that once numbered more than 5 billion died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. She was discovered lying on the bottom of her cage at 1 o’clock in the afternoon. Her name was Martha.
*
In Connecticut there is a 90-acre preserve dedicated to the Magicicada, a cicada that appears every 17 years. My mother told me about a recipe she once read for cooking cicadas that claimed you could boil them or fry them, that they are sweet, like a good venison. Not that she or I would know what venison, good or bad, tastes like. We draw the line at eating deer.
Some people confuse locusts with cicadas, big grasshopper-like bugs, they think, that whine and carry-on, singing so insistently through the sultry nights, the yellow-hot afternoons, like they know something the rest of us don’t, like their little hearts are going to break if they don’t do this thing—sing, sing, sing.
It was Socrates or maybe Plato who wrote that locusts were at one time human. I read this too in Jagger’s book. When the Muses first brought song into the world, the beauty so captivated people that they forgot to eat and drink. So when they died, the Muses turned them into locusts. Sing, sing, sing.
In a bird’s world singing is survival and it’s the father who teaches his male young to sing. Males sing, and the female chooses the best song, mates with the singer and life goes on. Maybe our father never taught Jagger to sing? Swallowed up, they call it, when a drug addict disappears. As if the land, like a giant concrete mouth, just opened up and consumed him.
After he was gone I spent most of my free time walking with Pansy in our field (I started calling it ours—Jagger’s, Pansy’s, mine), and I kept walking there even after Pansy suddenly died. A heart problem, the vet speculated, and probably he was right. Pansy was Jagger’s dog and she was never the same after he left. I think she died of a broken heart.
It was in the field that I discovered I was pregnant, squatting to pee in the dirt, focusing on the orange globe of a pollution sunset, and I smelled that peculiar smell. I read about this in a pamphlet from my mother’s doctor’s office. How hormones in flux can make some pregnant women’s pee smell like they’ve been eating asparagus.
*
Have you heard? Now it’s the honeybees that are disappearing.
*
During the car ride back I start to cramp. They warned me to expect this, and I curl up like a shrimp on the front seat; I can feel blood soaking through the pad. “We’ll clean you up when we get home,” my mother says cheerfully, like I’ve messed myself and a wet rag should do it. End of project, mission accomplished, scratch this one off the list—Amanda is satisfied. “You’ll be fine,” she assures me.
I stare out at the sky, the late afternoon light still too green, like the world has turned itself upside down somehow and the grass is above us and below is the emptiness of space. I think about those locusts, scarfing clothes right off the farmers’ backs, harnesses off their horses, saddles, clothing off the line, fence posts, anything that at one time was in any way organic and it’s gone, digested, yesterday’s news. All that is left in their wake are pieces: wings, exoskeletons, a shedding of what had been.
I think about how really there isn’t any cure for it, this loneliness: My brother will not be coming home, and all that is inside me now is a vast hollowness, like I swallowed the sky.
*
African elephant, American alligator, Asian elephant, Asian lion, black lemur, black-footed ferret, blue whale, bowhead whale, cheetah, chimpanzee, common green turtle, crested ibis, dodo, Eastern cougar, Eskimo curlew, fin whale, flightless cormorant, giant anteater, giant armadillo, giant panda, gorilla, great auk, grey whale, grizzly bear, humpback whale, Indian rhinoceros, jaguar, Komodo dragon, leatherback turtle, loggerhead turtle, leopard, monk seal, mountain gorilla, orangutan, pygmy hippopotamus, sea otter, sei whale, snow leopard, tapir, tiger, trumpeter swan, white rhinoceros, whooping crane, yak.
*
She had my father’s body flown back from the city he died in; was it Minneapolis? Some northern city, a cold white light, a too-big sky. It was winter, and at first she said we couldn’t bury him because the ground was too hard, then one day she decides to cremate him, but still no funeral. His brother calls, says, “We need closure,” and she gets that tight-lipped look, her withering glare, and after that the urn with his ashes disappears. One day when she is somewhere else, I creep into Jagger’s room and I find it in his closet, wrapped inside the Yankees jersey our dad gave him, though neither of them much liked sports.
*
“It hurts!” I whimper, and my mother reaches her hand across the front seat, stroking my wrist lightly, my own hand clasped over my stomach. She thinks I’m talking about the abortion. Am I? Everything is aching. “I wanted to save him,” I tell her.
“It’s the cramps,” my mother says. “They’ll be gone in the morning. You were too young, Sadie. I’m supposed to save you. That’s my job.”
*
Piece by piece of him stripped away, like some kind of eating machine that stuff needled into him, and he just became less and less. “A mountain lion,” she said, “with blood on its teeth.”
*
In a dream Jagger tells me it’s probably not true—starving mountain lions eating their kittens. “Males maybe,” he says, “but not the mothers. Mother animals don’t eat their babies.” He says maybe it’s a rumor started by gung-ho gun-types, the ones who want an excuse to extinguish a protected species, just because they’ve attacked humans. The next morning I look it up on the Internet. Mountain lions are protected, so attacks are on the rise! touts one website. Mountain lions look at just about any living thing as dinner, it said.
*
Last November I went to our field during hunting season, and it had transformed into a killing field of sorts, with wooden platforms erected in the trees so the hunters could track and shoot without even having to stand up, kind of like carts for golfers: low-impact sports you don’t have to move for except to knock the ball into the hole or pull the trigger. There were beer bottles strewn below one of these platforms, a glitter of deep green and amber poking out between the wheat-colored winter grass.
A hunter, garbed in head-to-toe camouflage, leaned up against a tree with his shotgun poised. He was so still, so completely inanimate, at first I thought he was a mannequin, an imitation hunter made of wax, action-toy hunter, a decoy encased in flesh-like plastic—maybe the deer propped him there as a warning! I called out to him several times, checking for life: “Hey!” When he finally turned his head, I told him I needed him to recognize I’m human.
The property owner in an abutting field had seeded it with alfalfa to attract the deer, then killed them as they grazed on the bounty he served them. Another neighbor told us about watching a massive buck with an eight-point rack surrounded by does, chowing down the alfalfa, and suddenly the buck staggered forward, maybe 20 yards, then collapsed. There was no sound, just the wind through the trees, and he figured it out, he said. A bow and arrow. A lucky shot. “They breed like rats,” he said, shrugging. “Cockroaches with tails. Long after we’re gone they’ll inherit the earth.”
January, the end of the hunt, I came upon the survivors, a doe in the field with her two yearlings, the three of them backlit and golden in the setting winter sun. They stared at me, and I at them, and then the young bounded off into the woods. The doe remained a couple more moments, gazing at me, almost defiant, I thought, until she too tossed back her head, that beautiful, long neck, turned toward the ring of dark trees and ambled in.
*
I stare at my mother’s profile in the waning light, her left hand clutching the steering wheel, bony knuckles white as eggs, her right hand resting on the seat beside me, those slender certain fingers that used to play the piano, play volleyball, play; that held my father’s hand, back when there must have been love; that once grasped her son’s shoulders, guiding him to safety crossing a street, let’s say, when she could still do this—keep him safe, keep him, at all. And I wonder if it is her blood too that is leaking, stealing away whatever hasn’t already been taken from her. I slip my hand into hers.
At first we will imagine it’s raining, and she’ll tell me to close my window. Then harder, like pebbles flung against the roof, the windshield, and pretty soon it will be more like sand, the solidity and density, a storm of it such that the Pontiac’s wipers can’t move fast enough, and it’s piling up. Squish, squish labor the wipers as they drag across the glass, thick splotches in their wake. We will inch over to the side of the road where everything has stopped, the air blackened like a mid-day eclipse only it has wings, this air, and I know if I crack open my window we will hear it, the ravenous want.