Carol V. Davis

How perfectly he has mastered the car alarm, jangling us from sleep. Later his staccato scatters smaller birds that landed on the wire beside him. Perhaps the key to success is imitation, not originality. Once, when the cat slinked up the orange tree and snatched a hatchling, the mockingbird turned on us, marked us for revenge. For two whole weeks he dive bombed whenever I ventured out the screen door lured by his call: first tricked into thinking the soft coo was a mourning dove courting, next drawn by the war cry of a far larger animal. He swooped from one splintered eave, his mate from the other, aiming to peck out my eyes, to wrestle the baby from my arms, to do God knows what with that newborn.

After a funeral, they were covered with black cloth, some draped with shawls like a scalloped valance. Leftover sewing scraps, wool, linen, synthetic, anything to shroud the odd-shaped mirrors, though sometimes a corner was exposed like a woman whose ankle peeks forbidden from under a long skirt. A mourner must shun vanity during shiva, focusing inward but as a child I wondered if this were to avoid ghosts, for don't the dead take their time leaving? I'm of a generation where grandparents disappeared, great aunts with European accents, rarely an explanation provided to us children. My mother died too young. With a baby in arms I couldn't bear to fling that dark cloth over the glass. After all she had come back from the dead so often, even the doctors could not explain it. Each time I looked in a mirror my mother gazed back. I could never tell if she were trying to tell me something or to take the baby with her.

I do better in animal time, a creeping dawn, slow ticking toward dusk. In the middle of the day on the Nebraska prairie, I’m unnerved by subdued sounds, as if listening through water, even the high-pitched drone of the cicadas faint; the blackbirds half-heartedly singing. As newlyweds, my parents drove cross country to Death Valley, last leg of their escape from New York, the thick soups of their immigrant mothers, generations of superstitions that squeezed them from all sides. They camped under stars that meant no harm. It was the silence that alerted them to danger. They climbed back into their tiny new car, locked its doors and blinked their eyes until daylight.

Every day in summer I'd cross the border; he'd nod, pick up the horseshoes, hand me one, triple the size of my palm, and say,You first. We'd play away the afternoon. Few words punctuated the clank of horseshoe against stake, until the fog rolled in and I'd retrace my steps home. I was five or six; he, white haired, however old that meant. One evening my father sat me down, spoke in the exaggerated tone adults adapt for children, asked if I knew who he was. Admiral Nimitz, of course, though I knew nothing of his command of the Pacific Fleet and was less impressed than if he'd landed a horseshoe. He was a calm man, a useful attribute for sending young men to their deaths. The only time I saw him upset, raccoons had invaded from their hideouts in the hills, attacked the goldfish in his pond, leaving muddy footprints as they escaped. As far as I knew, this was his only defeat.