Children of Earth

I

THERE was a racket in the hall. There almost always is a racket in my hall, yet I recognized this particular one as being made by John.

’I am not a boy,’ says John. ‘I am a herd of elephants.’

That, of course, explains everything.

‘Mother,’ yelled the Herd, as he bounded in at the door, ’come on out! Kev’s caught an oriole!’

I put the baby’s shoes on, gave her the pencil which makes her life’s happiness complete, and carried her down the stairs and into the garden. Kevin had indeed caught an oriole, a very young one that could neither sing nor fly. It had cuddled down in my older son’s cupped hands, apparently quite happy to be there since his stern mamma had turned him out of the nest.

‘And we’ll keep him! ’ Kevin chanted in the same ecstatic tone he had used the day before about two crawfish, now anchored on strings in the creek, and the day before that about a little green frog that sat in the sun in a glass jar and thought all manner of things about the world outside. And there had been a water snake — but his skin was drying in the grape arbor.

‘We’ll keep him forever,’ crowed Kevin, ‘and he’ll sing to me and follow me —’

‘What if Sunny Jim follows him?’ I asked.

Sunny Jim appeared at that minute following Anne, who had on my black felt riding hat. Sunny Jim was a yellow cat, and a special pet of Anne’s.

‘Drown Sunny Jim!’ said Kevin, with the gentle consideration of a brother.

Anne clutched Sunny to her heart, and two big tears filled the blue eyes under my hat. ‘No, you won’t drown my Sunny! ’ quoth Anne. ‘ I ’ll kick you in the pants.’

‘Anne,’ I admonished, ‘please remember you’re a lady.’ Secretly I wondered when she ever would be. She walked off, her checked gingham sash wagging behind in all the glory of her four and a half years.

‘Put Sunny in a cage,’ suggested John, who is a helpful mediator of other people’s wrongs.

‘That would n’t be very kind to Anne or Sunny,’ I replied, ‘or the bird. He does n’t want to be kept.’

‘He does n’t want to go away, does he?’ demanded Kevin. ‘Does he, now does he?’

He did not. At least, if he did, he was keeping very still about it.

‘I’ll make him a nest,’ crooned Kevin, ‘and I’ll dig him worms, and mash ’em fine.’

‘No, Kevin,’ John broke in. ‘You have to chew ’em!’

‘Well, all right!’ said Kevin. ‘I’ll chew ’em!’

Impasse! How the big things of life do hang upon the trifles! Here was a bird no bigger than a powder puff, yet it had me.

‘Keep him if you like,’ said I, ‘but remember! Once you take him, you’re responsible.’

Kev nodded, and I thought what a pitiful little thing that baby bird was, with its irregular feathers and its big beak. It looked so small and helpless even in Kev’s kind hands that I almost went back on my word. Indeed I should have done so had I had any idea what life with a bird in the family was to be.

Looking back on it, that day seems endless. Considering it, and the strenuous time we had, I wonder how man can be content to cut eternity into little bits and call each one a ‘day.’ Surely some days are longer than others. Some impish angel teases us by slipping in an unexpected moment, or perhaps Michelangelo’s pictured Hours have babies on the sly, and these misbegotten minutes play pranks on trusting mothers.

But I had given my word and I could not go back on it. Discipline must be maintained, no matter how much it hurts the maintainer.

II

As we started for the house, a bird swooped from the tree above us, and before the yellow flash was gone we knew what was up. The mother oriole was on the job. Then I realized that I had lost sight of my baby. I saw her making for the creek, and, not having wings, I had to run for her. I caught her and brought her back, protesting lustily against Thwarting Parents, and deposited her in the little fenced-in place that looks exactly like all the rest of the yard to everyone but the Bambina.

Kevin was shouting something about needles from an upstairs window, so I left the baby to provide herself with a stick in lieu of a pencil and ran up to see who wanted to sew what, and to preserve what would remain of my workbasket.

The oriole was sitting in the middle of my bed with a wire wastebasket turned over him. Kevin was standing beside it with a peculiarly cut bit of cloth in his hand.

‘This sheet does n’t look like it’s much good,’ Kev explained, holding out the article. (With the hole where he had cut the piece out of the middle, it did not ‘look like it was much good.’) ‘So I am making my bird a nest out of it. Have you any tape?’

I had. I had gotten it for the laundry bag, yet even at this early stage I realized the importance of the affair and gave it to him. After all, he is my first-born son, and mothers, for all they are mothers, cannot help being human.

He sat down by the bird and began to sew. The oriole was huddled into a disconsolate little bundle of feathers, too bewildered to cheep.

‘He’s going to be singing in a minute,’ Kevin prophesied, lest I be not properly impressed with his latest addition to the family circle. ‘Just wait till he gets in his new nest! Oh boy, won’t he sing!’

I said I hoped he would, and threaded another needle before starting to write a letter. I had not had eight years’ training in interruptions for nothing. I wrote, and the boy sewed and talked to his bird, and a wasp hummed on the window sill. It was getting hot. The sunshine lay in a blinding glare across the bit of river I could see from my desk. But it was not that which disturbed my writing. Every now and then there would be a flash of yellow that whipped past my window like the blade of a knife. From where I sat, I could see that Kevin’s face was getting redder.

He stood up at last.

‘There!’ he cried. ‘That’s a keen nest! That old mother bird need n’t think she’s going to get him back, and she can’t make a nest like this one, either!’

Certainly no mother bird ever made a nest like that. It was comfortably rounded and securely sewed, and it hung from three strips of tape.

‘Where are you going to put it?’ I asked.

‘On a nail over my bed, and I ’ll take the worms to bed with me so I can feed him at night.’

‘You had better feed him now,’ I said. ‘ Little birds eat all the time, you know.’

‘Well, John’s digging worms,’ Kevin explained. ‘He ought to be back now. Mother, do I have to chew ’em?’

I thought a little skepticism might ease the point.

‘I think you do,’ I said. ‘Mother birds do. Still, you are n’t a mother bird.’

‘But he’s a father bird!’ John came bounding in with his usual noise and explanations, and, what was more, with a catfish on a line.

‘Where are my bird’s worms?’ demanded Kevin.

‘Oh, I forgot ’em,’ John said airily. ‘I went to the river to get ’em, but I found this fish on my line.’

‘Your line!’ Kevin howled. ‘That’s my line! And my bird’s getting hungry! Oh, you!’

A fight was evaded by the oriole’s opening its eyes and uttering a pathetic little cheep. The voice of his adopted child recalled Kevin to the path of duty.

‘Why you ever had to get him!’ Kev swept a reproachful glance over the being whom proverb declares to be one’s closest friend, and left us to forage for his pet.

John looked reproved for a full half minute. Then his cherubic face lit up and he put his arm around my neck. The water was dripping off the catfish’s whiskers on to the rug.

‘Mother,’ said John, ‘do you know why the river is a lady?’

‘No, Lamb-Duck. Why?’

‘Because,’ he whispered, though we were alone, ‘it’s Missis-sippi.’

‘Yes?’

‘Missis Sippi! You never hear anyone say Mister Sippi.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Are you glad I told you?’

‘Awfully glad.’

We hugged, delighted that we shared another secret.

‘I love you so much, and so much, and so much,’ I said.

‘Mother,’ said John, ‘how good does a mouse taste to a kitty?’

My colossal ignorance was shielded by a cry from outside. I remembered that I had n’t seen Anne for nearly an hour, or heard her, either. We ran downstairs. Anne was rocking Sunny in the little red chair on the porch. Twenty-five years before, another little girl had rocked another yellow cat in that chair. As I ran past now I wondered, as I so often had, which of us was I. But history does not wait to answer questions.

III

Kevin was sitting under the old pine tree with the bird on his knee and a little pile of very squashed worm on a leaf beside him.

‘That old mother bird keeps coming around and won’t let my bird eat,’ he explained. ‘I yelled at her to go away, but she keeps coming back.’

An oriole, and not twenty feet from the house! A sudden pang shot through me. ‘So should I, if anyone went off with you.’

‘Well, what’s an old mother bird?’ he demanded. ‘ They are n’t any good. Have babies and forget ’em in a couple of months.’

I looked into his eyes and saw the rain on the horizon. ‘ Do you love it as much as that?’ I asked.

He looked away, and I tried to poke a bit of worm down the oriole’s beak. It made feeble efforts at pecking, and then, tired out, snuggled down in the cosy haven of Kevin’s cupped hands.

‘If she’d go way, he’d forget her in a minute,’ Kev sobbed. ‘Then he’d eat for me. I don’t want him to die! Mother, why do things die?’

A yellow flash shot over me as I looked to Heaven for an answer. Why do things love, I wondered, and I put my hand that had his hot tears on it to my mouth.

‘Let it go!’ I begged.

‘She shoved him out!’ Kevin replied. ‘She had him and she did n’t keep him! Go home and lay some eggs!’ he yelled at the wheeling bird. ‘He’s mine!’

For a moment the mother bird poised not ten feet from me, and I held out my hand as I should to another woman, but she darted off in an instant and scorned my human sympathy she could not understand. I got up and went to my baby’s pen. The Bambina was sitting on a pile of mown grass, scribbling on a leaf with the tag of her shoe string. I do not know what it is she writes, for I do not understand her cipher, and, as she never talks, she cannot explain. She held out her leaf, doubtless covered with some deathless sonnet, looked it over with a critical eye, and made a few corrections in the necessary places. Then she saw me and held out her arms. I took her over the fence and let her run. She made straight for the pine tree where Kevin sat with his bird. As we approached, two yellow streaks flashed by, and a cry that cut to my heart rang from the tree tops. The little oriole hopped down Kevin’s leg and flapped his wings in answer.

‘Has he eaten?’ I demanded.

The boy said no, but he did not look up.

I knew what it meant to him. To have a bird had been his life ambition — that is, a wild bird, one he had tamed. I remembered his first storm of disillusionment when a particularly fat robin had almost let himself be caught. So it had been since he was two. So it would be until he learned the philosophy of love that flies away.

I sat down on the far side of the tree. Anne came to sit by me. She held Sunny tight in her arms like a baby, and his long tail curled around her back.

‘Some day I’ll be a mother,’ she observed casually.

‘Yes,’ I replied as casually as I could. ‘Some day you will.’

She chuckled the funny little laugh that is so self-sufficient, so entirely Anne.

‘I wonder what babies will nurse me,’ she said.

I could not answer. John was puffing steam-engine noises under the lilacs. The Bambina had found another stick to write with. Kevin was trying again to make his oriole eat mashed worms. I felt the heat rise from the ground beneath me, and pressed my back against the pine tree.

Earth, Mother Earth, who brought us all to life out of herself, what is this driving energy of our creation? Do you feel about all of us as I feel about all of mine? All four in sight, and in each one I live a different life, and yet have strength enough to live my own. Do you love and live the life of all your children? No wonder the mountains are worn low and the wide sea pounds on the shore.

The mother bird was back. She was back with a frightened, darting swoop that dared almost enough, but lacked the final courage. Again and again she flew toward us, only to lose heart and sideslip away.

‘You’d think we were ogres,’ Kev muttered behind his teeth.

‘We are,’ I answered behind mine.

But she was back, poised on the air she trusted, and looked at me with eyes so full of agony that I almost forgot my son’s devotion in witnessing her pain.

‘Mine’s human,’ I pleaded, ‘and yours is n’t.’

It was such a silly excuse! As if it mattered to her what Man in his grasping egotism had done to the face of the earth! But I could not sit next to my son while he held hers a captive.

‘Bambina!’ I shouted, as a plausible reason for leaving.

IV

Indeed, where was the Bambina? Not on the porch, where John and Anne had spread a counterpane over the backs of two chairs and were feeding the cat and the dolls and themselves out of the same bowl. Not under the grape arbor, where old Shep dreamed of his youth. The creek? The sweat on my forehead was not from the July sun. No, not in the creek, not this time. There she knelt by the cistern, lapping out of Shep’s water pan. I seized her before her thirst was quenched and, with the dexterity that holding her has taught me, avoided getting bitten.

‘Bambi, Bambi,’ I said reproachfully, ‘a big girl going on three drinking out of Shep’s pan! Why did n’t you ask for water? Why don’t you talk?’

She smiled her most detached and blissful smile, the smile of the saint or the mystic who knows that speech is at best a futile thing and that only by means of silence can one respond to the conversations of Divinity.

‘Huysmans ought to have begot you, Mouse-Bird,’ I told her. ‘You’d make a lovely Trappist, but I don’t want a Trappist. How and why did you come to be mine?’

She looked at me with wonder in her eyes, and looked away to lilt her thrush song to the sweeping breeze. I put her down. That was as far as I ever got with Bambina, for I was neither a copy of Del Sarto’s ‘John the Baptist ’ nor a Beethoven sonata, and these two were, I knew, the only things she really loved in all this world. I felt very lost as I left her in the pen and went back to the pine tree where Kevin sat with his bird.

Anne, still up on the porch, had skinned her knee, and John was putting mercurochrome on it. The cat watched the tears drip from his mistress’s chin and pounced on one that fell upon the porch.

‘She’s back,’ said Kevin.

‘Eaten?’ I asked.

‘He tried to sing,’ Kev answered.

I could n’t stand it any longer.

‘Kevin, let him go! If you could make him happy it would be all right, but his life is n’t yours to kill. Kev, it’s a crime to keep a song out of the world.’

‘I love him so,’ Kevin said, and held the ugly little feathered thing against his cheek.

The old, old excuse of proud possession. Civilization, with all its modern improvements, has not yet taken it out of men.

I felt terribly tired. What ages it seemed since breakfast! The baby was getting cross, and that was a signal that lunch would soon be ready.

’He’ll be dead by night,’ I whispered.

Before the words were out of my mouth a whirring of wings was all around, and the mother bird swooped upon us. She dived straight at us, and before we could catch our breath she had lighted on Kevin’s knee. The baby bird hopped over to meet her and opened his mouth. Soft little gurgling noises came from the mother bird’s throat as she poured the food into the wide little beak. Then she gave us a look that seared our human souls, and flew away. Kevin watched his bird hop from his knee on to the grass and made no move to get it back. Nature had claimed her own. The things that made us men made us surrender.

High from the tree top the mother bird called, then low from the honeysuckle bushes, and we sat as still as the stones that bordered the flower beds to see the baby bird hop toward the noise. He fluttered a little and then opened his wings, and I heard Kevin sob when they lifted him off the ground.

I did n’t look at the boy, but I knew from the sound of his feet that he was running down the hillside, running to hide in the lilac bushes that shaded the creek. I had done it myself years before, and I was glad he went there. The mud would feel cool on his cheek, I thought, and the lilacs would drink up his tears, and he could tell it all to the creek, and the creek would tell it all to the river, and the river would tell it all to the sea, for it is no small or common thing to lose a love on the wing.

The cook announced that lunch was ready, and I took Bambina from the pen.

' We eat too much! ’ I said in my rebellion, but the next minute I heard myself telling John and Anne they must never be late to meals.

We tried to ignore Kevin’s empty place and be very gay, but a lassitude had fallen upon me and I could not eat. I cut up the meat, buttered the baby’s bread, mashed Anne’s potatoes, tied on John’s bib, and all the while my mind was crying under the lilacs and rejoicing in the tree tops, for mothers are of one kind, like the broad earth that bred them, and need both rain and sunshine to carry on existence.

‘John is my husband to-day,’ Anne said, when I was wiping her buttery fingers. ‘He’s the father of all my children.’

She kissed me, and they went back to their house under the counterpane. I took the baby upstairs for her nap. I did n’t know I was so tired — not tired from work that brings on peaceful thoughts as a reward, but tired of the strife of living that wants a vacant mind for half a minute and a heart of stone just long enough to see how it would feel. I put the baby to bed, and for once she snuggled down without pulling off all the covers and went immediately to sleep. I lay down on the big bed and shut my eyes.

‘Mother!’ shouted John.

‘Hush!’ I warned. ‘Barn’s only half asleep! ’

‘Mother,’ he called, in what he took to be a whisper, ‘when you cook a hot dog, do you bake him whole?’

I said you did, and pressed my face into the pillow. The house seemed suddenly to be very still. I could see a humming bird poised by the trellis. Down by the creek I caught a glimpse of Kevin sailing his boat. Then I shut my eyes again, and rejoiced in the calm that fell upon my soul. So still, so quiet! Rest! Mother of God, did you get as tired as I? Small Son, who played rackety games on a carpenter’s floor, keep them all quiet for ten minutes. Ten minutes! Is it too much to ask out of eternity, ten minutes’ quiet?

V

An oriole was singing when I awoke, a song so full of ecstasy and rejoicing that I lay hypnotized and wondered for a minute what the spell was that it laid upon me. Then I remembered, and, recollecting that Kevin had sailed his boat, I stretched my arms in the enjoyment of living, of knowing that peace was upon my household and that the earth was beneath my feet.

‘I must try not to get so tense over things,’ I said, getting off the bed. ‘They never last, and when they’re over they’re over.’ And, because I had slept so soundly, I stretched luxuriously again.

Then I saw that someone beside the sleeping Bambina was in the room.

Kevin was sitting cross-legged on the floor, waiting for me to wake up. His face was alight with happiness, and something was in his hand.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘What have you there?’

He chuckled and held out his hand.

A little black bird sat on his finger and pecked the grain from his palm.

‘This one’s a crow,’ he burst out, ‘so there won’t be any songs lost to the world! He eats, and his name’s Jim.’

I said nothing.

From outside the window I heard the joyful trilling of the oriole. Then a black flash darkened the pane, and the jubilant music was punctuated with a raucous caw. The life of Mother Earth’s children was still going on.