A Legacy of Birds
Thom Hawkins
Teddy sat on the side of the bed at an angle, so he could look at Emily, now so tiny.
“What is it that I’m supposed to teach them?” Emily asked, lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon.
“What you’re feeling,” Teddy told her. “Uh, what you’re thinking. What it’s like to be you, here.”
“If you want to know those things, can’t I just tell you?” Emily turned her head to one side, like she wanted to bury it into the pillow, but didn’t have the strength to turn her body. “Why the bird?”
“To remember you.” Gently, he picked up her limp hand and enclosed it with his hands. “The things you say to me now are only for now. If you teach the bird, she will continue to say them for years to come.” Teddy’s hand was red with freckles and the flesh on his ring finger nearly enveloped his wedding band. Emily’s hand was an ordered collection of bones and tendons wrapped in pale flesh. She’d removed her wedding ring when it began to slip off her finger regularly. While the comforts of middle-class life had added paunch and color to Teddy, the cancer had eaten at Emily and streaked her dark hair with grey.
Emily pulled her hand away and brought it to rest on her chest. “Why do you want to be reminded of these things? What good is it for a bird to tell you six months from now that its back hurts? That it just wants to die?”
Teddy covered his face with his hands this time. “The bird is an echo. I’ll hear you in her words. Not the same sound, of course, but the vocabulary, the phrasing—your voice can live on.”
Emily made an effort because it made Teddy happy. He could hear her in there sometimes during the day, muttering to Feather, one of their two birds, the African grey, trying to teach her things Emily would say, like “put a sweater on to put the cold out,” or, simply “looks like rain.” Feather especially took to the latter, but never connected the phrase with the weather. The morning of Emily’s death, Feather told Teddy, “looks like rain.”
***
Teddy had bought Feather on a whim from a shopping mall pet store twenty years earlier. “This will make my Emily happy,” Teddy said to Feather through the white wires of her cage as the cashier rung up the purchase. “Make my Emily happy!” Feather echoed. Teddy paid in cash, assured that this remarkable creature, capable of mimicking a phrase heard only once, would prove useful.
“I know what you’re doing,” Emily told Teddy after he’d invited her to see Feather’s cage in the guest room. Despite Teddy’s entreaties to involve her in Feather’s accommodation, Emily found the bird to be a poor substitute for the baby they’d always wanted.
Teddy raised his eyebrows as he did when he wanted people to think he didn’t understand something.
“And it’s fine.” She grabbed Teddy’s waist and pulled him in for a hug. “I’m fine.” She kissed him on a stubbly cheek. “We’re fine.”
“Make Emily happy!” demanded Feather.
***
While Feather demonstrated at least a minimum capacity for vocal mimicry, Dynamite, a blue and yellow macaw, made no attempt whatsoever to repeat anything anyone said to him, other than single-syllable utterances like “um,” “ah,” and “huh.” Teddy couldn’t afford to support freeloaders and had previously gotten rid of Loro, an Amazon parrot, and Kiss-Me-Keet, a ring-necked parakeet, because their progress was slow or their vocabulary limited. Unlike Loro and Keet, however, Dyno could give a look that, despite the difference in his features, was eerily alike that of the mimicked. Teddy’s main reason for purchasing Dyno was that Feather was nearing the end of her expected twenty-three-year lifespan. Dyno was only five years into his expected lifespan of seventy years.
While Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds lacked a section on symptoms that might be used to diagnose Dyno psychologically, a parrot capable of mock surprise, disappointment, fury, and rolling its eyes taught Teddy that there was more to a legacy than words.
***
Dynamite missed Emily. Teddy could see the sorrow in his eyes, but also knew it might be nothing more than mimicry. Either way, Dyno served as an embodiment of the emotion, which helped Teddy deal with the feeling as if it was a problem to be solved. “Put a sweater on to keep the cold out,” screeched Feather, and Teddy expected tears from Dyno because he felt like crying himself.
Weeks went by where Teddy did little and the pair of birds failed to say anything original. There was no sign that they’d learned what it was to be Emily, only what it was to mock her. Teddy gradually displaced his mourning of Emily with thoughts of his own inevitable death. If his heart was an egg, his heartbreak was an egg timer, ticking toward mortality.
A few months after Emily died, Teddy tried carrier pigeons. He found that, despite his encouragement, the pigeons only “homed-in” on the rooftop aviary where he kept them. Following a lengthy after-action review, Teddy finally roused himself from his perch on the couch with the thought that putting off his own legacy would only shorten it. He had two perfectly good birds, but maybe they were not enough. Two may be company, but three’s necessary for real infrastructure.
***
Teddy had a good feeling about Peep. He found her during his daily scroll of the “Pets” section on craigslist, as an entry for a “beautiful blue budgie.” As fate would have it, Peep was available because her previous owner had passed. Teddy avoided any inquiries about this owner, however, because he intended to use Peep as a test case. What could he find out about the late owner from what Peep alone knew?
Quarantining a new bird was standard practice to prevent communicable diseases, as birds are prone to respiratory problems, but Teddy also wanted to exercise discretion with Peep to avoid social contamination with his other birds, or anyone that might make an impression. He wanted to preserve her, as if in amber, to study without outside interference. He rented a motel room off the interstate, and once the door was locked behind him, called the front desk to say that he’d fallen ill and not to send in housekeeping until further notice.
For his first session with Peep, Teddy didn’t speak. He opened the door to Peep’s portable aviary, laid on the bed, and closed his eyes. He imagined he was an explorer who had come across a tribe of insular people who had never had substantial contact with the rest of the planet’s human population. What he wanted most of all was to learn without the interference of his presence. He knew it was possible that Peep wouldn’t speak at all. He hadn’t asked when he picked her up if she could speak. He just assumed that, as a budgie, she could and eventually would.
After several minutes, he heard wings flapping across the room. He opened his left eye and saw Peep settle on a lampshade. The light projected an uneasy shadow on the ceiling, her shape foreshortened from tail to head into a monster. He closed his eye again.
Teddy awoke several hours later and found Peep back on her cage perch.
“Mommy’s girl! Mommy’s girl!” Peep said.
Teddy took a notebook and pen out of his back pocket and wrote that down.
***
Teddy arrived home to a silent house. Since Emily’s death, he hadn’t bothered locking up the birds. The stink from their leavings somehow enhanced the lingering scent of Emily’s perfume, as if his nose was seeking solace.
As he passed through the bedroom door, he saw what looked like Emily’s face on her pillow. He fell, grabbing onto a bottom corner of the bed and burying his head in the green bedspread. A flutter of wings passed over his head and into the den. He wiped tears on the bedspread as he lifted his head. Emily’s pillowcase was stained with droppings and torn by talons. It was only more of their cruel mimicry.
***
At their next session, Teddy set Peep’s aviary on the desk. He sat in a chair, facing her.
“Mommy’s girl!” she said after several minutes. “Mommy’s girl!”
Teddy consulted his watch for the time, noted it on his pad, and wrote the budgie’s words next to it.
An hour and several of the same exclamations later, Peep changed her tune. “Where’s Mommy?!” she screeched suddenly. Teddy scribbled this down quickly, also noting that her eyes were squeezed shut as she’d spoken. She didn’t add any more to this and an hour later, Teddy left her alone in the room.
***
Teddy expected a tussle when introducing Peep to Feather and Dyno—old birds didn’t often take kindly to new birds—but it seemed like they had been expecting her. They approached Peep’s cage slowly, flitting from one piece of furniture to another, hopping rather than flapping their wings. They made their way to the top of the cage and stared down at the newcomer.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have!” screeched Feather.
Peep looked startled, cowering in a bottom corner of the cage. Dyno stared back, with exaggerated goggle-eyes. “Um.”
“Make Emily happy!” said Feather.
“Mommy’s girl,” responded Peep, tentatively.
Dyno moved his head back and forth as Feather said,“We’ll see about that!”
“Mommy’s girl,” said Peep again.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have!” cried Feather.
There was a look in Dyno’s eyes that Teddy could have sworn was pride.
***
In the weeks following Peep’s introduction, Teddy receded to the bedroom where he lay mourning at the altar of Emily’s pillow. The birds came and went from the room, but he made no attempt to teach them. There would be time for that—he was convinced—there was always time.
Feather and Dyno both expressed a fondness for Peep, following her wherever she went in the apartment and trying to engage with her. “Skeee-daddle!” Peep screeched, though Teddy wasn’t sure where she’d gotten that one.
“Put a sweater on to keep the cold out!”
“Sweater girl! Sweeter girl!” Peep improvised.
“Huh,” said Dyno from his spot atop the armoire.
Other times, Teddy heard them elsewhere in the apartment, murmuring just on the brink of discernibility. He thought he heard new words—life, love, happy—but like Emily’s face on the pillow, he realized it might only be what he wanted to hear.
***
Teddy quarantined himself after that—sequestering in the guest bedroom. There was nothing in Stroud’s Digest to indicate that mourning was contagious, but it was better to be cautious. Besides, he knew if he was to carry on, or rather, the birds were to carry on for him, he wanted to be selective about the thoughts and behaviors to which they were exposed.
The words circled above him as he lay pressed, damp with sweat, to the grey bedspread: life, love, happy. The sound of the birds’ play outside his door still echoed them. Teddy wanted his words and deeds to live after him, but not to supplant him. He finally understood Emily’s reluctance to take part.
The birds understood nothing. The weight that Emily felt in her final months pinned Teddy to the bed. It was fear, exhaustion—higher order functions once touted as evolution when they seemed in the moment to be setbacks.
***
It was a police officer—responding to a complaint from neighbors about the smell—who found Teddy’s body. The three birds perched on nearby furniture like a rainbow of buzzards.
“Oh, you shouldn’t have,” said Peep.
“OH, you shouldn’t have!” repeated Feather.
The two repeated each other back and forth, emphasizing different words in the phrase. Dyno simply stared at the officer, rotating his head to maintain eye contact as the man concerned himself with the dead body.
“Birds of a feather, huh?” said the officer as he checked the man’s pockets for identification.
“Huh,” repeated Dyno. “Um. Huh.”
When the officer threw open a window to diminish the smell of bird feces, rotting flesh, and a hint of Chanel No. 5, the legacy of birds took their leave, one after the other.
© Variant Literature Inc 2023