Blackbird

Paul A.Toth

 

I lived in an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, next to an abandoned cornfield.  I often walked the cornfield alone, just me and the circling blackbirds.  The blackbirds did not mind the burns that covered most of my body.  To them, they were as natural as a suntan.

 

I loved all things artificial.  I loved worlds that had passed, like the dead cornfield.  My favorite season was autumn.  How I enjoyed all those colorful illusions drifting to the ground, reminding me of what always happens to beauty: It gets stepped on and dies.  But the cold wind never touched my indoor plant.  It might never die: plastic.

 

One day, they started building a house not twenty yards from mine.  When I bought my old house, I hadn't thought to ask about the status of the neighboring properties, whether the land was for sale, who owned it and why.  I had worked hard in the computer sciences, earning enough money to buy this house and retire.  I took pleasure in wasting my time.  I only wished I could waste it more efficiently.  If possible, I would have slept all day, the ultimate victory, overcoming life in dreams.  I hoped one day some disease would overtake me and require vast amounts of morphine.  I would laugh when that day arrived.  I would swim into the artificial, which was so much better, so much more dependable.

 

How I dreaded the appearance of the family that would take over the house.  No doubt there would be a whole pack of kids running wild.  There would be a father with a pipe.  He would stand on the porch and glare at me.  "Honey," he would say through the screen door, "the neighbor's at it again, pacing back and forth in his cornfield.  Should we call the police?"

 

"Oh, dear, let the poor man be," she would say.

 

She would join her husband on the porch.  She would have hair dyed ten different colors, like the leaves that fell from the trees.  It would be clear she did not belong with a pipe smoker.  It would also be obvious she would rather not have had children, realizing it had been a mistake, that she was better alone and had been tricked into it by the pipe smoker.  She would peer at me from across the way and wonder about me, thinking, my, what an interesting and strange man, a loner like myself. 

 

Her husband would blow his cherry-scented smoke and say, "Well, I wish I would have known we were moving next to a lunatic.  Don't let the children near him."

 

His wife would shake her head, knowing this was a needless worry.  I wanted nothing to do with his children.

 

Soon the children would grow to school age.  A yellow bus would stop outside their home and take them a long way to school, many miles away, and it would be hours before they returned.  The woman would watch them leave and then sigh with relief.  I would turn to her and smile.  I understood.  And she would understand that I understood. 

 

Then her husband would hurry through the door with a newspaper tucked under one arm, a briefcase in his right hand.  He would kiss her cheek, barely grazing it, and she would smile at this graceless gesture.  The man would put on his sunglasses and zoom away in his sportscar, leaving a cloud of dust that lingered, obscuring for a moment the wife.  Then the dust would clear, and she would still be standing there, smiling awkwardly.

 

She made her way toward me, hair blowing like autumn leaves, and she started undressing until she arrived naked on my porch.  There were no neighbors to see us, after all. 

 

We made love upstairs.  A breeze came across the miles of open space through the open window and warmed our bodies.  Later, she collected her clothes and brought them inside. 

 


That night, her husband knocked on the door, clenching the pipe in his teeth.

 

"I want my wife back," he said.  He did not seem to mind that his smoke rolled straight into my face.

 

"You can't have her."

 

He took a swing, but I caught his fist and bent his arm down.  He almost fell to the ground before shouting, "I give, I give."  I let go of his hand.  He turned and sadly walked home.  What could I do?  He deserved it.

 

The next day, he packed up his clothes, tobacco, briefcase, sunglasses and children, and sped away, never to return.  Their house stood empty for years while the wife and I slept, made love, slept, made love, slept, and so on.  One day, we drifted through the window like autumn leaves, scattering in the wind.  At that moment, I understood the value of life, that it was worth living despite the certainty of our demise.

 

Unfortunately, no one moved into the new house next to mine.  The real estate market went through a lengthy downturn.  The house just sat there like a schizophrenic man who could no longer speak his anguish.

 

One day, I broke into the back door.  I wandered through the house, half-imagining I'd find the family inside, that I would carry the woman away to freedom and love. 

 

I brought my clothes over to the new house.  Since there was no power, I bought sandwiches and candles at the gas station.  I also bought a sleeping blanket and slept on the floor.  I began to believe the wife slept beside me in the blanket.  I felt her hair on my shoulders.  On occasion, it even tickled my nose.  Our love was mostly chaste now.  We had moved beyond the need for so much sex, but sometimes, sometimes...

 

Those were the happiest days of my life. 

 

But one day, someone knocked on the door.  It was not the family I had expected.  Instead, it was a single young man, maybe thirty years old.  A man in a real estate jacket -- Century 21, I think -- accompanied him.  The agent shook my hand but had a perplexed expression.

 

"Uh, what are you doing here?" the agent said.  "Do you--I mean, no one lives here."

 

"I--well, I got tired of my house, so I came here to stay for a while."

 

"But," the agent said, "I mean--I think I should call someone.  Are you all right?"

 

"Oh, I'm fine," I said, although actually I was feeling sad. 

 

"You see," the young man said, "I'm buying this house.  Actually, I've bought it."

 

"I'll be leaving," I said. 

 

"But," the real estate agent said.

 

"Just let him go, Larry," the young man said.  "It's all right.  There's no damage, is there?"

 

"Oh, no," I said.  "You won't even be able to tell I was here, except for the candles and the sandwich wrappers."

 

"Fine," the young man said.  "Well--"

 

And so I gathered my belongings and went back to the old house.  Soon, I became reacquainted with the cornfield and blackbirds.

 

Over the next two weeks, the young man moved into the house.  Sometimes he would sit on his porch sipping beer.  I would nod at him, and he would nod at me. 

 

One day, he came over while I was sitting on my porch.  He brought two beers and handed one to me.  He said, "Do you ever get lonely out here?"

 

"My thoughts keep me company.  But I'm older.  It is a wide open place and that can make a person feel strange."

 

"Right," he said.  "I guess I thought there would be something romantic about living so far from everything.  Now that I'm here, though, it does seem strange, just like you say.  Hey, by the way, what happened to your cornfield?"

 

"It was gone before I got here.  Died, I guess."

 

"There's something sad about that.  I mean, living by a dead cornfield.  Hell, this whole place is strange.  I'm starting to wonder what I was thinking.  I'm young.  I should be--I should be meeting--"

 

"Oh," I said, because I had skipped that part of life, or it had skipped me.  But I knew what he meant. 

 

"Meet someone and bring her here to live," I said.  "Then you'll be happy."  Someone with hair like autumn leaves, I wanted to add.

 

"You're right," he said.  "I just have to be more aggressive.  There's plenty of women where I work, women my age."

 

"You don't smoke a pipe, do you?" I asked.

 

"A pipe?  No, I don't smoke anything.  Why?"

 

"Just curious."

 

He returned a few times after that to discuss the women he met.  I tried to obtain descriptions from him, hoping one day he would describe the woman with the multicolored hair.  I told him something negative about every blond, brunette and redhead he described.

 

"Don't you like women?" he flat out said one day.  "Were they mean to you because of whatever happened?"

 

"The burns?  No, I just gave up on the idea.  It happened when I was so young.  I skipped that part of life, love and dating."

 


"I'm sorry," he said.  "I'd ask what happened but --"

 

"I was very young.  I barely remember."

 

"Oh," he said.  "Well, you know, I've actually been dating someone lately."

 

"That's nice," I said.  "What's she like?"

 

"She's very funny.  She laughs all the time."

 

She moved in a week later.  She was indeed always laughing, and her hair was black--I mean blackbird black, darker than the scabs the nurses had scraped off.

 

That night, I went to bed filled with dark disappointment.  I had many thoughts of things I might do.  I even thought of setting my plant on fire, watching it burn in the cornfield.  But it didn't seem fair to the plant. 

 

Then a breeze came across the miles of open space and warmed my body, reminding me of the love I had experienced in those events that never happened.