by Jack Carneal
Last night just after midnight he was awakened by the urgent hooting of an owl. It was as if the owl was directing him to do something, not asking but telling. This recognition had less to do with any mystical connection to owls that he did not have and more to do with the purity and directness of an owl’s voice. If you’ve heard an owl you know what this means. The sound pulses out of the owl in a pure and liquid way. It is very loud also, but extraordinarily clear with an almost visible or tactile quality. This clarity and purity and volume lends itself well to waking up human beings in the middle of the night and in the case of the owl that woke him up last night it sounded as if it was perched on his window sill when it was probably out in the cluster of old oaks in the alley or on the edge of the park behind his house.
He knows this because not two nights after he separated from his first wife and bought the ramshackle asbestos-shingled townhouse in Richmond’s Oregon Hill neighborhood not a year ago he was taking out the trash. It was winter and unlike this winter was very cold. A slick of ice lay across the alley. Cobblestones there were likely three hundred years old. Beyond the alley and beyond the park was a bluff, and on the edge of the bluff you could look down below and see the James River, just above the fall line here, where the settlers who’d come up from Jamestown could go no farther because of the rocks, and so here they stopped. Here they began a trading and mercantile outpost using the Indian roads west. Below Richmond the river bloomed out on its way to the Chesapeake past where the brackish water almost at Newport News at the house his family built in the early 18th century called Dovecote and Ogden stands on the bluff sometimes at night watching the river
This particular night he followed his breath-clouds out the back door and through the small backyard, unlatched the gate and lifted the lid of the bin and immediately after dropping in the bag of trash looked over both shoulders in order to see where the person was who he knew was watching. He was certain he’d see one neighbor or the other. A trail cuts through the woods behind the house and leads after about a half mile down towards Tredegar and the river and many’s the time he’s looked out the window to see a ghost-white tough peering over the fence looking to steal a gas grill or caught one of the wigger girls with her distressed jeans around her ankles yanking up her lime-green thong after squatting to pee in the wild bramble of forsythia now taking over much of the same alley. Tonight at the trash cans there was no question in his mind: someone was watching.
So he, Ogden Tyndall, looked around to see who it might be out there skulking in the woods but instead a dark shadow passed over his head large enough to make him duck and exclaim. Looking up with his single eye not twenty feet above his head was a large figure perched upon a branch he immediately deduced to be an owl. It was staring straight at him. The owl was huge and grey and hunched its shoulders once and settled back on the branch. Ogden uttered one thing or another. The owl loomed over him and waited. Ogden stood there for a long time. Well, Ogden said. The owl hunched its shoulders again, resettling on the branch. What do you want? Ogden half expected it to answer. Then without making a single perceptible noise the owl turned its huge bulk away from him standing there next to his trash cans and lifted itself into the dark woods. Its feathers made a loud shushing sound.
The image of the giant owl silhouetted against the moonglow spreading through the winter woods behind it became an image that his imagination stored in some deep place, an almost chthonic or ur-like image. When he heard the owl again just last night it was easy to conclude on one hand that the owl lived somewhere along the river, possibly in Hollywood Cemetery, and was hunting rats in the alley. He lay in bed and wondered if it was the same owl was immediately that had stared straight at him in that suggestive way, almost as if it wanted his attention, a year ago. To warn him away from something. To deliver some sort of message as in a children’s book. To impart wisdom, be he minister or scourge. To advise.
Now moving lumber from behind his parents’ shed. Now whipping a fishing rod away from his body and watching his ratl-trap splash in the cove, a boil swallowing it. Slicing the rock from anus to throat, spilling the guts out onto the concrete floor of the shed behind Dovecote. Now wandering lonely through the grocery store fingering the frozen goods. Now listening to the radio and hearing the litany of Iraqi and Afghani towns, small city names of the dead. Gomez, Smith, Williamson, McDonald, Washington. Jeb there now, Jeb fighting them, Jeb having left not three months ago. Now depositing checks made out to him for which he did not lift a single finger, substantial sums, into an account whose contents multiply in an exponential fashion that appears to have no relation to the amounts that he deposits. Now scraping the lead paint from his banister, now beholding the warren of rats in his neighbor’s yard, now watching another neighbor’s pit bull licking a brilliant red hot spot on its ass. Leaning into the wet air in his mother’s garden to pluck a tomato for lunch. Pulling the sheet back on the old Flying Scot and hearing the hiss of tide against her hull, heeling up against a Fall wind coming from upriver that bore the faint clarity of the distant mountains. Signing papers from Patty’s family’s lawyers. Starting books and putting them back on his bedside table. Walking the dog. Stripping paint. Laundry on Strawberry Street. Mundane tasks. Then the owl’s voice that nightat the trash when all was so terrible and dark illuminated a part of the world that had become dim. A bulb re-glowed in him.
He was reminded of when he and his wife were still married and sitting on the porch of one of the old slave houses at Dovecote. They both still smoked then. They were sitting on the front porch smoking and drinking tumblers of Pusser’s rum and talking about starting a family when a black shadow passed over them. It was so big that it had no form, moving above them less like an animal and more like a cloud, a shapeless black mass. It was night out there in the country along the James well below Richmond, nearer to Newport News/Hampton, a dark night, and yet the shadow of the owl was darker and bigger than the night itself. A storm was moving downriver from the Chesapeake and Ogden could feel the porch shake underfoot from thunder he could not yet hear. Patty was but an indistinct outline next to him, a dim silhouette against even dimmer night, a form that moved and which he could hear, the sound of her jewelry, the Indian silver and turquoise she favored, that Colorado-worship of her Virginia horse-type, the dangling earrings, the rustle of her jeans and the soft night smell of her, which he presently could see only in his mind’s eye because she was invisible to him in that growing darkness as the storm bore down. But even so the owl that passed over them was darker than the night, a slow whooshing shape so large it was hard to imagine that the thing could take flight.
Wind came just before the first lightning. In the flash Ogden beheld Patty’s face turned toward the storm, her eyes alight with excitement. The snapshot quality of the image, sharp, defined, dramatic, has forced out and replaced any more subtle images of Patty he might’ve retained and this one, haunting and perfect, is what he remembers when he is putting gas in his truck or reheating some noodles or taking the dog to the vet or driving and remembering as if just awakened that the world he lives in now is different than that which he lived in then. He wonders what she saw in that same moment of illumination. Certainly not him. He looking at her, she looking downriver at the storm.
Now entering his dark house while pale whites crouch underneath their cinderblock raised cars there in the street and hearing his keys he doesn’t recollect there being any moon before the storm began. The owl was like a hole in the night that let in the storm.
(to read Small and Lesser Fates: Cammie… click here…)