Cries Go On

Last year, a male goldfinch at one of the feeders caught my attention with his unusual behavior, and I realized that he was blinded in at least one eye. I’ve seen him a couple of times since then, and each sighting rings in the halls of my heart because it reminds me that, for some reason, he stays near our farm, and that he seems to recognize me.

I fill the bird feeders in the evening. We have various types of feeders — the cheap cylindrical kind that are easy to fill but also easy for squirrels to raid, the metal mesh kind that are impervious to rodents but do not protect the seed in wet weather, a couple of platform feeders that I’ve constructed, and a few metal pie plates hung from light chains beneath some of the trees.

Last evening, I walked right up to the plate hanging beneath the Japanese maple out front before I realized that a bird was sitting in it and had not flown away. It was a female house finch, and she was busy eating. She looked at me with eyes that seemed to register my presence, but she didn’t appear either injured or frightened. She did, however, seem to have something wrong with her beak. She was selecting the black sunflower seeds and trying to open them, but would drop each one after a momentary attempt, select another, and repeat the procedure. Her beak seemed out of kilter somehow, as if wrenched sideways. I stood and watched her for quite a while, close enough that I could have kissed her head, and I talked softly to her. She never seemed afraid. After a good ten minutes, during which I took several photos and a video, she finally got her fill and flew away. The nearby tree where she flew was full of her kin, and they spent the remaining hour before full dark swooping around the front garden and splashing in the birdbath. Their calls to each other had the same calming effect on me as the sound of children playing outside.

Tonight, Jinx and I went for a walk just as the night was pulling its blanket across the mountains. The driveway, full of leaves, had two ruts of powdered remnants from the back and forth passage of the car, and we walked together towards the gravel road, the air cider-scented from the apple trees and the silage nearby. Mars and Saturn were near the half-moon, which will be full on All Hallow’s Eve, the first time in many years.

The air was cool but unquiet. In the next pasture, the new calves were taken from their cows a few days ago, which set up constant bawling from the mamas seeking their babies. Yesterday, several head of cattle were penned in one area near a large barn, awaiting a cattle car that will probably arrive tomorrow. Since being penned, the cows have been crying out, sounding out the heavens in confusion and anguish, asking their bovine questions, rolling their fear-rimmed eyes and searching, ever searching.

Jinx was unnaturally sedate during our walk, sticking close to me and stopping to look over at the black mass of cattle behind the fence. We made our way down to where one farm abuts another, then returned the same way. The sound of the cows followed us, and I wondered as I always do what the animals were thinking, what they were trying to communicate.

I wondered how it would feel to have my own flesh and blood torn from me, and then to be herded into a small area and forced to wait with others like me, others who had been stripped of their own offspring for reasons that would never be explained. I wondered if they communicate the subtleties of their collective grief to each other, if one cow attempts to comfort another, if the cows ever dream of the lost calves.

Jinx and I returned home. I stood out in the front garden for a while, looking at the plate where the finch with the injured beak had fed. The night air was still full of the mothers’ laments. I felt as if I understood just a bit of what their cries were expressing. To call for answers and receive none. To wail against being confined to a certain place without knowing what is coming next. To be able to express only the most essential emotions in the only voice one has been given.  In the sharp air, with the rain approaching and my bones singing their own complaints, I think I understand just a bit.

And now I am inside, and the dogs are sleeping, and we are reading. Down in the valley, the cows are still standing together, waiting. Their cries go on, their cries tumble through the colored hillsides, their cries brace up the roof of clouds like pillars. Pillars sanded and shaped on the lathe of loss and pleading.

~ S.K. Orr