Dead Letters: The King of the Birds

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

You could hear the farm before you could see it.

I had driven out from Milledgeville in the middle of a Georgia afternoon, in the kind of heat that gets into the upholstery, and a half mile short of the place a sound came across the fields that I took at first for a woman calling from a long way off. It came again. It was not a woman. By the time the house showed itself, white and low behind a stand of oaks, the sound was coming from several directions at once and I had understood that whatever was making it, there was more than one.

There were more than one. They were on the roof of the house. They were on the water tank. They were standing in the drive so that I had to bring the car almost to a stop and let them decide about me, and they took their time about deciding, and one of them opened its tail as I sat there, and it filled the windshield, and then it closed the tail and walked off and left me to park.

She was on the porch, in a chair, with a pair of aluminum crutches leaning against the rail beside her. Flannery O'Connor, thirty-six that year, who had published Wise Blood and a book of stories that ended with a grandmother shot dead in a ditch by a man called the Misfit, and who now lived out here at Andalusia, her mother's dairy farm, and raised these birds. She looked at me over the top of her glasses the way a schoolteacher looks at a boy who has come in late with a story. The lupus had been in her ten years by then. It had taken her father in four. She had watched it do that, in this county, when she was fifteen, and she had known since her own began exactly what she was looking at.

She wrote every morning for two or three hours and then she was finished for the day, and I had come for the part of the day that was left.

I set my notebook on my knee. A peacock came up onto the porch step and screamed.

I want to be accurate about the noise, because I have been in rooms with men who were being sincerely hurt and it is not far off that. It has a human shape to it. It goes up and it does not come down where you expect. It comes from a bird that is at that moment doing nothing but standing there, and the bird looks at you while it does it.

She did not raise her voice over them. That is the thing I have never been able to get across to anyone I have told this to. She let them scream and she waited and then she went on with the sentence, and I found I was leaning forward in the chair with my ear turned toward her like a man hard of hearing, and the birds went on with it, and she never once told them to stop.

We talked about the farm. We talked about the cows and the hired man who worked them. We talked about the fig tree and the milk. Every few minutes one of them let go and the porch went white with the sound and I would lose the end of whatever she was saying and have to ask for it again, and she would give it to me again, without impatience, at exactly the same speed.

I had one question. I had driven four hours for it. I asked her, when the noise had backed off enough for a man to hear himself, what she kept them for.

She let a moment go by.

I said it again, thinking I had lost it to a bird. I said, what are they good for?

She looked at me over the glasses. She did not answer. She did not change her face and she did not fill the silence and she did not do me the courtesy of pretending the question was interesting. She had already answered it in print, though I did not know that yet. She had written that people ask her what the peacock is good for and that the question gets no answer from her because it deserves none. She was letting me have the answer she had settled on years before, which was the sight of her not giving one, and I sat there with my pencil up waiting for a sentence that was never going to come.

The bird on the step screamed. She let it.

She told me, later, when I had stopped asking, about the first time the press came for her. She was six years old in Savannah and she had a chicken that could walk backward, and Pathé News sent a man down from New York with a camera to get it on film. The man stayed all day. He got four seconds. She was in the picture too, she said, but she was only there to assist the chicken. The chicken died not long after. She said that everything since had been an anticlimax, and she said it the way you would report the weather, and behind her the birds were going up one after another across the yard, and I wrote it down.

I asked whether she meant that.

She said she intended to stand firm and let them multiply, and that in the end the last word would be theirs.

She had forty of them then. She had a hundred by the time she died, which was three years later, at thirty-nine, in a hospital in Milledgeville, and the birds were still on the roof and the water tank and standing in the drive of that farm when the people came out from town for the funeral.

I got back in the car at five o'clock with a notebook I could not read. I had been writing down whatever she said in the gaps and the gaps were not where the sentences were. What I had was half a farm, half a dairy, half a fig tree, and one clean line about a chicken. The rest of the pages had my own hand going crooked down the margin where a bird had opened up eight feet behind me and my pencil had jumped.

I sat in the heat with the door still open and went through it page by page, holding the book at an angle to the light to see whether any of it came back. She watched me do it from the chair. She did not offer to go over any of it again.

They came out and stood in the drive again while I turned the car around. One of them went up on the hood while I was in gear. I waited. It stood there and let me look at it, and it did not open its tail, and after a while it got down of its own accord, and I drove out past the rest of them and they were still calling to each other across the field when the house went out of sight in the mirror.

- F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.