Free All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage Page B

would act like a big-deal trumpet player, sitting with his woman in the back. If they started kissing, Cole got out and wandered around. He’d climb up the hill near the wires. From up there you could see the little houses in town and the big houses here and there on the outskirts. You could see their old farm with its empty barns. And you could see the long silver trains, the moonlight gleaming on the rails, and you could hear their sad songs all through the night.
    A couple weeks later, a big brown dumpster appeared at the farm, up on the lawn. A man in coveralls was down there, throwing stuff out. At night the boys went through it all, the artifacts that defined the Hales. They opened his mother’s old canning jars and ate the fat, sweet peaches and oily red peppers, the juice dripping down their wrists. They found their father’s fishing gear and wading boots, Wade’s football trophies, Cole’s old crayon drawings from kindergarten, Eddy’s boutonniere from the prom, and there were birthday cards and Halloween masks and marbles everywhere. It was all stuff that had no meaning to anyone else, but to him and his brothers it was evidence that their family had existed, that they’d lived a happy life here once, that they’d raised cows whose sweet milk was put in bottles and hand-delivered all over the county. All because of them, people had milk in the morning and ate corn in summertime with lots of butter and salt and pepper on it. If that wasn’t something to be proud of, he didn’t know what was.

    Winter ended finally and you’d see colors here and there and people came out of their houses, yanking at their gardens, hammering nails into fences. You’d see horses kicking out their hind legs like they were figuring out how to use them again. Cole was busy with school. He’d fold his tests up in his pocket and present them later to his uncle, ironing out the creases in the paper with the heel of his hand, his grade, usually an A, chicken-scratched in red pen as if based on some tentative conclusion and bestowed with regret. Still, he got along all right, but the farm, the house, was always in his mind, the idea of his mother wandering past the windows, fluid as water.
    In May their father’s birds returned, landing on the barn up near the cupola, the same three falcons that came back every year when the weather started to warm. His father had raised them from birth. He’d kept rats in the cellar to feed the baby birds, and sometimes the rats would escape and their mother would stand on a chair and scream while everybody ran through the house trying to catch them. You can’t count on much in this world, his father told him once, but those birds come back every year.
    Always in spring, when the apple trees got their pink buds and you could go outside without your coat and the air smelled like his mother’s perfume, his father would walk out into the field like a soldier in his F Troop gloves and stretch out his arms like a crucified man. A bird would drop down on his arm for a moment, flutter its wings a little and then fly away again.
    They were majestic creatures, he thought, perched up there on the roof. They lifted their brown wings ever so slightly, as if in greeting, their claws clicking on the rusty sheet metal. Cole wondered if they’d seen his father up in heaven. Maybe they’d brought a message from him. Hey, you birds, he called. They fluttered their wings again and he knew what they wanted, so he lifted up his arms into a T and stood there waiting, rigid as a scarecrow. The birds teetered on the ledge like they were trying to decide, and then the biggest one flew down and landed on his forearm. He wasn’t prepared for its weight and staggered back a step. The sharp yellow claws tore through his shirtsleeve and cut his skin.

    Easy, now, Eddy said, coming up behind him.
    The falcon fluttered prettily. Cole’s arm shook under its weight and it hurt, but he refused to cry. He thought maybe it was