After the Nuthatch Fell
Copyright 2013 Dennis Anthony
Before he killed the nuthatch, before God peeked in on him and before Mr. Gray with his duster and beige Stetson visited his room, five-year-old Parker French had to deal with the desperate loneliness of his first day in kindergarten.
“He's a clinger,” his Aunt Bess told Momma that summer. “School will toughen him. It's the best thing right now.” So Alinda French sent him off to kindergarten – her heart breaking at the smallness of him – hoping he might make other attachments, but also fearing that their special bond might erode in the process.
He stood before the door to Foxfire Elementary School – new stiff jeans, yellow collared shirt – shivered, and was unable to go any further. A sympathetic teacher helped him find his classroom and watched as he dropped into a tiny desk that seemed to engulf the frightened child in cold, wooden arms.
That empty spot in him normally filled by Momma was something he'd have to deal with now, now that he was on his own. Eventually Parker stopped shivering, sat quietly, looked around and waited for things to happen.
“Things are always happening to you,” Parker's mother whispered to him, bending over to wipe the blood off his forehead after Gringo, their big calico cat, leapt on his head for no apparent reason. Momma kissed him and Parker smiled. He knew what she said was true. Things happened.
When he was six years old, God peeked in his window while he was laying in bed. When he told Momma about it, she calmed him down, smiled, and explained that this was a special gift. After that, Parker began to realize that he saw things other people couldn't see. Mostly it was people who seemed lonely, like him. Usually they were older. Sometimes very old. He felt bad when he saw them because they often looked sad like they wanted to go home, just like he did on that first day in kindergarten.
And then one day he saw Mr. Gray for the first time. Mr. Gray. He might as well have been Mr. Nothing. Mr. Empty. He wasn't like the other shapes he saw.
Parker never saw God again, but Mr. Gray started showing up regularly. He stood at the entrance to his bedroom one afternoon as Parker wrestled with a pocket video game he’d received on Christmas. The man was wearing a long gray duster and a light-colored cowboy hat he later learned was a Stetson. The hat was pulled low so that his visage was hidden by a kind of gray shadow.
Parker never saw a face. He never saw eyes. Sometimes he would see a cloud of dust follow Mr. Gray as he moved, except that the cloud looked and moved more like a fog than a shifting haze of particulates. He never heard the sound of leather creaking, as it sometimes does. He never heard the swishing of the duster as it brushed along the ground. He could hear the boots as Mr. Gray walked across the uneven pine floor. Sometimes he heard the slight ting of what he guessed were spurs. He never saw Mr. Gray’s footwear. He never felt his touch.
Parker decided not to tell Momma about Mr. Gray. It was one thing to see God as long as he stayed outside. But even Momma might become worried if she knew this dark character was in the house, in Parker’s very own bedroom. He wouldn't do that to her. Parker was seven now and he understood that this truth omission meant the loss of a unique intimacy he shared with his mother. He didn't like it, but there it was.
Sometimes Mr. Gray sat on the edge of Parker’s bed, and the bed would creak gently as he settled, as though he didn’t want to disturb the young boy. He looked at Parker lying against his pillow (or Parker at least thought he was looking at him), and then he would be gone. Before too long Parker could anticipate when Mr. Gray would be arriving. He often felt a certain lightness that signaled his imminent departure.
In between the comings and goings, Parker spoke to him. Mr. Gray never answered and Parker soon stopped asking questions. Instead he began pronouncing observations on everything impacting his young life: other people, frustrations with games, fears he felt about the crashing storms, which so often pummeled the small homes around the community of Three Egg, Tennessee. When he took refuge under the covers, coming out after the storms finally passed, Mr. Gray would still be there.
Even though Parker could sense when it was getting near the time for Mr. Gray to go, he never said good-bye. Instead, Parker gave a simple wave, and sometimes a half salute. Mr. Gray didn’t gesture at all, but sometimes he would lift his head ever so slightly and then slowly dissolve, taking his Stetson, his boots, his duster and his gray cloud with him.
Once Parker thought he saw Mr. Gray in the hallway outside his room, but that was the exception. Usually he was in the bedroom, near the door, at the foot of the bed or sometimes – very infrequently – sitting on the bed.
As the years went by, he appeared less and less often, but his arrival was always accompanied by a comforting gentleness, and he never startled Parker in either his coming or his going. Parker gave up talking to him or even trying to figure out why he was there.
He became just one of those secrets boys keep, like the time Parker killed a nuthatch with his BB gun. He thought about that day a lot. The bird was fat and jumpy, lingering on a branch, turning this way and that. Hopping. Stopping. There was really no chance of hitting it. Parker took careful aim anyway, and pulled the trigger. There was the familiar springy phoot sound of the rifle firing and then he watched as the bird dropped to the ground, its black eye stripe distinct against the scaly brown pine as it fell.
What Parker wondered about that incident – on that day and just about every day since – was if some other, unseen bird – a mother nuthatch, maybe, or a child – suffered because of this thing he had done. Parker didn't know if birds could feel empty like people did, but he feared they might.
He was about ten years old when his sad-faced classmate Deacon Liles, a solitary child, much like Parker himself, unexpectedly invited him to spend a Friday night at his house. Many years earlier – he may have been only five or six, but before God or Mr. Gray appeared – Parker spent a night at another friend’s house. By eight o’clock that evening, he was on the phone to Momma, homesick and crying, eager to go home.
It wasn't Deacon's extensive collection of video games that attracted Parker to spend the night. He didn’t dislike Deacon – although lots of his classmates did – but he didn’t really have any positive feelings for him either. He simply wanted to prove to himself and to Momma that he could handle being out of the nest for a night at least. And so he accepted the invitation, and so he went.
Parker took along a small sleeping bag and his toothbrush and knocked at the Liles's door. The old brown-trimmed, gray house had a simple walk up step to a three-quarter length front porch and inside, an upstairs with two bedrooms. That’s where Deacon stayed.
For dinner, the family ate spaghetti in a tomato sauce that Mrs. Liles made from her own garden tomatoes. It was good and Parker said so. A beaming Mrs. Liles said she would put a jar aside for him to take home tomorrow, adding “You tell your Momma I gave this to you,” and Parker nodded and mumbled a thank you, but wondered where else would Momma think he had gotten a jar of tomato sauce?
After dinner Parker and Deacon climbed the creaky stairs (there were old, torn photos of family members framed and hanging on the wall) and before long, they were on the computer, exploring caves for gnomes, dragons and gold, then refighting World War II, then sailing the Spanish Main searching for more gold. Deacon seemed to like games where he could find gold.
Then the television set blinked, went to static, made a quick sound like the noise of an old radio tuning across the dial, then recovered. Deacon didn’t seem disturbed by this at all. Parker himself would have attributed it to one of the frequent, short power outages in the area – called hiccup outages by the locals – except that the lights never dimmed. And Parker starte
d to feel . . . the only word that came to his mind, was troubled. He wondered if Mrs. Liles’s tomato sauce may have been sloshing around a little too heartily in his belly. He was uneasy and anxious, and suddenly cold.
It happened again, a little longer this time. “Is something wrong with your television?” asked Parker.
Deacon, a small boy with, it seemed, a perpetually runny nose, had tiny eyes now focused on swinging his pirate brigantine around to take on a Spanish treasure ship. He didn’t answer Parker. Then there was another loss of signal, an electronic smear of voices, then snow. By the time the game wavered back into recognition, the